The three-year project is made possible by a grant awarded to the NMI Council for the Humanities by the National Science Foundation.
It is being directed by retired educator and former Humanities Council Chairwoman Dr. Elizabeth D. Rechebei and University of California linguistic professor Dr. Sandra Chung.
Dr. Rita H. Inos, a former education commissioner and the lead facilitator of yesterday’s meeting at Northern Marianas College, said each team of their group was assigned to review a number of pages from the 1975 Topping-Ogo-Dunca Chamorro Dictionary.
Yesterday, the group members reviewed their progress, so far.
The teams submitted the first batch of entries last Dec. 15, and were expected to submit the next one yesterday, Inos said.
“But what really is the most important today is that we are learning together in terms of the language itself,” she said.
Chung, who participated in the meeting through video-teleconference, made a presentation that aimed to help group “think through what they’re currently doing in revising the dictionary entries.”
The members then discussed the decisions they had made regarding certain entries.
“This is a journey that we have started right now and that is to look at what’s already developed in the Topping-Ogo-Dunca dictionary,” Inos said.
The group has to take a look at every entry and decide whether they need to add more definitions to the word, she added.
The Topping-Ogo-Dunca dictionary has three ways of classifying words.
Inos said, for their part, they will classify each word based on how the dictionary is traditionally used.
The revised dictionary, Chung said, will classify which part of speech a given word is.
Chung said the revised dictionary will be better because no word will be “unclassified.”
Each word, she added, will be more detailed — “the dictionary will say more about how the word is used and it will make a connection to the parts of speech in other languages.”
Inos said they are expanding the dictionary to assist the future generation gain command of the Chamorro language
“We don’t want to further endanger the language,” she added.
Rechebei said they aim to be “inclusive.”
“Language is always evolving so we will try to put all the words in the dictionary as much as possible,” she added.
The entries will be reviewed before publication.
