Towards computer-assisted word frequency studies in Northern Sotho

Principles and Practice of South African Lexicography

“…The corpus era introduced for African languages and especially for Sesotho sa Leboa lexicography by Prinsloo (1991), see also Chapter 3, opened new doors for the lemmatisation of nouns and verbs namely lemmatisation based on frequency of use. Using corpus data the lexicographer can ensure that frequently used words are not accidentally omi� ed and, on the other hand, that precious dictionary space is not taken up by articles of which the lemma is unlikely to be looked-up by the target users.…”

Lemmatization of Reflexives in Northern Sotho

“…pocket size or medium size. This is exactly what word frequency studies according to Prinsloo (1991) are all about: Selecting just the right corpus of words (reflexives) for a specific dictionary and secondly preventing the omission of essential words (reflexives). The relevance of this statement is clearly underlined in the introduction to the Setswana English Afrikaans Dictionary (1990), where Snyman and Shole honestly admit:…”

“…Table 1 it is clear that 'only' and 'time' are highly used words over a broad spectrum in contrast to 'Kennan' and 'two-day'. (See Prinsloo (1991) and Johansson and Hofland (1989) for detailed discussions on the Brown-and Lob Corpora as well as word frequency studies for Northern Sotho.) Thus a specific reflexive will only be regarded as relatively highly used if it occurs frequently in (a) the corpus as a whole and (b) every book or magazine (and not for example with a high frequency in one book, but not at all in the next five).…”

Rabadia Ratsatsha: Studies in African language, literature, linguistics, translation and lexicography

“…Trainable software solved, among other things, the recognition problem regarding s versus š. The corpus became known as the Pretoria Sesotho sa Leboa Corpus (PSC) and gradually grew from 156 000 running words or 'tokens' in 1990 (Prinsloo, 1991) to 5.8 million words a decade later . The availability of a corpus opened doors to a variety of new research possibilities for and insights into lexicography, linguistics, translation studies, etc.…”