COMPUTATIONA

L
LEXICOGRAPHY
LECTURES 2-3: LEXICOGRAPHY FROM THE RENAISSANCE
TO THE MODERN ERA
THE RENAISSANCE: THE IMPACT
OF PRINTING ON LEXICOGRAPHY
▪ Dictionaries are not only vast, systematic inventories of minutiae concerning lexical items;
they are also vehicles that disseminate such information, thereby encouraging the growth and
preservation of cohesive cultural and linguistic conventions in a language community
▪ Nicolas Jenson (1420-80), an expert in metals who had been master of the French Royal Mint
in Paris before moving to Venice and setting up a printing business there. Jenson was a type-
founder who introduced new standards of elegance and legibility, including skilful use of
space on the page, with minute attention to the tiniest details of letter spacing, kerning, etc.,
and systematic distinctions between capital letters and lower-case letters
▪ Robert Estienne’s masterly, elegant, and huge “Latin Dictionarium” (1531) - a quantum shift
in presentation, affecting both the quality and the quantity of information
ESTIENNE’S “DICTIONARIUM” -
MONOLINGUAL LATIN DICTIONARY
▪ Comprehensive list of words (lemmas);
▪ Morphology: selected inflected forms for lemmas (‘principal parts’), giving guidance on
conjugations and declensions;
▪ Clearly distinguished definitions, capturing an appropriate level of generalization for each
meaning of each word;
▪ Citations from literature (much of which was printed for the first time by Estienne himself),
supporting each definition
▪ Extensive selection of idiomatic phraseology
OTHER ESTIENNE’S
DICTIONARIES
▪ “Dictionnaire francoislatin” of 1539 - a practical work explicitly aimed at students learning
to express themselves in Latin. A noticeable feature is the large number of idiomatic French
phrases for which Latin equivalents are offered
▪ “Dictionarium Latino-Gallicum” (1552) - a practical guide which aim is to help students
decode the meanings of Latin words and Latin texts into their native French - an early example
of a bilingual dictionary
▪ Robert Estienne placed considerable emphasis on phraseology and context: it seems likely that
he would have been sympathetic to and even excited by modern theories of collocation and
construction grammar
PROMPTIRUM PARVULORUM
(1499) VS. DICTIONARIUM (1552)
TESORO DE LA LENGUA
CASTELLANO O ESPANOLA
One of the first monolingual European dictionaries devoted to a
vernacular language (i.e. not Latin) was the Tesoro de la lengua
castellano o española (Madrid, 1611) by Sebastian de Covarrubias, a
sophisticated linguist and cultured humanist who included not only
definitions and Latin etymons for words but also place-names and a
number of subjective comments on lexical issues. This is a
substantial work of over 1400 beautifully typeset pages, in the best
tradition of Robert Estienne
POLYGLOT DICTIONARIES AND THE
EMERGENCE OF BILINGUAL
LEXICOGRAPHY
▪ Renaissance marked the beginning of the long, slow decline of Latin as an international lingua
franca and the flourishing of vernacular languages as media for communication and culture
throughout Europe
▪ Up to the end of the sixteenth century bilingual dictionaries of vernacular languages were few
and far between
▪ “Dictionarium” of Ambrogio Calepino, an Augustinian friar living in Bergamo. Calepino’s
original edition (1502) was a Latin vocabulary, with glosses in Latin supported by citations,
together with encyclopedic entries for the figures of classical mythology. In a second edition,
glosses in Italian and French were added. By a process of accretion, the vocabularies of other
languages, starting with Greek and Hebrew, were gradually added by others to successive
editions of Calepino’s original
CALEPIN
▪ The 1573 edition printed and published in Venice includes the following comment in its front
matter, quoted and translated by Freed:
“In hac postrema editione, ut hoc dictionarium commodius exteris nationibus inservire possit,
singulis vocibus latinis italicas, gallicas, & hispanicas interpretationes inseri curavimus”
“In this latest edition, in order that this dictionary might more fully serve foreign nations, we
have taken care to insert Italian, French, and Spanish definitions among the lone Latin entrie”
▪ Ambrogio Calepino name had become common property. The OED has an entry for the
obsolete English word calepin, supported by sixteenth and seventeenth century citations and
glossed as:
“A dictionary (sometimes ‘a polyglot’); fig. one’s book of authority or reference; one’s notebook
or memorandum-book”
PALSGRAVES`S “LESCLAIRCISSEMENT
DE LA LANGUE FRANCOYSE”
▪ The great English linguist and lexicographer John Palsgrave was French tutor to Mary Tudor,
sister of Henry VIII, who was destined to marry the King of France. Palsgrave compiled a
magnificent bilingual French-English dictionary and phrase book (in many cases with amusing
and diverting illustrative phrases) as the major part of his general account of the French
language, “Lesclaircissement de la langue francoyse” (1530)
ETYMOLOGY GUARANTEES
MEANING?
▪ In 1612 (after over 20 years of work) the Accademia della Crusca published a Vocabolario for
the Italian language, the aim of which was explicitly prescriptive, conservative, and indeed
retrogressive, i.e. to establish the already old-fashioned Florentine dialect of the 14th century
(as written in particular by Dante, Boccaccio, and Petrarch) as a gold standard for Italian
▪ This was followed in 1640 for French by the first edition of the Dictionnaire of the Académie
Française, whose aim was equally prescriptive and conservative: “to give definite rules to our
language and to render it pure”
▪ The Real Academia Española was founded with similar aims in 1713, and still proudly
announces that its mission is to regulate the Spanish language—“to fix the voices and
vocabularies of the Castilian language with propriety, elegance, and purity”. The first edition
of its dictionary, published under the title Diccionario de autoridades (‘Dictionary of
Authorities’) in 1726. It is called a “dictionary of authorities” because its definitions are
supported by citations from literature
SAMUEL JOHNSON AND HIS
DICTIONARY (1755)
Those who have been persuaded to think well of my design require that it should
fix our language, and put a stop to those alterations which time and chance have
hitherto been suffered to make in it without opposition. With this consequence I
will confess that I flattered myself for a while; but now begin to fear that I have
indulged expectation which neither reason nor experience can justify. When we
see men grow old and die at a certain time one after another, from century to
century, we laugh at the elixir that promises to prolong life to a thousand years;
and with equal justice may the lexicographer be derided, who being able to
produce no example of a nation that has preserved their words and phrases from
mutability, shall imagine that his dictionary can embalm his language, and
secure it from corruption and decay. (Preface to the Dictionary, Johnson 1755,
§84)
OBSERVE AND DESCRIBE, RATHER
THAN PONTIFICATE AND PRESCRIBE
▪ Extensive use of illustrative citations from literature—not only to prove the existence of a
particular sense of a word, but also to illustrate elegant usage and to delight and educate the
reader
▪ Arrangement of senses in a rational order, so that each dictionary entry stands as a coherent
discourse, reflecting meaning development, influenced by but not governed by etymology and
not just a list of senses in historical order
▪ Extensive use of Aristotelian-Leibnizian principles of definition—stating first what kind of
thing in general a word denotes and then adding carefully selected differentia
▪ Respect for the vagaries of a living language—he recorded word meanings as he found them,
not necessarily as he may have wished them to be
▪ Effective treatment of phrasal verbs
FIRST MODERN
DICTIONARIES
▪ Johnson’s was the standard dictionary of English until the end of the 19th century, when it was
superseded by the Philological Society’s New English Dictionary on Historical Principles (NED,
1884–1928) Film: “The Professor and the Madman”.
▪ The NED was published by Oxford University Press and in the 1930s it was re-christened The Oxford
English Dictionary (OED)
▪ It was followed by a shortened version, the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (SOED), in two large
volumes—whose title is sometimes wrongly thought to be some kind of joke, since it is so very much
bigger than most other English dictionaries
▪ Dictionary of American English (DAE), the Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue (DOST), the
Scottish National Dictionary (SND), the Australian National Dictionary (AND), and the Dictionary of
South African English (DSAE), among others
▪ 19th-century European movement to compile historical dictionaries of national languages, which
included the Deutsches Wörterbuch of the brothers Grimm
OED HISTORICAL PRINCIPLES
A dictionary on historical principles places the
etymology at the start of each entry and traces the
semantic development of the word by arranging
senses in historical order. Thus, in the Oxford
English Dictionary—a dictionary on historical
principles—the entry for camera starts by
explaining that the word is from classical Latin
camera. The first sense is “the department of the
papal Curia dealing with finance; the papal
treasury”. Sense 2 is “an arched or vaulted roof,
chamber, or building (also more generally: any
room or chamber)”. It is not until senses 4b and
4c respectively in the third edition that we get the
familiar modern senses, “a device for taking
photographs” and “ a device for capturing moving
pictures or video signals” (OED 3rd edition; entry
revised and updated in 2010)
MERRIAM WEBSTER
DICTIONARY
▪ The Merriam dictionaries trace their history back to the American Dictionary of the
English Language compiled by the polemical lexicographer Noah Webster in 1828. It
contains no less than 70,000 entries
▪ Webster (1758–1843) was an indefatigable collector of words with a rare gift for
definition writing. Only some of his definitions were taken directly from Johnson’s
dictionary, and he introduced some sensible spelling reforms (color, center) into
American English, although unfortunately some of them (e.g. tung for tongue) did
not achieve acceptance by the American public. At the same time, he added and
defined Americanisms such as caucus and wigwam
▪ In continental Europe, the academies did not maintain a monopoly on dictionaries on
historical principles.
LECTURE 2: CONCLUSIONS
▪ Printing revolution
▪ Renaissance and “vulgar” languages
▪ First bilingual dictionaries
▪ Etymology
▪ Observe and describe – Johnson
▪ First modern dictionaries