Friday, June 15, 2012

Merging entries from Cordova's colonial Zapotec dictionary

A couple of weeks ago, I managed to import all of Cordova's 1567 dictionary of Spanish into my FLEx project.

Since that book is Spanish -- Zapotec, one thing that is revealed by created a project that can sort on the Zapotec is how many times Zapotec words are listed under multiple translations in Spanish.  This gives us a much better sense of the range of meanings of the Zapotec word.

Consider the following merged entry for aba-queta 'fall', which combines information from six different Spanish - Zapotec entries

.  

Here it would not have been too difficult to see this, since all but one are listed under caer 'fall' in Spanish.

But the value is much clearer when the Spanish glosses are more various.   Consider the following entry for aate 'harden',  where the various Spanish glosses are not alphabetically adjacent.  Nor is the idea that the same word is used for freezing and hardening obvious.


No comments: