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Архитектура Аудит Военная наука Иностранные языки Медицина Металлургия Метрология Образование Политология Производство Психология Стандартизация Технологии |
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Архитектура Аудит Военная наука Иностранные языки Медицина Металлургия Метрология Образование Политология Производство Психология Стандартизация Технологии |
Pail bucket pail bucket/pail
Tonic/soda coke/cold drink soda/pop pop Devil’s darning snake feeder snake doctor dragon fly, Needle mosquito-hawk, snake doctor
The form of speech used by radio and television, mostly used in scientific and business discourse, is often referred to as General American, the language that may be also heard from Ohio through the Middle West and on to the Pacific Coast, and that may be described as the norm of American English. (Some scholars, however, object to this term and use Network Standard instead).
Concluding the chapter, it is worth mentioning again that English like all other languages is an abstraction consisting of many regional variants, local and social dialects, accents and idiolects. From a social point of view some of the dialects are considered superior than others, though there is no linguistic evidence for such prejudice. It should also be noted that these days dialect identification has become more difficult due to mobility of people and wide use of mass media. Its study now requires more elaborate methods.
Further reading: Швейцер А.Д. Социальная дифференциация английского языка в США. – М.: Наука, 1983. Ярцева В.Н. Развитие национального литературного английского языка. – М.: Наука, 1969. Aitchison, J. Linguistics. – London: Teach Yourself Books, 1992. Chambers, J.K. Dialectology. – Cambridge: CUP, 1980. Flexner, S.B.and Soukhanov, A.H. Speaking Freely: A Guided Tour of American English from Plymouth Rock to Silicon Valley. – New York, Oxford: OUP, 1997. Freeborn, D., French, P. and Langford, D. Varieties of English. An Introduction to the Study of Language. Second Edition. – Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire and London: The Macmillan Press Ltd, 1993. Holmes, J. An Introduction to Sociolinguistics. – London and New York: Longman, 1994. Hughes, A. and Trudgill, P. English Accents and Dialects. An Introduction to Social and Regional Varieties of British English. – London: Edward Arnold, 1979. Long, D. Sociolinguistic Aspects of Japanese Loan words in English // XVIth International Congress of Linguists. Abstracts. – Paris, 1997. – p.165. Marckwardt, A.H. American English. – New York, Oxford: OUP, 1980. O’Donnell, W.R. and Todd, L. Variety in Contemporary English. – London: G.Allen & Unwin, 1980. Quirk, R. Grammatical and Lexical Variance in English. – UK: Longman, 1999. Strevens, P. British and American English. – London: Cassell Ltd., 1978. Wardhaugh, R. An Introduction to Sociolinguistics. – Oxford: Basic Blackwell Inc, 1986.
Chapter 9. ENGLISH LEXICOGRAPHY
Dictionaries are like watches: the worst is better than none, and the best cannot be expected to go quite true. —Dr S. Johnson.
Lexicography vs. lexicology. The history of British and American lexicography. How modern dictionaries are made. Some problems of lexicography. Classification of dictionaries
Lexicography vs. lexicology Lexicography — the art and science of compiling dictionaries — has a history of over 2, 000 years. Its origin dates back to ancient China, Greece, and Rome, though other countries have also made serious contributions to the field. With the invention of printing many of dictionaries of many languages appeared in various countries. The 20th century made lexicography a highly scholarly subject due to the development of linguistics, including lexicology, and new technologies. The growth of academic societies, like the Dictionary Society of North America (1975), and the European Association for Lexicography (EURALEX, 1983) has also contributed to its development.
The object of lexicography and lexicology is the same — vocabulary of a language. But lexicology is mostly interested in revealing structural and systematic features of vocabulary, while lexicography is mainly concentrated on compiling dictionaries – word-books with lists of vocabulary units and their specific semantic, structural and functional characteristics. Lexicology works out principles of vocabulary organization and thoroughly studies data about certain lexical units and lexical phenomena that are widely used in lexicography. In its turn lexicography collects and preserves valuable information for lexicology. Thus, both branches of linguistics complement each other and use each other’s achievements.
2. The history of British and American lexicography British lexicography is one of the richest in the world. Many of new editions of well-known dictionaries appear regularly (like the Concise Oxford English Dictionary ), and new series of dictionaries have recently been launched (like Longman ). Specialized dictionaries that have appeared recently can hardly be enumerated.
Yet, the history of British lexicography is not very long in comparison with, for example, Arabic lexicography, which developed in the 8th century. The first word-books that appeared on the British Isles during the entire Anglo-Saxon and most of the Middle-English period were lists of difficult Latin terms used in the Scriptures. These lists of ‘difficult Latin words’ were accompanied by glosses in easier Latin or sometimes with Anglo-Saxon equivalents. Sometimes they were written between the Latin lines. No attempts were made to list the Anglo-Saxon words in some order.
The first English dictionaries were published in the sixteenth century, though none of them were ever called ‘dictionaries’: various fanciful names were used, like hortus ‘garden’ or thesaurus ‘hoard’. They included words organized in a systematic, usually alphabetic, way so that the user could find words easily. They were bilingual foreign language word-books (English-French and French-English, English-Italian and Italian-English, English-Spanish and Spanish-English, English-Latin and Latin-English).
The 17th century saw the emergence of a monolingual English dictionary. In 1604 the first monolingual dictionary was published. It was A Table Alphabeticall, contayning and teaching the true writing and understanding of hard usuall English wordes borrowed from the Hebrew, Greek, Latine, or French, etc., by Robert Cawdrey, a schoolmaster. The dictionary had more than 2, 500 entries containing ‘hard’ words like anathema, gargarize. No modal verbs, pronouns or ‘obvious’ words like eat, cat were included in it yet.
The Golden Age in the history of British lexicography began in the 18th century. Hard-word dictionaries began to be replaced by ordinary-word dictionaries focusing on literary usage. In 1702 John Kersey published his New English Dictionary and moved away from the ‘hard word’ tradition.It included words of daily language and aimed ‘for Young Scholars, Tradesmen and the Female Sex’ to teach them ‘to spell truely’.
The best dictionary of this time was the Universal Etymological Dictionary by Nathaniel Bailey (1721). For the first time a dictionary included etymology, usage including style information, syllabification, illustrative quotations (chiefly from proverbs) and even pronunciation — all types of information that is customarily provided in modern explanatory dictionaries. In 1730 N.Bailey and two collaborators published a more comprehensive work, containing 48, 000 words, the Dictionarium Britannicum. It became the basis of S.Johnson’s dictionary.
In 1755 Dr. Samuel Johnson, the poet, essayist and literary criticpublished his great Dictionary of the English Language in two volumes consisting of 2, 300 pages with 40, 000 entries. This work became the most authoritative text for several generations of Englishmen and was superseded only by the Oxford English Dictionary. It took Johnson more than eight years to write it (instead of the intended three), and it was the first English dictionary ever compiled by a writer of the first rank.
The dictionarywas a scholarly record of the whole language, based on a corpus of examples (an important innovation! ) by the ‘best’ authors of that time like Shakespeare, Milton, Pope, Addison, Bacon, Spenser (though many of them were reproduced from memory). Thus it became a prescriptive, ‘purifying’ guide to the best usage of the English language for more than a century. Johnson’s attempts to fix the language, his thorough choice of the words for inclusion, and high repute in which the dictionary was held established a lofty bookish style that was given the name of “Johnsonian” or “Johnsonese”. In 1880 a bill was actually thrown out of Parliament because a word in it was not in “the Dictionary” /Whitehall 1969: 204/.
S. Johnson was especially good at giving definitions; he was called ‘a skillful definer’. Yet he sometimes gave in to his personal prejudices and humour — ‘whimsical and licentious manifestations of his personalities’, as critics remarked. “When you are in business, it helps if you have a keen sense of humour”, — Johnson used to say. The most quotable example is that Dr. S.Johnson included a vexatious definition of oats because he meant to vex the Scots — ‘A grain, which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people’. Lexicographer he defined as ‘A writer of dictionaries; a harmless drudge, that busies himself in tracing the original, and detailing the signification of words’. To illustrate the meaning of the adjective dull he wrote: “To make a dictionary is a dull work”. According to the dictionary a patron is ‘one who countenances, supports or protects”. He also added with humour that a patron is “commonly a wretch who supports with insolence, and is paid with flattery’.
Pronunciation was not registered in the dictionary because S. Jonhson was aware of a variety of pronunciations and realized that the task of standardizing them was imposiible then. Various pronunciation dictionaries appeared later in the second half of the 18th century (among them are Thomas Sheridan’s General Dictionary of the English Language — 1780, and John Walker’s Critical Pronouncing Dictionary and Expositor of the English language — 1791).
Proper names and extralinguistic items were mostly excluded, and this is still a characteristic feature of modern British lexicography.
One more important innovation that S. Johnson made was to preface his Dictionary with an explanation of his aims and procedures. The preface also included a short history of the language and a grammar. There he made also an attempt to depart from prevailing prescriptive principles and take a descriptive approach. While in the dictionary’s plan (1747) he wrote that “the chief intent [of the dictionary compiler] is to preservethe purity and ascertain the meaning of our English idiom”, its preface (1755) stresses that its major aim is “not form butregister the language”. This departure from prescriptive to descriptive principles initiated a new era in lexicography:
Dr. S. Johnson
In 1621 N.Bailey published his Universal Etymological Dictionary and the English people — shopkeepers, farmers, tradesmen began buying it. It became a best-seller and was reprinted thirty times.
The book earned enormous sums of money, and the publishers decided to write a “real dictionary”.They hired Samuel Johnson to write this dictionary. Large, fleshy, untidy, his powdered wig askew on his big head, he was a man of immense learning, self-confidence, and sharp — sometimes savage — wit. He earned a slim income in writing poetry, essays, but he spent most of his days in a tavern talking with friends.
When Lord Chesterfield (a publisher) offered a down payment of 1, 575 pounds to write a dictionary, Johnson accepted gladly. He needed the money — he had a wife to support. Tatty [his wife] was 20 years his senior, a fat, easy-going companion whom he loved dearly.
So confident was Johnson of his literary powers that he offered to write a dictionary in 3 years. Friends warned him that this time wasn’t time enough. It had taken 40 French scholars 40 years to write a French dictionary. Shouldn’t he reconsider?
“Nonsense”, Johnson replied in affect, “Any Englishman is the equal of 40 Frenchmen. Three years. That’s all it will take! ’
One afternoon in 1747, having breakfast at noon, his usual hour for getting out of bed, he huffed up the narrow stairway to the attic of his home at No 17 Gough Square. Sitting himself at a small table and using crude paper and a goose quill pen, he began to work.
A dictionary, he said, should “preserve” the purity of a language, save it from “corruption and decay”, and hold back the flood of “low terms” he heard all around him on London streets and in the tavern.
He introduced examples showing how authors used these words. The written word, he believed, was the keystone of a language, the spoken language should sound like sentences in books....
In 1755 Johnson finished his A Dictionary of the English Language (it took him eight years, not three), and he was not satisfied with the work he produced. But he learnt a lot. 1. He realized that relying on his memory for definitions wasn’t good enough for dictionary making.... 2. He no longer thought it possible to “fix” the language. It was like trying to “lash the wind”, he said. Dictionaries were out of date as soon as they were printed. 3. It was people and spoken English, not books that determined how the language developed.
The Dictionary. .. was a huge success. Johnson’s work was a landmark in the history of dictionary making. It was the first time anyone had put down on paper the words that made up the English language, and it set basic guides for the craft of dictionary making. Lexicographers for the next two centuries would follow the principles Johnson — the intellectual, storyteller, and idler in taverns — had established.
(From “The Story of the Dictionary” by Robert Kraske. N. -Y.: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975 P.9-12)
But a real turn away from prescribing to recording dictionaries – fixing words and their meanings and not giving rigid recommendations about their usage – was made only in the 19th and 20th centuries.
In the 19th and 20th centuries three new concepts emerged in English lexicography: 1. The idea of compiling dictionaries on historical principles. 2. The replacement of prescriptive rules by a relatively systematic descriptive approach. 3. The idea of compiling independent national dictionaries reflecting English language development in the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and the West Indies /Burchfield 1985: 88/.
The idea of compiling dictionaries on historical principles belongs to Dean Richard Trench who in 1857 published his celebrated paper ‘On Some Deficiencies in our English Dictionaries’. He put forward the idea of a new dictionary – A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles (NED), that would exhibit each word and each meaning in a historical manner, arranging senses in chronological order, and which contain illustrative quotations from verified printed sources.
Real work on the dictionary began in 1879 when James A.H. Murray, a Scottish schoolmaster and self-taught philologist, was persuaded to become the editor. Later three more editors were added to speed its work, yet the final volume appeared only in 1928 (by that time it was called The Oxford English Dictionary, or OED ). The dictionary, nicknamed “the King of Dictionaries”, consisted of 12 volumes, 16, 569 pages and contained 414, 825 defined words. It traced the history of English words over 10 centuries. It included 5, 000, 000 quotations, and 2, 000 readers provided most of them. Sense divisions were precise and detailed. Etymologies were the best available at the time.
It was a 70-year project in which a wide network of volunteers and the editors’ families were involved. However, “the wonder is not that it took fifty years to complete, but that it was ever completed at all” /Miller 1991: 141/. Other major languages of the world, including Russian, still lack such a dictionary, though many languages, like Swedish, French, German, Hebrew, have recently got a historical dictionary of this kind.
A supplement appeared in 1933, and four further supplements appeared between 1972 and 1986. In the late seventies a two-volume set in a much-reduced typeface was issued. This edition included a powerful magnifying glass.
The first computerized edition of the OED on CD-ROM has been available since 1988 ( Compact Edition of OED ). It contains the original 12 volumes, without the Supplement, however. The words that were extinct by 1150 are not included in it, and it does not do justice to the OED.
James Murray
Johnson’s and Webster’s dictionaries recorded words used by people in England and America during their lifetimes. Then in 1857, an Irish Archbishop, Dan Richard Trench, came up with an idea for a remarkable new dictionary, a dictionary of the entire English language, a record — or biography — of each word for as long as people kept written records.
Work on that began at Oxford University in England. A group of volunteer readers — all people interested in the project but unpaid — met one day and began dipping into books, the old Early English Bible and the reign of Alfred the Great (849-899).
In 1879 Sir James A.H.Murray became first of four editors. In his back yard he built “Scriptorium” where he worked over the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. His two daughters, three assistant editors, helped him and 2000 volunteer readers.
In 1928 — seventy-one years after Dean Trench had thought of the idea — the tenth and final volume, X-Y-Z, was published. (The Panama Canal during this time was dug, but it took only 10 years (1904-1914) to complete.) Some people were in service for it for 50 years.
(From The Story of the Dictionary by Robert Kraske, N. -Y.: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975, p21.)
As for the second concept in dictionary-making that emerged in the 19-20th centuries — the replacement of prescriptive rules by a relatively systematic descriptive approach — it should be said that there is no clear boundary between prescriptivism and descriptivism. Both principles are mainly an attitude of mind, and modern dictionaries usually use a mixture of both techniques.
Prescriptivists usually regard innovations dangerous or at least resistible. They frequently use restrictive expressions like erroneously, sometimes, used to mean, falsely, avoided by careful writers. Prescriptive dictionaries arrange senses chronologically. Elements of this approach are found, for example, in A Dictionary of Modern English Usage by H.W. Fowler (1926, revised in 1965) and in The Concise Oxford Dictionary (7th edition, 1982), though the latter does not employ chronological order.
Descriptivists quickly identify new linguistic habits and record them without indicating that they might be unwelcome. In descriptive dictionaries archaic words and senses are usually omitted, and the senses are arranged in order of commonness or so-called logical order. Webster’s Third New International Dictionary (1961) — the most famous American dictionary — may be considered an example of the descriptive approach, which is widely used in modern American lexicography — though the order in sense arrangement is mainly chronological there.
The third concept implemented in English language lexicography of the 19-20th century – development of national lexicography in each English-speaking country – is best reflected in the history of compiling dictionaries in the US.
The first American dictionaries were unpretentious little books containing words used or spelled in a different way in the US. Noah Webster’s first work, The American Spelling Book (1783), was not an exception though it was extremely popular and brought him money to write an explanatory dictionary.
His first two attempts to write a dictionary were not a big success. Only his third attempt, An American Dictionary of the English Language in two volumes, was comparable to S.Johnson’s dictionaries in its values, scope and clarity of definitions. Yet, it was strongly biased towards Americanisms, American way of life, had a rudimentary pronunciation system inferior to those already in existence and some problematic etymologies.
After Webster’s death, his publishers commissioned a German scholar to rewrite Webster’s etymologies and in 1864 the new dictionary gained international fame.
The Webster’s Third New International Dictionary of the English Language carries 450, 000 entries in 2, 662 pages and it aims to include all the words used in English since 1755.
Noah Webster One American who objected to the personal style of S.Johnson’s dictionary was a sober, pious New England schoolmaster, named Noah Webster. “Johnson was always depressed by poverty”, he said tartly. “He was naturally indolent and seldom wrote until he was urged by want. Hence... he was compelled to prepare his manuscripts in haste”.
The judgment was hard, but so was Noah Webster. In his view dictionary making allowed no compromise, permitted no weakness. Webster set a standard for excellence in dictionary making that continues to this day.
During the Revolutionary war he joined the state militia in 1777 marched to the fighting at Saratoga. By the time his company arrived, though, the battle was over. Webster and other men turned around and marched home again.
He attended Yale College and five years after graduation, in 1783, published his Blue-Back Speller, America’s first speller, grammar, and reader. It was a tremendous success.
The money the book earned freed Webster from the need to work for a living. He could spend his time doing what he really wanted — write dictionaries.
To train for the task, he set about studying languages and in time he learned twenty-six, including Sanskrit.
He was aware of differences between British and American English, and said that American English had grown apart from the mother tongue.
In 1806 Webster published A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language. By Compendious he meant “concise, brief, a summary”. Like many writers of his day, however, Webster never used a short, clear word where a long, hard one would do. And like most dictionary makers, he was fond of elegant, obscure words.
Of the 37, 000 words in Webster’s Dictionary about 5, 000 were native to America. Squash, skunk, raccoon, hickory, caucus, presidency, apple-sauce, and bullfrog are examples.
He also began recording words as he heard people use them.
He also simplified spelling rules ( favor instead of favour, public, music instead of publick, musick ), dropped one l in traveller, and transposed the last two letters in English words like centre, used hed for head. Some of these changes were adopted, and some were rejected.
The Compendious sold well, but it was only a warm-up for Webster’s next project: An American Dictionary of the English Language. He worked for it for the next 22 years; it was finished in 1828, when he was 70. He was afraid not to survive to write the last word. It was zygomatic. The dictionary carried 12, 000 American words not registered in Johnson’s dictionary.
There was a lot of criticism for including “low” words.
Unlike his speller and first dictionary, though, Webster’s two-volume dictionary did not sell well. Its price of $15 was more than people wanted to pay for a dictionary.
Despite advanced age and dwindling funds, he started on yet a third dictionary. For another 12 years, working alone in his study he revised his 2-volume work.
In it he changed the spelling of words that people objected to ( wimin, tung ) as now he felt a dictionary should mirror the language as people used it, not as a dictionary maker would like to see it.
In 1840 Webster finished his last dictionary. It carried 5, 000 more words. But he couldn’t find a publisher for his work. So, ever independent, ever walking his own path, he borrowed money from a bank, found a printer, and published it himself. He placed a price of $15 on his dictionary, but again people wouldn’t pay it.
Bankrupt and on his death bed three years later, the old wordsmith suddenly sat up, told his grown children that a “crepuscule” was falling over him, settled back on his pillow, and died. He might have said “twilight”, but he chose instead to pay a final loving tribute to special words.
Webster’s children faced the problem of what to do with the unsold copies of his last dictionary and how to pay off the printer, George and Charles Merriam of Springfield, MA.
The debt was paid off when the Merriam brothers bought the dictionary and legalized the name of Merriam-Webster. They neglected, however, to legalize the single name Webster. Today, if a company wants to publish a dictionary and use the name Webster in the title, it can do so. The name can be used by anyone. But the G. and C.Merriam Company, the publisher of the Merriam-Webster dictionaries is the only company today that continues Noah Webster’s work.
On September 24, 1847, the two Merriam brothers brought out the first Merriam-Webster dictionary. Since that year, the company published new editions in 1864, 1890, 1909, and 1934.
In 1961 the company published Webster’s Third New International Dictionary of the English Language, Unabridged. The language had grown enormously since Webster’s day. The last word of 450, 000 words in it was zyzzogeton, the word that would have delighted the old wordsmith.
(From The Story of the Dictionary by Robert Kraske, N. -Y.: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975, pp.15-18) Lexicography in Britain and lexicography in the USA have their own traditions and distinctly different identities. American dictionaries, for example, in contrast to the British tradition set by S. Johnson, present encyclopedic information: they provide pictures, entries for real people and fictious characters, many geographical entries and detailed taxonomies for flora and fauna. American dictionaries usually give information discriminating among synonyms while British usually just list synonyms.
Yet, British and US dictionary producers have recently begun to cooperate and exchange principles for the sake of both. Some leading publishing companies, like Longman and Merriam-Webster, have entered partnerships, the result of which are new British-American dictionaries: the Longman New Universal Dictionary (1982) and the Longman Dictionary of the English Language (1984). Both of them made wide use of the text of the American Merriam-Webster English Collegiate Dictionary. Another example of cooperation, this time from east to west, is in the field of learners’ dictionaries: the Oxford Student’s Dictionary of American English (1983) was based on the British Oxford Student’s Dictionary of Current English (1978) (see R. Ilson in /Суша 1999: 83-84/).
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