Questions tagged [lexicography]
Production of dictionaries and analysis of the relationships between the words of a language.
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questions
4
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1answer
472 views
How is the “basic form/citation form” defined in highly inflected languages besides IE languages?
A "basic form" may seldom appear in a highly inflected languages, and languages in the world are different from each other, by which we cannot simply apply the convention of IE languages on ...
3
votes
0answers
60 views
Noun phrases in dictionaries
Today's Oxford English Dictionary word-of-the-day ("ice master") reminded me of a question that's been on my mind for some time:
What criteria do dictionary-makers use to decide whether a ...
0
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0answers
32 views
how does one properly escape the context of a definition when writing one
When a lexicographer is forming a definition how do they make sure they are not overly influenced by the examples they refer to when forming their definitions.
how do they properly escape the ...
7
votes
1answer
623 views
What's the term for finding an attestation of a word that predates the earliest known one?
Certain dictionaries make a point of citing the earliest known written usage of a particular word. Sometimes, after the dictionary is published, someone tracks down an even earlier attestation of the ...
2
votes
0answers
46 views
Is it possible to infer the meaning of a word of a language based on corpus analysis, without prior knowledge of the language?
If I am totally foreign to a language, are there corpus analysis methodologies and theories that I can employ to figure out the meaning of a word in a corpus based on that language?
If yes, do point ...
0
votes
1answer
67 views
Indo-European Etymological Dictionaries Online database (by Brill, Leiden University)
The Indo-European Etymological Dictionaries Online database (by Brill) already includes eleven dictionaries https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/6356/22504
I've read about this "database" before. ...
0
votes
1answer
87 views
What was the diffusion and the use of dictionaries in ancient times? Every civilization with a dictionary?
Did they have dictionaries in the ancient times?
I mean who used the dictionaries? Did authors use them to know how to write?
I don't think it worked this way. But when in the history dictionaries ...
0
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2answers
52 views
How to make a dictionary with and without technology (comparison)
I'd like to know the difference between the way lexicographists wrote dictionaries in the past, and the way they could procede now, in our modern times.
Note: To compare, I'm talking about ...
2
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0answers
78 views
Is there a dictionary of word commonalities across languages?
The most common combination of letters that is used for a word... What is that called? And is there a dictionary of that?
An example is... Pineapple... If you look at the word pineapple in all the ...
5
votes
3answers
828 views
How do dictionaries source attestation?
Some dictionaries source attestation and try to go for the earliest quotes they can find. How do they find them? Without electronic indexing this must have been impossibly difficult.
The reason I'm ...
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votes
1answer
96 views
Minimal English: Lack Of Clarity And Redundancy
In terms of semantic useful words, Minimal English lists:
Foods:
corn (yams, etc.)
flour
meat
rice
salt
sugar
sweet
wheat
Technology And Transport:
bicycle
boat
car
engine
phone
pipe
plane
radio
...
2
votes
1answer
80 views
Greek: differences between words marked as αρχαιοπρεπής, λόγιος or παλαιότερα
In my dictionary some words are marked with αρχαιοπρεπής (dated, archaic), λόγιος (learned form) and παλαιότερα (more ancient use). What are the differences, if any, between these terms, and what is ...
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0answers
47 views
Programming tools for exploring semantic relationships between words
By relationships I mean things like "hypernym", "hyponym", "synonym", "antonym".
I'm not quite sure what type of tool I'm after; I just want to "easily explore".
I discovered WordNet and the wn ...
1
vote
2answers
392 views
Dictionary building / corpus exploring software
What software do lexicographers use these days to manage and search corpora? Is there a standard solution used by most people, or does every dictionary commission their own software to suit their own ...
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0answers
52 views
an open source lexicographical framework
I am looking for a lightweight open source framework for lexicographical experiments: building vocabularies, converting from one type to another, merging, dealing with multilingual issues, ...
google ...
0
votes
2answers
176 views
How do native speakers determine a word's literal/basic meaning?
For example, to me, the verb "to turn" has a literal meaning along the lines of "to change physical orientation along some particular axis". You can also say "X turned [adj.]", "X turned up (as in to ...
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0answers
25 views
Is there any OED-as-directed-graph research?
Say, I want to know what a "dog" is, so I read the definition for dog in the OED. But, of course, it contains a list of words too so I set out to read the definitions for those as well. This forms a ...
3
votes
2answers
150 views
Center of a set of words
Is there any available algorithm that can take a set of words and attempt to find a word that best represents the "center of mass" of all those words?
This would be easy if we can define a distance ...
5
votes
2answers
518 views
Is there an open source English dictionary that isn't too fine-grained in defining a word?
I'm creating a multilingual online dictionary and I need an open source English dictionary to work off of.
Wordnet is the obvious choice, as it's extremely complete and its license is permissive of ...
4
votes
0answers
313 views
Dictionary with real IPA and English sandhi rules?
I don't like English dictionaries that use pseudo-IPA to indicate pronunciation. I've seen none indicating that most plosives should be aspirated, but when they're in "sp", "st" and other combinations ...
2
votes
1answer
417 views
How can a multi-language dictionary be made? [closed]
Let's pretend we are producing four-language cross-dictionary. To be more difficult, let it be a Russian-English-Japanese-Sanskrit dictionary.
By "cross-dictionary" I mean that the person using it ...
7
votes
1answer
186 views
How are dictionaries produced
What are the steps invoked in producing a dictionary?
I am primarily interested in understanding the role software plays in the production process.
Obviously a corpus for the language is first ...
2
votes
1answer
363 views
Dictionary of Georgian language with lexical stress?
I search for dictionary of Georgian with lexical stress, but i can't find online of offline. Perhaps Georgian have any explicit rules for lexical stress which i don't know?
8
votes
2answers
3k views
What is the notion of lemma?
Psycholinguistically, a lemma is an abstract conceptual form of a word. However from a lexicographic perspective, the lemma is merely the aorist or canonical form of a word.
In English, the lemma of ...
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vote
1answer
1k views
Etymology and Morphology
In lexicography is the following claim correct?
To describe the origin of a word in a dictionary only you need either describe its 'etymology' (if that word has a single morpheme) or 'morphology' (if ...
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votes
7answers
3k views
Important english word which doesn't exist in another language
I'm looking for an important English word which doesn't have a corresponding word in another language. I would be happy even it's a language spoken only by a small population.
Preferably, the word is ...
4
votes
1answer
178 views
How are meanings of a word ordered in a dictionary?
What base does vocabulary.com use for its hierarchy of meanings of a word? For example see http://www.vocabulary.com/dictionary/sound. Are top levels (numbered list) all homonyms?
What structure do ...
5
votes
2answers
607 views
Is our mental lexicon structured like a tag-cloud system or hierarchical?
Thinking about this discussion on meta i was reasoning about simple self-experiments you can do in psycholinguistics, where you dont need great background knowledge in Cognitive Psychology or ...
7
votes
3answers
957 views
Are there dictionaries like Collins COBUILD for other languages than English? [closed]
Let me explain what I'm after:
monolingual
all examples are taken from a large corpus of contemporary text (the COBUILD series is now using Bank of English)
the senses for each entry are sorted by ...
