Lecture 9. Lexicography

Compiling dictionaries or lexicons containing an alphabetical arrangement of the words in a language with a definition of each is called lexicography.

Sometimes the smallest dictionary will give all the information needed. But it often happens that what you are especially concerned about perhaps the older meanings of a word, rare or special meanings, or detailed etymology - is not to be found except in one of the larger volumes.

In its proper sense a dictionary is a book, containing a collection of the words, dialect or subject, arranged alphabetically or in some other definite order, and with explanations in the same or some other language. When the words are few in number, being only a small part of those belonging to the subject, or when they are given without explanation, or some only are explained, the work is called a vocabulary, a glossary is properly a collection of unusual or foreign words requiring explanation. It is the name frequently given to English dictionary of dialects.

The tendency of great dictionaries is to unite in themselves all the peculiar features of special dictionaries. A large dictionary is most useful when a word is to be thoroughly studied, or when there is difficulty in making out the meaning of a word or phrase. Special dictionaries are more useful for special purposes, for instance, synonyms are best studied in a dictionary of synonyms.

Small dictionaries are more convenient for frequent use as in translating from a foreign language, for words may be found more quickly, and they present the words and their meaning in a concentrated form, instead of being scattered over a large space and separated by other data.

There are bilingual dictionaries and dictionaries of several languages, called polyglots, of different kinds. Some are polyglot in the vocabulary, but not in the explanation, like Johnson's, dictionary of Persian and Arabic explained in English; some in the interpretation, but not in the vocabulary or explanation, like Calepini octoglotton, a Latin dictionary of Latin with the meanings in several languages. Many great dictionaries are now polyglot in this sense.

Some are polyglot in the vocabulary and interpretation, but are explained in one language, like Jal 's Glossaire Nautique, a glossary of sea terms in many languages, giving the equivalent of each word in the other languages, but the explanation is in French. There are also special dictionaries of many kinds, such as: dictionaries of etymology, foreign words, dialects, slang, pronunciation, spelling.

There are dictionaries of political and social sciences; of mathematics; of natural history, of philosophy, of zoology and botany, of agriculture and rural economy, of commerce, navigation and the military arts; of chemistry, geology and mineralogy; of architecture, painting and music; of medicine, surgery, anatomy, pathology and physiology, of diplomacy; of law, of mechanics, machines and manual arts. There are dictionaries of antiquities of chronology,

of dates, of genealogy, of abbreviations and of very many other subjects. And lastly, there are dictionaries of the arts and sciences, and their comprehensive offspring, encyclopaedias, which include in themselves every branch of knowledge.

The history of English lexicography begins with the compilation of Latin-English glossaries of which many appeared in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.

Among the earliest publications we find John Bullokar's English Expositour (1616), which is probably the earliest claimant for the title of the first English dictionary.

A Table Alphabetical published in 1604 by Robert Cawdrey according to its full tide is limited to borrowed words and to importations from Greek, Latin and French.

Minsheu's Ductor in Linguas, or Guide into the Tongues (1617), is the first of etymological dictionaries; Henry Cockeram's English Dictionary published in 1623 is the first in which the word dictionary is used in the sense in which we understand it now.

The full titles of Bullokar's and Cockeram's compilations suggest the early conception of a dictionary as limited to difficult words only: the one reads: An English Expositour; Teaching the Interpretation of the Hardest Words Used in our Language, with Sundry Explications, Descriptions and Discourses; the other: The English Dictionary or An Interpreter of Hard English Words.

Earlier dictionaries followed in the line of old glossaries and directed their attention to such words as were likely to be unfamiliar to the ordinary man. They usually make the proper meaning of a word the starting point of its definition and arrange its other meanings ignoring the historical order in which the various meanings arose. Still less do they attempt to give data from which the vocabulary of the language at any previous period may be determined. The philologist, however, for whom the etymology of words is a fact of major importance, regards no record of a language as complete, which does not snow this growth in its successive stages. He would like to know when and where each word and each form and sense of it are first found in a given language; if the word or sense is obsolete, when it died; and any other fact that throws light upon its history. The full etymology of a word should include the phonetic descent the source of the word, whether native or foreign, and, if the fitter, whether by adoption, or adaptation, or if a formed word, the origin of the parts which go to make it up.

Later dictionaries with greater pretension to completeness are: Edward Phillips -New World of Words, or A General English Dictionary (1658) and that of Nathaniel Bailey, the direct predecessor of Johnson - Universal Etymological English Dictionary.

The first edition of Samuel Johnson's dictionary, in two folio volumes, appeared in 1755.

The greatest of all dictionaries is The New English Dictionary (also called The Oxford English Dictionary), which appeared in instalments over a period of forty-five years from 1883 to 1928. Its first editor was James Murray. The editor's principal assistants were Dr. Henry Bradley, Dr. W. A. Craigie, and C. T. Onions.

The dictionary fills twelve volumes embracing not only the standard language of literature and conversation, whether current at the moment or obsolete, but also the main technical vocabulary, and a large measure of dialectal usage and slang.

Founded mainly on materials collected by the Philological Society it applies the method of exposition on historical principles particularly by quotations. Illustrative sentences and lines of poetry are quoted, with date and author.

The New English Dictionary furnishes for the first time data from which the extent of the English vocabulary at any given period, and the course of its development, can fairly be estimated.

It presents in alphabetical series the words that have formed the English vocabulary from the times of the earliest records down to the present time with all the relevant facts as to their form, sense, history, pronunciation and etymology. For this purpose the materials furnished by the older dictionaries are quite insufficient, on account of their incompleteness and unhistorical character.

Other distinctive features of The New English Dictionary are the precision with which variations of pronunciation and spelling are indicated; the fullness of the etymologies which abound in new information and corrections of old errors, the accuracy of the definitions and the elaborate differentiation of meanings which, if not in all cases with entire success, yet on the whole gives a wealth of linguistic evidence in the history of words. The full historical account is especially valuable to the student who finds in his reading of sixteenth or seventeenth century literature uses of words which are wry different from the modern usage.

It may be said with little fear of exaggeration that this monumental work, whose history goes back to 1857, is one of the greatest achievements of modern English scholarship and research.

Abridgements and adaptations of The New English Dictionary (several forms) have been produced by the Clarendon Press: the two-volume Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, the Concise Oxford Dictionary of Current English, the Pocket Oxford Dictionary (of which there is an American version) and the Little Oxford Dictionary, the Oxford Shakespeare Glossary is also directly based upon it.

In matters of pronunciation foreign students rely more and more on Daniel Jones's An English Pronouncing Dictionary, the ninth edition of which, containing 56,280 words in international phonetic transcription appeared in 1948.

The Encyclopaedia Britannica is a Dictionary of Arts, Sciences and Literature with pectoral illustrations, with brief etymological notes showing but in outlines the sources and history and in many cases the development in meaning.

In the manner of compilation it is a modern cooperative dictionary, the joint product of a large number of scholars.

In the application of the encyclopaedic method it is conservative, excluding, with a few exceptions, proper names and restricting, for the most part, the encyclopaedic matter to descriptive and other details, which might be added to the definitions.

The combination of lexicon and encyclopaedia is exhibited in the Century Dictionary edited by W. D. Witney, and published in 1889-1891 in 6 volumes, containing 7046 pages.

It conforms to the philological mode in giving the older as well as the present vocabulary of the language, and in the completeness of its etymology; but it does not attempt to give the full history of every word within the language. Its other distinctive features are the inclusion of a great number of modern scientific and technical terms and the abundance of its quotations.

It is to be marked that between the dictionary and the encyclopaedia no rigid line of demarcation can be drawn. Instances are not few when the meaning of words cannot be explained properly without some description of things, and, on the other hand, the description of things and processes often comprises the definition of names.

The large vocabulary of the general dictionary makes it possible to present certain kinds of encyclopaedic matter with a degree of fullness and convenience of arrangement, which are possible in no single work of any other class.

There are also well-known Webster and Merriam-Webster Dictionaries: An American Dictionary of the English Language, edited by Noah Webster in 1828; The Revised Edition, in 1840; a New and Revised Edition, edited by Chauncey A. Goodrich, in 1847; a Revised and Enlarged Edition with Pictorial Illustrations and a Table of Synonyms, edited by Chauncey A Goodrich in 1859; the Unabridged, with Vocabulary three times the size of the 1828 Dictionary, and with etymologies revised in 1804; the Unabridged, with a Pronouncing Gazetter in 1884; the International in 1890; and the New International, having more that 400,000 entries, in 1909. The latest is Webster's New International Dictionary off the English Language (Springfield, mass., USA, 1948).

W. W. Skeat's Etymological Dictionary is devoted especially to the etymology of English words. There are special dictionaries of synonyms such as W. Taylor's English Synonyms Discriminated (1813), J. Crabb's English Synonyms Explained (1816), George F. Graham's English Synonyms Classified and Explained' (1846), Roget's Thesaurus of 'English Words and Phrases and others.

In a Thesaurus words are grouped according to the ideas they express, rather than in alphabetical order as in a dictionary. Usually, about half the volume is devoted to an index giving references to the various numbered sections of the Thesaurus itself. In Roget's Thesaurus, for instance, there are six primary classes;

1. Abstract relations. 2. Space. 3. Matter. 4. Intellect. 5. Volition. 6. Affection.

For English idioms, proverbs and proverbial phrases the student may consult such special works as P. M. Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases, W. McMordie's English Idioms and How to Use Them, L. P. Smith's Words and Idioms, J. M Dixon's English Idioms, Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, A Desk-Book of Idioms and Idiomatic Phrases by Vizetelly and Bekker.

Students of English will also find valuable information on English idioms in A. Koonin's Anglo-Russian Phraseological Dictionary, Kiev, 1956. The book will be highly useful not only as an aid in immediate difficulties but as a means to extend the practical knowledge of the language.

The best known bilingual dictionaries edited in our country are: The Russian-English Dictionary compiled by O. S. Akhmanova, T. P. Gorbunova, N. F. Rotshtein, Prof Smirnitsky and Prof Taube (Moscow, 1948); V. Myullefs Anglo-Russian Dictionary (Moscow, 1955); M. L. Podvesko's Ukrainian-English and English-Ukrainian Dictionaries edited in Kiev in 1957 and in 1959; K. T. Barantsev's English-Ukrainian Phrase-Book edited in Kiev in 1969; M. I. Balla's English-Ukrainan and Ukrainan-English Dictionaries edited in Kiev in 1996 (in two volumes); Ye. F. Popov Ye. F., M I. Balla's Comprehensive Ukrainian-English Dictionary edited in Kiev in 2001.