Gretchen: One of the analogies I like to use is that language is an open source project, and dictionaries are help documentation.
Lauren: Ahhh, that’s nice.
Gretchen: If you think about an open source project, you have different people contributing to it and stuff lives or dies based on whether other people take it up. So every speaker of a language is contributing to that language’s open source project, and it’s useful to have help documentation, but help documentation often lags behind new features. Like, it still says that this menu is over here, but actually that’s not true anymore because in version 7….
Lauren: We changed the menus.
Gretchen: Exactly. Dictionaries are help documentation for a language, they’re not the language itself. Like, if a new feature isn’t in the help documentation yet, that doesn’t mean it’s a bad feature! Of course new words aren’t going to be in any dictionaries for a while – you have to implement the feature before you can add it to the help documentation. Same thing goes for minority languages: even if their dictionary is not as complete as the many English dictionaries…
Lauren: They still have all the words and they can add more words.
Gretchen: Their language is still as complex as English even if their dictionary technology – their help documentation – is less comprehensive.
Listen to the full episode, read the transcript, or check out the show notes for more interesting links about dictionaries.
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