foreign/borrow words
Colin Suggett
-- Colin
Ronald Moe
Colin Suggett wrote:
“How are borrowed/foreign words supposed to be handled in a Flex lexicon?”
Unfortunately this is one of the deficiencies of FLEx. There is an etymology section that is patterned on MDF. But the FLEx team overlooked the \bw (borrowed word) field from MDF. Several of us have brought this to the attention of the FLEx team, but it has never been prioritized. If you feel this is an important need, please express your opinion to the FLEx team.
I would recommend that you use a custom field and call it something like “Source language”. The “Source” field in the Etymology section is for a bibliographical source and (in MDF) was not intended as a printing field.
If you are interested in more on the subject of etymology, I have written up some things. David Mead also has a useful article on the subject, which is written for Shoebox users.
Ron Moe
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Colin Suggett
Colin Suggett wrote:
“How are borrowed/foreign words supposed to be handled in a Flex lexicon?”
If you feel this is an important need, please express your opinion to the FLEx team.
Dear Flex development team,
I would like this need to be addressed with a specific field similar to the "\bw" field.
I would like to be able to maintain a short list of languages in the "list" section. Adding an entry to this list would initially bring in the basic language description and codes from the enthnologue database. The user could then edit a field which would link that language (say Dioula), to an entry in the lexicon which gives the vernacular equivalent for the language in question.
In this way, the "\bw" field would permit the user to display the language from which a word is borrowed in either an analysis language like English or French, or the vernacular.
The "\bw" field itself would link to the short language list.
-- Colin
Robert Hedinger
Jeff and Peg Shrum
I also think it would be good to have a standard way to indicate the Language of origin of borrowed words. There are a large number of things that did not exist here before European contact, and there are many “alternate” forms of words that are really from neighboring languages and I need to record the differences.
Jeff S.
From:
flex...@googlegroups.com [mailto:flex...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Ronald
Moe
Sent: Tuesday, June 30, 2009 8:43 PM
To: flex...@googlegroups.com
Subject: [FLEx] Re: foreign/borrow words
Colin Suggett wrote:
Brad Smeltzer
field to be a definite need. What would really be nice is to have a
field where you list the source language, followed by a field where
you put the source form, and this field could be written in the
appropriate orthography.
Brad
On Jun 30, 11:43 am, "Ronald Moe" <Ron_...@sil.org> wrote:
> Colin Suggett wrote:
>
> "How are borrowed/foreign words supposed to be handled in a Flex lexicon?"
>
> Unfortunately this is one of the deficiencies of FLEx. There is an etymology
> section that is patterned on MDF. But the FLEx team overlooked the \bw
> (borrowed word) field from MDF. Several of us have brought this to the
> attention of the FLEx team, but it has never been prioritized. If you feel
> this is an important need, please express your opinion to the FLEx team.
>
> I would recommend that you use a custom field and call it something like
> "Source language". The "Source" field in the Etymology section is for a
> bibliographical source and (in MDF) was not intended as a printing field.
>
> If you are interested in more on the subject of etymology, I have written up
> some things. David Mead also has a useful article on the subject, which is
> written for Shoebox users.
>
> Ron Moe
>
> _____
>
Alexandre Arkhipov
Alexandre
Sharyn Thomson
I’ll add my vote as well. This is a field I use regularly in Toobox.
Sharyn
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Mobile: +226 76.07.73.33
Skype: sharynthomson
D. Rowe
I would think that one thing that needs to be addressed is how to
I would recommend that you use a custom field and call it something like “Source language”. The “Source” field in the Etymology section is for a bibliographical source and (in MDF) was not intended as a printing field.
indicate a chain of borrowing, for example, if Language A borrowed a
word from Language B, which in turn borrowed it from Language C. In an
English dictionary one might see
clock [ME clock clock, bell; LL clocca bell]
where there is (a) language name, (b) word in that language, (c) gloss (or possibly a longer explanation if the derivation isn't obvious), which can then be repeated multiple times.
Perhaps the writing system used for (b) would be sufficient to indicate (a).
David Rowe
Ronald Moe
David Rowe wrote:
“I would think that one
thing that needs to be addressed is how to
indicate a chain of borrowing, for example, if Language A borrowed a
word from Language B, which in turn borrowed it from Language C.”
This would require making the etymology section a repeatable bundle of fields (which I assume is what you were proposing). This would work for inherited words for which there are documented stages (e.g. Modern English, Middle English, Old English, Germanic, PIE) as well as words that have been borrowed from language to language (e.g. ‘sugar’ which has a very long chain from Sanskrit to English).
David Rowe wrote:
“Perhaps the writing system used for (b) would be sufficient to indicate (a).”
Unfortunately you don’t always need to indicate the language. For instance in this entry (from the American Heritage Dictionary) the forms ‘cebada’ and ‘cebo’ are understood in the context as also being from Spanish:
sabadilla n. A tropical American plant… [Spanish cebadilla, diminutive of cebada, barley, from cebo, feed, from Latin cibust, food, probably of non-Indo-European origin]
You might also want to abbreviate some, but not all of the language names. It would be better to make the Source Language field into a list field and maintain the list of languages that you are using in the Lists area. But this gets complicated. The language and writing system obviously need to match. But in the etymology section you might not want to use the normal orthography used for that language. For instance your users might not be able to read Greek, Hebrew, or Arabic script. So it might be better to transcribe the form into a Romanized font (for instance in a vernacular-English dictionary). If we need a set of writing systems, this opens up a can of worms.
Ron Moe
From: flex...@googlegroups.com
[mailto:flex...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of D. Rowe
Sent: Friday, July 03, 2009 8:08
AM
To: flex...@googlegroups.com
Subject: [FLEx] Re: foreign/borrow
words
