suitability of Base for dictionary project

Hello. I would like to use OOo 1.9 for an academic database project. I 
need to convince the principal investigator for the project of the 
viability of OOo Base for the project, since he has advocated for the 
use of FileMaker (which is not available on my own platform). I have 
never used a database program before (although i have lots of experience 
in various programming languages). I have read through the Getting 
Started Guide, chapter 10 "Getting Started with Base: Introduction to 
Data Sources".

I need to know the answers to a few questions to decide whether Base is 
actually viable for our project. I would greatly appreciate answers to 
any of these questions. I suppose it would be useful to first describe 
what the project is. This is something of a dictionary in an endangered 
language spoken in Ghana to be used by linguists. The database will 
include about 1500 entries, each with fields such as citation form (such 
as singular for a noun), additional forms, tonal pattern, English 
translation, verb or noun class, etc. An English translation or remarks 
field might need room for 100-200 characters.

Here are my questions:

1.  The transcription for the language might need to make extensive
     use of non-ASCII and non ISO-8859-1 characters and diacritics.
     Will extensive use of Unicode characters pose a problem?

2.  Is Base suitable for a database of this size?

3.  Will it be easy to export the database file to other database
     formats? Would it be feasible to input all of the data into the
     database even if it was later decided that a different program
     would be more appropriate for queries?

4.  Is the following work flow feasible for work in Base:
     a. User A works on the database file on Linux.
     b. User B gets the database file from user A to work on
        it in Windows.
     c. User A gets the database file from user B to work on
        it in Linux.
     d. Etc.

Thank you for any answers or insight you may have.

Leston