a question about reversals

[Kevin Warfel]

I have not worked much with reversal dictionaries yet, so I’m hoping this will be an easy question to answer for those of you who have experience in this area.

 

Summary:

How can I get an English or French word to appear as a headword (or whatever the correct term is) in my reversal dictionary without its vernacular equivalent being according status of a headword or minor entry in my main dictionary? For example, how can I get this entry in my English reversal

wish  n  cààlʋ

without having any kind of entry for cààlʋ in the main dictionary, since it’s a regular, predictable derived form in the language? (The verb cà ‘want’ is a headword in the main dictionary.)

 

Details:

In Phuien [pug], a Gur language of West Africa, nominalization of verbs is a very productive process in the language. For just about every verb I’ve encountered, a suffix can be added that will result in a noun that means something like “the action associated with X”. In English we do roughly the same thing via the gerund. Unfortunately, in English the gerund has the same form as the progressive form of the verb, so the linguistically naïve native speaker often confuses the two. In case-marking languages, such as Latin, the forms are more easily distinguished.

 

Here are a couple of examples from English of verbs and their gerund forms, with an example sentence for the latter:

run         running                Running takes energy.

walk       walking                 Walking is good exercise.

 

Nominalized verbs in Phuien are often translated in English by either the gerund or by the phrase “the act of X.” The nominalized verb forms are so regular, so predictable, that I am reluctant to include them even as minor entries in the Phuien-French-English dictionary I am working on. Any votes for or against my thinking on this?

 

However, there are certain nominalized verbs that correlate semantically to specific English (or French) nouns. Here are some examples:

want      wish (n)

steal      theft

think      thought (n)

 

So here’s my question:

When the phuien verb (e.g., the one for “want”) can be nominalized by the normal, predictable, very productive process of adding a nominalizing suffix to it, but the result has an equivalent in the analysis language that is an “independent” lexical entry, how do I exclude the phuien nominalized form from the phuien dictionary, but include the independent word in the analysis language in the reversal? That is, how do I get a reversal entry like this:

wish  n  cààlʋ

while avoiding a (minor) entry in my main dictionary like this:

cààlʋ  nom. of cà?

 

I would not want reversal entries for all nominalized verb forms because many of them do not have a one-word equivalent other than the gerund in English, so I don’t think the reversal entry would be of any use to an English speaker searching for a way to express something in Phuien, since the entry for the verb will be right there and knowledge of the grammar leads directly to the required form.

run  v  cʋa

*running  n  cʋaàlʋ

 

Thanks for any help or insights from you who are more experienced than I!

Kevin

 

Kevin Warfel

Associate Dictionary and Lexicography Services Coordinator

a.k.a. Dictionary Development Coordinator

SIL International

 

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[Oumar Bah]

Kevin,

I am afraid what you want is currently not possible in Flex. A reversal entry cannot exist without a counterpart in the main dictionary. This is at least my own experience. The two are inextricably linked with each other.

Regards.

Oumar

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[Robert Hedinger]

I always react somewhat negatively to the idea of a reversal dictionary. Somehow there seem to be the idea that once you have done a dictionary from L1 to L2 you can then just switch things around and have a dictionary mirroring the L1-L2 dictionary. This may work for a simple wordlist. However, languages just are not mirror images of each other, as we all know being in the business of language analysis and translation. If they were, we would be out of a job.

 

In a bilingual dictionary you use L2 to describe L1. So it is all about the lexical, semantic and grammatical structure of L1 . The reverse is a description of the structure of L2 using L1. They are just not mirror images.

 

Specifically about your examples. Taking the example of ‘wish’. It is interesting that you did not specify it as ‘the action associated with wish’ or something like this. Now a wish is not necessarily the action associated with whishing. This means you may have two meanings of the word cààlʋ. One being the predictable gerund, the other being a noun the meaning of which is not predictable, though related to the verb base. So in your language you rightly may not want to put the predictable forms in the dictionary, but the ones that are not predictable should be part of the dictionary. If you do this, you would have an entry for cààlu which then would appear in your reversal index under wish.

 

Perhaps I have not represented your language properly, however I hope that the principle is clear.

 

Robert

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[Kevin Warfel]

Thank you, Robert. The principle is clear, and I have considered this. There are cases where the distinction between two senses is clearly necessary. In many instances, however, I think it is just that the sense of the normal derived noun cannot be adequately rendered in either French or English, and “the action associated with” is my best effort to render it. In any case, I agree with your principle, and I intend to apply it in this dictionary.

 

I appreciate your input.

Kevin

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/flex-list/93CAF6DA9A724C9E8E9D917B7B2B5A6B%40RobertHedinger.

[Kevin Warfel]

Oumar,

 

Thank you for your response. Since some sort of counterpart is necessary in the main dictionary, I wonder if I have the option of specifying that that counterpart not be published as part of the main dictionary? That would also solve my problem, if I could mark the element in the main dictionary as not published, but have the reversal be included. Is that possible? (I haven’t done anything at all in the area of marking entries as published or unpublished or as included in Publication A or excluded from Publication A, so I’m not even very sure about where to look for that at this point. I’ll have a look the next time I’m working on my dictionary.)

 

Again, thank you for your input.

Kevin

 

From: 'Oumar Bah' via FLEx list [mailto:flex...@googlegroups.com]
Sent: Monday, May 23, 2016 10:45 PM
To: flex...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: [FLEx] a question about reversals

 

Kevin,

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/flex-list/149337264.2488193.1464057910882.JavaMail.yahoo%40mail.yahoo.com.