Onondaga-English/English-Onondaga Dictionary (review)

Major dictionaries of three Iroquoian languages have appeared during the past few years: Tuscarora (Rudes 1999), Oneida (Michelson and Doxtator 2002), and Cayuga (Frohman et al. 2002). Hanni Woodbury's massive Onondaga-English/English-Onondaga Dictionary provides a companion to these volumes. Publication of all four dictionaries was sponsored by the Ontario Ministry of Education and Training, which has provided substantial funding aimed at recording and preserving the province's native linguistic diversity. Woodbury's dictionary is the lengthiest so far and reflects over 30 years of original fieldwork on the language, as well as the author's thorough familiarity with previously published Onondaga language materials. The morphemic analysis of verb forms in all four dictionaries owes much to the noted Iroquoianist Floyd Lounsbury's scheme of morpheme position classes (cf. Lounsbury 1953). At the same time, the entries themselves are organised primarily around the concept of lexical "base", which could be defined as the word stem minus all grammatical inflections. Some bases are individual root morphemes. But many more are semantically fused sequences of several morphemes corresponding more to stems built with derivational affixes in other languages. Woodbury regards these bases—regardless of their morphological complexity from a diachronic perspective—as the true fundamental lexical units of the language. The bases, in turn, interact with morphosyntactic patterns to produce morphological words in grammatical contexts.

The lion's share of the dictionary consists of an alphabetical listing of Onondaga bases or affixal morphemes (pp. 69-978). Each entry form is followed by an English translation or by a metagrammatical functional label. This is followed in turn by one or more full Onondaga word forms. Since simple sentences in Iroquoian languages often consist entirely of a verb form, in many instances these words represent full sentences and are translated into English as such. Entries might also include a cross-listing of additional bases derived from the given form, or a morphological etymology listing the morphemes from which the base ultimately derives. For instance, the base -ade^ʔshi·yo- 'be easy' (p. 130) is identified as deriving from the base -ade^ʔshR-, 'target', which yields another base, -ade^ʔshi·yosd-, meaning 'to take good aim at'. Such examples illustrate the idiomatic nature of the semantics that associate morphologically related bases. One of the main strengths of this dictionary for researchers is the careful cross-referencing of etymologically interconnected forms. Entries also include notes about any relevant alternative pronunciations. Finally, special parenthetical symbols indicate whether an individual word is actually found in colloquial use among either of the two extant Onondaga speech communities (the Onondaga Nation in upstate New York and the Six Nations Reserve in southern Ontario). Because these groups have been separated since the time of the American Revolution, lexical differences between them have steadily accumulated to the point where it is appropriate to speak of two Onondaga dialects.

The second part of the dictionary consists of a much simpler English-Onondaga glossary (pp. 983-1446) without analytical identifications of the internal morphological complexity of individual words. This portion will be of the most immediate practical use to speakers or partial speakers interested in looking up new vocabulary, though here, too, the wealth of examples in each entry can likewise be of great value to users concerned with linguistic analysis. For example, the entry 'yellow, bile' ojítgwa·^ʔ (p. 1446) is typical in that it offers a half dozen word forms containing the given form in full-word morphosemantic combinations denoting such things as 'my hair is blond', 'it is completely yellow', and 'lots of bile', as well as several other meanings.

The remainder of the book consists of the introductory portions that precede the dictionary itself, and several informative appendices at the dictionary's end. An introduction (pp. 1-5) describes the two Onondaga communities from an historical and contemporary vantage, and the dialectal differences that have accumulated between the two. Three appendices provide thematic English-Onondaga listings of various semantic categories. Appendix One (pp. 1451.1482...