LW/D 17: A Dictionary of Yogad

A Dictionary of Yogad

Philip W. Davis & Angel Mesa
Rice University

Yogad is a Philippine language spoken in Echague and several nearby towns in Isabela Province, which is located in the Cagayan Valley in central eastern Luzon. Ethnologue, citing a 1975 census, estimates the number of speakers at 14,000. The variety of Yogad represented in the dictionary is that of a male speaker (the second author) in his mid-sixties, who is a native of Echague. Although Yogad is his first language, he is also fluent in Ilokano, Tagalog, and English; and he has some knowledge of Ibanag.
The information which we have chosen to include in the dictionary and its organization are a result of the experience in writing a grammar of Yogad (Davis, Baker, Spitz & Baek 1998) with Angel Mesa. The user of this dictionary is referred to that work (The Grammar of Yogad: A functional explanation), which should be used in conjunction with the present dictionary in order to gain the best understanding of Yogad. The grammar and dictionary offer complementary perspectives of the language, and together they provide the most complete view.
In the Yogad - English portion of the dictionary, each entry of an item will ideally contain several pieces of information with respect to how that item interacts with certain contexts. First, following its gloss(es) and other information, we note how the lexical item behaves with the determiners of the language, usually yu/nu or tu (Cf. Davis, Baker, Spitz & Baek. 1998, Chapter 2, section 4). Here, we discover whether the item will be more 'noun'-like or more 'verb'-like. Generally, Yogad lexical resources function with indifference to the syntactic positions in which we expect 'nouns' and 'verbs' to appear. For example, the language may be described as VSO, but any lexical item can fill the 'V' position and accept the 'verbal' affixes. Conversely, any lexical item which can appear in the 'V' position can also occur in the 'S' or 'O' position with a determiner and appear to be a 'noun'. Rather than mark entries as 'n' or 'v', we let the sense of the root in the context of determiners provide the relevant information.
Lexical items can sometimes appear in the 'V' position without accompanying affixes, and some must. Those possibilities are noted next in each entry. Not all lexical items work in this way, and where they do not, we mark that fact with an asterisk. Knowing the ways in which a lexical item cannot be used is as important for understanding the lexical resources of the language as is knowing how they can be used. Throughout, we follow the practice of including and marking unacceptable or meaningless combinations. Next, there will appear a sequence of examples which fix the possibilities of occurrence with the 'verbal' affixes of Yogad; and this includes some eighteen affixal combinations. The first four (pairs of) affixes focus on the 'S', and the remaining ones focus on the 'O'. At least one affix (ma-) may select either the 'S' or the 'O' for focus. Again, the reader is referred to Davis, Baker, Spitz & Baek (1998) for detailed discussion of the meaning of these affixes.
Following the detailing of affixal combinations, examples will be provided to illustrate the possibilities of reduplication. There are several such patterns in Yogad. And finally, where useful, additional examples of usage will close out an entry. At any point in an entry, there may occur material between double quotation marks. These are verbatim comments by the speaker, which may help elucidate the sense of an expression and also how it differs from closely related ones.
It is obvious that each lexical entry will have numerous pieces of information included concerning it ... that is, if the plan of the dictionary were completed as just described. In its present state, this information is fragmentary, and its completion will always remain an ideal. The intent is to create a functional description of the Yogad lexicon as it meshes with the semantics of Yogad grammar, i.e., a 'functional dictionary'.
The dictionary concludes with an English - Yogad section which directs the reader to the Yogad entry in which the English expression will be found. Because of the semantic variation of the Yogad roots in combination with their affixes, we cite only the Yogad lexical root corresponding to each English entry. The root by itself may not have the associated meaning, which may appear only when the root is in the appropriate grammatical context. The reader will then have to search through the entry for that root to find exactly how Yogad contrives to match the English.

ISBN 9783895865855. Languages of the World/Dictionaries 17. 420pp. 2000.