Dictionaries of English. Prospects for the Record of Our Language (review)

Sirrah, as a form of address aimed at inferiors, is fairly frequent in Shakespeare's plays and those of the seventeenth century, but its etymology has, surprisingly, never been convincingly identified. To date, the only explanation available is that sirrah was a composition of sir and the interjection ah or ha. This hypothesis, often uncritically quoted, even by the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), goes back to John Minsheu, a lexicographer of the early seventeenth century. But this paper tries to show that Minsheu's opinion, based on word formation, is far-fetched and that sirrah is merely a phonetic variant of sir. Both words have the same Old French etymological origin, namely sire. Sirrah is, in fact, an ironical and mimicking pronunciation of sire. Sir, for its part, though generally an honourable title, was also not entirely free of derogatory connotations in Late Middle and Early Modern English. The evidence for the close proximity of sir and sirrah will be taken from historical English phonology, semantics, pragmatics and sociolinguistics. The retrieval of the key data is based on Open Source Shakespeare and, for Late Middle English, on both the Middle English Dictionary and the OED, as well as the Innsbruck Middle English Prose Corpus.

Previous articleNext article No AccessWordsworth-Coleridge Association 2009John Clare's Words and Their Survival in AmericaEric H. RobinsonEric H. Robinson Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Wordsworth Circle Volume 41, Number 2Spring 2010 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/TWC24043603 Views: 1Total views on this site © 2010 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

The Early Modern English cultural scene The linguistic period identified as Early Modern English began some time during the second half of the fifteenth century. There is no single historical event comparable to the Norman invasion of 1066 for Middle English which can be taken conveniently as the boundary between Middle and Early Modern English. The language changes which characterize the transition of Middle to Early Modern English coincide chronologically with several major cultural and social changes. The most notable among these is the introduction of the printing press, by Sir William Caxton, in 1476 . This year is commonly taken as the cut-off date because it marks a turning point in the production and accessibility of books. Another historical event which coincides roughly with the beginning of Early Modern English is the discovery of the New World in 1492 . While its effect on our word stock was not as immediate as the availability of printed books, the discovery of the Americas has had extraordinary consequences for the composition of the English lexicon. The end-point of Early Middle English coincides with two important events which occurred in the second half of the eighteenth century. We have already mentioned the appearance of the first really influential dictionary of English, the Dictionary of the English Language in two volumes by Samuel Johnson in 1755 . That dictionary boosted enormously the prestige of English lexicographical research.

The linguistic period identified as Early Modern English began some time during the second half of the fifteenth century. There is no single historical event comparable to the Norman invasion of 1066 for Middle English which can be taken conveniently as the boundary between Middle and Early Modern English. The language changes which characterize the transition of Middle to Early Modern English coincide chronologically with several major cultural and social changes. The most notable among these is the introduction of the printing press, by Sir William Caxton, in 1476. This year is commonly taken as the cut-off date because it marks a turning point in the production and accessibility of books. It is also easy to remember. Another historical event which coincides roughly with the beginning of Early Modern English is the discovery of the New World in 1492. While its effect on our word-stock was not as immediate as the availability of printed books, the discovery of the Americas has had extraordinary consequences for the composition of the English lexicon.

Dictionaries, 1 (1979) "RIDING POINT ON THE LEXICON OF THE NORTH AMERICAN WEST"* Thomas E. Toon The aim of this paper is (1) to announce a proposed period dictionary of the varieties of English which emerged and are still spoken in the North American West; (2) to set down a brief rationale for such a dictionary—with an articulation of the several stages of the task just now underway; and (3) to solicit advice from interested scholars and help from willing readers of Western American literature. The very idea of such a project is feasible (indeed, something short offoolhardy ) only because English is an exceptionally well dictionaried language. The work anticipated in this paper would extend and bring together the central corpus already well established by the lexicographical tradition begun with the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) and variously developed in A Dictionary of American English (DAE), A Dictionary ofAmericanisms (DA), A Dictionary of Canadianisms oh Historical Principles (DC), and the ongoing Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE). The present author and Professor Don D. Walker (Department of English, University of Utah) are directing the work. Generous grants from the University of Utah Institutional Funds Committee and the University of Utah College of Humanities are supporting the initiation stage of the project. The initial work and planning are well enough underway to make this essay both an announcement and a progress report. We welcome early comments and criticisms from the scholarly community of English lexicographers. A full plan (with working bibliography) will be completed in the next year. 1. TOWARDS A DICTIONARY OF WESTERN AMERICAN Malkiel's typology of dictionaries based on a broad classification by the features of range, perspective, and presentation makes a useful starting point for the description of a new lexicographical project.1 By range, he means "the *Some special thanks aie in order: Malcolm Sillais (Dean, College of Humanities) and Norman Council (Chairman, Department of English), my colleagues at the University of Utah, have provided encouragement and support since the conception of this project. The essays by Clarence L. Barnhart and Allen Walker Read were an excellent guide in reviewing my progress and preparing this report. Richard W. Bailey and Bernard Van't HuI, colleague lexicographers at the University of Michigan, discussed the project and this essay at length and with tireless enthusiasm. 57 58THOMAS E. TOON volume and spread of the material assembled."2 Perspective covers "the Geographer 's logistics and strategy"—"the type of curiosity that drives him in the first place to delimit and launch his project."3 Such tactical choices as the nature of definition, the kind of verbal documentation, the inclusion of special features (pronunciation, dialectal provenience, etc.) and the like are included under presentation. RANGE: Our intention is to extend and concentrate the scope of the existing historical dictionaries of English. We will follow Avis' suggestion that 'lexicographers compiling dictionaries of the English used in North America might well be advised to adopt the label North Americanism."* His arguments for obliterating a distinction between "American" and "Canadian" are particulary valid for the West: In the first place, many terms in this class were current in North America before the United States existed as a political entity. Indeed, the presentday boundary between the United States and Canada was not fixed— especially on the Pacific Coast—until well into the nineteenth century. Furthermore, Canadians and Americans from the late seventeenth century onward have moved back and forth across the border in such numbers and with such regularity that it is impossible to determine exactly where certain terms originated. So much is and has long been similar or identical in the social and economic spheres of Canadian and American life and so much, especially along the border, is shared with respect to natural resources , flora and fauna, topography, and so on, to say nothing of our common contacts with the American Indians, that hosts of terms cannot be claimed by one country or the other with any degree of confidence whatever.5 A major difficulty in limiting the range of this work is the problem of defining the West. Mathews' solution offers a sound beginning: At any particular time, that part of the...

386LANGUAGE, VOLUME 74, NUMBER 2 (1998) In spite of these shortcomings, the review of literature in this book can be useful to those not familiar with the various approaches to discourse. The application, while not always satisfying, offers some useful insights and invites others to investigate language use in dramatic contexts in new and fruitful ways. REFERENCES Levinson, S. 1983. Pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sacks, H.: E. A. Schegloff; and G. Jefferson 1974. A simplest systematics for the organization of turntaking for conversation. Language 50.696-735. 19 Courtney Dnve Farmingville, NY 11738 Dictionary of American Regional English: Volumes I-III. Chief Ed., Frederic G. Cassidy, Assoc. Ed., Joan Houston Hall. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Vol. I (A-C), 1985. Pp. elvi, 903. VoLII(D-H), 1991.Pp. 1175. Vol. Ill (I-O), 1996. Pp. 927. Reviewed by Ellen Johnson, Western Kentucky University Frederic Cassidy and Joan Hall are to the twentieth century what James Murray was to the nineteenth century, at least for those of us who are concerned with studying language at the microcosmic level, in its full diversity and complexity. Their multivolume work, still in progress, has already become as indispensable to the study of regionally- and socially-restricted features as the Oxford English Dictionary (upon which it is modelled) is for information on words of more general distribution. Of course, being 'restricted' in a country the size of the United States can mean a word, pronunciation, morphological or syntactic formation that is familiar to millions of people. Far from being a collection of mere oddities, the Dictionary ofAmerican Regional English (DARE) is a monument to the dynamic nature of language, its flexibility, and its infinite capacity for metaphor and innovation. The dictionary draws upon multiple sources of data, among them eighteenth-century diaries, small-town newspapers, Dialect Notes and its offspring American Speech, fiction, botanical guidebooks, linguistic atlases, tapes of aluminum disk recordings, television shows, advertisements , the Internet, and observations from linguists far and wide, folklorists, and the general public. At the core of the project are interviews systematically collected from 2,777 speakers across the United States between 1965 and 1970. This fieldwork provides a synchronic view of language variation that intersects and informs the diachronic approach ofthe editors, who provide ample evidence for etymology, diffusion, and development. Volume 1 has been reprinted; it contains information vital to linguists who wish to use the dictionary, such as the principles for inclusion of terms and principles of spelling which the editors have adopted. The text of the field questionnaire is there along with a list of interviewees and their salient characteristics (i.e. social variables and location). All citations in the entries themselves are identified so they can be traced back to this key and to a list of abbreviations. The DARE map is demystified in the front matter: Because of its distortion relative to a conventional US map, some explanation is required. The difference reflects the population density of each state and is thus analogous to showing percentages as opposed to raw numbers in a table. The computer mapping program used by the editors allows them to label expressions that cluster in any of 37 overlapping regions, variously defined by linguists (e.g. South Midland), by physical features (Rocky Mountains), or by cultural tradition (Upstate New York). The separately published index to the first two volumes (Metcalf 1993) lists entries by these regional labels as REVIEWS387 well as by social labels, usage labels (indicating pragmatic restrictions), and etymological notes regarding morphology and borrowings, from Algonquian to Yoruba. The technical information in Volume 1 is supplemented by two essays on American English, one by C noting common syntactic features of folk speech and explaining linguistic processes such as epenthesis and euphemism, and the other by James Hartman giving an overview of American English pronunciation. Neither is theoretically satisfying, with the latter, for example, simply stating, 'For the purpose of discussing phonological variation, linguistic scholarship has produced no completely satisfactory system of analysis' (xlvi). Hartmann avoids any serious consideration of the issue of phonetic versus phonemic differences, raised in Labov 1994 and elsewhere, that goes to the heart of questions about the...

THE NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR THE HUMANITIES AND ITS SUPPORT FOR LEXICOGRAPHY Dorothy Wartenberg The following is a list of dictionary projects and data bases supported, in whole or in part, by the Research Division of the National Endowment for the Humanities from 1967 to date. The dates given are those during which the projects have received funding from NEH. While the Endowment's budget has decreased somewhat since 1 980, there has been no significant reduction in the funds available for research tools and reference works (such as dictionaries), and the Endowment expects to award at least $3 million in outright and matching funds in this area alone in fiscal years 1984. You are invited to look through this list in order, first, to get a sense ofthe variety and range ofprojects that have received funding up to now, and second, to see where there are gaps, particularly in regard to major reference works, for which outside funding may be necessary. The Endowment would appreciate having your comments and suggestions. Prospective applicants should discuss their projects with NEH and ask for staff comments on a preliminary draft before submitting a formal proposal. The next deadline for Research Tools (dictionaries, encyclopedias , data bases) is October 1, 1984. Please write or call: Dorothy Wartenberg, Assistant Director for Reference Works, Research Division, National Endowment for the Humanities, 1 100 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, D.C. 20506 (202-786-0210). 115 1 16NEH and Lexicography DICTIONARIES ARCHAEOLOGY Stillwell, Richard, Princeton University Press, Princeton Dictionary of Classical Archaeology Project, 1 968-70; 1970-76. FILM Eskino, Andrew H., International Museum of Photography , Planning Project for a Biographical Dictionary on Photographers, 1980-81. HISTORY Near and Middle East—Middle East Bonebakker, Seegar, A., University of California at Los Angeles, Computerization ofArabic Biographical Dictionaries for the Onomasticon Arabicum, 1977-84. Herzog, Marvin L, Columbia University, Preparation and Publication of Language and Atlas of Ashkenazic Jewry, 1978-83. European—Medieval Worth, Dean S., University of California at Los Angeles, Dictionary of the Novgorod Birchbark Letters (Medieval Russian), 1982-84. Asian Hucker, Charles O., University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, Historical Dictionary ofChinese Official Titles, 1976-78; 1980-82. Dorothy Wartenberg117 LANGUAGE AND LINGUISTICS Native American Krauss, Michael E., University of Alaska at Fairbanks, Alaska Native Languages Dictionary Project, 1978-84. Mattina, Anthony, University of Montana, Colville Dictionary , 1980-83. Rhodes, Richard A., University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, Eastern Ojibwa-Ottawa Dictionary, 1981-84. Rood, David S., University of Colorado, Siouan Languages Archive, 1977-8 1 . Salzmann, Zdenek, University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Dictionary of Contemporary Araphano Usage , 1981-83. Siebert, Frank T., Penobscot Nation, Research and Preparation of Penobscot Dictionary Project, 1979-83. Taylor, Allan R., University of Colorado, Gros Ventre Dictionary, 1979-83. Thompson, Laurence, C, Pacific and Asian Linguistic Institute, Salish Indian Lexicography, 1979-83. Thompson, Laurence C, University of Hawaii at Manoa, Salish Indian Dictionaries: Klallam and Tillamook, 1982-84. Yound, Robert W., University of New Mexico, Navajo/ English-English/Navajo Dictionary, 1974-76. Hispanic American Boyd-Bowman, Peter M., Research Foundation of SUNY Buffalo, The Linguistic Analysis of Spanish Colonial Documents, 1974-82. Boyd-Bowman, Peter M., Research Foundation of SUNY Buffalo, Spanish-American Lexicon of the Nineteenth Century, 1982-84. 1 1 8 NEH and Lexicography American/British Bailey, Richard W., University of Michigan, The Early Modern English Dictionary, 1973-76. Cassidy, Frederic G., University ofWisconsin, Dictionary of American Regional English, 1971-84. Fraser, Russell A., University of Michigan, Early Modern English Dictionary, 1971-72. Nicolaisen, Wilhelm, SUNY at Binghamton, A Concise Dictionary of Scottish Place Names, 1983-86. Robinson, Jay L., University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, The Middle English Dictionary, 1980-85. Sherman, Donald, Unaffiliated, Dictionary ofEarly Modern English Pronunciation 1500-1800 (including a computer version) 1 974-77. European—French Valdman, Albert, Indiana University, Preparation of a Dictionary of Creole French, 1974-81. European—German Lehmann, Winfred P., University of Texas at Austin, A Gothic Etymological Dictionary, 1980-84. Lloyd, Albert L., University of Pennsylvania, An Etymological Dictionary of Old High German, 1978-84. Wells, John C, Tufts University, Dictionary of the Old High German Glosses, 1967-73; 1976-81. European—Greek Georgacas, D. J., University of North Dakota at...

This article begins by discussing some of the factors that determine the content of the quotation paragraphs in an historical dictionary and compares how they apply to the Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE) and to the Oxford English Dictionary. Basic policies and how they are implemented are important, but equally important is the quality of the material you have to select from; this material includes not only the quotations already on hand, but also the potential body of quotations available to lexicographers from a variety of resources. It is this last factor that has changed radically since the earlier volumes of DARE were published, with the advent of the Internet. The rest of the article takes a statistical look at the quotation paragraphs in DARE and how they have (and have not) changed over the years in response to this and other factors, with special emphasis on the documentation of chronology.

Problems in New-Word Lexicography John Algeo .Had lexicographers but world enough and time, they would no doubt include in their dictionaries every lexical item ever used by any speaker or writer of English, with all recoverable information about each item. To be sure, such a dictionary would be more than most users want. The users of a particular dictionary obviously have needs that circumscribe the appropriate contents of that book. But within such user-oriented limitations, the impossible dream of the lexicographer is exhaustive comprehensiveness—a complete listing of all lexical items with complete information about each. This dream of a full accounting for lexis is a mystical vision of the linguistic plenum. As Dr. Johnson observed in his melancholy way, such visions are "the dreams of a poet doomed at last to wake a lexicographer." The jangling alarm that wakes the lexicographer is the sound of "Time's winged chariot hurrying near," driven by some soulless accountant who cares for the bottom line and not at all for the main entry. The lexicographer 's bitter task is selection—deciding what to include and what to leave out. And his lot is therefore not a happy one. The problem of selection is particularly keen in new-word lexicography , where it has two aspects: the definition of what a new word is and the decisions of which new words to include and of what to say about them. The problem of definition—deciding what is new and what is not—is especially troublesome in new-word glossaries. The problem of inclusion, on the other hand, is general: the editor of every new or revised dictionary is faced with the need to make decisions about which new words, however defined, will be included and which omitted. In these remarks I propose to examine some of the questions that need to be answered in deciding about inclusion. The aim is not to provide answers, which must in any case depend on purposes, re- 40 ___ John Algeo sources, and the bottom line. Robert Burchfield (1989, 105) defined his policy in editing the OED Supplement (OEDS) as follows: "The main governing factor in the choice of words to be treated is the editability of a given item in the time available and with the resources at my disposal ." That is a practical answer, taking into account Time's winged chariot and its soulless charioteer, but it does not tell how priorities are decided. The aim here is to identify issues that bear upon the priorities. What are the factors that guide the lexicographer's decision, wherever the bottom line may be drawn? The examples used to illustrate the questions are drawn from three dictionaries published during the past two years: Random House Webster's College Dictionary, 1991 (RHWCD); The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 3d ed., 1992 (AHD3); and Merriam-Webster's Collegiate® Dictionary, 10th ed., 1993 (WlO); and from two periodical records of neology: The Barnhart Dictionary Companion (BDC) and American Speech's "Among the New Words" (ANW). The Oxford English Dictionary, 2d ed., on compact disk, 1992 (OED2CD), has also been checked for these items, and the Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE), 1985-, has been consulted for appropriate items. In all, 1 1 questions are asked. The first question will be examined in some detail, and the remaining ones more superficially. Yet other questions are obviously possible and appropriate. QUESTION 1: When does an expression that is grammatically predictable become lexicalized and thus deserving of dictionary entry? The recently popular (and controversial) term politically correct is an example. There are entries for it in the RHWCD, WlO, and the BDC. The RHWCD definition both applies the term specifically to the political left and identifies the areas of discourse to which it applies: "marked by or adhering to a typically progressive orthodoxy on issues involving esp. race, gender, sexual affinity, or ecology." (Incidentally, the expression sexual affinity used in that definition as a politically correct term for homosexuality contrasted with heterosexuality is not defined in the RHWCD, although it is by no means analytical or transparent .) The WlO definition specifies the areas of discourse in which the term is...

Lamed. O vos omnes qui transitis per viam, attendite, et videte si est dolor sicut dolor meus! quoniam vindemiavit me, ut locutus est Dominus, in die irae furoris sui. Lamed. O all ye that pass by t...

Abstract: Lexical survival and loss during the transitional period between Old and Middle English are difficult to grasp. Even though this period is covered partially by both the Dictionary of Old English and the Middle English Dictionary , and entirely by the Oxford English Dictionary and the Historical Thesaurus , there are still words which have fallen through the metaphorical cracks and are not adequately or exhaustively described in these lexicographical resources. By carefully analyzing the available attestations and supplying additional evidence from the Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English , the present article discusses common methodological issues in this line of research and their consequences for quantitative studies.

The article is devoted to the description of new trends in theory and dictionary making process of modern English lexicography. At the same time the paper also covers the main historic steps of formation and development of national English lexicography with special reference to the most reliable English dictionaries for general purposes (early glossaries and concordances, Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary, Oxford English Dictionary, etc.) and special purposes (English writers’ glossaries, concordances, lexicons to the complete and separate works of Chaucer, Shakespeare, and other famous English men of letters). The main accent is made on the digital époque of English national lexicography, describing innovative features of both printed and Internet dictionaries of various types and formats from the point of view of a user studying English as a foreign language. The paper touches upon new branches of English lexicography (collaborative, volunteer) with users’ needs and demands at the centre of dictionary making process.

The aim of the present brief study is to review selected Medieval English lexical representations of the noun judge ‘one who tries cases and interprets the laws’ (MED) and their semantic development in the history of English (cf. OE domsettend, dempster, worulddema). The study uses standard databases, such as Bosworth−Toller’s Anglo-Saxon Dictionary (B−T), Clark Hall’s A Concise Anglo-Saxon Dictionary (CASD), Dictionary of Old English Corpus (DOEC), Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue (DOST), Historical Thesaurus of English (HTE), The Innsbruck Corpus of Middle English Prose (ICoMEP), Middle English Dictionary (MED), the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), Scottish National Dictionary (SND), Thesaurus of Old English (TOE), A Thesaurus of English Word Roots (TEWR), Collins Dictionary (CD) and Merriam-Webster Dictionary (MWD). A preliminary search for the terms in question confirms either their decline shortly after being first recorded in Old English (cf. domsettend, gesetla, worulddema) or their survival into the Middle or Early Modern English periods (cf. doomer, doomsman, judger). Only two nouns, judge and jurist, have survived beyond Medieval English and are frequent in current use.

Old and Early Middle English did not yet have modal sentential adverbs of low probability. Old Norse did not have such words, either. From the 13th century onwards first epistemic prepositional phrases of Anglo-Norman origin functioning as modal adverbials consisting of the preposition per/par and nouns such as adventure, case, chance were borrowed into Middle English. In the late 15th century an analogous hybrid form per-hap(s), the combination of the Old French preposition per/par ‘by, through’ and the Old Norse noun hap(p) ‘chance’, both singular and plural, was coined according to the same pattern and was gradually grammaticalized as a univerbated modal sentence adverb in Early Modern English. The Norse root happ- was the source of some other new (Late) Middle English words which had no cognate equivalents in the source language: the adjective happy with its derivatives happily, happiness, etc. and the verb happen. Together with another new Late Middle English formation may-be, a calque of French peutêtre, perhaps superseded the competing forms mayhap, (modal) happily, percase, peradventure, perchance, prepositional phrases with the noun hap and, finally, per-hap itself in Early Modern English after two centuries of lexical layering or multiple synonymy. The history of perhaps is a clear example of grammaticalization, whereby a prepositional phrase became a modal adverb now also used as a discourse marker. We find here all the typical features of the process: phonetic attrition, decategorization, univerbation, and obligatorification.

The present paper analyses the fates of the Middle English synonyms of the adjective happy. The group of the examined words contains adjectives beneurous, benewred, felicious, gracious, seely and the key item happy. Focusing on their fates in the period under question, the study uses data from the Innsbruck Corpus of Middle English, a collection of 129 Middle English digitised texts, preserved in 159 files, to determine token frequency, text distribution and semantic changes of the examined adjectives. Other sources used in the study are Middle English Dictionary (MED), The Oxford English Dictionary (OED), Historical Thesaurus of English (HTE) and AntConc, a freeware corpus analysis program. The evidence from the Innsbruck Corpus of Middle English Prose shows considerable discrepancies in the token frequency of the analysed terms and the number of attestations employed in the sense ‘happy’. Although the position of the adjective gracious was extraordinarily strong (354 attestations), the termyielded only 13 attestations used in the sense under study. The marginal status of benewred (2 attestations)and lack of beneurous in the Middle English texts examined announce their loss at the end of the period.