Abstract
Tshivenda is one of the official languages of South Africa, mostly spoken in Limpopo Province at Vhembe District. From 1994, when the Republic of South Africa became a democratic government, speakers of the Tshivenda language spread to all nine provinces of South Africa. Tshivenda has different word categories, like nouns, verbs, adjectives and many more. When words are looked up in dictionaries, one should know what types of categories are given, e.g. their spelling, pronunciation and meaning. If this is not clearly represented one would not be able to use such a dictionary. This paper seeks to investigate how nouns are lemmatised in Tshivenda dictionaries. Attention is given to word and stem lemmatisation. It also looks at the lemmatisation of singular and plural nouns, and the lemmatisation of deverbative and diminutive nouns. This will be accomplished by analysing published Tshivenda dictionaries in circulation.
Highlights
If dictionaries are not compiled according to the required acceptable standard, Lexikos 24 (AFRILEX-reeks/series 24: 2014): 214-224 http://lexikos.journals.ac.zaThe Lemmatisation of Nouns in Tshivend a Dictionaries 215 users of such dictionaries would find it difficult to use them
When the current dictionaries of South African languages, including Tshivend a, are investigated, it is found that nouns are lemmatised principally in two ways: (a) using the whole word, and (b) using the noun stems
When we look at the Tshivend a noun mushumi 'worker/labourer', it is lemmatised in the singular by Van Warmelo (1989: 237)
Summary
If dictionaries are not compiled according to the required acceptable standard, Lexikos 24 (AFRILEX-reeks/series 24: 2014): 214-224 http://lexikos.journals.ac.za. There should be proper planning to determine what information about spelling, pronunciation as well as meaning should be included On the other hand, Plisson et al (2005: 369) define lemmatisation as "the process of finding the normalized form of words" as their arrangement into alphabetical order whereas Sinclair (1991: 173) defines lemmatisation as "the process of gathering word-forms and arranging them into lemma or lemmata" From these definitions, it can be deduced that lemmatisation is the selection of words or data to be included in a dictionary. When the current dictionaries of South African languages, including Tshivend a, are investigated, it is found that nouns are lemmatised principally in two ways:.
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