Re: OT: Dictionaries: why two sections??

On Sun, 24 Sep 2006 Henrik Theiling wrote:
>
> Hi!
>
> Do you often open a dictionary, try to find a word and when you reach
> the corresponding page and line, you notice that all words around are
> in the wrong language?  And then you notice that you started in the
> wrong one of the two sections of the dictionary, namely exactly the
> wrong direction of translation?  And have to do the lookup again in
> the other direction?
>
> It happens to be very often.  I want to look up 'schimmelig' in a
> Latin-German, German-Latin dictionary and then at sch..., there are
> only Latin words around!  Oh, yes, wrong section.  Use German-Latin
> instead of Latin-German.
>
> Why are there two sections??  It is unnatural!  Let all the words be
> in one list, no matter what language they are in!
>
> Did anyone encounter this problem before?
Of course! ;(


> Did anyone have the same solution? :-)
Well, I thought about it, and actually tried using it when I was
jotting down Cham vocabulary from friends' conversations.  But
I soon ran into a major problem - major confusion!  The problem
was that it was often much simpler to gloss a Cham word with a
Malay one rather than an English one - the two cultures overlap
rather more than either does with English - but then I sometimes
didn't know, on rereading, whether a particular word was in Malay
or in Cham - same spelling, slightly different meaning.  So I gave
that up, and reverted to keeping two separate wordlists.


>   **Henrik (with way too many dictionaries around him)
There *are* worse complaints! ;-)


> ------------------------------
Paul Bennett replied:
>
> Harrap's published in 1991 a 5-language dictionary (English, French,
> German, and I think Spanish and Italian), that was arranged in straight
> alphabetical order per headword. Better yet, it was tabular, with one
> column per language and one row per headword, clearly marked and laid out.
What a very, very sensible idea!  Of course it would lead to a great deal of
redundancy.  Translate "aeroplane" into four different languages (or five
if you count American!); that gives you one row of the table, with the
English headword "aeroplane" emphasised, say in bold.  You then have to
insert 4 copies of that row, each with a different language's entry
emphasised as headword, and sort these rows by their emphasised heads.
Unless I completely misunderstood the arrangement you describe, which
is quite possible.

An alternative, less democratic, is to prefer one language over the others
and only tag as headwords those in that language.  The dictionary would
then effectively be sorted only by the preferred language.  For example,
my Tamazight "Lexique Scolaire/Student Dictionary/qamus madrasi (*)/
Amawal Aghurbiz (&)", by Muh.end Uremd.an Larab from Morocco, has
the following three divisions:
 -  Français - Tamazight
 - English - Tamazight
 - `arabiyat - amazighiyat (*)
(*) written right to left in Arabic script)
(&) written in Amazight script)

The assumption here is that a Tamazight speaking (primary-school)
student wishes to understand words from French, English or Arabic,
or translate them into Tamazight.  Unfortunately, that gives rise to
the book really being a compilation of three unidirectional dictionaries
(which is about thrice as abominable an idea as one unidirectional
dictionary).

The drawback to this arrangement is that I can't even *look up* the
words in the 6 sentences of the Foreword or Introduction (whatever
"Tazwart" really means), so reading and translating this only, slight
sample of Tamazight is probably not going to be the most practical
way of learning Tamazight grammar ...  Even were I to compile a
Tamazight-English dictionary by reversing and sorting the English-
Tamazight one, I suspect that most words in an "Introduction"
would be beyond the primary-school-age vocabulary level, so I'd
have plenty of gaps left to guess at.

And the silly thing is that the entire volume could be made much
more useful, just by adding a four-language table like Paul's Harraps
5-language dictionary had, using only Tamazight headwords.  Not
only furriners like us could look up a Tamazight word, but also local
students learning foreign languages (surely the book's major target
group) could transfer, say, French learning to English or Arabic.


> It wasn't as detailed as many good two-language dictionaries, but you got
> the word, part of speech, gender, declension, and any irregularities. I
> don't recall how many entries had multiple destination-language
> alternatives for each headword, but I don't recall it being deficient.
>
> Unfortunately, a few minutes' research shows that it is out of print now,
> and reasonably collectable. Amazon carry it used from $50 up to over $80.
> I think I paid about nine pounds for mine, brand new. Alas, I left it
> behind when I came to the USA.
>
> Paul
A collectable dictionary!  I bet a few of mine have become pretty
rare in the decades since their very limited publications ...  but what
linguist or conlanger would even think of selling his dictionaries?
Still, my modern "Pocket Oxford" dictionaries will never become
collectable, as they fall apart after only a few hundred hours of
rough handling - er, serious use.  I've even photocopied the verb
tables from the Spanish one, laminated and punched them, and hung
them together on a ring for quick, non-destructive access.

But wouldn't you rather your dictionary was (a) online and (b)
regularly updated?  For filling gaps in my knowledge when replying
to Germ- or Hisp-anophone penpals, I rely increasingly on imTranslator
to get me in the ballpark:
http://translation.paralink.com/translation.asp

- but mind the popups; you need a good popup killer like Internet
Explorer 6.0 (scoff, ye heathens and *nixen!  It works.) preferably
backed up by a tool like NoAds.

Best,
Yahya



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