This volume represents the lexicographic facet of the multifaceted scholar, Professor Zgusta: The... more This volume represents the lexicographic facet of the multifaceted scholar, Professor Zgusta: The editorial goal was to arrange the articles according to topic and then to construct a continuous narrative of ideas from the collected works while preserving some of the distinctiveness of individual articles. Zgusta's work reminds us that within the most up-to-date description of language there is also historical depth. The reader of this book will enter a narrative of wide historical and textual scope while engaging an analysis of dictionaries and lexicographic principles.
Broadening Perspectives in the History of Dictionaries and Word Studies, Nov 17, 2021
This volume brings together fifteen chapters exploring the linguistic and literary foundations of... more This volume brings together fifteen chapters exploring the linguistic and literary foundations of lexicography and lexicology. Topics explored here include a discussion of the relationships between lexicography and ideology in China; Frisian legal language and the "Deutsches Rechtswörterbuch"; the history and lexicography of Faroese; "Wortgeschichte digital" and its relation to Grimmian tradition; the linguistic history of phonetically imitative words; and studies of Croatian, Czech, English, Greek, and Turkish historical dictionaries. The book also presents a digital and textual study on the status of eponyms across the history of the Royal Society, as well as a study of German paronym dictionaries, a modern history of bilingual Russian-Tajik terminological dictionaries, and an historical overview of the lexicography of Frisian.
The research findings and close readings by expert practitioners and historians of dictionaries and word studies found in the pages of this volume continue to broaden critical perspectives upon the study of manuscripts and print artifacts; dictionaries and standard varieties; biographies; bibliography and text analyses; dictionary production; and corpus and digital analyses.
Dictionaries are artifacts that represent the cultural, bibliographic, and linguistic heritage of... more Dictionaries are artifacts that represent the cultural, bibliographic, and linguistic heritage of a language community. All the ideological underpinnings, the tensions inherent in proposing the study of Englishes, the hierarchies of English varieties, and the very concept of the English language itself are revealed when we have to collect, identify, describe, and explain the printed and spoken linguistic evidence. These tasks, essential to the practice of lexicography, make the compilation of a dictionary of world Englishes a complex collaborative undertaking that can be years in the unfolding. Linguistic, literary, cultural, and even political considerations are brought to the foreground of our research, separately and intertwined, the moment we decide to record and explain the English language of a community of speakers (in some cases speakers and writers). The notion of legitimacy for pluralized Englishes (e.g. Kachru & Kahane 1995) largely rests upon the presence or absence of an authoritative text called "the dictionary," the authority of which may depend on popular notions of the standard when applied to a language. Because the idea of a dictionary is so firmly rooted, even traditional, within the history of English and Englishes, there are certain expectations from users, lexicographers, and publishers that theorists and practitioners must observe and negotiate.
NOTE: 1st Edition Full Text available on this site.
Historical Dictionaries in their Paratextual Context, 2018
In order to answer the question posed in the title, we will explore the careers of a group of aut... more In order to answer the question posed in the title, we will explore the careers of a group of authors, booksellers and printers active in 17th century England. In doing so, we question previous work on the printing history of one of the Royal Society’s earliest commissioned books, An Essay towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language, by Bishop John Wilkins. The argument of this article focuses on (1) the authors John Wilkins and William Lloyd, both clerics (and both eventually Bishops) as well as being leading intellectuals of their day; (2) booksellers Samuel Gellibrand, John Martyn, and James Allestry, all of whom owned and operated their own bookshops and undertook the expense of paying for and overseeing the publications of books; and (3) the printers whom we have identified as the most likely candidates for printing this book. We hope by treating each bookseller and printer in turn that we can show that the preponderance of evidence points to Anne Maxwell as the most likely printer of Wilkins’s Essay. As we shall see, Maxwell had the means of production, a long-term association as printer for Wilkins and the bookseller Samuel Gellibrand, and the reputation for quality work that makes her a mostly overlooked, but important, woman working in the book trade of 17th century London.
Words and Dictionaries from the British Isles in Historical Perspective, 2007
[...] Fredric Dolezal's "Writing the history of English lexicography," opens up some of the mos... more [...] Fredric Dolezal's "Writing the history of English lexicography," opens up some of the most important questions addressed in the collection as a whole. How, Dolezal asks, do we write the history of English lexicography? DeWitt Starnes and Gertru de Noyes's The English dictionary from Cawdrey to Johnson has been unsuperseded for sixty years, a tribute to its accuracy and clarity. But the long reign of a standard authority may have a deadening effect on a field of inquiry: when Gabriele Stein wrote a short introduction to a facsimile reprint published in 1991, she noted that
Research on the dictionaries studied by Professor Starnes and Professor Noyes has generally focussed on identifying further sources and interdependencies between individual works revealing the lexicographical methods used by the compilers. (Stein 1991, xi).
This sort of Quellenforschung is extremely useful as far as it goes, but it is inevitably limited in its intellectual ambitions and in its appeal to non-specialist readers. The chronological range of Starnes and Noyes's book is also limited, and although the period up to 1604 has been surveyed by Stein in The English dictionary before Cawdrey (1985), for Anglophone lexicography after 1755 the only monographic overview appears to be Jonathon Green's popular Chasing the sun (1996). Dolezal sketched some of the possibilities for a history of English lexicography after Starnes and Noyes in his review of the reprint edition (Dolezal 1996: “Tracing the History of English Lexicography”, American Speech, ), and now opens up these possibilities much further. So, for instance, he reflects upon and challenges the application of concepts such as "influence" and "borrowing" to the history of lexicography (and indeed "plagiarism," with which cf. Landau 2001, 402-4); questions the relationship of the history of dictionaries to literary history; and discusses the relationship between typology and chronology as ordering principles. Dolezal's critical questioning encourages further questions inspired by his. Is "the English dictionary" itself a useful rubric: what might a History of the dictionary in Britain look like? Could a single author write it? Sooner or later, the time will come for The English dictionary from Cawdrey to Johnson to be superseded, and whoever undertakes the work will have to take careful heed of Dolezal's arguments.
--- John Considine, p. ix: "INTRODUCTION". Words and Dictionaries from the British Isles in Historical Perspective, edited by John Considine and Giovanni Iamartino, Cambridge Scholars Press.
The History of Lexicography: Studies in the History of the Language Sciences, 1986
I present evidence from the early history of English lexicography that will show the extent to wh... more I present evidence from the early history of English lexicography that will show the extent to which the 'tradition' (be it mildly labelled as influence or harshly labelled as plagiarism) can be adequately described as a series of edited and revised texts. the evidence I present will lend substance to the hitherto intuitive notion we commonly refer to as the English Dictionary; my argument turns on the textual question of uniformity among a plurality of texts, and the theoretical implications of the concept 'author'.
The Heroic and Herculean Tasks of a Greater Lexicography
We live in a time in which ‘humanistic’... more The Heroic and Herculean Tasks of a Greater Lexicography
We live in a time in which ‘humanistic’ and ‘philological’ are more relics than even ossified reliquaries. Why should anyone but a historian of languages or lexicography have interest in the recovery and collection of inscriptions of early modern Europe? Lexicography is more than the sum of all lexicographers and all dictionaries compiled and inscribed or being compiled and about to be inscribed. John Considine tells us in the opening pages of Dictionaries of Early Modern Europe: Lexicography and the Making of Heritage that ‘this book originates in an attempt to understand the association between dictionaries and heroic narratives.’ (p. 4) Dictionaries in the European chain of texts are artifacts of inheritance: genealogical (for example, Robert and Henri Estienne), bibliographical, and material (including ownership of land, perhaps unexpectedly). And thus, we begin to understand the relationships of a seemingly vanished heroic age revealed contemporaneously as an heroic heritage and the lexicographer, the collector and transmitter, as ‘heroic in his own right’.
Digital representations of historical print artifacts that present knowledge and language systems... more Digital representations of historical print artifacts that present knowledge and language systems should provide simultaneous images of the original artifact alongside its digital counterpart.
Adventuring in Dictionaries: New Studies in the History of Lexicography, 2010
In Chapter 5, Fredric Dolezal examines the work of the English contemporaries of Borel’s whose pl... more In Chapter 5, Fredric Dolezal examines the work of the English contemporaries of Borel’s whose place in lively intellectual exchange is most evident: John Wilkins and William Lloyd, respectively the leading author of the Essay towards a real character and the philosophical language of 1668, and the provider of “continual assistance” to Wilkins, most notably the compilation (partly from bilingual English-Latin dictionaries) of an “Alphabetical dictionary” to stand beside the philosophical Tables of the Essay. The philosophical language on which Wilkins and Lloyd worked had to analyse English lexical items rationally before providing them with equivalents. As Wilkins remarked, a verb such as set, taken together with all the phrasal verbs formed from it like set up, set down, and set out, may have more than 100 senses; for his purposes, this meant the concept denoted by its various senses might have a great many different places in his system. Dolezal discusses Wilkins and Lloyd’s responses to the challenge, with particular attention to their lexicographical metalanguage and its implications, concluding with the argument that the “Alphabetical dictionary” is a “compendium of the many possibilities of lexicography” which from its publication invited its readers take part in intellectual exchange. The physical bulk and excellent typography of the Essay sometimes tends to obscure the point of its title: that Wilkins and Lloyd really were essaying ideas, trying them out. –John Considine (xiii-xiv), Adventuring in Dictionaries, 2010.
In this essay I will analyze the construction of entries in the Alphabetical Dictionary (1668), c... more In this essay I will analyze the construction of entries in the Alphabetical Dictionary (1668), concentrating my attention on (1) the notational system; (2) the delineation of polysemy; and (3) the use of sub-entries.
As one might suspect, the methodological foundation for dictionary entries is then notational system. There are five basic kinds of notational devices in the AD:
Abbreviation: Jug. [Narrow-necked pot sp. of Earth];
Indentation: Discharge [Obligation] From Duty. [Perform Duty]
Dictionaries confer legitimacy upon a language as a comprehensive concept, or some part of a lang... more Dictionaries confer legitimacy upon a language as a comprehensive concept, or some part of a language, whether we call that register, dialect, lexicon, or vocabulary ... 'Legitimacy' can be understood as a shorthand for identifying and establishing the varieties of Englishes that are used in various locations around the world. The notion of legitimacy for pluralized 'Englishes' largely rests upon the presence or absence of an authoritative text called ‘the dictionary'.
A radical proto-feminist reading of “Our Father” by Bishop Wilkins based on his philosophical lan... more A radical proto-feminist reading of “Our Father” by Bishop Wilkins based on his philosophical language.
0. Introduction ...I continue to seek a method that will allow me to discuss coherently a three-hundred-and-some-year-old text ... An essay towards a real character and a philosophical language (Wilkins, 1668), falls within the discipline of "humanistic linguistics," a discipline named by Kahane ... This article raises questions concerning the nature of definition and its relation to meaning; but it also must address the nature of a lexicon, specialized dictionaries and the representation and transmission of knowledge. Within the confines of a brief essay it is not possible to follow every intellectual lead; therefore, I concentrate on defining the problems posed by the questions and presenting a solution offered by the scientific community in seventeenth-century England. 1. Philosophical Language and its Dictionary That a dictionary of philosophy should be something quite different than a philosophical dictionary tells us about the specialization of our intellectual life which, in turn, indicates a fragmented and compartmentalized approach to knowledge: in a dictionary of philosophy we expect to find special terms defined according to an encyclopedic method, as if the only matters upon which philosophers argue would be the jargon created especially for philosophical discourse. A specialized dictionary organized according to this principle determines the limits of philosophical discourse; that is, a dictionary of only specialized terms seems to deauthorize ordinary language as proper to philosophy. A dictionary of scientific terms follows the same method: is science a specialized vocabulary that finds expression within the grammar of a given natural language?
This volume represents the lexicographic facet of the multifaceted scholar, Professor Zgusta: The... more This volume represents the lexicographic facet of the multifaceted scholar, Professor Zgusta: The editorial goal was to arrange the articles according to topic and then to construct a continuous narrative of ideas from the collected works while preserving some of the distinctiveness of individual articles. Zgusta's work reminds us that within the most up-to-date description of language there is also historical depth. The reader of this book will enter a narrative of wide historical and textual scope while engaging an analysis of dictionaries and lexicographic principles.
Broadening Perspectives in the History of Dictionaries and Word Studies, Nov 17, 2021
This volume brings together fifteen chapters exploring the linguistic and literary foundations of... more This volume brings together fifteen chapters exploring the linguistic and literary foundations of lexicography and lexicology. Topics explored here include a discussion of the relationships between lexicography and ideology in China; Frisian legal language and the "Deutsches Rechtswörterbuch"; the history and lexicography of Faroese; "Wortgeschichte digital" and its relation to Grimmian tradition; the linguistic history of phonetically imitative words; and studies of Croatian, Czech, English, Greek, and Turkish historical dictionaries. The book also presents a digital and textual study on the status of eponyms across the history of the Royal Society, as well as a study of German paronym dictionaries, a modern history of bilingual Russian-Tajik terminological dictionaries, and an historical overview of the lexicography of Frisian.
The research findings and close readings by expert practitioners and historians of dictionaries and word studies found in the pages of this volume continue to broaden critical perspectives upon the study of manuscripts and print artifacts; dictionaries and standard varieties; biographies; bibliography and text analyses; dictionary production; and corpus and digital analyses.
Dictionaries are artifacts that represent the cultural, bibliographic, and linguistic heritage of... more Dictionaries are artifacts that represent the cultural, bibliographic, and linguistic heritage of a language community. All the ideological underpinnings, the tensions inherent in proposing the study of Englishes, the hierarchies of English varieties, and the very concept of the English language itself are revealed when we have to collect, identify, describe, and explain the printed and spoken linguistic evidence. These tasks, essential to the practice of lexicography, make the compilation of a dictionary of world Englishes a complex collaborative undertaking that can be years in the unfolding. Linguistic, literary, cultural, and even political considerations are brought to the foreground of our research, separately and intertwined, the moment we decide to record and explain the English language of a community of speakers (in some cases speakers and writers). The notion of legitimacy for pluralized Englishes (e.g. Kachru & Kahane 1995) largely rests upon the presence or absence of an authoritative text called "the dictionary," the authority of which may depend on popular notions of the standard when applied to a language. Because the idea of a dictionary is so firmly rooted, even traditional, within the history of English and Englishes, there are certain expectations from users, lexicographers, and publishers that theorists and practitioners must observe and negotiate.
NOTE: 1st Edition Full Text available on this site.
Historical Dictionaries in their Paratextual Context, 2018
In order to answer the question posed in the title, we will explore the careers of a group of aut... more In order to answer the question posed in the title, we will explore the careers of a group of authors, booksellers and printers active in 17th century England. In doing so, we question previous work on the printing history of one of the Royal Society’s earliest commissioned books, An Essay towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language, by Bishop John Wilkins. The argument of this article focuses on (1) the authors John Wilkins and William Lloyd, both clerics (and both eventually Bishops) as well as being leading intellectuals of their day; (2) booksellers Samuel Gellibrand, John Martyn, and James Allestry, all of whom owned and operated their own bookshops and undertook the expense of paying for and overseeing the publications of books; and (3) the printers whom we have identified as the most likely candidates for printing this book. We hope by treating each bookseller and printer in turn that we can show that the preponderance of evidence points to Anne Maxwell as the most likely printer of Wilkins’s Essay. As we shall see, Maxwell had the means of production, a long-term association as printer for Wilkins and the bookseller Samuel Gellibrand, and the reputation for quality work that makes her a mostly overlooked, but important, woman working in the book trade of 17th century London.
Words and Dictionaries from the British Isles in Historical Perspective, 2007
[...] Fredric Dolezal's "Writing the history of English lexicography," opens up some of the mos... more [...] Fredric Dolezal's "Writing the history of English lexicography," opens up some of the most important questions addressed in the collection as a whole. How, Dolezal asks, do we write the history of English lexicography? DeWitt Starnes and Gertru de Noyes's The English dictionary from Cawdrey to Johnson has been unsuperseded for sixty years, a tribute to its accuracy and clarity. But the long reign of a standard authority may have a deadening effect on a field of inquiry: when Gabriele Stein wrote a short introduction to a facsimile reprint published in 1991, she noted that
Research on the dictionaries studied by Professor Starnes and Professor Noyes has generally focussed on identifying further sources and interdependencies between individual works revealing the lexicographical methods used by the compilers. (Stein 1991, xi).
This sort of Quellenforschung is extremely useful as far as it goes, but it is inevitably limited in its intellectual ambitions and in its appeal to non-specialist readers. The chronological range of Starnes and Noyes's book is also limited, and although the period up to 1604 has been surveyed by Stein in The English dictionary before Cawdrey (1985), for Anglophone lexicography after 1755 the only monographic overview appears to be Jonathon Green's popular Chasing the sun (1996). Dolezal sketched some of the possibilities for a history of English lexicography after Starnes and Noyes in his review of the reprint edition (Dolezal 1996: “Tracing the History of English Lexicography”, American Speech, ), and now opens up these possibilities much further. So, for instance, he reflects upon and challenges the application of concepts such as "influence" and "borrowing" to the history of lexicography (and indeed "plagiarism," with which cf. Landau 2001, 402-4); questions the relationship of the history of dictionaries to literary history; and discusses the relationship between typology and chronology as ordering principles. Dolezal's critical questioning encourages further questions inspired by his. Is "the English dictionary" itself a useful rubric: what might a History of the dictionary in Britain look like? Could a single author write it? Sooner or later, the time will come for The English dictionary from Cawdrey to Johnson to be superseded, and whoever undertakes the work will have to take careful heed of Dolezal's arguments.
--- John Considine, p. ix: "INTRODUCTION". Words and Dictionaries from the British Isles in Historical Perspective, edited by John Considine and Giovanni Iamartino, Cambridge Scholars Press.
The History of Lexicography: Studies in the History of the Language Sciences, 1986
I present evidence from the early history of English lexicography that will show the extent to wh... more I present evidence from the early history of English lexicography that will show the extent to which the 'tradition' (be it mildly labelled as influence or harshly labelled as plagiarism) can be adequately described as a series of edited and revised texts. the evidence I present will lend substance to the hitherto intuitive notion we commonly refer to as the English Dictionary; my argument turns on the textual question of uniformity among a plurality of texts, and the theoretical implications of the concept 'author'.
The Heroic and Herculean Tasks of a Greater Lexicography
We live in a time in which ‘humanistic’... more The Heroic and Herculean Tasks of a Greater Lexicography
We live in a time in which ‘humanistic’ and ‘philological’ are more relics than even ossified reliquaries. Why should anyone but a historian of languages or lexicography have interest in the recovery and collection of inscriptions of early modern Europe? Lexicography is more than the sum of all lexicographers and all dictionaries compiled and inscribed or being compiled and about to be inscribed. John Considine tells us in the opening pages of Dictionaries of Early Modern Europe: Lexicography and the Making of Heritage that ‘this book originates in an attempt to understand the association between dictionaries and heroic narratives.’ (p. 4) Dictionaries in the European chain of texts are artifacts of inheritance: genealogical (for example, Robert and Henri Estienne), bibliographical, and material (including ownership of land, perhaps unexpectedly). And thus, we begin to understand the relationships of a seemingly vanished heroic age revealed contemporaneously as an heroic heritage and the lexicographer, the collector and transmitter, as ‘heroic in his own right’.
Digital representations of historical print artifacts that present knowledge and language systems... more Digital representations of historical print artifacts that present knowledge and language systems should provide simultaneous images of the original artifact alongside its digital counterpart.
Adventuring in Dictionaries: New Studies in the History of Lexicography, 2010
In Chapter 5, Fredric Dolezal examines the work of the English contemporaries of Borel’s whose pl... more In Chapter 5, Fredric Dolezal examines the work of the English contemporaries of Borel’s whose place in lively intellectual exchange is most evident: John Wilkins and William Lloyd, respectively the leading author of the Essay towards a real character and the philosophical language of 1668, and the provider of “continual assistance” to Wilkins, most notably the compilation (partly from bilingual English-Latin dictionaries) of an “Alphabetical dictionary” to stand beside the philosophical Tables of the Essay. The philosophical language on which Wilkins and Lloyd worked had to analyse English lexical items rationally before providing them with equivalents. As Wilkins remarked, a verb such as set, taken together with all the phrasal verbs formed from it like set up, set down, and set out, may have more than 100 senses; for his purposes, this meant the concept denoted by its various senses might have a great many different places in his system. Dolezal discusses Wilkins and Lloyd’s responses to the challenge, with particular attention to their lexicographical metalanguage and its implications, concluding with the argument that the “Alphabetical dictionary” is a “compendium of the many possibilities of lexicography” which from its publication invited its readers take part in intellectual exchange. The physical bulk and excellent typography of the Essay sometimes tends to obscure the point of its title: that Wilkins and Lloyd really were essaying ideas, trying them out. –John Considine (xiii-xiv), Adventuring in Dictionaries, 2010.
In this essay I will analyze the construction of entries in the Alphabetical Dictionary (1668), c... more In this essay I will analyze the construction of entries in the Alphabetical Dictionary (1668), concentrating my attention on (1) the notational system; (2) the delineation of polysemy; and (3) the use of sub-entries.
As one might suspect, the methodological foundation for dictionary entries is then notational system. There are five basic kinds of notational devices in the AD:
Abbreviation: Jug. [Narrow-necked pot sp. of Earth];
Indentation: Discharge [Obligation] From Duty. [Perform Duty]
Dictionaries confer legitimacy upon a language as a comprehensive concept, or some part of a lang... more Dictionaries confer legitimacy upon a language as a comprehensive concept, or some part of a language, whether we call that register, dialect, lexicon, or vocabulary ... 'Legitimacy' can be understood as a shorthand for identifying and establishing the varieties of Englishes that are used in various locations around the world. The notion of legitimacy for pluralized 'Englishes' largely rests upon the presence or absence of an authoritative text called ‘the dictionary'.
A radical proto-feminist reading of “Our Father” by Bishop Wilkins based on his philosophical lan... more A radical proto-feminist reading of “Our Father” by Bishop Wilkins based on his philosophical language.
0. Introduction ...I continue to seek a method that will allow me to discuss coherently a three-hundred-and-some-year-old text ... An essay towards a real character and a philosophical language (Wilkins, 1668), falls within the discipline of "humanistic linguistics," a discipline named by Kahane ... This article raises questions concerning the nature of definition and its relation to meaning; but it also must address the nature of a lexicon, specialized dictionaries and the representation and transmission of knowledge. Within the confines of a brief essay it is not possible to follow every intellectual lead; therefore, I concentrate on defining the problems posed by the questions and presenting a solution offered by the scientific community in seventeenth-century England. 1. Philosophical Language and its Dictionary That a dictionary of philosophy should be something quite different than a philosophical dictionary tells us about the specialization of our intellectual life which, in turn, indicates a fragmented and compartmentalized approach to knowledge: in a dictionary of philosophy we expect to find special terms defined according to an encyclopedic method, as if the only matters upon which philosophers argue would be the jargon created especially for philosophical discourse. A specialized dictionary organized according to this principle determines the limits of philosophical discourse; that is, a dictionary of only specialized terms seems to deauthorize ordinary language as proper to philosophy. A dictionary of scientific terms follows the same method: is science a specialized vocabulary that finds expression within the grammar of a given natural language?
"The articles are gathered under three broad topics: 'The new generation of English learner... more "The articles are gathered under three broad topics: 'The new generation of English learners' dictionaries: historical background - assessment of specific features - the perspective of the user' ; 'Learners' Dictionaries - other dictionaries'; and 'Dictionaries - corpora perspectives'. The anthology appropriately begins with an article by Anthony P. Cowie, one of the editors in the OALD series of dictionaries, that treats some historical issues, ' Learners' dictionaries in a historical and a theoretical perspective.' It is always highly useful and interesting to get an overview of a dictionary from a working lexicographer who regularly writes and speaks on the principles of putting together a dictionary; in this case, Cowie gives us a look into the early work of A.S. Hornby, Michael West, and Harold Palmer on the vocabulary control movement, dictionary examples, and phraseology. The historical/theoretical approach illuminates some of the ideology underlying this branch of lexicography. Cowie's informative article serves to remind us how much more research needs to be done on the history of lexicography . In the twenties and thirties there were at least two schools of the propagation of English: the one we are currently considering given its foundation by Palmer, West and Hornby; the other is r presented by C. K . Ogden and I.A. Richards, the founders of the BASIC (British American Scientific Industrial Commercial) English enterprise. One has as its mission to bring all those who would learn English into the greater comm unity of English speakers under the helpful cloak of the English commonly associated with a certain variety of British English. The other has as its mission to offer English for the purpose of international communication; it emphasizes a utilitarian variety of English that does not necessarily value immersion in English speaking culture. The dates of the two approaches are so intertwined that without knowing more details it is not possible to determine if these projects influenced one or the other. The important point is that both projects led to the production of dictionaries that have controlled defining vocabularies (see also, The General Basic English Dictionary 1940 , 'chiefly for the use of learners of English' p. v). Ogden 's vocabulary depended on contemporary linguistic studies on word frequencies.
When we consider the early moments of modern science, especially as it is represented in certai... more When we consider the early moments of modern science, especially as it is represented in certain quarters of England in the 17th century, we notice that issues of language, philosophy, experimental method, applied science and what could be called public relations were, in turn, given considerable attention. The hierarchical and logical structure of ideas could ideally be considered the abstract manifestation of the structure of things observed in the world; it is no wonder that discourse, whether narrative or non-narrative, should hold the attention of the scientific community.
Uploads
The research findings and close readings by expert practitioners and historians of dictionaries and word studies found in the pages of this volume continue to broaden critical perspectives upon the study of manuscripts and print artifacts; dictionaries and standard varieties; biographies; bibliography and text analyses; dictionary production; and corpus and digital analyses.
NOTE: 1st Edition Full Text available on this site.
Research on the dictionaries studied by Professor Starnes and Professor Noyes has generally focussed on identifying further sources and interdependencies between individual works revealing the lexicographical methods used by the compilers. (Stein 1991, xi).
This sort of Quellenforschung is extremely useful as far as it goes, but it is inevitably limited in its intellectual ambitions and in its appeal to non-specialist readers. The chronological range of Starnes and Noyes's book is also limited, and although the period up to 1604 has been surveyed by Stein in The English dictionary before Cawdrey (1985), for Anglophone lexicography after 1755 the only monographic overview appears to be Jonathon Green's popular Chasing the sun (1996). Dolezal sketched some of the possibilities for a history of English lexicography after Starnes and Noyes in his review of the reprint edition (Dolezal 1996: “Tracing the History of English Lexicography”, American Speech, ), and now opens up these possibilities much further. So, for instance, he reflects upon and challenges the application of concepts such as "influence" and "borrowing" to the history of lexicography (and indeed "plagiarism," with which cf. Landau 2001, 402-4); questions the relationship of the history of dictionaries to literary history; and discusses the relationship between typology and chronology as ordering principles. Dolezal's critical questioning encourages further questions inspired by his. Is "the English dictionary" itself a useful rubric: what might a History of the dictionary in Britain look like? Could a single author write it? Sooner or later, the time will come for The English dictionary from Cawdrey to Johnson to be superseded, and whoever undertakes the work will have to take careful heed of Dolezal's arguments.
--- John Considine, p. ix: "INTRODUCTION". Words and Dictionaries from the British Isles in Historical Perspective, edited by John Considine and Giovanni Iamartino, Cambridge Scholars Press.
We live in a time in which ‘humanistic’ and ‘philological’ are more relics
than even ossified reliquaries. Why should anyone but a historian of languages or lexicography have interest in the recovery and collection of inscriptions of early modern Europe? Lexicography is more than the sum of all lexicographers and all dictionaries compiled and inscribed or being compiled and about to be inscribed. John Considine tells us in the opening pages of Dictionaries of Early Modern Europe: Lexicography and the Making of Heritage that ‘this book originates in an attempt to understand the association between dictionaries and heroic narratives.’ (p. 4) Dictionaries in the European chain of texts are artifacts of inheritance: genealogical (for example, Robert and Henri Estienne), bibliographical, and material (including ownership of land, perhaps unexpectedly). And thus, we begin to understand the relationships of a seemingly vanished
heroic age revealed contemporaneously as an heroic heritage and the
lexicographer, the collector and transmitter, as ‘heroic in his own right’.
As one might suspect, the methodological foundation for dictionary entries is then notational system. There are five basic kinds of notational devices in the AD:
Abbreviation:
Jug. [Narrow-necked pot sp. of Earth];
Indentation:
Discharge
[Obligation]
From Duty.
[Perform Duty]
Typeface: Italics for Entires and Sub-entries;
Brackets:
Scoff. {Reproach]
{Mock];
and Horizontal Line:
Jail.
___er
0. Introduction ...I continue to seek a method that will allow me to discuss coherently a three-hundred-and-some-year-old text ... An essay towards a real character and a philosophical language (Wilkins, 1668), falls within the discipline of "humanistic linguistics," a discipline named by Kahane ... This article raises questions concerning the nature of definition and its relation to meaning; but it also must address the nature of a lexicon, specialized dictionaries and the representation and transmission of knowledge. Within the confines of a brief essay it is not possible to follow every intellectual lead; therefore, I concentrate on defining the problems posed by the questions and presenting a solution offered by the scientific community in seventeenth-century England. 1. Philosophical Language and its Dictionary That a dictionary of philosophy should be something quite different than a philosophical dictionary tells us about the specialization of our intellectual life which, in turn, indicates a fragmented and compartmentalized approach to knowledge: in a dictionary of philosophy we expect to find special terms defined according to an encyclopedic method, as if the only matters upon which philosophers argue would be the jargon created especially for philosophical discourse. A specialized dictionary organized according to this principle determines the limits of philosophical discourse; that is, a dictionary of only specialized terms seems to deauthorize ordinary language as proper to philosophy. A dictionary of scientific terms follows the same method: is science a specialized vocabulary that finds expression within the grammar of a given natural language?
The research findings and close readings by expert practitioners and historians of dictionaries and word studies found in the pages of this volume continue to broaden critical perspectives upon the study of manuscripts and print artifacts; dictionaries and standard varieties; biographies; bibliography and text analyses; dictionary production; and corpus and digital analyses.
NOTE: 1st Edition Full Text available on this site.
Research on the dictionaries studied by Professor Starnes and Professor Noyes has generally focussed on identifying further sources and interdependencies between individual works revealing the lexicographical methods used by the compilers. (Stein 1991, xi).
This sort of Quellenforschung is extremely useful as far as it goes, but it is inevitably limited in its intellectual ambitions and in its appeal to non-specialist readers. The chronological range of Starnes and Noyes's book is also limited, and although the period up to 1604 has been surveyed by Stein in The English dictionary before Cawdrey (1985), for Anglophone lexicography after 1755 the only monographic overview appears to be Jonathon Green's popular Chasing the sun (1996). Dolezal sketched some of the possibilities for a history of English lexicography after Starnes and Noyes in his review of the reprint edition (Dolezal 1996: “Tracing the History of English Lexicography”, American Speech, ), and now opens up these possibilities much further. So, for instance, he reflects upon and challenges the application of concepts such as "influence" and "borrowing" to the history of lexicography (and indeed "plagiarism," with which cf. Landau 2001, 402-4); questions the relationship of the history of dictionaries to literary history; and discusses the relationship between typology and chronology as ordering principles. Dolezal's critical questioning encourages further questions inspired by his. Is "the English dictionary" itself a useful rubric: what might a History of the dictionary in Britain look like? Could a single author write it? Sooner or later, the time will come for The English dictionary from Cawdrey to Johnson to be superseded, and whoever undertakes the work will have to take careful heed of Dolezal's arguments.
--- John Considine, p. ix: "INTRODUCTION". Words and Dictionaries from the British Isles in Historical Perspective, edited by John Considine and Giovanni Iamartino, Cambridge Scholars Press.
We live in a time in which ‘humanistic’ and ‘philological’ are more relics
than even ossified reliquaries. Why should anyone but a historian of languages or lexicography have interest in the recovery and collection of inscriptions of early modern Europe? Lexicography is more than the sum of all lexicographers and all dictionaries compiled and inscribed or being compiled and about to be inscribed. John Considine tells us in the opening pages of Dictionaries of Early Modern Europe: Lexicography and the Making of Heritage that ‘this book originates in an attempt to understand the association between dictionaries and heroic narratives.’ (p. 4) Dictionaries in the European chain of texts are artifacts of inheritance: genealogical (for example, Robert and Henri Estienne), bibliographical, and material (including ownership of land, perhaps unexpectedly). And thus, we begin to understand the relationships of a seemingly vanished
heroic age revealed contemporaneously as an heroic heritage and the
lexicographer, the collector and transmitter, as ‘heroic in his own right’.
As one might suspect, the methodological foundation for dictionary entries is then notational system. There are five basic kinds of notational devices in the AD:
Abbreviation:
Jug. [Narrow-necked pot sp. of Earth];
Indentation:
Discharge
[Obligation]
From Duty.
[Perform Duty]
Typeface: Italics for Entires and Sub-entries;
Brackets:
Scoff. {Reproach]
{Mock];
and Horizontal Line:
Jail.
___er
0. Introduction ...I continue to seek a method that will allow me to discuss coherently a three-hundred-and-some-year-old text ... An essay towards a real character and a philosophical language (Wilkins, 1668), falls within the discipline of "humanistic linguistics," a discipline named by Kahane ... This article raises questions concerning the nature of definition and its relation to meaning; but it also must address the nature of a lexicon, specialized dictionaries and the representation and transmission of knowledge. Within the confines of a brief essay it is not possible to follow every intellectual lead; therefore, I concentrate on defining the problems posed by the questions and presenting a solution offered by the scientific community in seventeenth-century England. 1. Philosophical Language and its Dictionary That a dictionary of philosophy should be something quite different than a philosophical dictionary tells us about the specialization of our intellectual life which, in turn, indicates a fragmented and compartmentalized approach to knowledge: in a dictionary of philosophy we expect to find special terms defined according to an encyclopedic method, as if the only matters upon which philosophers argue would be the jargon created especially for philosophical discourse. A specialized dictionary organized according to this principle determines the limits of philosophical discourse; that is, a dictionary of only specialized terms seems to deauthorize ordinary language as proper to philosophy. A dictionary of scientific terms follows the same method: is science a specialized vocabulary that finds expression within the grammar of a given natural language?