Onondaga-English/English-Onondaga Dictionary (review)

Many years ago now, the Ontario government and the University of Toronto Press entered into an agreement to publish dictionaries and grammars of the major Aboriginal languages of Ontario. The Onondaga dictionary is the fourth Iroquoian dictionary to be published by the Press in recent years. The Press is to be applauded for taking on this commitment. The results have been consistently high quality reference materials that set the standard for work on languages of this family.

Onondaga is an Iroquoian spoken at the Six Nations Reserve near Brantford, Ontario and at Onondaga Nation near Syracuse, New York. The language was once spoken by a large population, but now has only a small number of speakers. The dictionary is an extraordinarily rich resource, the product of thirty years of work. It is based both on work with speakers and reference to earlier grammatical resources, with the oldest source dated 1860 (although Woodbury says that this work was completed in the seventeenth century). The older sources provide insight into what Woodbury calls Old Onondaga, or Onondaga before several sound changes took place.

Following an introduction highlighting dialects, the organization of the dictionary, and discussion of the orthography, the Onondaga dictionary begins with a basic grammar of nouns and verbs. This is a clearly written discussion that presents many of the intricacies of Onondaga. It is followed by Onondaga-English and then English-Onondaga entries. The dictionary ends with extensive appendices that are, essentially, a topical dictionary within the larger dictionary. Topics include nature, people, household, and community, each with a number of subcategories.

Onondaga, like other Iroquoian languages and like many languages of the Americas, poses many challenges to the dictionary maker. This is because the root, or the part of the word that contributes the major meaning, is generally not found at the beginning of the word. As an example, consider the root -ohae- 'wash something, bathe someone.' This root occurs preceded by a prefix and followed by a suffix, as in g-óhae-k 'I wash,' ag-oháe-k 'she washes (it),' ha-oháe-h 'he has washed it.' Another root, -tshahnit- 'be industrious, be driven,' is similar: go-tsháhnit 'she is industrious, she is driven,' age-tsháhnit 'I am industrious,' ho-tsháhnit 'he is ambitious, he is industrious.' Another form of this verb includes an incorporated noun, written -gaæ- 'story, bill, price': o-gaæ-tsháhnit 'it is an unusually high price.' In the Onondaga dictionary and some other Iroquoian dictionaries, words are listed as what are called 'bases,' or units of meaning. As Woodbury says, 'By this we mean that the unit's meaning or its shape cannot be determined exclusively from a knowledge of the form or the meaning of its elements.' This choice probably accords with intuitions of speakers about what a word is. It is not feasible to list every word of a language like Onondaga, as the number of words would be incredibly large. What is required to use a print dictionary of this type of language is knowledge about the structure of the word so that the base can be accessed. On-line dictionaries may well be able to overcome this limitation at some point; meanwhile, compilers of dictionaries of morphologically complex languages have much to learn from the thought that went into organizing this dictionary.

I end this review with a brief discussion of another highlight of the dictionary. There are copious notes on lexical items, notes which are of value both linguistically and culturally. Some are linguistic - the choice of variant of a word is determined by what aspect is present or by particular phonological conditioning. Others are sociological - alternate forms are used by different speakers. Yet others are historical - changes in the language since the early recordings. Finally, the dictionary is rich with cultural notes - a base refers to a ritual of a particular type.

I have not done justice to the outstanding quality of this dictionary in this brief review. It and the other recent...