Abstract
The aim of this article is to investigate the viability of the compilation of a single bidirectional dictionary with a single lemma list for the Sesotho sa Leboa, Setswana and Sesotho → English side and a simultaneous treatment of the three Sotho languages in the articles of the English lemmas in the English → Sesotho sa Leboa, Setswana and Sesotho side of the dictionary. Specific attention will be given to selected macrostructural and microstructural aspects of such a compilation. Keywords: sotho languages, nguni languages, bilingual dictionaries, communicative equivalence, corpora, user perspective
Highlights
The aim of this article is to study the viability of a bidirectional dictionary bridging English and the Sotho languages†: Sesotho, Setswana and Sesotho sa Leboa
Prinsloo dictionary compared to three comparative bidirectional bilinguals: English– Sesotho/Sesotho–English, English–Setswana/Setswana–English and English– Sesotho sa Leboa/Sesotho sa Leboa–English, and the additional value it would have in the absence of bilingual dictionaries bridging African languages with each other
On microstructural level preliminary tests indicate that the average article length in the envisaged English → Sotho languages side of the dictionary would vary between one-third and two-thirds of the combined article length of the English → Sesotho/Setswana/Sesotho sa Leboa sides of three separate dictionaries, a 30% – 60% reduction
Summary
The aim of this article is to study the viability of a bidirectional dictionary bridging English and the Sotho languages†: Sesotho, Setswana and Sesotho sa Leboa. 194 D.J. Prinsloo dictionary compared to three comparative bidirectional bilinguals: English– Sesotho/Sesotho–English, English–Setswana/Setswana–English and English– Sesotho sa Leboa/Sesotho sa Leboa–English, and the additional value it would have in the absence of bilingual dictionaries bridging African languages with each other. It is not possible to do a detailed analysis of all relevant lexicographic aspects within the limitation of a journal article and the discussion will be limited to a number of key microstructural and macrostructural aspects The compilation of such a dictionary will require the combined skills of mother-tongue speakers of all four languages and corpora for these languages
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