What dialect or sociolect
John Burton
jburton at morobegold.com.pg
Thu Nov 9 19:38:43 EST 2000
>I think there is another question that follows on what David Counts wrote;
>namely, what dialect or sociolect will this dictionary try to document?
I don't think there's a need to limit ourselves at an early stage, or
perhaps ever. I realise that dictionaries of English end up choosing a
variety - Australian English, US English etc - but these are much bigger
things. I would merely say that this project is primarily about Papua New
Guinea Tok Pisin and not really about Solomons Pijin or Bislama (although we
might compare from time to time).
Given that, is it true that a 'core lexicon' exists? If so, can we find out
what it is? There would be an equation here with bush pidgin = 'core
lexicon' pidgin. But it may not be true - what if we find bush varieties are
all so different we cannot agree on a selection?
A simple starting point might be to consider Mihalic's dictionary documents
the core lexicon reasonably well. Then we might like to add and subtract
from it. (I'd query the obscure tolai tree names to start with - who knows
them?)
John Burton
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