Making the first standard Portuguese-Capeverdean dictionary: a technical and linguistic challenge

BIBLIOTHÈQUE DES CAHIERS DE L'INSTITUT DE LINGUISTIQUE DE LOUVAIN — 132 In and Out of Africa Languages in Question In Honour of Robert Nicolaï VOLUME 2 Language Contact and Language Change in Africa edited by Carole DE FÉRAL Maarten KOSSMANN Mauro TOSCO PEETERS LOUVAIN-LA-NEUVE – WALPOLE, MA 2014 CONTENTS Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Preface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Carole de Féral 3 Dix raisons pour s’intéresser à l’œuvre de Robert Nicolaï : procès-verbaux d’un mandéiste . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Thomas Bearth 5 Multilingual actors: examples from a West-African contact zone . . . . Klaus Beyer 15 When blood becomes money: lexical acculturation in Southern Africa . Matthias Brenzinger 37 Problems for the salvage linguist: picking up the pieces after asymmetrical contact . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . G. Tucker Childs 73 Le développement d’un marqueur de déplacement centripète en mandinka : une influence possible du contact avec les langues atlantiques . . . . . . Denis Creissels 95 Where have all the noun classes gone in Tima? . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103 Gerrit J. Dimmendaal On substratum: the history of the focus marker d in Jijel Arabic (Algeria) Maarten Kossmann 127 Making the first standard Portuguese-Capeverdean dictionary: a technical challenge . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141 Mafalda Mendes & Nicolas Quint Adjectives and Other Qualifiers in Cerma (Gur) . . . . . . . . . . . . . 163 Gudrun Miehe Sound symbolism in Iraqw literature . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 201 Maarten Mous & †Safari Sanka Swahili in Central African contact and colonization . . . . . . . . . . . 209 William J. Samarin Imports and exports in linguistic markets in the West African Sahel . . 251 Henning Schreiber The morphological structure of animal names in Maa (Eastern Nilotic) . 269 Rainer Vossen The coding of plural, collective, and inclusive in Lamang-Hdi (Chadic). 281 H. Ekkehard Wolff La détermination nominale en songhay : les dialectes de la périphérie et du centre . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 315 Petr Zima MAKING THE FIRST STANDARD PORTUGUESE-CAPEVERDEAN DICTIONARY: A TECHNICAL AND LINGUISTIC CHALLENGE1 Mafalda MENDES Faculdade de Letras da Universidade de Lisboa Nicolas QUINT LLACAN (UMR8135 - INaLCO/CNRS) Estoy convencido de que el monólogo no existe. Es siempre un diálogo entre un hombre y su conciencia.2 Joaquín Calvo Sotelo 1. INTRODUCTION Today, in the Republic of Cape Verde, two languages are in daily use:3 • Capeverdean, a Portuguese-based Creole language, is the mother tongue, spoken by nearly all of the 500,000 inhabitants of the country. Capeverdean Creole is also in current use among the Capeverdean diaspora, particularly in the U.S. (more than 200,000 speakers). In Portugal, Capeverdean is the second language in use after Portuguese, with over 100,000 speakers (Quint 2005: 26-27). 1 2 3 Many thanks to Elise Moore-Searson, Philip Baker and Dave Roberts for having so kindly and profitably reviewed the English text and translations of this article. We obviously assume full responsibility for any remaining mistake in English (due to our nonnative competence in that language) which may have made its way into the final version of this paper. “I am convinced that there is no true monologue. It is always a dialogue between a man and his conscience.” The following abbreviations and conventions are used: abbrev. = abbreviation; adj. = Adjective; C.L.U.= Complex Lexical Unit; Cv. = Capeverdean; MSL = MorphoSyntactic Level; P.O.S. = Part of Speech; Pt. = Portuguese; s. m. = Masculine Noun; SPL = Semantic/ Pragmatic Level; sth. = something; UL = Usage Level; v. intr. = Intransitive Verb; v. tr. = Transitive Verb; WL = Word-form Level; WPL = Word Patterns Level. {} brackets enclose a Portuguese gloss. In the glosses, the following abbreviations appear: ADJ = adjective; ART = article; CONJ = conjunction; DEF = definite; DEM = demonstrative; ENCL = enclitic; HAB = habitual; PASS = passive; POSS = possessive; REFL = reflexive; REL = relative; S = subject; SG = singular; TON = tonic (stressed). 142 M. MENDES & N. QUINT • Portuguese is the official language of Cape Verde, and the only one used in written communication, government services and schools. The coexistence of two languages (Capeverdean and Portuguese) in Cape Verde and in Capeverdean communities can be seen as a cultural treasure. However, the present-day situation of diglossia (Duarte Almada 1998; Quint 2000b: 243) in particular in Cape Verde and Portugal, where Capeverdeans speak Creole and have to learn Portuguese at school, can sometimes lead to linguistic confusion. In 1998, the Capeverdean Parliament officially recognized the role of the Capeverdean language (Conselho de Ministros 1998: 18-23). This could, in time, lead to the introduction of Creole in Capeverdean schools and favor the appearance of a bilingual society. However, in order to teach Capeverdean, it is necessary to standardize the language and to provide adequate didactic material, especially grammars and reference dictionaries. Some Capeverdean dictionaries are already available and provide translations for several thousands of Capeverdean items into Portuguese (Fernandes 1991; Quint 1998; Lang 2002), English (Pires & Hutchison 1983), and French (Quint 1999). However, except for the Portuguese-Creole lexicon4 of Lopes da Silva (1957) and a rather short French-Capeverdean dictionary5 written by Quint (1997), there is still no sizeable reference lexicographic work offering translations from a foreign language into Capeverdean. Between 2000 and 2002, our Capeverdean, Portuguese and French team built the first standard PortugueseCapeverdean dictionary. This task was quite a challenge from at least two points of view: (1) technically, because of the scarcity of economic and human resources and the lack of previous work in this specific field, and (2), linguistically, particularly because of numerous problems arising from the non-standardized status of the Capeverdean language. In this article, we will begin by describing the characteristics of the dictionary we have produced. Then we will explain in detail the difficulties we encountered, and the solutions and methodology we developed in order to solve 4 5 This lexicon is a serious and valuable work, but the Creole words are written in a non-international phonetic system and the majority of the vocabulary comes from the dialect of São Nicolau, the speakers of which represent roughly 3% of the whole Capeverdean population. For those reasons and despite its linguistic interest, the lexicon cannot be used as such as a general reference for modern Capeverdean. This dictionary includes slightly more than 3000 entries, but most of them have a relatively poor lexical treatment (few meanings are differentiated and few idioms or complex lexical units (see 2.3.4. below) are taken into account). MAKING THE FIRST STANDARD PORTUGUESE-CAPEVERDEAN DICTIONARY 143 them. We will illustrate each point with examples taken from our dictionary, which was finally completed and published during the second half of 2002. 2. THE DICTIONARY 2.1. Target users The target users of the dictionary are primarily a) the Capeverdean-speaking pupils having Portuguese as their only school language in Capeverdean and Portuguese schools, and b) the Portuguese teachers or social workers who deal with Capeverdean-speaking pupils either in Cape Verde or in Portugal. 2.2. Macrostructure Given a) the state of the art in bilingual Portuguese-Creole lexicography, b) the present scarcity of bilingual resources for Capeverdean school population, and c) the available human and financial resources for the project, we have decided to limit ourselves to 4.000 Portuguese entries. These 4000 entries include: 1) The 2217 words from the Português Fundamental Vocabulary (Português Fundamental 1984; Bacelar do Nascimento & Garcia Marques & Segura da Cruz 1987a; 1987b). 2) About 840 words selected by Mário Vilela from school text books (from the first six Portuguese school levels) in his Dicionário do Português Básico (Vilela 1990). These 840 words were meant to enhance the vocabulary coverage of Português Fundamental, taking into account the school needs of six to twelve year old Portuguese students. 3) About 1000 words coming from a pre-existent Capeverdean-Portuguese lexical database6 and selected by the Portuguese team by crossing two main criteria: a) frequency rate in a corpus of about 9 million words (mainly journalistic texts) and b) adequacy to the school needs of the envisaged target public. 6 The lexical database developed in order to produce our Dicionário Caboverdiano-Português, variante de Santiago (Quint [Quint-Abrial] 1998). 144 M. MENDES & N. QUINT 2.3. Microstructure The lexicographic analysis of the Portuguese words follows a pre-defined microstructure which distinguishes five main levels of lexicographic information: WL – word-form level: graphic and phonetic; MSL –morphosyntactic level; WPL – word patterns level; SPL – semantic/ pragmatic level;UL – usage level, i.e.: WL – word-form level MSL morphosyntacyic level WPL word patterns level SPL – semantic/pragmatic level UL – usage level Figure 1. The five levels of lexical information in each Portuguese entry 2.3.1. WL – word-form level: graphic and phonetic At the word-form level, every lexical unit is registered by the graphic form of its conventional base form, according to Portuguese grammatical standards: a. Singular for nouns with no gender inflexion; b. Masculine, singular for adjectives or nouns with gender inflexion; c. Infinitive for verbs. A lexical entry is headed by the graphic base form of the lexical unit. A lexical entry may contain different morphosyntactic and semantic units if the etymological base is the same. Each base form is assigned a phonetic transcription in the international phonetic alphabet using standard European Portuguese pronunciation. At this level we also registered any current variant forms of the word (e.g. Pt. ouro/oiro, ‘gold’) and gave information about the existence of homographs (e.g. Pt. este ‘east’ / este ‘this’), homonyms (e.g. Pt. aterrar ‘to land’ / aterrar ‘to frigthen’) and homophones (e.g. Pt. cozer ‘to boil’ / coser ‘to sew’). MAKING THE FIRST STANDARD PORTUGUESE-CAPEVERDEAN DICTIONARY 145 2.3.2. MSL – morphosyntactic level At the morphosyntactic level, each lexical unit is treated according to its morphosyntactic behavior, giving rise to what may be called the morphosyntactic units. Each morphosyntactic unit is assigned a part-of-speech label and whenever necessary irregular inflectional forms are registered at this level too. 2.3.3. WPL – word patterns level Throughout this project, our lexicographic approach pays special attention to the behavior of the words in contexts of real usage of the language. Therefore, rather than treating each isolated lexical unit, we tried to take into account the context in which words tend to occur. For this purpose, we extracted collocations from the above-mentioned nine million words corpus, searching for evidence of the most common lexical patterns involving the words under analysis. As a result, this dictionary is particularly rich in complex lexical units such as complex terms (e.g. Pt. base de dados, ‘database’), idiomatic expressions (e.g. Pt. despedir-se à inglesa, ‘to take French leave’), collocations (e.g. Pt. cair doente, ‘to fall ill’) and syntactic frames (e.g. Pt. carregar algo de/ com algo, ‘to load sth. with sth.’). 2.3.4. SPL – semantic/ pragmatic level The semantic scope of a lexical unit is often quite complex, particularly when one deals with high-frequency words. At this level of analysis, we tried to establish a clear mapping between the morphosyntactic or complex lexical units and what we will term the meaning units. The perspicuous delimitation of the meaning units is fundamental to guarantee accurate and useful translations. Meaning delimitation was expressed by means of different types of information: • glosses to help the translators’ task (not to appear in the final version of the dictionary). • lists of synonyms and/ or antonyms. • pragmatic information such as domains of usage, language register and type of idiom. It must be noted here that in cases of polysemic lexical units we did not set out to give an exhaustive account of every possible meaning unit subsumed by that lexical unit. According to the profile of the dictionary, our purpose is to explain only the most current and basic meanings of the word at stake. Therefore a highly proficient speaker of Portuguese may find that some word meanings are not registered but these are deliberate gaps of semantic information. 146 M. MENDES & N. QUINT 2.3.5. UL – usage level Illustrative sentences, shortly called “examples”, were added whenever we felt it necessary to enhance the explanatory power of the dictionary. Some examples were extracted from the corpus exactly as they occurred; in other cases, the sentences of the corpus were slightly adapted to fit the general profile of a basic dictionary. Some other examples have been written from scratch by the Portuguese team, who always tried to produce totally plausible and common utterances. In Tables 1 and 2, one can see the result of the analysis of a verbal element, mexer, and of a nominal one, burro. WL MSL-P.O.S. mexer v. tr. 1 v. tr. 2 v. tr. 3 v. intr. 1 WPL-C.L.U. 1 2 SPL-MEANING UNITS UL-EXAMPLES {imprimir movimento a; agi- felizmente conseguia mexer tar; mover} os braços e as pernas ‘to put in motion, to move’ ‘fortunately, he was able to move his arms and legs’ {revolver o conteúdo de algo, mexe bem o leite, para disde forma a misturá-lo bem} solver o chocolate ‘to stir the contents of sth. in ‘stir the milk well so that the order to mix it well’ chocolate dissolves’ ~ em {tocar em} se mexeres nele, pode morder-te ‘to touch’ ‘if you touch it, it may bite you’ -se {agitar-se, mover-se} inquieto, o pássaro mexia-se dentro da gaiola ‘to move’ ‘the restless bird was bustling around its cage’ SPL-MEANING UNITS mexe-te! ‘get a move on!’ põe-te a mexer! ‘go away!’ Table 1. Lexicographic analysis of the Portuguese verbal entry mexer MAKING THE FIRST STANDARD PORTUGUESE-CAPEVERDEAN DICTIONARY WL burro MSL-P.O.S. s.m. 1 s.m. 2 adj. WPL-C.L.U. 1 2 3 147 SPL-MEANING UNITS {animal} ‘donkey’ {certo jogo de cartas} ‘a kind of card game’ {estúpido, bronco, que sabe pouco} ‘stupid, idiotic, ignorant’ SPL-MEANING UNITS UL-EXAMPLES cabeça de ~ és um cabeça de burro! ‘stupid person’ ‘how stupid you are!’ albarda-se o ~ à vontade do dono ‘cut your cloth according to the width’ vozes de ~ não chegam ao(s) céu(s) ‘sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me’ Table 2. Lexicographic analysis of the Portuguese entry burro In that systematic way, we devised a Portuguese framework capable of being used as a solid reference to elaborate well-defined, unambiguous Capeverdean equivalents. 3. ASSEMBLING THE CAPEVERDEAN DATA 3.1. Technical preliminaries 3.1.1. Choice of the dialect and orthography In common with almost all of the World’s languages, Capeverdean has several dialects, some of which display significant differences. In this dictionary, we chose to work exclusively on the Santiago dialect (also called Santiaguense in Pt. or Badiu in Cv., anglicized under the form Badew), spoken as a mothertongue by the inhabitants of the island of Santiago (Cape Verde), who represent 148 M. MENDES & N. QUINT more than half of the whole Capeverdean population7. Badew is also the main Capeverdean dialect in use in Lisbon and other Portuguese cities, where it is spoken even by Capeverdeans originating from other islands and sometimes by Portuguese shopkeepers. To write Capeverdean words and phrases, we based ourselves on the ALUPEC (ALfabeto Unificado Para a Escrita do Crioulo Caboverdiano = Unified Alphabet for the Writing of Capeverdean Creole (Conselho de Ministros 1998: 18-23)) with slight adaptations8 due to the peculiarities of Badew and to some linguistic considerations of our team. 3.1.2. Linguistic resources To build the Capeverdean part of the dictionary, we had the following linguistic resources at our disposal: • the linguistic competence of the Capeverdean team, that is to say Nicolas Quint (scientific responsibility) and one main Capeverdean collaborator, Aires Semedo. Of course, this competence is far from being exhaustive. Nicolas Quint is a native-speaker of French and, although he has been exposed during a relatively long time to an almost monolingual Capeverdean environment, his knowledge of Capeverdean Creole is limited. Aires Semedo was born and raised in the island of Santiago in a traditional Creole-speaking community. Nonetheless the life of one individual is not sufficient to give a full account of the complexity of a whole society. For example, neither of the two members of the Capeverdean team had ever spent a long time with fishermen or blacksmiths and consequently, we had only an elementary knowledge of words relating to fishing or ironworks. • The information supplied by a large number of Capeverdean informants, friends and relatives, living in Cape Verde, Portugal and France. • The lexical material already collected by our team (in particular Quint 1999; 1998; 1997). • The available published material. At the time (i.e. before 2002)9, the richest documents for Santiaguense were undoubtedly the works of Armando Napoleão Fernandes (1991) and António de Paula Brito (1885), who were 7 8 9 For justification of the dialectal choice, see Mendes & Quint [Quint-Abrial] & Ragageles (2000) and Quint (2000a; 2000b; 2000c; 1999; 1998). For more details about these adaptations, see Quint (2003: 209; 1999: XVIII) and Mendes & Quint & Ragageles & Semedo (2002: 34-35). Mention must be made here of the fact that we were not able to fully exploit the resources of Lang’s Dicionário do Crioulo da Ilha de Santiago (Cabo Verde), which was issued only a few months before our own dictionary. MAKING THE FIRST STANDARD PORTUGUESE-CAPEVERDEAN DICTIONARY 149 both native-speakers of Badew and spent a significant part of their lives trying to understand the mysteries of their own language. But many other publications were used, including those dealing with other Capeverdean dialects. 3.2. Translation The main goal of this operation was to translate into Capeverdean the meaning units and examples as analyzed and selected by the Portuguese team when elaborating the microstructure of the dictionary. 3.2.1. Grasping the exact meaning As Portuguese was not the mother-tongue of the Capeverdean team, we were frequently faced with problems of comprehension of the Portuguese matrix of the dictionary. Of course, we had to be sure of the exact meaning of every Portuguese meaning unit or example before proposing a Capeverdean translation. Our doubts found expression in several thousands of questions which were methodically answered by the Portuguese team, mainly through e-mails, and sometimes orally. Inside the Capeverdean team, we discovered, curiously enough, that we had a different but complementary understanding of Portuguese: • as an individual educated in Western Europe, a relatively homogeneous cultural area which includes both Portugal and France, and as a nativespeaker of a Romance language, French, closely related to Portuguese, Nicolas Quint felt more at ease with administrative formulae, with figurative meanings and with some Portuguese phrases or idioms that are almost identical in French and Portuguese. • As an individual educated in Portuguese (the only language in use in Capeverdean schools) and as a native-speaker of Capeverdean Creole where many words are directly or indirectly derived from Portuguese, our Capeverdean team-mate would understand other Portuguese words, phrases or specific contexts which remained totally obscure to his French counterpart. 3.2.2. Providing Capeverdean equivalents As much as we could, we tried to provide a simple, easy-to-use Creole translation for each of the Portuguese lexical units encompassed in our database, using exclusively Capeverdean as our working language. 150 M. MENDES & N. QUINT In this process, we had to deal with the following problems and difficulties: 1. False friends: lexically, Cape-Verdean is clearly a neo-Portuguese language, with more than 95% of its vocabulary derived from classical or modern Portuguese (Quint 2008b: 71). Nonetheless, this lexical proximity is frequently a source of possible mistakes, as quite a lot of Creole words and idioms that are phonically very similar to their Portuguese cognates have different meanings. Example 1: the Cv. phrase na trés pankáda is obviously derived from Pt. às três pancadas. However, the Portuguese expression means ‘badly and hastily’, whereas its Capeverdean counterpart has preserved only the idea of speed, and thus means simply ‘hastily, quickly’. Despite the appearances, Cv. na trés pankáda cannot be held as a suitable translation for Pt. às três pancadas, for which we found the following Creole equivalents: sem kudádu, djur-djur, tudu trapadjádu or tudu fadigádu. 2. Language levels: to date, we believe no-one has ever tried to distinguish systematically language levels in Capeverdean. However, in Capeverdean as in any other tongue, all the words cannot be used randomly in the same social or geographical contexts. In our dictionary, we finally decided to retain three criteria: 2.2. Authenticity. This criterion aims at a) distinguishing between the most typical Capeverdean words and the ones that have been recently borrowed, chiefly from Portuguese, the main lexifier language for Capeverdean, and to a lesser extent from English, and b) taking into account the frequency of use of each Capeverdean item. Authenticity was measured in a 6 degree scale, as can be seen in Table 3.10 N° Degree Pt. translation Cv. translation Cv. abbrev.10 1 recent, marginal borrowing lusitanismo (recente, pouco usado) purtugezádu pt. 2 recent borrowing in widespread use lusitanismo corrente purtugezádu di tcheu uzu pt. t. u. 3 borrowed from English anglicismo|di lingua nglés ngl. 4 UNMARKED NEUTRO NORMAL 5 conservative speech fundo fundu fd. 6 conservative speech, poorly used fundo pouco usado fundu di poku uzu fd. p. u. Table 3. Scale of authenticity (see Mendes & al. 2002: 21) 10 The abbreviations are given in Capeverdean in the published version of the dictionary, as the main purpose of our book is to make Portuguese words understandable to a Capeverdeanspeaking user (see also section 2.1. above). MAKING THE FIRST STANDARD PORTUGUESE-CAPEVERDEAN DICTIONARY 151 Example 2: in order to translate Pt. cerveja /s¢r’vΩ®Ω/ ‘beer’, we had two possibilities: sarabedja /sΩrΩ’bed®Ω/, used in the countryside, mainly in conservative communities, and serveja /ser’ve®Ω/ recently borrowed from Pt., but now the most commonly used. Thus, serveja was labeled as “pt. t. u.” and sarabedja as “fd. p. u.” 2.2. Social geography. This criterion takes into account the geographical origin and the age of the speakers who use a determined word, and it is measured through a 4 degree scale, as can be seen in Table 4.11 N° Degree Pt. translation Cv. translation 1 UNMARKED NEUTRO NORMAL 2 rural rural di fóra fóra 3 urban urbano di sidádi sid. juvenil di mosindádi mos. 4 youngster’s speech 11 Cv. abbrev. Table 4. Scale of social geography (see Mendes & al. 2002: 21) Example 3: in order to translate Pt. cólera, ‘anger’, we had two words at our disposal: réiba, a typical form from Praia, the Capeverdean capital, and ráiba, used mostly in the countryside. Thus réiba was labeled as “sid.” and ráiba as “fóra”. 2.3. Sociolinguistics. This criterion is concerned with the social connotations that a word conveys and it is measured through a 3 degree scale, as can be seen in Table 5. N° Degree Pt. translation Cv. translation Cv. abbrev. 1 2 3 UNMARKED colloquial pejorative, slang, vulgar NEUTRO familiar calão NORMAL diskudádu feiu disk. feiu Table 5. Scale of socio-linguistics (see Mendes & al. 2002: 21) 11 We did not distinguish between urban and rural youngster’s speech for, in modern Capeverdean society, words typical of youngster’s speech generally originate in urban contexts (mostly in Praia, the Capeverdean capital, situated in Santiago) and then spread very quickly among all Santiaguense youth, because of the high prestige of urban culture. 152 M. MENDES & N. QUINT Example 4: in order to translate Pt. cemitério, ‘cemetery’, we had two expressions in mind: simiteri, commonly used by all speakers and kása-diskansu, word-by-word ‘rest home’, a common, humorous euphemism for ‘cemetery’. Thus simiteri was left unmarked and kása-diskansu was labeled as “disk.” 3.The absence of any known Capeverdean equivalent for some Portuguese lexical units. In this case, we had recourse to three different strategies: 3.1.Borrowing. The borrowings were almost every time made from Portuguese, which is de facto the main provider of new words in modern Capeverdean, and the foreign language most familiar to the vast majority of Capeverdeans. Example 5: to our knowledge, there is no Capeverdean equivalent for Pt. cereal [s¢’rja√] ‘cereal’. The closest aboriginal term is Cv. gram, ‘grain, seed’, which can be used to refer to ‘cereals’ or to ‘beans’, and ‘beans’ by no way are ‘cereals’. However, after further consideration, the very concept of ‘cereal’ is not specifically Portuguese, it is rather a scientific term used with a very precise meaning in technical contexts (agriculture, biology…). We needed a word to translate exactly the notion of ‘cereal’ in Capeverdean and this word did not exist. But if you are Capeverdean and want to talk about ‘cereals’ in your own language, you need an appropriate word. Thus we decided to integrate the Portuguese term under its most probable form in Capeverdean (taking into account the phonological rules of this language), and the result was sirial [si’rjΩl]. 3.2. Adaptations or neologisms: direct borrowings from Portuguese are not always the best solution. A pre-existent Capeverdean word can frequently be adapted or modified to express a non-Capeverdean reality. Example 6: Pt. antónimo, ‘antonym’, was not directly transferable into Capeverdean, as this term is unknown to or not used by a large number of Creole speakers, in particular those who have a low educational level, among whom we may include young Capeverdean-speaking pupils, who still are at the beginning of their educational route. Moreover it has a proparoxytonic stresspattern which is at variance with general Capeverdean phonological rules (Quint 2000a: 71-73). Finally, there exists in Capeverdean a traditional word, okontrári, ‘reverse, opposite’, the meaning of which could easily be expanded to include the academic notion of antonym(y). So we decided to translate Pt. antónimo as (palábra) okontrári, ‘opposite (word)’ in Cv. Example 7: Pt. escudo, ‘(riot) shield’, was not either easily borrowable as such into Capeverdean, for two reasons. First, the very notion of ‘shield’ in its MAKING THE FIRST STANDARD PORTUGUESE-CAPEVERDEAN DICTIONARY 153 military acception (whether carried by knights of the Middle Ages or by today’s policemen), while being commonly used in modern Pt. (the knights frequently appear in stories for children, and so do the riot shields and their policemencarriers in the mass-media), does not really belong to the cultural environment or references of many Capeverdean speakers, and this is particularly true for those Capeverdean speakers who live in Cape Verde. Second, the Portuguese word escudo does not represent a clearly circumscribed technical or scientific notion as ‘cereal’ does. As a matter of fact, there are other meanings associated with escudo in Portuguese. For example, in our dictionary, beside the military acception, we also have taken into account two additional acceptions of escudo, namely those of ‘currency unit’ – which usually translates as merés in Cv. – and ‘shield’ in the figurative meaning of the word, i.e. ‘protection’, translated by us into Cv. as diféza. In this case, in order to translate Pt. escudo in its military acception, we had recourse to an existing Capeverdean term, skudri or skudi, which actually is historically derived from Portuguese escudo and means ‘plastron (of a sea turtle)’. After all, the ‘plastron’ of a turtle is the part of its squeleton which protects its belly and therefore acts as a kind of shield. For that reason, we considered that the fact of giving a military acception to skud(r) i could be viewed as a reasonable adaptation based on the already attested use of this word in spoken Capeverdean. 3.3. Use of words attested by other authors (but unknown to us). As a rule, we did not use such words as the only equivalents of a Portuguese lexical unit, but we resorted to the experience of other authors only when we felt that the terms they were mentioning were important testimonies for the history of the Capeverdean tongue or for our general knowledge of this language. Example 8: in modern Capeverdean, the equivalent of Pt. dúvida, ‘doubt’ is dúvida /’duvidΩ/ in almost every social and geographical contexts. Nevertheless, both Armando Napoleão Fernandes and António de Paula Brito bear witness to an older form, dubra /’dubrΩ/ (written dubda in Fernandes 1991: 54)12, the paroxytonic stress of which is more in accordance with the phonological patterns of Capeverdean than dúvida, a proparoxytonic form that must have been borrowed to Portuguese during the 20th century. In this case, alongside with dúvida, we included dubra in the dictionary, as well as references to our source material. 12 Actually, the form dubra can still be heard sporadically in the conservative speech of some rural elders. N. Quint personally had the occasion to hear it once during a fieldwork session in the Northwest of Santiago in 2007 or 2008 (i.e. after the completion of the dictionary presented in this article). 154 M. MENDES & N. QUINT We are fully aware that the absence of Capeverdean equivalents does not entitle us to produce the missing lexical items. The borrowings, adaptations, neologisms and references we gave are only proposals, and as such, all of them are duly indicated in the dictionary by a system of abbreviations (e.g. KN < Cv. kontu nóbu for ‘neologism’), so that any reader can distinguish them from the rest of the lexical information. 3.2.3. Providing sense definitions in Capeverdean Many times, it was not possible to translate a Portuguese meaning unit by a simple Capeverdean equivalent. We were then obliged to resort to glosses, that is to give sense definitions in Capeverdean language. Two kinds of situations have lead us to use definitions: 1. A didactic necessity. Occasionally, the cultural differences between Cape Verde and Portugal are too important to be expressed through a single word or phrase. Example 9: in the Pt. entry caricatura, ‘caricature’, we gave the form karikatura (borrowed from Pt. and used by some young urban Capeverdean speakers) as a possible Cv. translation. But if we use karikatura as the only translation of Pt. caricatura, it cannot be said that we have correctly treated this entry. In essence, this dictionary is intended to help Capeverdean speakers to comprehend effectively basic Portuguese. It is unlikely that there is any interest in finding a Capeverdean form for ‘caricature’ if many users do not know what a ‘caricature’ is. Therefore, in such cases, we felt that we should explain the meaning of the Portuguese entry in Capeverdean, in a plain, easy to understand style. For ‘caricature’, we gave the following definition: dizenhu di trósa ki ta fasedu drawing hab make.pass of of joke rel di algum kusa o di algem. some thing or of someone ‘satirical drawing made of something or someone’. 2. The linguistic differences between Portuguese and Capeverdean. Albeit lexically related, Portuguese and Capeverdean display some drastic discrepancies in terms of morphology, distinction of parts of speech and word-order13. This implies that many Portuguese adjectives, nouns, etc. cannot be translated by a corresponding noun or adjective in Capeverdean and clearly require a Creole gloss. 13 From a typological point of view, it is not exaggerated to say that Portuguese is more closely related to French and even to English than to Capeverdean Creole, the latter showing many Atlantic and Mande grammatical influences (Lang 2009; Quint 2008b; 2006; 2000b: 3-66). MAKING THE FIRST STANDARD PORTUGUESE-CAPEVERDEAN DICTIONARY 155 Example 10: the Pt. verbal noun leitura, when meaning {acto de ler}, ‘act of reading’ cannot be translated by any Capeverdean noun14. Thus we chose to give an explanatory sentence in Creole, namely ok-u lé, ‘when you read’. Example 11: the Pt. preposition a, ‘to’, when introducing a complement of destination, is generally not expressed by any word in Creole: Pt. (ele) foi a Lisboa, ‘he went to Lisbon’ vs. Cv. e bá Lisbuâ, ‘he went Lisbon’. Of course, it is not sufficient to translate Pt. a by something that would mean ‘nothing’ or ‘zero marker’ in Cv. It is absolutely necessary to explain in Capeverdean what a means in Pt. and in which context it is used. In other words, in order to translate the above use of Pt. a, we had to introduce in Capeverdean the notions of ‘preposition’ and ‘complement of destination (i.e. allative or motion to(wards))’. Consequently, we found ourselves compelled to elaborate a standardized, regular way to express grammatical notions in Capeverdean, which lead us to create almost ex nihilo a whole Creole linguistic metalanguage, resorting to a combination of borrowings and neologisms as well as drawing inspiration from the brilliant example of the first Capeverdean grammarian, António de Paula Brito (1887 [1885]) who, like ourselves, had tried to devise an autonomous grammatical terminology in Creole (see Quint 2008a). 3.2.4. Translation of the examples The translation of the Portuguese examples set us some rather specific problems, principally: 1. The question of style and register. For social and historical reasons, Capeverdean Creole is fundamentally confined to oral use, as Portuguese is the language of school in Cape Verde and the main written language of Capeverdean speakers anywhere in the world. For example, there are no newspapers in Creole, and when educated Capeverdean speakers want to talk about scientific, technical or literary matters, they usually resort to Portuguese or at least borrow many Portuguese words or entire Portuguese sentences when speaking Creole. That is why, so often, the translation into Capeverdean of a simple, common sentence typical of written Portuguese can become a nightmare. 14 Santiago Capeverdean, at least in conservative, rural speech, uses the noun letura, obviously derived from Portuguese leitura. But in Santiaguense letura generally means ‘schooling, instruction’ and cannot account for the meaning of ‘act of reading’. 156 M. MENDES & N. QUINT Example 12: the following Pt. sentence is used as an illustration for the verb explorar, when meaning ‘to take advantage of’: é necessário explorar ao máximo (it) is necessary to take advantage of to.ART.DEF maximu os fracos recursos hídricos da região. ART.DEF low resources water.ADJ of.ART.DEF region ‘it is necessary to take maximum advantage of the low water resources of the region.’ In Capeverdean, there are no simple translations (as there are in English) neither for Pt. ao máximo, ‘to the maximum’ nor for recursos hídricos, ‘water resources’. Furthermore, the Pt. word-order (which is almost the same as in English here) sounds very unnatural in Capeverdean. If we borrowed the “missing” words from Pt. and followed the original word-order, we would make a sentence that any native-speaker of Creole would see as very clumsy and awkward, to say the least. Our sentence would be what Capeverdean historian Moacyr Rodrigues (p.c. 2000) calls Crioulês or “Creolese” (a mix of Creole and Portuguese), but it would not be Creole. In such cases, as much as we could, we favored the model provided by spoken Creole and tried to produce a translation that expressed the meaning of Portuguese with the vocabulary and turns of phrase that are familiar to Creole speakers. For the above sentence, it gave this result: kel poku águ ki tem na kel zóna DEM few water REL be.there in DEM place ‘that few water that there is in that place tem ki purbetádu bem purbetádu. have CONJ take.advantage.of.PASS well take.advantage.of.PASS has to be taken advantage of well taken.’ Of course, it has often been very difficult to convey the exact meaning of written Portuguese using typical, spontaneous Creole sentences. But our experience of speakers has shown us that you can say everything in Creole, as in any other language. Our problem here was more the lack of habit in dealing with certain concepts in Capeverdean than some incapacity of the Creole tongue to express those concepts. Moreover, the translation of several thousands of Portuguese examples was also an opportunity for us to discover that the Capeverdean language had many more resources at its disposal than what we had been thitherto aware of. 2. The idiomaticity of the translations. As Creole has its own genius and way of saying things, even modifying the word-order and choosing appropriate MAKING THE FIRST STANDARD PORTUGUESE-CAPEVERDEAN DICTIONARY 157 vocabulary, it has not always been possible to preserve in our Capeverdean translations the literal content of the Portuguese original. Example 13: Pt. o gato arranhou o chão com as unhas, ‘the cat scratched the floor with its claws’. One of the main characteristics of Capeverdean morphology is its extreme reluctance to use redundant expressions (Pereira 1992; Quint 2003; 2000a: 321-380). Thus, for a Capeverdean brain, it is rather bizarre to say that a ‘cat scratched something with its claws’: if the ‘cat scratched something’, it is obvious that it must have been ‘with its claws’, and so it is just unnecessary to tell it. Therefore the best translation in Creole is just gátu ránha tchom. cat scratch floor ‘the cat scratched the floor’. Example 14: Pt. serei teu amigo para sempre, ‘I will always be your friend’ or ‘we will always be friends’. Theoretically, this sentence should not pose any problem in being translated quite faithfully into Capeverdean Creole. In fact, there is a Cv. idiom that corresponds exactly with the Pt. sentence: mi ku bo é móri xinta na stera 1SG.TON with 1SG.TON be die sit in mat ‘you and me, we will remain friends until one of us dies and the other sits by his commemorative altar’.15 The Cv. idiom is undoubtedly the best translation, but the trouble here is that this example was destined to illustrate the Pt. entry sempre, ‘always’, usually translating as sempri or tud’óra in Cv. However, neither sempri nor tud’óra were used in our Cv. sentence. Thus, if we should keep this example (which we actually did) for its idiomatic interest, we would have to try to provide another one that would illustrate better the use of Cv. most common equivalents (sempri and tud’óra) of Pt. sempre. 4. OVERALL COHERENCE OF THE DATA During all the process of making this dictionary, we took great care to maintain the coherence of the data we have produced and combined. 15 In rural Santiago, following a death, a commemorative altar (Cv. stera) is erected in the house of a relative or friend, and on appropriate religious occasions, the village people will gather there to pray throughout the night in memory of the deceased. 158 M. MENDES & N. QUINT 4.1. Treatment of semantic families In Portuguese as in Creole, we always treated identically each element of a semantic family, such as the names of the days, the numerals, the personal pronouns or the arithmetical operations (addition, subtraction…). 4.2. Standardization of glosses and definitions in Capeverdean When we elaborated a technical and grammatical Capeverdean vocabulary to provide sense definitions in Creole (see above discussion of Examples 10 & 11 in 3.2.3.), we remained faithful to our choices throughout the dictionary. Example 15: in a Pt. dictionary, reflexive verbs and idioms are usually expressed in the 3rd person, like in despedir-se à francesa take.leave-3SG.REFL in.ART.DEF French to take leave oneself in the ‘to take French leave’ French (way) But morphologically, Cv. does not express reflexiveness through pronominal forms. That is why we preferred a gloss in the 2nd person: ók-u bá bu kaminhu sem fla náda when-2SG.S.ENCL go 2SG.POSS way without say nothing ‘when you go on your way without saying anything’.16 Once we had decided that the 2nd person in Cv. would be the best way to translate Pt. 3rd person reflexive forms, we used it systematically in the whole dictionary to avoid confusion for our users. 4.3. Avoiding repetitions When dealing with phrases and idioms, it is not always evident in which entry they should best be placed. Example 16: let us consider the Pt. idiom marcar golo, ‘to score a goal’: should it figure in the entry marcar, ‘to score’ or in the entry golo, ‘goal’, or 16 If we had stuck to the 3rd person in Creole, the result would have been curious enough for, in the absence of any other contextual element, the 3rd person form ok-e bá si kaminhu sem fla náda, means ‘when s/he goes on her/his way without saying anything’, and a Creole speaker would wonder to whom that ‘s/he’ refers. MAKING THE FIRST STANDARD PORTUGUESE-CAPEVERDEAN DICTIONARY 159 in both? In such situations, we established a system of cross-references, so that marcar golo appears both in marcar and in golo, but is treated only in one of them. In this particular case, one will find the translation of marcar golo in golo, but in marcar, the idiom marcar golo appears with a special mark (v.) preceding the word golo (i.e. marcar v.golo), thereby allowing the user to know that marcar golo is treated in golo. 5. CONCLUSION Our Portuguese-Capeverdean dictionary, which was finally completed at the end of 2002 and made available to the users at the beginning of 2003, is now a reality. Of course it is a pioneering work and it must be regarded as such. Some years ago, a tourist guide of Cape Verde said quite rightly that ‘officializing [i.e. ‘implementing the official use of’] Creole would be a mammoth task’ (Colum & Aisling 2001: 27). All our team agrees with this statement. Indeed, there is still a lot of work to do if we want to develop Capeverdean as a written language, with all the didactic material that is available for other linguistic communities of a comparable size, for example Icelanders or Estonians. The work we have done has at least two advantages: • It has been methodically processed and it uses modern, computerized support, so that the database we have made can easily be increased and improved without having to start again from zero. • The glosses and definitions we have been producing in a systematic way could serve as a starting point for a future monolingual Capeverdean dictionary, which seems a highly desirable work if the Capeverdeans desire to take full advantage of their own language in the future. For the moment, we can only hope that this dictionary (of which several hundred copies have already been sold) is proving to be a helpful resource for the Capeverdean and Portuguese speakers who are using it. We hope too that we have demonstrated that a reduced but highly motivated team can produce a lexical work of some value. Finally, we would like to draw attention to the fact that we managed to unite the efforts of people coming from three different countries to make this bilingual dictionary. In these volatile times when dialogue between disparate nations is all too frequently restricted to bellicose posturing, we hope that more people will spend some of their time understanding each other’s language and way of thinking. 160 M. MENDES & N. QUINT REFERENCES Bacelar do Nascimento, M. F. & Garcia Marques, M. L. & Segura da Cruz, M. L., 1987a, Português Fundamental, Lisbon, Instituto Nacional de Investigação Científica/ Centro de Linguística da Universidade de Lisboa, Vol II. Métodos e documentos, Tomo 1: Inquérito de frequência. Bacelar do Nascimento, M. F. & Garcia Marques, M. L. & Segura da Cruz, M. L, 1987b, Português Fundamental, Lisbon, Instituto Nacional de Investigação Científica/ Centro de Linguística da Universidade de Lisboa, Vol. II. Métodos e documentos, Tomo 2: Inquérito de disponibilidade. Busse, W. & al., 1994, Dicionário Sintáctico de Verbos Portugueses, Coimbra, Almedina. Colum, W. & Aisling, I., 2001, Cape Verde Islands, the Bradt Travel Guide, Bucks, Bradt. Conselho de Ministros, 1998, Bases do Alfabeto Unificado para a Escrita do Crioulo Caboverdiano (Decreto-Lei nº67/98), Boletim Oficial da República de Cabo Verde, I Série, Nº 48, December 31, 1998, 18-23. Duarte Almada, D., 1998, Bilinguismo ou Diglossia?, Mindelo, Spleen Edições. Fernandes Montez, C., 1995, Computational Lexicography: a Contribution for New Bilingual Dictionaries [unpublished Mestrado (Master) dissertation], Lisbon, Universidade Nova de Lisboa - Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas. Fernandes, A. N., 1991, Léxico do Dialecto Crioulo do Arquipélago de Cabo Verde, Mindelo, Ivone L. R. Fernandes Ramos. Ferreira de Holanda, A. B., 1999, Dicionário da Língua Portuguesa, Aurélio Século XXI, Dicionário Electrónico, Rio de Janeiro, Lexikon Informática/ Editora Nova Fronteira. Hunston, S. & Francis, G., 2000, Pattern Grammar, A Corpus-driven Approach to the Lexical Grammar of English, Amsterdam/ Philadelphia, John Benjamins Publishing Company. Lang, J., 2002, Dicionário do Crioulo da Ilha de Santiago (Cabo Verde), Tübingen, Gunter Narr. Lang, J., 2009, Les langues des autres dans la créolisation, théorie et exemplification par le créole d’empreinte wolof à l’île de Santiago du Cap Vert, Tübingen, Gunter Narr. Lopes da Silva, B., 1957, O Dialecto Crioulo de Cabo Verde, Lisbon, Junta de Investigações do Ultramar - Centro de Estudos Políticos e Sociais. Malaca Casteleiro, J. & al., 2001, Dicionário da Língua Portuguesa Contemporânea da Academia das Ciências de Lisboa, Lisbon, Verbo. Mendes, M. & Quint [Quint-Abrial], N. & Ragageles, F., 2000, Apresentação do Dicionário Bilingue Caboverdiano-Português. In Actas do XV Encontro Nacional da Associação Portuguesa de Linguística (Faro, 1999), Braga, Associação Portuguesa de Linguística, 183-198. Mendes, M. & Quint, N. & Ragageles, F. & Semedo, A., 2002, Dicionário de Português-Caboverdiano, Lisbon, Verbalis. Paula Brito, A. de, 1887 [1885], Apontamentos para a Gramática do Crioulo Que se Fala na Ilha de Santiago de Cabo Verde, Boletim da Sociedade Geográfica de Lisboa, 7ª série, Nº10 (1887), 611-669. MAKING THE FIRST STANDARD PORTUGUESE-CAPEVERDEAN DICTIONARY 161 Pereira, D., 1992, O Princípio da Parcimónia em Crioulo de Cabo Verde. In E. d’Andrade & A. Kihm (ed.), Actas do Colóquio sobre “Crioulos de Base Portuguesa”, Lisbon, Colibri, 141-151. Pires, J. & Hutchinson, J. P., 1983, Disionariu Preliminariu Kriolu/ Preliminary Creole Dictionary Capeverdean/English, Boston, Funku’l Nho Lobu. Português Fundamental, 1984, Lisbon, Instituto Nacional de Investigação Científica/ Centro de Linguística da Universidade de Lisboa, Vol I. Métodos e documentos, Tomo 1: Vocabulário. Quint [Quint-Abrial], N., 1997, Dictionnaire français-cap-verdien, Paris, L’Harmattan. 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