Re: Dictionary formats

Aidan wrote:

>   Those of you with detailed dictionaries (are there any of you?), how do
>you list everything in your notes? Everyone here can't be making one-to-one
>wordlists. So how do you make comments indicating various usages,
>compounds, and so on?
I based my format on my Cassell's German-English/English-German
dictionary, since there aren't any wildly different parts of speech
in Géarthnuns.

>For example, looking in my Latin dictionary here,
>
>   bed: lectus, cubile; (in a garden) areola; (of a river) alveus ; to go
>to _: cubitum ire; to make the _: lectum sternere
Using this example, key words and phrases would be in bold, part of
speech and explanatory notes in italics, different parts of speech
separated by Roman numerals:

bed - I. s. 1. víls (ref. to furniture); go to ~ XXX; make the ~ XXX.
2. XXX (ref. to garden). 3. XXX (ref. to river). II. vt. XXX.

(XXX means either these words do not yet exist or I can't recall them
without the dictionary here in front of me)  Compounds where the
words are separated (like "bed and breakfast") would fall under the
above entry; attached compounds (like "bedroom", "bedclothes") are
their own entries.

>   Do you do anything to make sure that you're not relexifying, e.g. use
>WordNet, or another language's dictionary?
For a straightforward concept like "bed" (furniture) or "street", I
usually just create indigenous Géarthnuns words. When I think it's
going to yaw into weird semantic territory, I take an inventory of
the many dictionaries I have at my disposal at home. After checking
in with the Eurolangs, I especially like to check out the
non-Eurolangs (Chinese and Japanese, in particular, of which I can at
least hum a few bars) (and Hungarian is a nice foot-in-both-worlds
kind of lang) to see if they have a different approach. Sometimes,
everybody seems to be using the same expression or having a similar
idea, and I try to calque using native Géarthnuns elements. Then I
let semantic drift kick in if it wants.

And sometimes, I create distinctions which I am not aware exist in
any of the languages I'm familiar with (like the "save (money)" by
accumulating vs. by getting a good deal distinction in my previous
post).  I find the less I worry about relexing, the less it is likely
to occur.

Kou

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