Am 22.11.2016 um 10:19 schrieb David Cuenca Tudela:
There are many many words with multiple spellings, but not many words with
more than two, and few with more than three [citation needed].
That is not true in languages with a high amount of dialects. For instance in Catalan there are 5 standard spellings for "carrot" depending on which dialect you choose, plus some more if you consider local variations: https://ca.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pastanaga
How does Lemon handle this? Does it provide some guidance on how to display a Form with many represenations? Or is that simply left to the application?
You are right that dialects pose a problem here, since they often have multiple competing spellings (e.g. there's German Low-German and Dutch Low-German - mostly same vocabulary, different orthography).
Additionally the same form can have different meanings depending on which dialect you choose. For instance "pastenaga" means "orange carrot" in Catalan from Catalonia, and "purple carrot" in Catalan from Valencia.
Which makes me think, how dialects will be handled? Statements?
This is up to the community. I suppose it will depend on the individual case. Sometimes, it will be more useful to have a separate lexeme. Sometimes, you'd have multiple representations (lemmas), plus representation statements with qualifiers.