Modern Wendat Lexicography: Using XML to Reflect the Grammar and Lexicon of an Iroquoian Language

Abstract

ABSTRACT: Building dictionaries with tools and methods emerging from Eurocentric traditions has proved problematic for Indigenous languages. We are building a dictionary for Wendat, an Iroquoian language formerly known as Huron that is being reawakened in Wendake, Québec. There are twelve manuscript dictionaries and lexicons for Wendat, created by missionaries during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. We are encoding the manuscripts using a standard Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) schema. However, when we came to create and encode a modern reconstructed Wendat dictionary, we were overly constrained by Eurocentric structures and assumptions inherent to TEI. Building our own custom XML schema allows us to better reflect Wendat grammar, responding to community needs and our evolving understandings of the language. This article describes the development of this schema, based on analysis of the archival documentation and related languages. Through this discussion, we will exemplify the schema we built and address the points of friction between TEI and Wendat grammatical structures. Our custom schema enables us to elegantly and economically represent exactly what our analysis of the language reveals, capturing elements of the language such as event-verb consequentiality, conjugation class, and stems, while avoiding incompatible elements and assumptions.