It is over 150 years since Richard Chenevix Trench, an Anglican┬áarchbishop, a Dean of Westminster,┬áand a poet wrote his thoughts on the dictionary. He wrote that “A Dictionary is an historical monument, the history of a nation contemplated from one point of view; and the wrong ways into which a language has wandered or been disposed to wander, may be nearly as instructive as the right ones in which it has traveled: as much as may be learned, or nearly as much from its failures as from its success, from its follies as from its wisdom” (Trench 1860: 7). It is important that Trench sees a dictionary as “…a historical monument, the history of a nation…” since his definition implies rightly that a dictionary is a national assert which documents the expansiveness of a national linguistic heritage.
It reflects the different contacts that a linguistic community has had with other linguistic communities. For instance from contacts between the Setswana language and Afrikaans (Afk) and English (Eng) speakers, Setswana has borrowed words such as jase (Afk: jas), galase (Afk: glas), emere (Afk: emmer), kara (Afk: kar), aterese (Eng. address), founu (Eng. phone), jesi(Eng. jersey), and phathi (Eng. party). The words of a language therefore narrate a tale, not just of language contact, but also of “asymmetric power relations” (Webb, 2004: 229), since less influential languages tend to borrow from more influential ones. In this case Setswana has borrowed copiously from English and Afrikaans while English and Afrikaans have not or limitedly borrowed from Setswana.┬á┬á┬á┬á
Trench develops further the argument on what a dictionary is by pointing out that: “A dictionary….is an inventory of the language… It is no task of the maker of it to select the good words of a language. If he fancies that it is so, and begins to pick and choose, to leave this and to take that, he will at once go astray. The business which he has undertaken is to collect and arrange all the words, whether good or bad, whether they do or do not commend themselves to his judgment, which, with certain exceptions hereafter to be specified, those writing in the language have employed. He is an historian of it not a critic… There is a constant confusion here in men’s minds. There are many who conceive of a Dictionary as though it had this function, to be a standard of the language; and the pretensions to be this which the French Dictionary of the Academy sets up, may have helped this confusion. It is nothing of the kind” (Trench 1860: 7).
Lately, I have received numerous requests on the key features of Tlhalosi ya Medi ya Setswana. Tlhalosi is the monolingual dictionary published in 2012 by Medi Publishing. It will be impossible to cover all the features of Tlhalosi in this column. First, a headword (a word that has been defined) has at least one core meaning, to which a number of polysemous senses (related meanings) may be attached. Core meanings represent typical, central uses of the word in question in current Setswana, based on corpus analysis and established research. The core meaning also represents the most literal sense that the word has in ordinary modern usage. This is not necessarily the same as the oldest meaning of the word, because word meaning change over time. Some related words have multiple parts of speech. The decision of which part of speech appears first is made based on the most common usage. In the dictionary the core sense acts as a gateway to other, related polysemous senses. Other words have figurative meaning extension of the core sense. The word mokwatla’s core sense is the back part of the body and the figurative meaning extension is support of a system or organization.
Tlhalosi is the first Setswana dictionary to have comprehensive pronunciation detail for each lexical entry. Since Setswana is a tonal language, each transcription is marked with tonal markings. Phonemic transcriptions are important since they help users: language learners, linguists and teachers to have a pronunciation reference point. The tonal markings are in particular important for disambiguating words which though orthographically written the same way, have different tonal distributions. These are words such as mosimanyana ‘a small boy’ and mosimanyana ‘a small hole’.
The dictionary is also compiled to capture all the Setswana lexical varieties such as Sengwaketse, Sekgatla, Sengwato and others. It doesn’t represent one dialect. For instance a word for tin is lexicalised differently in a number of Setswana dialects. It is mmolopita in Sekgatla, tsiri in Sengwaketse and sebagabiki in the Sengwato dialect. In the dictionary, all of these words are cross-referenced and marked with a dialectal marker. The dictionary therefore captures high levels of synonymy. The dictionary has over 4,400 cross-references of synonyms from a variety of dialects. Synonyms appear at the end of head word and are preceded by the equal sign [=]. The headwords bear the following dialectal marks AfBo. (South African) Bots. (Botswana) Ngwk.
(Sengwaketse), Lete. (Selete), Kgat. (Sekgatla), Ngwt. (Sengwato), Rolo. (Serolong), and Kwen. (Sekwena). As more research goes into the Setswana dialectal studies, a more detailed characterisation of Setswana lexical wealth will be revealed. Currently, Tlhalosi ya Medi ya Setswana has 371 headwords with dialectal markings. The dictionary also has stylistic markings for informal entries and terms which may be considered offensive by the users and speakers of the language.
Tlhalosi ya Medi ya Setswana is the first Setswana dictionary to mark frequency. Frequency markings indicate which word is rare and which one is common. The most frequent 4000 headwords are marked with the use of stars immediately following the headword. The most frequent 1000 words get four stars (****); words ranked between 1001 and 2000 get three stars (***); words ranked between 2001 and 3000 get two stars (**); words ranked between 3001 and 4000 get one star (*) while words ranked 4001 and below get no star. Kilgarriff (1997: 135) notes that “A central fact about a word is how common it is. The more common it is, the more important it is to know it.” Additionally, highly frequent words are more likely to be polysemous.
Setswana has for a long time been in contact with Afrikaans and English and therefore has borrowed extensively from the two languages. Other languages from which Setswana has borrowed include Zulu and Kalanga. Of over 15,000 headwords in the Tlhalosi ya Medi ya Setswana, 1,179 have etymological information. Headwords with etymology information therefore constitute about 7.6% of the dictionary. The dictionary traces a word to the language of its origin as well to its etymon (a word in the source language).
The Tlhalosi database has changed and grown since the publication of Tlhalosi ya Medi ya Setswana in 2012. The aim is to continuously develop it into a comprehensive encyclopaedic dictionary that captures the wealth of the Setswana language since a dictionary is an historical monument of a people’s language and culture.
