Keeping the Lakota language at your side has never been easier. Two new products being released by LLC this fall liberate you from wi-fi signal and web servers, even as they deliver language study at the speed of the digital age.

NLD-Pro

While it’s comforting to hold a solid book in your hands, carrying around a resource like the New Lakota Dictionary poses some challenges. To bypass these, LLC has created both the NLD-O app to connect your smart phone to the online dictionary – and now, a way to download the entire NLD to your desktop computer, making an Internet connection unnecessary.

 

 

The NLD-Pro is the entire New Lakota Dictionary set in an interactive, searchable form designed to let you work offline.  The Help feature is especially useful to language learners. It will give you a handle on how to use the dictionary to build your own path of research and study.

For example, the NLD-Pro helps your word-search go quicker with an approximate spelling function – you don’t have to know a word’s exact spelling and diacriticals to look it up. The Help text says,

Press Ctrl + F and check “approximate spelling”. This will allow you to type e.g. tatanka when searching for tȟatȟáŋka or wicasa when searching for wičháša.

However, bear in mind that the approximate spelling (or simplified orthography) results in frequent ambiguities, for instance the search result when typing toka will be three words: tȟóka, tȟoká and tókȟa. The search for lena will display both léna and lená. Depending on the size of the entries you might only be able to see the first entry within the visible part of the search window so it is necessary to scroll down in order to see all search results.

 

NLD-Pro offers Autocorrect options for words you type in, and many different ways to search for a known or unknown word.  You can also “change the direction” of your translating, from English – Lakota to Lakota – English and back again.

The NLD-Pro’s Help function will show you how to do all of this, and more.

Part II takes an in-depth look at the Lakota Audio Series.