Article: Citing verbs in polysynthetic languages: the case of the Cherokee-English dictionary.(Report)

ABSTRACT. This article represents an additional contribution to the steadily growing body of work that addresses the problems faced in creating dictionaries for Native American languages. In his 1975 Cherokee-English dictionary, Feeling cites verbs in the third-person singular conjugated forms. Cherokee is a polysynthetic language in which all verbs are bound roots; accordingly, bare verbal stems do not surface for speakers. Today's potential audience differs from the 1975 audience in a number of ways, however, which render the choice to use conjugated forms less appealing. This paper asserts that listing verbs by their unprefixed stems is a linguistically sound ...

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