International Journal of Lexicography Advance Access originally published online on August 3, 2006
International Journal of Lexicography 2006 19(3):257-285; doi:10.1093/ijl/ecl014
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Making a Dictionary for Community Use in Language Revitalization: The Case of Mutsun
University of Arizona
Amah Mutsun Tribal Band
(nwarner{at}u.arizona.edu)
How one writes a dictionary of a language can be greatly affected by what information is available about the language, and by who the intended users of the dictionary are. This article describes the making of a dictionary for Mutsun, a Native American language which currently has no speakers (it is dormant). The Mutsun community is attempting to revitalize their heritage language, and the creation of this dictionary is one part of that project. We discuss the issues of making a dictionary for use by community members rather than linguists, issues that are similar to those for dictionaries of endangered languages. We also address questions of how to make a dictionary when the information about the language is incomplete and based on a variety of archival sources, and no new information can be collected. This problem is similar to that of dictionaries for dead languages. We address the lexicographic issues we have encountered with Mutsun as an example.
1 We prefer the words "dormant" or "sleeping" to "extinct" or "dead" for languages with a community but no living speakers. Hinton (2001) uses "sleeping" to describe these languages. We distinguish between "dormant" languages such as Mutsun and "dead" languages such as, as far as we know, Gothic: dormant languages have a heritage community that would like to bring the language back into use, and there is enough data about the language that bringing some form of it back might be possible. Furthermore, community members often do not like to hear their languages or cultures described as "extinct," and "extinction" implies a permanent status.
2 The practical orthography currently in use for Mutsun is shown here. Symbols can be written double to indicate distinctive length. See Warner et al. (in preparation) for discussion of how this orthography was developed and why these symbols were chosen.
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- denotes separation between stems and clitics, and between parts of compounds.
3 Throughout the paper, forms in the practical orthography (which is also a phonemic transcription) are printed in italics. Where the original spelling used by a source is at issue, original spellings are in single quotation marks. The practical orthography does not use IPA symbols, but it is a phonemic transcription, and maintains all distinctions of the language.
4 Even Harrington, an excellent phonetician, often re-elicited a word with T or c multiple times to be sure of which sound he was hearing.
5 Although Harrington's phonetic level transcription is not problematic for linguists, it causes problems for community members working with the original notes. Non-linguists tend to feel that each symbol should be pronounced differently. When the differing symbols are representing primarily free variation, literal interpretation of the transcriptions will lead community members to attempt to produce a wide range of artificial distinctions, occurring arbitrarily in any particular word. It is important to train community members who work with original sources not to take every detail of every transcription as a requirement, but also to train them in which non-English distinctions are important to maintain.
6 A reviewer points out that it may be surprising to find older forms apparently inserting sounds. However, Mutsun is known to have had some type of short, unclear epenthetic vowel in some consonant clusters (Okrand 1977 p. 66–67), and Harrington generally did not transcribe these, while Arroyo often did. This may explain the extra vowel in akkara, and many of the other longer Arroyo forms include suffixes or otherwise represent a string of morphemes.
7 ahen may correspond to haahen, with omission of h and of vowel length. The final –n in haahen is the final allomorph of the inherent reflexive suffix –ni, so the original spelling aheniakken might be correct, with a vowel rather than a glide. The –ak could be the third person singular clitic pronoun. However, this leaves the final –ken completely unclear, and if –ak is the clitic pronoun, then the –n allomorph, rather than the –ni allomorph, would be expected. aheniakken is far too long for the disyllabic verb templates, so there must be additional morphemes in this form.
8 Providing forms that may be changed after further data analysis means that learners must often relearn corrected forms of words they have learned in the previous form. This is obviously inconvenient, but the Mutsun community prefers this to waiting until all archival analysis is complete before beginning to learn the language. Indeed, we doubt that motivation for the project could be sustained if the community were asked to wait on revitalization for several years while linguists complete archival analysis (Warner et al. in preparation).
9 This reduction is also found with some of the objective pronouns. Its apparent restriction to function words suggests that it may have been conditioned by word frequency or prosodic reduction.
10 porti consists of poor ‘flea’ and the verbalizer –ti, so the literal translation is "to be a flea".
11 This does not provide all the information about sources. If the main phonological form comes from Harrington, but Mason/Arroyo and Merriam also have the word, in a variant form, the source information will mention only Harrington. Since variant forms are not included in the hard copy dictionary, a dictionary user would not be able to see that this word is attested by three sources. This is unlikely to be a problem: any dictionary user who is advanced enough to use information about how many variants are attested by which sources could be working with the electronic version containing all information.