Abstract
This paper argues that the Setswana language is characterised by spelling variants which are a consequence of multiple factors. It considers spelling variants found amongst individual words as well as those found in multi-word expressions (MWEs). It argues that spelling variation may be a result of historical fissions and amalgamations of the Batswana groups as well as borrowings from adjacent languages such as Afrikaans and English. The paper considers how three monolingual Setswana dictionaries of the past twenty years, Thanodi ya Setswana (Kgasa and Tsonope 1995), Thanodi ya Setswana (Mareme 2007) and Tlhalosi ya Medi ya Setswana (Otlogetswe 2012) have lemmatised spelling variants. The paper argues that spelling variants must be included in a general monolingual dictionary and that how such variants are handled must be informed by frequency information from corpus data. The paper concludes by proposing three strategies for addressing variation in MWEs where a difference between the two or more MWEs occurs because of a single word in the MWE or where variation is caused by the presence or absence of a word in a MWE. The third solution applies to cases where the variants differ in too many places such that it would be much more elegant to treat them as separate entries.
Highlights
Natural languages are characterized by numerous variants
The challenge that confronts a lexicographer is whether all variants of a form should be entered in a dictionary and if they were to be entered, how they would be treated in a monolingual Setswana dictionary
We propose that multi-word expressions be handled in any one of the three different ways in a general dictionary
Summary
Natural languages are characterized by numerous variants. The variants may be pronunciation variants, as those found, for instance, in words such as data (deɪtə or dɑ:tə), potato (pəteɪtəʊ or pəteɪtoʊ) and either (aɪðə or i:ðər) (Wells 2000). Some of the variants are dialectal (Southerland and Katamba 1996: 565) while others are spelling variants. This paper restricts itself to the investigation of Setswana spelling variants most of which are a consequence of phonological features of different dialects. The paper considers how three monolingual Setswana dictionaries of the past twenty years have dealt with spelling variation. We measure the frequency of variants in a twenty million-word Setswana corpus to determine which variant is to be the primary form in the dictionary. This paper answers a specific question: How should variants be treated in Setswana dictionaries? In answering this specific question the paper proposes different strategies of how variants should be handled in a general Setswana dictionary This paper answers a specific question: How should variants be treated in Setswana dictionaries? In answering this specific question the paper proposes different strategies of how variants should be handled in a general Setswana dictionary
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