Current Projects In Historical Lexicography

Current Projects in Historical Lexicography brings together seven papers by present and recent editors of historical dictionaries and lexical databases. The collection is introduced with an overview of the history of historical lexicography from the ancient world to the present day, with particular emphasis on the major nineteenth-century dictionaries of German, French, English, Dutch, Swedish, and Danish, and on their successors. In the first paper, Javier Martín Arista describes the present state of, and the prospects for, the Nerthus lexical database of Old English. The next two introduce specialized dictionaries of the language of medieval and early modern texts: Fernando Tejedo-Herrero’s comprehensive dictionary of the language of the great thirteenth-century lawcode Siete Partidas, and Juhani Norri’s Dictionary of Medical Vocabulary in English, 1375–1530. Marijke Mooijaart’s paper discusses the online integration of the four historical dictionaries which cover Dutch from the earliest times to the twentieth century. The next two papers, Stefan Dollinger on the Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles and the Bank of Canadian English, and Maggie Scott on the Concise Scots Dictionary, describe projects to revise twentieth-century historical dictionaries as the language varieties which they register evolve. Finally, Jeremy Bergerson’s paper presents a project for an etymologically rich historical dictionary of Afrikaans. An appendix to the volume comprises two previously unpublished short documents by Katherine Barber and John Considine which bear on the history of the Dictionary of Canadianisms revision project. The contributions to this volume offer a rare set of insights into ongoing lexicographical work, addressing both methodological issues such as inclusion criteria and the balance between diachronic and synchronic coverage, and practical issues such as publication media and funding.

Adventuring in Dictionaries: New Studies in the History of Lexicography brings together seventeen papers on the making of dictionaries from the sixteenth century to the present day. The first five treat English and French lexicography in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Heberto Fernandez and Monique Cormier discuss the outside matter of French–English bilingual dictionaries; Kusujiro Miyoshi re-assesses the influence of Robert Cawdrey; John Considine uncovers the biography of Henry Cockeram; Antonella Amatuzzi discusses Pierre Borel’s use of his predecessors; and Fredric Dolezal investigates multi-word units in the dictionary of John Wilkins and William Lloyd. Linda Mitchell’s account of dictionaries as behaviour guides in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries leads on to Giovanni Iamartino’s presentation of words associated with women in the dictionary of Samuel Johnson, and Thora Van Male’s of the ornaments in the Encyclopédie. Nineteenth-century and subsequent topics are treated by Anatoly Liberman on the growth of the English etymological dictionary; Julie Coleman on dictionaries of rhyming slang; Laura Pinnavaia on Richardson’s New Dictionary and the changing vocabulary of English; Peter Gilliver on early editorial decisions and reconsiderations in the making of the Oxford English Dictionary; Anne Dykstra on the use of Latin as the metalanguage in Joost Halbertsma’s Lexicon Frisicum; Laura Santone on the “Dictionnaire critique” serialized in Georges Bataille’s Surrealist review Documents; Sylvia Brown on the stories of missionary lexicography behind the Eskimo–English Dictionary of 1925; and Michael Adams on the legacies of the Early Modern English Dictionary project. The diverse critical perspectives of the leading lexicographers and historians of lexicography who contribute to this volume are united by a shared interest in the close reading of dictionaries, and a shared concern with the making and reading of dictionaries as human activities, which cannot be understood without attention to the lives of the people who undertook them.

Yesterday’s Words: Contemporary, Current and Future Lexicography reflects the main issues of scholarly discussion in the fields of historical lexicography and lexicology including the historiography of lexicography. The state-of-the-art volume offers a wide range of contributions in five chapters. After the editors’ introduction to Yesterday’s Words, the chapter Dictionaries and Dictionary-Makers of Former Ages concentrates on historical lexicography, including both the main lexicographical works in English and German and dictionaries of minority languages such as Frisian, Welsh, Irish and Scots. The Vocabulary of the Past discusses historical lexicological and etymological issues such as the results of early language contact in the West-Germanic area and in Jamaica in more recent times. Researchers involved in ongoing lexicographical projects, such as the first dictionary of Old Dutch, report on their practice and methodological approach in Current and Future Lexicography and Lexicology. Many dictionaries or dictionary research projects discussed in the volume have been or are being carried out in a digital environment. In the final chapter, Technology of Today for Yesterday’s Words, special attention is paid to projects in which computer techniques and the development of new applications have been essential. The volume is an essential text for lexicographers, historiographers and historical linguists.

This volume is a collection of papers from the 1st International Conference on Historical Lexicography and Lexicology at the University of Leicester in 2002. The purpose of the conference was to bring together scholars and academics from around the world working as scholars and editors on historical dictionaries or as practising lexicographers. The papers are, accordingly, arranged in two sections, reflecting the distinction between those individuals working on the historical development of dictionaries and those considering the lexicological problems and challenges facing the lexicographer in attempting to represent as fully and justly as possible historical forms of the English language.

No detailed description available for "Proceedings of the Second International Round Table Conference on Historical Lexicography / Actes de la Table Ronde Internationale de Lexicographie Historique".

Webs of Words: New Studies in Historical Lexicology brings together ten papers on aspects of the history of words and vocabulary, which address aspects of Chinese, Czech, Dutch, English (including Caribbean varieties), German, Italian, Māori, Persian, Portuguese, Russian, and other languages. In the first four essays, focussing on pre-1800 material, Karel Kučera and Martin Stluka’s opening essay discusses the plotting of the relative historical frequency of common words, drawing on their work with the diachronic portion of the Czech National Corpus; Ian Lancashire asks why Tudor England had no monolingual English dictionary; Chiara Benati discusses the interplay between Low German, High German, and Latin in an early modern surgical text, and Mateusz Urban sorts out the competing etymologies of English balcony, Italian balcone, and similar forms in Persian and Russian. The next six turn to more recent material. Jane Samson analyzes the nineteenth-century debate as to whether the Māori language was too primitive to have a word for “blue”; Vivien Waszink discusses the Dutch prefixes bio- and eco- and their documentation in a new dictionary; Tommaso Pellin examines a series of attempts to provide a grammatical terminology in Chinese; Lise Winer surveys the naming of fauna in the English / Creole of Trinidad and Tobago; Mirosława Podhajecka writes on the treatment of Russian loanwords in the current revision of the Oxford English Dictionary, with special attention to Google Books as a research tool; and Isabel Casanova asks whether Portuguese dictionaries should register English words. The contributions to this volume share an interest in empirical evidence rather than in lexicological study at a highly theoretical level, and in the wide contextualization of the words which constitute this evidence in the social and cultural lives of their users.

Webs of Words: New Studies in Historical Lexicology brings together ten papers on aspects of the history of words and vocabulary, which address aspects of Chinese, Czech, Dutch, English (including Caribbean varieties), German, Italian, MÄori, Persian, Portuguese, Russian, and other languages. In the first four essays, focussing on pre-1800 material, Karel KuÄera and Martin Stluka's opening essay discusses the plotting of the relative historical frequency of common words, drawing on their work with the diachronic portion of the Czech National Corpus; Ian Lancashire asks why Tudor England had no monolingual English dictionary; Chiara Benati discusses the interplay between Low German, High German, and Latin in an early modern surgical text, and Mateusz Urban sorts out the competing etymologies of English balcony, Italian balcone, and similar forms in Persian and Russian. The next six turn to more recent material. Jane Samson analyzes the nineteenth-century debate as to whether the MÄori language was too primitive to have a word for "blue"; Vivien Waszink discusses the Dutch prefixes bio- and eco- and their documentation in a new dictionary; Tommaso Pellin examines a series of attempts to provide a grammatical terminology in Chinese; Lise Winer surveys the naming of fauna in the English / Creole of Trinidad and Tobago; MirosÅawa Podhajecka writes on the treatment of Russian loanwords in the current revision of the Oxford English Dictionary, with special attention to Google Books as a research tool; and Isabel Casanova asks whether Portuguese dictionaries should register English words. The contributions to this volume share an interest in empirical evidence rather than in lexicological study at a highly theoretical level, and in the wide contextualization of the words which constitute this evidence in the social and cultural lives of their users.

From the contents: Maurizio GOTTI: The origin of 17th century canting terms. - Anne MCDERMOTT: Early dictionaries of English and historical corpora: in search of hard words. - Paivi KOIVISTO-ALANKO: Prototypes in semantic change: a diachronic perspective on abstract nouns. - Manuela ROMANO POZO: A morphodynamic interpretation of synonymy and polysemy in Old English."