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In an earlier publication it was claimed that there is no useful relationship between Swahili-English dictionary look-up frequencies and the occurrence frequencies for the same wordforms in Swahili-English corpora, at least not beyond the top few thousand wordforms. This result was challenged using data for German by a different team of researchers using an improved methodology. In the present article the original Swahili-English data is revisited, using ten years’ worth of it rather than just two, and using the improved methodology. We conclude that there is indeed a positive relationship. In addition, we show that online dictionary look-up behaviour is remarkably similar across languages, even when, as in our case, one is dealing with languages from very dissimilar language families. Furthermore, online dictionaries turn out to have minimum look-up success rates, below which they simply cannot go. These minima are language-sensitive and vary depending on the regularity of the searched-for entries, but are otherwise constant no matter the size of randomly sampled dictionaries. Corpus-informed sampling always improves on any random method. Lastly, from the point of view of the graphical user interface, we argue that the average user of an online bilingual dictionary is better served with a single search box, rather than separate search boxes for each dictionary side.
This paper looks at whether, after two decades of corpus building for the Bantu languages, the time is ripe to begin using monitor corpora. As a proof-of-concept, the usefulness of a Lusoga monitor corpus for lexicographic purposes, in casu for the detection of neologisms, both in terms of new words and new meanings, is investigated and found useful.
While there was arguably a need for multi authored, multi volume, metalexicographic handbooks three decades ago – when the field of metalexicography was still ‘young’ – it is a bit puzzling to make sense of the current output flurry in this field. Is it simply a matter of ‘every publisher trying to fill its shelves’? or is there really a need in the scientific community for more and (continuously) updated reference works? And once available, are such works also consulted? Which parts? By whom? How often? For what purposes? In this paper we look at an ongoing, real world metalexicographic handbook project to answer these questions.