Lexicographical Developments in the Shona Language as…绍纳语中的词典发展为.pdfVIP

The African e-Journals Project has digitized full text of articles of eleven social science and humanities journals.  This item is from the digital archive maintained by Michigan State University Library. Find more at: /projects/africanjournals/ Available through a partnership with Scroll down to read the article. Zambezin (2002) , XXIX (ii) Lexicographical Developments in the Shona Language as Reflected in the Making of the Duramazwi Guru ReChiShona (DGS)1 N . MPOFU African Languages Research Institute, University of Zimbabwe Abstract Tins article traces lexicogiaphical developments in Shona, one of the major languages of Zimbabwe, with particular focus on corpus building and the role the corpus has played in Shona lexicography in the past hundred or so years and recent developments as reflected in the making o/Duramazw i Guru ReChiShona by the African Languages Research Institute (ALR1) team of the University of Zimbabwe. Background Lexicography in Shona is not a new discipline. It dates as far back as the 1850s when missionaries began constructing orthographies for Shona speakers in the areas in which the missionaries were stationed. These early orthographies were to be used to construct vocabularies that would enable the translation of religious texts from English into Shona. From then until the 1990s, several glossaries and dictionaries were produced. As Fortune (1979,1992) correctly observed, Shona dictionaries compiled in this period were all bilingual in nature . Their primary purpose was to provide a written basis for the lexical items of the language as a whole (Fortune 1992:18) and were targeted at foreign mission