Research Articles

Documenting Lexicons: Chechen and Ingush

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Abstract

Producing easily usable, professional-looking descriptive dictionaries on a shoestring budget in a short time span is a priority for documentation, but hard to achieve. The usual procedure for field dictionaries is to compile a target language-to-contact language lexical database (e.g. Chechen-English, in our case) and generate a contact-to-target dictionary or index from the glosses, This is economical but not always fully satisfactory. Here we describe our solutions to some common problems of field lexicography based on several years’ experience at compiling, editing, and publishing dictionaries of Chechen and Ingush, close sister languages of the Nakh-Daghestanian language family spoken in the central Caucasus. They are languages with large, literate speech communities for which dictionaries need to be sizable, attractive, and linguistically sophisticated and for which two different alphabets are needed, and we hope that our experience in trying to meet these goals will be helpful to linguists embarking on lexical documentation.

Keywords: language documentation, dictionaries, lexicons, lexicography, challenges, solutions, Chechen, Ingush, Caucasus, compilation, editing, publishing

How to Cite:

Nichols, J. & Sprouse, R., (2003) “Documenting Lexicons: Chechen and Ingush”, Language Documentation and Description 1, 99-121. doi: https://doi.org/10.25894/ldd309