Abstract: FOR THE FIRST TIME SINCE ITS INITIAL APPEARANCE IN 1979, Dictionaries is published here in a second issue of its annual volume. That’s a notable advance for the journal, and other changes are under discussion. Still, the core values, functions, and structure of the journal remain steady, and you’ll find articles, book reviews, and reports of reference works in progress here, as usual. While the value of older dictionaries in tracing the semantic evolution of words is well known, their usefulness in aid of phonological evolution is less so. In an article highlighting the utility of eighteenth-century dictionaries and orthoepic treatises in tracing the history of particular sounds, Nicolas Trapateau ... Read More Keywords: World War, 1914-1918; Clark, Andrew,; English language; Simpson, J. A.,; Multilingualism; Lexicography; Language and languages PubDate: 2018-01-09T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: Standing on Didcot Station in Oxfordshire in August 1914, Andrew Clark was informed by a passing railway porter that mobilization was underway and that the reserves—in the idiom of the day—had been “called out.” War was officially declared two days later. For Clark, the events of the next four years would become the basis for two extraordinary projects. Clark’s war diary, initially entitled “Echoes of the 1914 War in an Essex Village,” saw its final (62nd) volume in December 1919.1 Clark’s other project, running in parallel and replete with intersections and cross-references to his diaries, was an equally voluminous—if long-neglected—collection on the subject of “English Words in War-Time.” Archived in the ... Read More Keywords: World War, 1914-1918; Clark, Andrew,; English language; Simpson, J. A.,; Multilingualism; Lexicography; Language and languages PubDate: 2018-01-09T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: All dictionary lovers should have conveniently available on their bookshelves this learned yet accessible collection of thirty-seven essays, edited by Philip Durkin and written by both scholars and professional lexicographers. Let me begin by stating what this book is not. Although it appears in the Oxford Handbooks in Linguistics series and touches on linguistic issues, it is not largely focused on linguistics. Nor is it a “howto” manual for training lexicographers, although it speaks pragmatically about the decisions lexicographers face in their often fraught enterprise of creating, revising, and publishing a dictionary. And although individual essays, especially John Considine’s (605–15), are full of ... Read More Keywords: World War, 1914-1918; Clark, Andrew,; English language; Simpson, J. A.,; Multilingualism; Lexicography; Language and languages PubDate: 2018-01-09T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: “Prescriptivism is as American as apple pie or the NRA, and as inevitable as sex, death, and taxes,” John Algeo (2000, 246) has written. Unlike perennial popular interest in the subject, scholarly interest has waxed and waned, although a recent upswing can be noted in a series of Prescriptivism Conferences, initiated in Sheffield in 2003; the sixth has been announced for Vigo, Spain, in 2020. Values of competing kinds have been at the heart of prescriptivism and anti-prescriptivism for centuries, and the 2017 Prescriptivism Conference in Park City, Utah, identified “Value(s) and Language Prescriptivism” as its theme. Another thread among the 2017 participants was the putative distinction between ... Read More Keywords: World War, 1914-1918; Clark, Andrew,; English language; Simpson, J. A.,; Multilingualism; Lexicography; Language and languages PubDate: 2018-01-09T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: Anyone who thinks that the longtime chief editor of the revered Oxford English Dictionary (OED) might have written a stuffy or plodding autobiography will be happily disappointed. John Simpson’s The Word Detective comes alive from the very first sentence of the introduction, in which the author makes known his desire, since his earliest days as a “cub lexicographer,” to “pick away at the stereotypes imposed on lexicographers” by the general public, the media, and even lexicographers themselves. From an American perspective, it could be said that Simpson actually fits the stereotype of a British lexicographer: A student of English literature “at university” (when not engaged in such classic English ... Read More Keywords: World War, 1914-1918; Clark, Andrew,; English language; Simpson, J. A.,; Multilingualism; Lexicography; Language and languages PubDate: 2018-01-09T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: One of twenty-four books in the South Asia Across the Disciplines series, Walter Hakala’s Negotiating Languages is a brief historical survey of several Urdu dictionaries that were written across three centuries. The book is a meaningful achievement, as this is a relatively underexplored area, and some of the authors discussed in the book, and their lexicographic works, have long lain buried in history. The author’s primary object is “to explode the belief that any lexicographic work, be it a children’s glossary or a multi-volume dictionary, is merely a mimetic representation of an underlying linguistic reality and not a carefully constructed product of human labor” (27). He illustrates this through the story ... Read More Keywords: World War, 1914-1918; Clark, Andrew,; English language; Simpson, J. A.,; Multilingualism; Lexicography; Language and languages PubDate: 2018-01-09T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: Usage labels have been a constant ingredient of metalexicographic considerations in historical, theoretical, and evaluative approaches alike. Despite an abundance of work on the subject, some fundamental characteristics of subject-matter labels remain unaccounted for. The present paper is devoted to one such characteristic: the distinction between exodistinctive and endoprofiling specialized subject-matter labels. The contribution of the paper lies chiefly in its argument that the metalexicographic literature needs to attend to both label types and that present-day dictionaries have the possibility of consistently incorporating both label categories. The paper argues for a consistent use of endoprofiling labels ... Read More Keywords: World War, 1914-1918; Clark, Andrew,; English language; Simpson, J. A.,; Multilingualism; Lexicography; Language and languages PubDate: 2018-01-09T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: The first major lexicographers of the eighteenth century saw no need to describe the pronunciation of vowels and consonants. Samuel Johnson (1755) himself considered such information “useless” and was content to represent a minimal stress mark on the headwords of his Dictionary of the English Language. From the 1750s on, a number of dictionaries, including those of James Buchanan (1757), William Johnston (1764), William Kenrick (1773), Thomas Sheridan (1780), and John Walker (1791), started to offer complete transcriptions for all entries, and those pre-phonetic transcriptions provide underutilized but invaluable resources for diachronic studies in phonology. Thanks to a digital re-edition of Walker’s ... Read More Keywords: World War, 1914-1918; Clark, Andrew,; English language; Simpson, J. A.,; Multilingualism; Lexicography; Language and languages PubDate: 2018-01-09T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: Readers of this journal will need no introduction to the OED, nor will they require detailed reminder of the various search functions facilitated by OED software (on CD-ROM or online) or the kinds of research it has made possible, much of it discussed in these pages. However, in the face of the bounty of information delivered by OED software concerning the history of the English language, of English-language literature and culture, and of English lexicographical theory and practice, it is worth remembering a few questions that the software was not able to address in any systematic way. In her study of loanwords, Sarah Ogilvie (2013) had to rely on the (not always reliable) counts of main entries and “alien ... Read More Keywords: World War, 1914-1918; Clark, Andrew,; English language; Simpson, J. A.,; Multilingualism; Lexicography; Language and languages PubDate: 2018-01-09T00:00:00-05:00
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