Stages of development of English and American lexicography

The history of dictionary making conventionally falls into several periods.

The first period (7-16 c.) got the name “glossarization”, that is a period of primitive hand-written bilingual glossaries. Glossaries are lists of incomprehensible foreign (often Latin or Greek) words accompanied with the English translation. On defining the meaning of an unknown word, a learned person or a scribe would write the translation of this word in his native language between the lines or most often in the margin of the manuscript. Such a sign got the name “gloss” (from Greek glossa “language, word”). Later, a longer list of words was created by uniting glosses in the whole which was named “glossary”, e.g. the Leiden glossary and the Erfurt glossary.

This stage was characterized by naïve approach to describing the vocabulary of the language. Firstly, only some isolated, chosen at will words were described. Secondly, interpretation of the word meanings was of a superficial and unscientific quality. Thirdly, dictionaries of that period didn’t contain any information about grammatical or phonetic properties of lexical units, no examples were brought to illustrate the usage of the word in the text. Words were arranged not only in the alphabetical order, but according to the thematic principle as well.

The end of the period is marked by the appearance of the first printed dictionaries. Thus, 1500 saw the first printed dictionary Hortus Vocabulorum, and dictionaries become nearly most popular printings

The second period in the English language lexicography can be defined as the period of “dictionaries of difficult words” (17 – early 18 c). Dictionaries of this period are distinguished by their compilers’ tendency to embrace only those lexical units which they considered to be difficult for comprehension while everyday words were either ignored or too shortly defined, hardly differing from each other. Some dictionaries of this period are A Table Alphabeticall by Robert Cawdry (1604), the first explanatory dictionary of the English language, An English Expositor by John Bullokar(1616), The English Dictionarie by Henry Cockeram (1623), The New World of English by Edward Philips (1658) and others. All of them give unilingual explanations of English words including obsolete words and borrowings.

The first etymological dictionary showing word origins and genetic affinities appeared in 1721. It was called An Universal Etymological English Dictionary, comprehending the derivation of the generality of words in the English tongue, either ancient or modern, the compiler being Nathan Baily. This dictionary contained such words as cat and dog, and faced 50 printings. Baily notes that the language is a changeable phenomenon and supplies etymologies to nearly every word drawing examples from Old English and parallel words from German, Dutch and Icelandic. For words of Roman origin appropriate French and Italian and then Latin ones are supplied. Proverbs are used to illustrate word meanings. It was the first scientific, it was compiled for philologists.

The third period in the English dictionary making can be called as “pre-scientific or prescriptive” (18 – early 19 c). The lexicographer established the language norm, set authoritative standards for spelling, pronunciation and usage and “corrected”, following the word etymology, analogy and rationalism. Lexicographers tried to give exhaustive information about the word, aimed at recommending the reader how to use, pronounce and write this or that word, that’s why nearly all dictionaries of this period can be characterized as normative.

Word definitions were of a more comprehensive structure that the definitions in earlier dictionaries. Usages were illustrated with quotations from literature. Etymologies were also indicated. This period dictionaries are A Dictionary of English Language by Samuel Johnson (1755), An American Dictionary of English Language by Noah Webster (1828) and others.

The dictionary by Samuel Johnson who was a famous English critic, writer, linguist, was conceived as a normative one. What was new about the dictionary is that it differentiated and enumerated word meanings, provided quotations and indicated the author but didn’t give pronunciation and set expressions. The major drawback of the dictionary is its being to some extent archaic even for its time. Johnson considered that the golden age of the English language was 16-17 c., so his dictionary was illustrated by examples from the English literature of this period. Another fault of the dictionary were etymologies, in this respect it is inferior to Bailey’s dictionary. It can be explained by the fact that Johnson didn’t know any German language except English. Nevertheless the dictionary was a great success and it influenced the development of lexicography in all countries. The dictionary contributed to normalization of the English vocabulary. But at the same time it helped to preserve the English spelling in its conservative form. The authority of Johnson’s dictionary lasted for a century or so. In 1857 the London royal society decided to reprint this edition.

By the end of this period American lexicography starts to develop. 1798 sees the first dictionary in the USA США “A school dictionary being a compendium of the latest and most improved dictionaries and comprising and easy and concise method of teaching children the true meaning and pronunciation of he most useful words on the English language”, his author being also Samuel Johnson (a namesake), mainly meant for school purposes.

In 1806 Noah Webster published his first dictionary словарь “A compendious dictionary of the English language”. It indicated words pronunciation, defined their meanings but without etymologies, and contained some reference material in the appendix. In 1828 Webster published a two-volume dictionary of 70 000 words “An American dictionary of the English Language …” The advantage of the dictionary is accuracy of meanings.

The modern period in dictionary making can be called “scientific or historical”, as it bases itself on the following principles:

1) dictionaries are compiled on the historical principle;

2) there’s a shift from the prescriptive (normative) approach to dictionary-making to the descriptive one;

3) lexis is described as a system.

The representatives of the descriptive approach in lexicography considered that a dictionary shouldn’t prescribe anything to the language, but it should just register what already exists in it, that is words of the language, in a most exhaustive and accurate way. In special literature such a type of a dictionary got the name “thesaurus”. The first dictionary compiled on this theoretical basis was thesaurus by P. Roget.

The gem of the English lexicography which embodies this concept to the fullest is The Oxford English Dictionary, the largest lexicographic project of the 19-20 centuries. It also belongs to the dictionaries of the thesaurus type.

It took 70 years of hard work of a very big staff of people taking part in collecting examples to create this dictionary. The work over the dictionary started in 1858 under the aegis of the Royal philological society when Dr. R. Trench, a member of the English philological society, suggested in his report that a dictionary entry should be a biography of the word. The first volume of the dictionary was published in 1884, but the whole work was ended only in 1928. The edition consisted of 10 volumes and was called A New English Dictionary (NED). The dictionary was complied with a great help of people who selected quotations that is with involvement of general public. The editor of the dictionary was Sir James Murray. In 1933 the dictionary was reprinted under the title The Oxford English Dictionary, as the work over the dictionary took place in Oxford. The new edition consisted of 13 volumes. As the dictionary was very big and expensive, the scientists continued their work and offered shorter editions of the dictionary: The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (in two volumes), giving the same number of dictionary articles but drawing less examples from literature, and one-volume the Concise English Dictionary, providing only contemporary material without examples from literature. 1989 saw a 20-volume edition of The Oxford English Dictionary. The fully revised edition is to be published in 2010. At the moment the most up-to-date version of the dictionary, the Oxford English Dictionary Online (OED Online), can be seen at the official site of the Oxford English Dictionary or on CD-ROM editions.

The dictionary entry of the Oxford dictionary starts with the indication at the part of speech, them come pronunciation, sphere and features of usage, etymology, parallels from other languages and definitions of the meanings. Each meaning is illustrated by examples in a chronological order. The demerit of the dictionary is extreme separation and confusion of meanings.

Other popular English (Lоngman, Cambridge, Chamber’s) and American (Webster, Century Dictionary, Funk and Wagnalls) publishing houses take into consideration lexicographic principles laid in The Oxford English Dictionary.

There’s the latest tendency in the English lexicography to reflect linguistic phenomena in direct relation to culture elements eo ipso describing influence of culture on language formation. Such dictionaries as the Longman English Dictionary of Language and Culture, the Macmillan English Dictionary can serve an example.

The other trend in modern lexicography is its computerization. Computerization means conversion earlier paper dictionaries into electronic computer form, creation of data banks, larger synchronic and diachronic text corpora for their further lexicographic processing and complex automated lexicographic systems.

Corpus (or corpus-based) linguistics deals with compiling dictionaries on the basis of electronic text corpora which register word usages as a result of continuous investigation of texts. For example, the COBUILD English Dictionary – the dictionary made on the basis of computer processing of information, uses the British National Corpus, which is of more than 100 mln words of modern English. 90% of the corpus are written works since 1975 (60% of written texts are books, 25% – periodicals): regional and national newspapers, specialist periodicals, academic books, journals, popular fiction, letters, memoranda, school and university essays. 75% of texts are from informative writings (from the field of applied sciences or art), 25% are from imaginative writings. 10% of the corpus includes spoken language – records of all kinds of conversation and TV and radio broadcasts.