Dictionaries Of African Languages Research Articles

Orature and morpholexical deconstruction as lexicographic archaeological sites: some implications for dictionaries of African languages

This article takes a multidisciplinary approach to African lexicographic practice. It has as its primary premise the assumption that without words there can be no dictionaries to compile and discuss. Owing to this fact, the article focuses on a specific strategy for collecting words which belong in a special category of their own, namely archaic or obsolete words. Such words are important because of the need to mark them as such in any general purpose dictionary. Most, if not all dictionaries of African languages seem not to have this category, giving the misleading impression that there are no such words in African languages. Apart from digging up archaic or what we have also referred to as artefact words, the article also argues that the words have a substantial and intrinsic etymological value. Thus they can be used in specialised etymological dictionaries of African languages or even in standard general dictionaries. The multidisciplinary aspect resides in the methodology proposed for the recovery of archaic words. It is considered necessary that disciplines such as oral literature, oral history, historical linguistics and to a limited extent theoretical linguistics and computational linguistics, and, symbolically, archaeology and lexicography itself, be brought to bear on the subject of inquiry. The article is also an attempt at working out a method which African lexicographers can employ as an instrument to dig up artefact words for etymological and other such purposes. Hopefully the method can be refined further. Keywords: orature, morpholexical, deconstruction, reconstruction, archaeological sites, lexicography, African languages, dictionaries, diachronic, synchronic, historical linguistics, proverbs, riddles, idioms, oral traditions, mnemonic, etymology, archaic, shona, deverbative nouns, verb root, semantic, artefact words

Linguistic theory in the practical lexicography of the African languages

In this article, we look at the relationship between linguistics and lexicography. We specifically look at the relevance of data derived from theoretical linguistic investigations to the compilation of dictionaries in African languages. Our point of departure is that since it is language description that lies at the core of both lexicography and linguistic theory, lexicographers can improve their work by using insights from theoretically-guided linguistic investigations. Our view is that as long as lexicographers focus on words and their existence in the linguistic system, they cannot work effectively without referring to linguistic theory, consciously or unconsciously. Lexi-cography is not only concerned with dictionary creation, that is, with the collection of lexical units and their proper description in dictionary entries, but also with the theoretical aspects concerning the lexicon. It is necessary for dictionaries to capture all lexical interrelationships of a phonetic, morphological, syntactic or semantic nature. Drawing examples from a few dictionaries on African languages, we try to show how dictionary compilers have benefited from specific theoretical investigations in general linguistics. We look at how the different linguistic theories have contrib-uted to the improvement in the quality of the contents of some dictionaries of African languages. Our conclusion is that there is a stronger bond between linguistic theory and lexicographic practice than is generally assumed. Ways must therefore be found to understand the various links between the two disciplines. There should be a deliberate move from mutual neglect to collaboration be-tween the two disciplines. Keywords: african languages, dictionary, grammatical categori-sation, headword selection, lexical meaning, lexicographer, lexico-graphy, linguist, linguistics, linguistic theory, practical lexicography, tone marking

South Africa's new African language dictionaries and their use for the African speech communities

During the last 15 years, the lexicographic scene in South Africa changed drastically as many new dictionaries for the African languages were compiled. The different dictionary types and publication modes discussed in this article are: general dictionaries, restricted dictionaries, printed dictionaries, electronic dictionaries, online and cell phone dictionaries. Although there are different dictionary types, they all have three major uses for the speech communities. Dictionaries are useful tools for language documentation and standardization, as they try to cover and docu-ment the general vocabulary (general dictionaries) or the specialized vocabulary (technical diction-aries). They empower the language users because they help to improve communication by pro-viding users with the necessary vocabulary they need. In addition, dictionaries have a high sym-bolic value for a language. Having dictionaries, and especially technical, online or cell phone dic-tionaries, is the visible proof that a language is standardized and modern, and can be used in all domains of life. Keywords: lexicography, general dictionaries, restricted dictionaries, online dictionaries, cell phone dictionaries, language documentation, language standardization, empowerment, communication, psychologi-cal factor, sociolinguistics, language planning

Electronic corpora as a basis for the compilation of African-language dictionaries, Part 1: The macrostructure

Good modern dictionaries increasingly base the compilation of both their macro- and microstructure on electronic corpora. As the macrostructure is the subject of this article, a few typical macrostructural inconsistencies in existing African-language dictionaries, which can be rectified by the utilisation of a corpus, are discussed. It is shown that the first application of a corpus is the utilisation of word-frequency counts to compile a lemmatised frequency list. Together with data on lemma-sign distributions across sub-corpora, the lemma-sign list of a dictionary can subsequently be derived. These theoretical notions are exemplified with a thorough discussion of how an electronic corpus led to the creation of the macrostructure of a Cilubà-Dutch dictionary. In addition, explicit frequency markers are advanced to further enhance the macrostructural reference quality. The latter is illustrated with both Cilubà-Dutch and Sepedi-English dictionaries. Finally, the article concludes with a series of macrostructural improvements of corpus-aided/based dictionaries over manually compiled ones.

Electronic corpora as a basis for the compilation of African-language dictionaries, Part 2: The microstructure

Good modern dictionaries increasingly base the compilation of both their macro- and microstructure on electronic corpora. As the microstructure is the subject of this article, the focus is on corpora as the key to writing better dictionary articles, with special reference to African-language lexicography. As such, the impact of corpora as an aid to sense distinctions, the retrieval of typical collocations, the pinpointing of frequent clusters and the selection of representative, authentic examples is given due attention. Throughout the discussion, corpus data are contrasted with native-speaker intuitions, and dictionary articles that were compiled intuitively within the framework of so-called traditional ‘manual lexicography’ are evaluated against those compiled by means of a corpus. All corpus data are culled from two relatively large electronic corpora, one 4-million-word Pretoria Sepedi Corpus (PSC) and one 2.2-million-word Kiswahili Internet Corpus (KIC).

Some New Light on Old Jamaicanisms

T HE SOURCES of a number of well-known Jamaican terms have long reSmained in doubt for a variety of reasons. One is the general tendency, no more absent from Jamaica than elsewhere, to treat etymology as a sort of amateur sport, in which the object is to make lively guesses without caring much about plausibility or knowing for certain how to recognize it. With this tendency has gone a disposition to seek for origins only in the more familiar European languages. Another and serious reason has been the inaccessibility of works, especially dictionaries, on American, African, and the lesser known European tongues. Yet etymology requires a high degree of linguistic sophistication and an understanding of the sound laws which have operated in the formation of Jamaican folk speech (Jamaican Creole). Fortunately, the past fifteen years have seen considerable improvement in both the facilities for this study and the awareness that it is not a guessing game. Working chiefly at the University of the West Indies library in preparing the Dictionary of Jamaican English,' Dr. Le Page and I were happily able to consult a goodly number of the most important American and African language dictionaries, as well as other studies, and hence have succeeded in clearing up many formerly obscure or puzzling questions. Some of our results follow.