As at this writing, there are 3,629 published name entries in the dictionary.
At the rate of about twenty new entries per day, we could reach a year’s goal of 10,000 entries in no time. In this post, I would like to show you how a submission from the homepage becomes an indexed entry in the dictionary. There will be lots of pictures to illustrate the process.
The homepage is at YorubaName.com where hundreds of users have submitted their names into the dictionary since we launched the public page in February 2016.
So, what happens when an entry is submitted?
On the lexicography dashboard, I see a list of names suggested by the public, or by other in-house lexicographers. As you can see in the image below, the email of the submitter is listed.
I have blurred an email address to protect the person’s privacy. In the future, we will have a login name instead of an email address.
To begin editing, I click on whatever name I would like to work on. In this case, I give preference to the publicly submitted name over the in-house ones. The name is “oderinde“.
In the edit mode, the name is expanded and I can see all that the submitter put in his/her submission. In most cases, as in this example, the submitter hasn’t been able to find the exact spelling of the name so some editing will be needed.
I begin first with capitalisation. I change the first letter from “o” to “Ọ”
The submitter seems to have an idea of the meaning so I move further down to the syllable breakdown. This functionality is meant to be used to train our text-to-speech system to know how to render Yorùbá names. The functionality isn’t yet live, but the field is compulsory, so I complete it, rendering the name syllable by syllable.
By now, I’ve completed the three required fields. So, to prevent my work from being lost, I scroll down and save the entry.
I get a notification on the top right corner.
Sometimes I return to the “meaning” box to modify what the submitter wrote.
Then I move to the “morphology” field to break down the name according to its smallest meaningful units (the linguistic term is morpheme). This is usually the most exciting part for me, because that is where the names usually unravel.
The morphology and the gloss fields are usually written in small letters, but their meanings can include capital letters in the case of proper nouns.
Sometimes there is more than one meaning of a morpheme, so I supply them, and then save.
I save at this stage by just hitting “enter”.
The geolocation field is one of our most cherished features, designed to be able to map certain names across the country. The user has chosen “Abẹ́òkuta” as the location of this name. But because I know that it is a name that is borne in other different parts of Yorùbáland, I add another location indicator: “General”.
At this point, I get an epiphany as to a better way to express the meaning of this name that is not too literal as to render it risible.
So I edit it again. This time I’m satisfied.
Finally, to see if there are notable people with this name, I turn to Google, which never fails.
I get many hits, but I am biased to the topmost one.
I sometimes also go to the “news” tab, since notability might also reflect in the newsmaking ability of the bearer.
In the end, I settle for the topmost hit on Google. For now, at least, until another user goes to the entry and upbraids us for overlooking another famous name.
I add the link as well.
Then save.
Finally, I publish the entry.
Ọdẹ́rìndé is now in our dictionary!
The end.
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Addendum
Shortly after this post was drafted for review, Laila drew my attention to an interesting phonological feature in this particular name which I’d not paid attention to in my earlier work: there is an extra /ẹ/ in “Ọdẹ́rìndé” which I hadn’t accounted for before. As it often happens with incomplete entries, I simply returned to the name and edited as necessary.
I also left a short note in the relevant box about the phonological behaviour of certain tones like this in contiguous environment. In a layman’s language, a grammatical morpheme in this word took on the feature of a neighbouring vowel resulting in an extra tone mark where there otherwise isn’t any.
Fascinating linguist’s stuff.
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If you’d like to join our lexicography department to help speed up the meeting of our 10,000 names goal, send an email to project@yorubaname.com with “Lexicographer Volunteer” in the subject field.
