The Nishnaabemwin Dictionary project: About a thousand words to go

By Mary Ann Corbiere

This estimate is based mainly on terms from dictionary workshops held up to 2019, the last year I was able to do these. I’ve now checked all the workshop notes and typed up the terms that aren’t in the database yet. As of this August, I’ve added pertinent information (e.g., meaning, verb, and noun gender) for about 400 words. There are about 17 more pages of the list of terms to be fleshed out in this way, so this project won’t be finished for several more months. Given this timeframe, I wanted to assure people at this time, “Nda-piichiikaanaa go,” – We are continuing to work on this (though not 9-to-5, five days a week). The finished Nishnaabemwin Online Dictionary should contain around 20,000 words.

The information I add goes into a table that I began compiling late last Fall. Rand Valentine, the linguist and database expert, will export this to the database once I’ve finished. As well, I want to revisit terms documented earlier that are hard to translate with the aim of shortening or simplifying wordy or convoluted translations. This effort often has me mulling for quite a while. Thinking of phrases related to an idea and Googling them sometimes helps with wording. I Googled “chewing gum on an airplane,” for instance, as I was struggling to translate nsaaksheshkaa (a verb not in the database yet). A phrase came up that seemed quite apt to include in the translation, “airplane ear”; one’s airplane ear be relieved, is much shorter than my initial translation. For verbs that pose a translation challenge, I include an example sentence or two to illustrate how the word can be used. The one I drafted for nsaaksheshkaa means: They say that one’s airplane ear is relieved if they chew gum. How would learners find a nifty Anishinaabemowin verb like this?

Key English words are taken from translations and put into the part of the database from which search results are compiled when an “English to Nishnaabemwin” search is done. When a word is typed into the search bar, the results appear as a list of the various Anishinaabemowin terms that contain the idea typed in. Some results lists are long as happens with the word ear; the word a learner wanting to say something about airplane ear might type it in the search bar. We have many verbs containing the idea, ear: tawgaapne, have an ear infection; gzhiibtawge, have an itchy ear; etc. Unfortunately, the way the database was designed, search results list any term that has the letters typed into the search bar, so unrelated terms like mskokmigaa, [earth] be red, and wiiba, early also show up for ear (I didn’t realize a dictionary database would do quirky things like this). This issue might be resolved by the revision of the database design that Rand and another database expert are doing.

Typing in abbreviations for part of speech, and noun and verb gender (e.g., vta, vti) is straightforward for the most part. But for some verb sub-types, inconsistencies have arisen over the years. Verb sub-types include those that, for instance, normally are only in plural form (e.g., biidaabiigmawak, stream of cars coming this way). Another sub-type includes the idea “each other”, for example, n’kweshkdaadwak, they meet each other (another term missing from the dictionary). In checking how I abbreviated the label for a sub-type, I find inconsistencies such as vaip-recip for miigaadwak (fight each other) and vtap-rec for some other verbs of the same sort (“Recip” and “rec” are abbreviations of “reciprocal”, relating to the idea, “each other”). When I see a verb sub-type from my workshop notes, I double-check what abbreviation I used in past years for other verbs like it, making adding information on parts of speech proceed a bit more slowly. I’ll also need to check with Rand whether verbs like miigaadwak are essentially transitive animate (ta) or animate intransitive (ai) verbs; he’s more knowledgeable about how various verb sub-types are derived (i.e., whether one is essentially transitive or intransitive).

As I go back and forth to check information among the various lists, typos I missed before jump out at me. Any that are in the table I’m currently compiling, I correct promptly. Correcting typos in the online dictionary is best left until the database design is revised so other errors aren’t inadvertently introduced. I’ve made another list to keep track of these. Once the database is finished, we’ll turn our attention to preparing a print dictionary, and figure out how to select which terms to include. Perhaps just 60 or 70 per cent of the terms will be included so as to ensure it’s not cost-prohibitive. How long this might take, we can’t estimate, but it remains a major goal.