Khumalo, L.
Khumalo, L. 2009. Looking Beyond Meaning in the Advanced Ndebele Dictionary. Lexikos 19 Supplement: 102-111.
Publication year: 2007

This article discusses the presentation of etymological information in the prospective Advanced Ndebele Dictionary (henceforth the AND) which is still in its planning stage. The AND will be a successor to Isichazamazwi SesiNdebele (henceforth the ISN), a medium-sized, general-purpose, monolingual Ndebele dictionary published in 2001. The AND will not just be larger than the ISN, but will be more advanced with regard to the depth and scope of its lexical items and definitions. Whereas the ISN was based on a corpus size of about a million running words, the AND is envisaged to have as basis a corpus size of about five million. To this end, corpus expansion is an ongoing process. Again, unlike its forerunner, the AND will provide additional grammatical information for each lexical item, including phonetic transcription, tone marking and etymology. It is the inclusion of etymological information in the AND that is critically examined in this article. There is a long tradition of providing etymological information in modern dictionaries from Oxford’s New English Dictionary to ALRI’s Duramazwi Guru reChiShona.