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Funding needed for Carolinian dictionary CD reproduction
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Posted on Mar 26 2005
The Carolinian Affairs Office is lobbying for funds to electronically mass reproduce the revised Carolinian dictionary.
Frank Rabauliam, chair of the Carolinian and Related Language Assistance, said during a presentation at a session of the Saipan and Northern Island Legislative Delegation last week that his team has come up with a more organized, authoritative, and comprehensive version of the Carolinian dictionary in a compact disc.
He said the group would want to reproduce the CDs for sale and distribution to schools, the Northern Marianas College library, courts and public libraries.
“We hope to eventually put it on the web so that everybody can access it,” said Rabauliman.
He could not say, though, exactly how much does CARLA need for the mass reproduction of the dictionary.
The program initially received $75,000 from the 12th Legislature for the development of the computer-based dictionary.
“We, however, came up short in estimating the enormity of the work involved,” said Rabauliman.
During the process, he said, “we found ourselves working backwards instead of forward.”
He said that in a review of the existing written Carolinian dictionary, they found “shortcomings,” one of which was how the words were alphabetically arranged.
He said it was difficult to find a word and words were difficult to use.
“We found that without an established Carolinian orthography, we realized that we really did not have a basis on how words should be appropriately organized,” he said.
He said several individuals and groups supported the program, including Jim Ellis, a University of Hawaii linguist student who supported CARLA from the beginning, and Cameron Fruit, who serves as CARLA computer specialist and “who made this application a much more user-friendly software.”
Rabauliman said the CARLA project is far from finished.
“However, I’m very confident that what we present today is something that the community can use in the preservation and use of the Carolinian language,” he said.
Now that the dictionary has been updated and contains appropriate words, he quipped, “Carolinians need to be more careful in speaking because people can easily know what you’re saying through the dictionary.”
