Faclair na Gàidhlig and Corpas na Gàidhlig: New Approaches Make Sense

For minority languages in the twenty-first century increasingly overshadowed by their global counterparts, language maintenance and revitalisation are of paramount importance. Closely linked to these issues is the question of corpus planning. This essay will focus on two projects in Scottish Gaelic which will play a major part in preserving and maintaining the language by providing it with high quality lexicographical and research resources: Faclair na Gàidhlig and Corpas na Gàidhlig respectively ; the essay concludes with a brief case study on Gaelic numerals which illustrates how Corpas na Gàidhlig can powerfully enhance our understanding of Gaelic

A corpus-based survey of four electronic Swahili-English Bilingual dictionaries

In this article we survey four different electronic bilingual dictionaries for the language pair Swahili-English. Aided by a data-driven morphological analyzer and part-of-speech tagger, we quantify the coverage of the dictionaries on large monolingual corpora of Swahili. In a second series of experiments, we investigate how applicable the dictionaries are as a tool in the development of a machine translation system, by evaluating bilingual coverage on the parallel SAWA corpus. At the same time we attempt to consolidate the dictionaries into a unified lexicographic database and compare the coverage to that of its composite parts

Beyond definition: Organising semantic information in bilingual dictionaries

This paper considers the process of organising semantic information in bilingual dictionaries with diachronic coverage, from selecting the textual source-material to designing the entries. The discussion centres on practical aspects of ancient Greek lexicography. First, the traditional semantic frameworks are described. Then, more recent approaches are noted, notably those of Adrados and of Chadwick, both of which aim to integrate contextual data within a semantic framework. Since the relevance of contextual information varies with lemma part of speech, different configurations are required for entries describing nouns, adjectives, and verbs. These are illustrated by three entries from a Greek-English dictionary currently being written at Cambridge. In order to organise data to this level of specificity, stylistic templates are indispensable, and digital software provides a means of providing them. However, systems designed for writing new dictionaries require different features from those designed for encoding pre-existing texts. A description is given of how the lexicographic requirements of the Cambridge dictionary were met by a user-designed system

Revolutionizing bantu lexicography: a Zulu case study

Zulu uses a conjunctive writing system, that is, a system whereby relatively short linguistic words are joined together to form long orthographic words with complex morphological structures. This has led to the so-called 'stem tradition in dictionary making for Zulu, as well as for most other Bantu languages. Given this lemmatization approach has been found to be inadequate for young learners (who fail to isolate stems), the development of a new approach was imperative for them, but until recently deemed impossible to implement. In this paper it is argued that it is now perfectly possible to reverse the unproductive trend, and to opt for the lemmatization of full words for all but one of the word classes in Bantu. This revolution is made possible thanks to the recent availability of relatively large corpora, with which the really frequent citation options may be pinpointed. Rather than a mission statement, this paper offers the result for all word classes. To do so, an actual guide to the use of a Zulu dictionary is re-represented and annotated

Considering a lexicographic plan for Gabon within the Gabonese language landscape

This article raises a number of questions that should be dealt with in drawing up a lexicographic plan for Gabon. For which of the Gabonese languages should lexicographic units be established? This question entrains the issue of inventorying the Gabonese languages and their standardization as well as the issue of language planning for Gabon. What is the status of those foreign languages widely spoken in Gabon? What about French? Should Gabon keep importing its French dictionaries from France, or should the Gabonese compile their own French dictionaries, including French words and expressions exclusively used in Gabon? Finally, after trying to answer these questions, a number of suggestions are made for the establishment of a lexicographic plan for Gabon