Matthew Winterton and Dr. Deryle Lonsdale, Linguistics and English Language
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Since Madagascar gained its independence from France in 1960, the country’s leaders have tried to promote a unique sense of identity for the Malagasy people and culture. Part of this effort has been spent in preserving the Malagasy language. However, due to the limited extent of vocabulary in the Malagasy language, a high demand for English arose, resulting in English becoming an official language in 2007. Since the first Malagasy-English dictionary was published by British missionaries in 1835, there have been attempts to fabricate a modernized Malagasy-English dictionary, but these efforts have by no means been comprehensive and are often mistranslated with archaic definitions. Those seeking to learn Malagasy were left with inadequate and inaccurate materials.
Dr. Lonsdale and I recently developed a new Malagasy-English dictionary. Our approach was to use WordSmith Tools, a program for corpus research, and Microsoft Excel to compile a frequency word list and definitions (Figure 1). Excel has the advantage of a simple alphabetization algorithm which is useful for sorting large amounts of text without encoding it in XML format. I initially gathered hundreds of texts from various internet and print sources to compose a 3 million+ word corpus from which I gathered the 7500 most frequent Malagasy words. Using Excel, I defined each word, cross-referenced definitions, and provided numerous usage examples. Dr. Lonsdale then wrote software to transcribe the Excel document into the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) standard format for dictionaries (Figure 2).
Variations from the proposed project were not extensive; however, in compiling the dictionary, I collaborated with Dax Jarnagin, an additional BYU student with extensive experience in Excel programming and macros. The dictionary was split into parts of speech to work in manageable pieces, and Dax wrote several macros to compile the dictionary back into one list. Additionally, because of the unique morphology of the Malagasy language, we saw the need to develop a comprehensive verb chart including all conjugations and organized by root (Figure 2).
In February of this year, I presented my research at the Utah Conference on Undergraduate Research. I also recently presented my work to the BYU Alumni Board. We are currently preparing the dictionary for submission for publication. We had anticipated having published our dictionary by this time; however, the majority of our time was spent compiling data, formatting our Excel document, and translating. Moreover, we will submit our results to a major linguistics conference and/or journal.
In terms of further research, we plan to author an English-Malagasy dictionary this coming year. This will be different from our current dictionary in that the frequency list will come from existing English corpora and the definitions will be simple Malagasy translations, so that a native English speaker will be able to look up what he or she wants to say and have modern, accurate translations in Malagasy.