Words of Freedom

Hello everybody, this time the post’ll be about writing a bilingual dictionary.

Before starting to write a bilingual dictionary, you have to determine the purpose that you want the dictionary to serve (eg. you want someone who speaks Dutch but not English to understand the English language). The purpose of the dictionary can affect the next step greatly, which is gathering the definitions of the words that you want to put in the dictionary. First of all, you need to determine which words you will define in the dictionary, then how you want to define those words, and lastly you have to choose a form of definition. You will also need some equivalents of words from the source language (here, that would be Dutch) in the non-source language (English). This is a critical thing; the user should be able to compare the use of the word in his own language to the use of the word in the language he wants to learn.

The dictionary that I’ve described above, one that serves to make the user understand another language better, is called an Explanatory Combinatorial Dictionary (ECD).

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As we’ve seen quite often in previous posts, you have to make sure to know something about the connotations a word can have. Eg. When you want to make a Dutch-Bini (the latter is also known as Edo) dictionary and the source language is Dutch, you cannot say in Bini that a dog is man’s best friend, since it isn’t like that in Bini-speaking countries; a dog is something else to them. When finding something out about the connotations of a word you should look at words that look the same, as well as the use of those corresponding words. This can be done in various ways. When looking at the English word mouse in everyday speech patterns, you quickly discover that it has two meanings. Sometimes, when people talk about mice they also talk about mousetraps and mousetrap cheese, which tells you that a mouse would not be something you want to have in your house. These lexical items suggest some things about mouse that might not be the same in another language. The proverbs and sayings one might find when investigating a word can also suggest some connotations English people have when talking about a mouse, eg. when the cat’s away the mice will play which informs you about the relationship between mice and cats. This is something you might want to involve in your dictionary. You can also make someone draw a mouse for you on a piece of paper which will inform you about possible connotations and size etc. When putting all these things together you get a general idea of the connotations involving mouse, which you then can translate into your dictionary.

When trying to explain a term, you’ll often find lexical or referential gaps. This means that there is no equivalent for the word in the language you are translating it to. Eg. what kind of translation would you give for ‘Lord Chanceller’ when you want to translate from English to Dutch? You can only describe it using synonyms, since we do have some similar positions, but they’re not quite the same. You want something that is both the English definition as well as a proper translation. Make sure to not only put an equivalent of the word in the definition. As we’ve seen before, it’s possible that you’ll use one equivalent to explain a term, and when explaining that equivalent you direct us back to the word you were defining in the first place. This is called circularity and should be avoided at all times. Sometimes however, it’s difficult to find out that you have circularity in a dictionary. This can happen with words that have a lot of synonyms, like bag.

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We can avoid problems with circularity by obeying a set of ground rules:

1. AVOID OBSCURITY
I think we all know what obscurity is in your everyday language, but here obscurity can come in many forms:
- circularity (which we have seen above)
- regressive definitions (when you define salt as NaCl. Sure it’s right, but it won’t really help most of the users of your dictionary)
- synonymy  (don’t define a word with its synonym, because when you’re making a bilingual dictionary, the synonym usually doesn’t make you understand the word in the first place)
- opposites (when defining a word, don’t only use it’s opposites. Which makes sense, but in some English dictionaries wild is still defined as not civilized. While that’s correct, it doesn’t really do anything for somebody who’s learning the language.)

2. PROPERLY CAPTURE THE SEMANTIC INVARIANT
The semantic invariant of a word is the meaning that applies in most contexts without that meaning being one seperate word. This means you have to find a definition for the word, one that is part of the native speaker’s knowledge about the language which guides them in the use of that specific word.  Which is, hands down, pretty damn difficult if you have to do it all day long, but failing to properly capture the semantic invariant can lead to pseudo-polysemy, which happens when you present a term as being polysemous when it is not. Usually, when defining this, it’s best to use so-called molecules: words that can be used for definitions without making the definition itself more complicated.

3. PROPERLY IDENTIFY YOUR REFERENT
When you fail to identify the referent of the thing that you’re defining, you can get a numer of errors:
- Incorrect genus (There is an English dictionary that defines cake as bread with other ingredients besides flour. The problem here is that the genus, meaning the fathering category, of cake is NOT bread. When you think of cake, bread isn’t the first thing to pop into your head; nobody will say that cake is bread, so don’t use it. When identifying the genus of a word, it’s usually best to use the term that pops into your head straight away. Do note that this term can be a bad genus if it doesn’t have multiple meanings. Not having those would make it a synonym of the word you’re trying to define.)
- Broad definitions (eg. chair is sometimes defined as seperate, usually moveable seat for one. Here, the moveable part is erroneus because chairs can also be non-moveable; eg. in a theatre. The same goes for jail, which can be defined as a place for the confinement of persons in lawful detention. This is too broad because there are plenty of other things that can be defined as such, like an asylumseekers camp)
- Narrow definitions (eg. boot is sometimes defined as leather footwear extending above the ankle. There are most definitely boots that do not stretch beyond the ankle, so it is erroneus.)
- Metaphores (eg. fruit can be defined as seed with its envelope, especially for food or means of reproduction. First of all, the word envelope is a metaphore which doesn’t clarify things. Secondly the word especially is a bit weird there. It makes sense when looking at the whole picture, for us, but the word is too complicated for second language learners and it’s a bit ambiguous. And so on.)

Now try to do it yourself! Define cake for me. Define it in such a way that somebody who isn’t a native speaker of English can understand it.

Hi everybody! This post will be about forms of definition. Therefore, I have to introduce a term here that can only be translated as meaning definition, which is an icky translation (Ducth word is betekenisdefinitie) but I can’t do better than that. The ones that also study Linguistics might know that I’m missing a post, but I won’t put that on line. As I might have told you, we don’t use powerpoints for this class, and the only thing left for me to do would be to summarize the chapters we had to read for that class. I refuse to summarize those chapters here because it would probably count as copyright infringement, and I don’t want to be shut down no matter how much I disagree with the establishment on this particular area. I know that that makes me quite the lame protester but hey, I don’t want to throw away another year of college, so let’s just not do that. Best to be taking down the establishment with an education, hyar hyar.

Anyways. A meaning definition is something you can use to describe the meaning of a term. To do so, you must first determine what the meaning of the term is. You can use various criteria to determine this:

- Context. When you take a look at the sentence I’ve put the X on the table, you can use your awesome powers of deduction to determine that X must be a thing you can put on top of a table. Therefore, it should not be too large and heavy, because it wouldn’t fit on the table otherwise, and if it were it would also have been impossible for one person to get it on the table in the first place, et cetera.

- Part of speech. When you take another look at the sentence I’ve put the X on the table, you see that X is a word that appears in a noun slot, a place where a noun would fit into a sentence. Do note that a word that fits into a noun slot doesn’t necessarily have to be a noun! Such a place can also be taken by a verb that can occur on its own, which is the case in the sentence I hate ice skating. Here, ice skating could be a verb or a noun, so which one is it here?
To make sure X is a noun, we need to look at other parts of the sentence I’ve put the X on the table. When we do, we find out that X has an article preceeding it. This tells you that X must definitely be a noun. You can also take a look at the syntactic structure of the word: can it appear with different parts of speech? Which ones?

- Situation. This would be, when do you use the word? In which situation did you use it? This can tell you a lot about the contextual meanings a word might have.

(- Own intellect. You can only use this when you know and speak the language in which the sentence I’ve put the X on the table is, obviously. )

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When defining a word in a dictionary, people usually also use secundary sources, which means other dictionaries, reference works, encyclopedias et cetera, to make it easier for them to define a word. When doing so, you have to make sure to not directly copy things because of copyright infringement (:P), but you also have to make sure that your data is reliable. This mistake is commonly made when a book is reprinted again and again over a very long period of time, and you keep copying the previous print. That’s what happened with some of the lemma’s in the Dikke van Dale: they kept copying the previous edition, which resulted in a dictionary containing definitions of a word that weren’t used anymore. Looking at other dictionaries however can also be very useful when you have to define abstract terms like hate and doubt. Encyclopedias are often used to describe the reality behind the word, like when you have a noun that applies to an exotic animal. To describe it, you must provide at least some background for the people who have never seen it before. This is also something you must not forget when the noun that applies to the animal is ambiguous: the Dutch words zeekoe (manatee) and nijlpaard (hippopotamus) don’t have anything to do with a cow (koe) or horse (paard).

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Now we get to the actual subject of the post: forms of definition. The most frequent form of definition is a one-word definition, in which you give the reader one word which you then define. This can be done in bilingual dictionaries by listing an equivalent, eg. koe - cow, and in monolingual dictionaries we usually describe the term using synonyms, eg. jeans – pants. However, if you’re going to make a very large dictionary, it’s better to use also use other forms of definition besides synonyms because words are never absolute synonyms (after all, not all pants are jeans). The reason why you’d want to use different forms of definition, is because it’s almost inevitable that you’re going to use one synonym to describe the other and the other way around. Meaning you’d define bike as bicycle and the other way around, which would be okay for native speakers since they know they both mean the same thing. But what if you don’t know that there’s only a difference in connotation between bike and bicycle (meaning that one of the words is the more official term for the other one) and not a difference in meaning?

It’s best to, when you have multiple words with the same meaning as is the case with bike, you can give all of them the same synonymic definition. This would mean that all the possible forms of the word (bike, cycle, wheels et cetera) would refer you to one synoniem (let’s take bicycle) to define further. Do note that giving a synonymic definition is not the same as listing hyponyms and hyperonyms (often defined as the is-a-relationships, eg. red is a colour. Here, red would be the hyponym and colour would be the hyperonym or hypernym)! Yes, a house = a building, but a house is also a building THAT you use to live in, which means it should be defined as the latter.
You can give the reader a better visual of what the synonym is when you add the analytic definition of the word, which would be the original meaning of it. So, when we return to the definition of our bicycle, that would be means of transportation. We call this an analytic definition because have to analyze the meaning of the word to be able to put it in the right category of original definitions, and because you have to show people what the difference is between the term you’re describing and the other members of that category. For bicycle, that would look like this:

BICYCLE – means of transportation

- has two wheels, a saddle, steering wheel, frame and pedals
- doesn’t require fuel
- requires manpower to ride
- can be used for outdoor and indoor sports
- et cetera.

The analytical definition of a word is mainly used when you want to define a noun or a verb, because they can usually stand alone. Adverbs however can not be defined analytically because they usually are dependent on the noun they precede. I will tell you some more about this later on.

Do note that some connotations can also depend on the culture of the country. In the Netherlands, salmon (zalm) was a kind of fish that used to be pretty expensive, but it was also prized and known for it’s great taste. The best part of it, or so people say, is the triangular part that’s right below the mouth of the fish. In the Netherlands this part is known as het neusje van de zalm, literally the nose of the salmon. But because it was considered such a superb delicacy, the expression het neusje van de zalm (the crème de la crème, the elite et cetera) became a synonym for something that was very good, exclusive and very expensive, which later on translated to somebody or something that is considered to be/taste very good.
This is similar to a form of definition called intentional definition or classical lexicography, in which you describe something by listing it’s connotational characteristics. This means that you’d describe a fox as a sly animal.

When defining a conjugation or derivation, it’s usually best to use a morpho-semantic definition, which means that you describe the definition by using the elements of which the conjugation/derivation is made. This goes for derivations such as painted, which can indicate that something contains paint or is coated with a layer of paint, but also for conjugations such as well-raised which can mean that somebody is raised very well, which makes him/her appear well-behaved in various situations. Do note that some conjugations and derivations are not quite as easy to see through as the two I’ve used to describe the morpho-semantic definition with, so you have to make sure to define them properly (I don’t know any, do you?).

Another form of definition is an antonymic definition. When you use this form, you give opposites to make the user of the dictionary understand the word that you are defining. Antonymic definitions should never be the only definition provided (because defining hot as the opposite of cold doesn’t make you understand what cold is) and you should be careful when using them, since some antonyms also depend on the context in which they appear. Woman-man would be a perfectly good antonym, but so is woman-girl, and last time I checked, girl wasn’t a synonym for man.

As I’ve said before, it’s more difficult to define an adverb than a noun. Because of this, we have come up with all sorts of ways to define them, manyof them listed above. A new way to define an adverb easier is the so-called COBUILD-definition, which means that you define the adverb by placing it into a sentence that can be divided into two halfs. In the first half you introduce the word, and the second half of the sentence explains what the word means (eg. When you’re ANNOYING you make people feel and act grumpy or something similar). The advance of this method is that you’re able to provide more context for the user, which makes the term easier to understand. The COBUILD-definition works pretty well when you’re making a dictionary for people that want to learn a new language.

Another form of definition which is often used is the prototypical definition: you define a word by naming elements that have something to do with the meaning of the word. This is what we did when we defined bicycle: we used prototypical representatives of that word to describe it. It’s usually good for your readers to include the most prototypical definition of the word in your dictionary (for bicycle, that would be the wheels, saddle, steering wheel et cetera). Usually, the most prototypical definition of a word is a definition that you’ll know off the top of your head, a definition that belongs in the collective memory of a group of people, something that it’s widely known for (eg. cow – animal that provides us with milk). There are words that can only be described like this, like sensory experiences and colours, mostly the primal colours since you can still describe purple as somewhere in between red and blue. When defining blue however, you’d have to use a prototypical definition, like the colour of the sky. Do note that the names of colours are bound pretty tightly to the culture of a group of people (the ancient Greeks, for example, didn’t have a word for blue. They considered the sky to be bronze), and colours are also usually associated with particular terms, eg. red – the colour of blood.

Related to the prototypical definitions are the relational definitions. These definitions express the relationship of the word you’re defining with another word by referring to that other word. Eg. canon (1) a form of musical composition (…), (2) with regard to canon law. 

Lastly, you can add metalingual definitions, which are commonly used for words that have a certain function like articles, conjunctions, possessives et cetera. You simply show people when to use which word. They are usually also used to define profane words.

Hello! Last time I blogged we talked about categories and such. This time I’ll dive into one of these categories, namely polysemy.
You might know that some words have multiple meanings. When writing a dictionary, you face the constant challenge to define things as clearly and easy as possible. When you want to place a word with multiple meanings in a category, you might discover pretty quickly that there are some things that need to be defined before you can do so. That is why I will also feature the terms and definitions I will give you below in a tree structure that might clarify things more.

We can divide words with multiple meanings into two categories:

- homonymic forms (the different meanings the word has don’t have anything to do with eachother)
- polysemous forms (the different meanings the word has have a connection between them)

These categories themselves can also be divided into subcategories. Homonymic forms can be divided into homophones (words that only sound the same, like flower and flour) and homographs (words that are written and pronounced the same, like the Dutch word bank which, apart from place to store your money, can also meancouch).

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Polysemous forms can be divided into words that show regular and irregular polysemy. Regular polysemy is a form of systematic, recurring polysemy. Examples of this polysemy can be found in the Dutch word vrouw which can mean both wife and woman. It is also seen in the English word girl which can mean both small female child and girlfriend. Words that we categorize as possessing irregular polysemy do not have this systematic relation. Words that possess irregular polysemy however do tend to be connected to one another via metaphorical relationships between the five* senses.

To make it a little more confusing, irregular polysemy can also be divided into subcategories (that would make them sub-sub-categories). These categories are radial polysemy and chain polysemy. In radial polysemy, you have one specific definition of the term at the center of a whole group of other meanings. This meaning connects all the other ones to eachother; you could say that the center definition radiates outwards towards the other definitions, to connect them to the center. When you draw them on a piece of paper, you get something that looks a bit like the word spiders you used to make in elementary school.
In chain polysemy, the different definitions one word has form a chain that connects each definition to the previous and next one. The first and last meaning might not have all that much in common, but when you look at the meaning(s) in between you can see the relationship between them.

Both of these forms of polysemy can be understood better when illustrated with an example. A nice example of radial polysemy would be the Ewe noun ga, which means metal, money, time and prison, depending on the context in which it is used. This might seem confusing, but when you realize that the meaning at the center is metal, it becomes less confusing. After all, coins (so money) are made of metal, as are church bells (used to tell the time) and the bars that prisons have in front of their windows to prevent criminals from escaping. The center definition can also be called a bridging context since it connects all the meanings to eachother.  Cake, right?
An example of chain polysemy can also be found in Ewe: speakers of this language use one verb for chasing away, washing clothes manually and kneeding (as in, kneeding dough). The meaning chasing away is the meaning that connects them all: you chase the dirt away with your hands when you brush it off of your clothes (which is related to washing them). The movement you use when washing your clothes is roughly the same as the movement you use to kneed dough, and that’s how they’re all connected.

The opposite of polysemy is monosemy: one word only has one meaning. You can also define this as the absence of ambiguity.
There are other connections you can make between words. One of those is called metonymy: the meaning of one concept extends itself to the entire object. This usually happens with flowers (rose, lilac).
You can also use a container as a measure to name the object with. This is called regularity and is often used for bottles, cans and other containers: bottle –> one bottle of water. When making a dictionary, you should think about how you will represent this, since the name for the container doesn’t tell you anything about what’s inside it. However, when you put a mass object in it, such as beer, cola and water, you can use the container as a measure to name how much of it there is.
Sometimes words have contextual meanings, like the Dutch word leren. This can be translated into teach and learn, which suggests that the word may be ambiguous in Dutch. In Dutch, the word has morphological derivatives such as leerling (student) and leraar (teacher), which gives you the clue that there could be two different meanings to leren. But how should we define these when making a dictionary? How should we define leren? Should you represent the contextual meanings of the word, and if so, how far will you let these meanings stretch?

Culture can also play a role in some of the decisions you make. In Ewe for example, you have the word to which can mean various things, depending on the context:
- ear
- father-in-law
- district or quarter
- riverbank or edge 
- to pass by… (as a verb)
- to go out  of… (in Africa, there is an insect that can crawl into the corn and eat the inside. In that context, to is used to describe the action)
- mountain/hill
- overgrown (when the hair grows into a bushy mess)

These different meanings are all related to eachother via ear, which is something that stands/sticks out, since it’s directed away from the body. A mountain or hill is also something that sticks out, just like a riverbend. But father-in-law is connected to ear because in this culture, the father-in-law is the person you go to when you have problems. He is the ear of the relationship between a man and a woman. This is something you must represent when you make a bilingual dictionary, because otherwise your users wouldn’t be able to understand some of the conversations in Ewe. (Question time! What do you call the relationship between the various meanings of to?)

Another way in which words can be related to one another is heterosemy. Heterosemous words are words that belong to different parts of speech but are related semantically. Usually, we would categorize such words as being polysemous, if it weren’t for the different parts of speech-part. This means that the word can occur as a noun and a verb (or any other random category) while the semantic relation (here that would be defined as the relation between both definitions) is preserved. We see this when we look, for instance, at the word knife, which can occur as a noun (knife: sharp, triangle-shaped piece of steel with a hilt, used to cut things with) and a verb (to knife somebody, I knifed him: to kill somebody). Here, you can use the noun to make the verb form of the word because you use the instrument that the noun indicates.

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When making a dictionary, you have various ways to actually collect data. Considering what’s said above, you should be able to determine which method should work best for the kind of dictionary you make. Imagine, if you will, that you are in a faraway country wandering aimlessly through the jungle. Suddenly you find a village. You discover that they speak a language that has not been registered yet. A new language. When you find yourself in such a situation, you’d want to talk to the villagers, right? Discover what they know about the world and such, right? You’ll need to at least make a glossary, so you can learn their language and understand them. When making a glossary, you can obviously walk around and point at stuff and let them tell you the word for it, but different cultures have different values. Some things might be taboo, which might stop the villagers from telling you the name for it, since it would be considered bad form to do so. Here in the Netherlands, you can talk about your genitals all you want, but some cultures might think differently about that. You’ll need to make a scheme of the human body. You can give these to the natives so they can indicate parts of the body by writing the names for them down. This could pose a problem when something that we define as a body part with its own name isn’t defined as such in the language of the locals (for example, Swahili doesn’t have a word for hand). Another problem poses itself when you find out that none of the natives can write, or when you find out that the ones that can write are too shy to write names of genitals down. Well, nothing lost yet, maybe they’ll be more comfortable around you once they get to know you. For now, you can focus on something else. Which is good, because you didn’t come completely unprepared: you took picture books about plants and animals that are and aren’t common in the area in which you are. When you show them to the locals, you can gather more information about what they know about the world, but also about their daily routine. When they recognize a bird that is not common in their area, you could hypothesize that they travel. But that also poses a problem: recognition. Not only because people usually aren’t intensely focused on birds, but also because some pictures might not be clear, or because the plant or animal occurs in different colours or shapes in their area. It would be better if you went back into the jungle and took pictures. That way, you can make sure that the locals recognize the animals portrayed.
Of course, you can also use modern technology. For instance, you can film the locals when they are playing games or cooking. When doing so, make sure that you have somebody with you that can explain what’s happening, so you can translate it later on. You can also use these recordings in the dictionary itself: lots of dictionaries are also e-dictionaries nowadays. When you are in the village, try to write down some of the stories that they tell eachother. They will tell you a lot about the culture and contextual meanings that some things can hold. Of course, you can also feature these in the dictionary.

Lastly, it’s also important to gather data about your informants, the locals. Education strongly affects the personal lexicon.

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* You actually have about 20 senses. Being able to feel pain is also a sense, as is the ability to feel different temperatures, the ability to maintain your balance, etc. Being the 21st sense makes ‘the sixth sense’ (yes, the paranormal one) seem a whole lot less impressive, doesn’t it?

Well hello again and another blog for you! We talked, among others, about synonyms in our most recent class on Word and Meaning (which was yesterday, so I’m quite fast for once in my life ). I’m sure you all know what synonymy is, you substitute one word with another without changing the meaning of your sentence. Well let me tell you, there are no synonyms that are absolute, absolute meaning that you can substitute them for each other every single time and in every single sentence either one of them is used. They are practically non-existent (you’d maaaaaaybe find one if you looked really hard, but that’d be awfully difficult and boring ). That’s because not all words mean the same in every context. It’s a bit of a bad example, but look at the English words hot and warm. You can usually substitute them for one another, but sometimes you can’t:

- This pan is hot.
- This pan is warm.
- It’s hot out here.
- It’s warm out here.

But:

- That girl is hot.
- *That girl is warm.

Gramatically, this would be a possibility, but since hot and warm don’t always have exactly the same meaning, this doesn’t fly (the asterix is used to notify you that the sentence following is not correct). That’s why the absolute synonyms people talk about are generally partial synonyms: there are contexts in which these words are interchangeable, but there are also contexts in which they aren’t.

Earlier I used a sentence with the word hot in it. The difference between hot and cold, or even hot and warm, is part of a gradable antonymy. You also have simple antonymy, this contains words like dead and alive. The difference between these two is quite easy. When you say something is hot, it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s not cold, but when you say something is dead, that something is most certainly not alive. And when you talk about gradable antonymy, you can usually attach words like little and very to the antonym and your sentence would still be grammatical.
Antonymy itself means that the words contained within this concept are each other’s opposites, and it works a lot with respective cultural meanings (or so my notes say).

Next to synonymy and antonomy, you have taxonomic and functional categories. The taxonomic categories contain only living things, and the words in it are all “kind of”- words. Like this:
Living things – plant – tree – oak et cetera. A plant is a kind of living thing, and a tree is a kind of plant, and so on. The words that we categorize as functional don’t do this. Functional words handle collectibles like furniture, weapons, cutlery and so on. You cannot say that a gun is a kind of weapon, because a gun is a weapon.

A little bit like the functional categories is meronymy. This contains words that have a part-of-relationship with one another. It’s biologically and culturally grounded, because we distinguish for example arm-hand-fingers and say that our fingers are a part of our hand. On the other hand (forgive my pun), native speakers of Swahili don’t see the hand and the arm as different things; they say that our fingers are part of our arm. They don’t have a word for hand.

You have to be careful about putting something in this category. For example, is your armpit a part of your body, or is it a place on your body?

Another thing Bantu-languages have (Swahili is a Bantu-language) is reversals. This category contains words that are each other’s opposites, but in a different way than I described above. They have a certain morphology that tells the listener/reader that it’s the opposite of one certain word. For example, the English words buy and sell have nothing in them that will tell you that one is the opposite of the other. In Swahili, opposites will work like this:
Funga (to close) – fungu-a (to open). These reversals contain only words in which the action they imply is reversible (that’s why we call them that). Words like buy and sell are called conversals.

When making a dictionary you also have to think about are connotations. Connotations are cultural agreements about certain animals, for example. In the Western culture, an owl is dubbed as wise, but in Africa, an owl is linked to witchcraft and is an ill omen. These things are important when you want to explain what something means in a different culture, e.g. when you’re making a dictionary that translates words from one language to the other.

And that’s a wrap!

Well. This is a pretty abstract course and it’s mostly (or at least, that’s what really stuck) about how to write a dictionary and stuff, how do you make it as easily accessible as possible and such. So for us students it’s mostly just reading texts and going to the classes in which you simply get a lot of definitions and that’s about it (and assignments but that’s not the point I’m making here). I’m not quite sure if I’m going to continue following this class, since I already picked two courses too many, but on the other hand it’s very interesting so I’m just going to continue thinking about that. Since it’s purely definitions, I probably won’t blog that much about it; at the end of the course though we have to make our own dictionary which will be very interesting to blog about. If I continue I’ll blog about that a lot and just give you a glossary with some notes each week. This time it’ll make (a little) sense though!

So, about that glossary eh. First up is the term glossary, which is a collection of words and definitions. Glossaries have been made throughout the ages but for us Dutchies, they started being popular in the Medieval period since we started writing and reading a lot more. This was usually done in Latin instead of Dutch (also by monks) so after a little while somebody started making a glossary to be able to write/read his texts better. Since writing was done by hand in those days, people simply copied the version that they wanted and that was it. When we started making books – well, you all know what happened then. Bible translations! But also dictionaries. In the Netherlands it was mostly Cornelis Kiliaan’s doing, his best work went to the presses in 1599 and that was already the third print of his dictionary.

After that, the Golden Ages arrived. Since the Netherlands were mostly trade-based, we started writing a lot of dictionaries that incorporated foreign languages (they’re called bilingual dictionaries), so we could learn them and make more money. When the Golden Ages were over, people gained more and more interest in their own language, so we wrote descriptive (and sometimes also prescriptive) dictionaries. And that’s where we are right now. Nowadays we have loads of different kinds of dictionaries, which you might know, and a ‘science department’ that studies the vocabulary called lexicology. We also have metalexicology which is what I described above; that mostly covers the how-to’s about dictionaries and such.

As you might know, the term lexicography also exist. This is mostly rules about language, and the difference between this term and lexicology is that lexicography describes where lexicology merely studies the various possible outcomes of lexicography.

When making a dictionary (we’re diving into the metalexicology here) you have to make sure it’s easy for everybody to access it. This can be done by taking various terms and such into account when you write it. First of all, a word has certain properties that tell you something about what kind of word it is and such. When you want to define a term, you’ll start by looking at its form. How many sounds are there and in which form are they written down? This is all phonological, so you usually write it in IPA. When I say boek (‘book’), you notice that there are 3 different sounds I’m making, and that you can write them down as [buk]. The form also incorporates the spelling of a word in regular alphabet, and the morphology of it. You might notice that, when you open a dictionary to find a word like ‘walked’, you can only find the form ‘walk’. This form of ‘walk’ is also called the canonical form, so the form of the verb without flection and affixes and such.

After having looked at the form of the word you start looking at the meaning of it, and how you can explain this meaning to your readers. When defining a word like this, you start with the literal meaning, move on to the figures of speech and end with job-specific meanings (jargon). You also look at the part-of-speech memberships of the word.

Moving on, we get to the function of the word and how it’s related to other words. This means grammar, gender, what kind of word it is (e.g. adverb) and the idiomatic connections the word might have. Idiomatic connections are things likeit’s raining cats and dogs, so things you might want to read in a dictionary because some of them don’t really make sense when you just look at the words. It doesn’t take up that much time and space in your dictionary, and it’s one of the least important items on this list, but you’ll miss it when it’s not there.

Lastly we have the use of the word. That means you look at the use of it: is it a formal word or is it informal, in what situations would you use it, but also labeling. When something is an insult to somebody, you have to put that in the dictionary. In the Netherlands we use something like ‘beled.’ which is an abbreviation of the word ‘belediging’ which means insult.

The terms above are the ones you need to take into account when you write something about a word in a dictionary. When writing a dictionary an sich you need to write about very similar things, namely:

formal information (make sure the dictionary contains the orthographic forms, pronunciation information and morphology, so inflection and word formation),
syntagmatic information (make sure the dictionary contains possible part-of-speech memberships, constructions/syntactic valency and collocations)
semantic information (make sure the dictionary contains definitions, content-paradigmatic info and equivalents)
pragmatic information (information about how to use the word).

You also use the diachronic perspective, which basically is etymology, and of course you use some examples. And that’s how you make a dictionary! Basically, that is. There are a lot more other things you need to take into account, but they’ll follow later on.