Linguistics, Lexicography, and the “Early Modern” Hannah Crawforth (bio) Keywords lexicography, linguistics, early modern, periodisation, John Cheke The emerging early modern discipline of linguistics is premised upon the idea that the act of defining a word lexicographically is itself constituted by, and simultaneously reconstitutes, both past and present. As such, there is a profound connection between the way in which writers of the period think about the history of its language, the origins, etymologies, usage, and evolving development of English words, and the way they conceive of their own relation to time. This brief paper will suggest an important pre-history to our own debates about periodization and the concept of the “early modern” that lies within the period itself. The rise of lexicography and birth of what we today would describe as historical linguistics during the late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth centuries both provokes and is itself a response to important questions about the relationship between past and present. Interest in such topics as etymology, archaism, and neologism, evident in the work of early modern literary writers as well as linguists at this time, embodies such concerns at the level of the individual word: what kind of past does contemporary language carry within itself? At what point do the words of the past become impenetrable to the readers of the present? Does linguistic obsolescence represent a form of periodization, dividing the texts of the past from our own moment? These are some of the issues I will consider here, and which, I intend to show, preoccupied the linguists and lexicographers of what we call “early modern England.” I will begin my discussion with an analogy drawn from lexicography, setting up a model for thinking about periodization based upon the ideas of early modern dictionary-makers, before proceeding to consider a brief case study of one of the leading linguists of the period, and the ways in which he resists periodization in his own treatment of the past. [End Page 94] Today, dictionaries are usually considered in the terms of two broad categories. Prescriptive dictionaries designate words no longer in current usage, and recommend that their readers should avoid such terms. Descriptive dictionaries are more porous documents, interested in the idiosyncrasies of usage rather than linguistic determinism. This distinction can also be observed in the earliest monolingual English dictionaries, of which the first was Robert Cawdry’s Table Alphabeticall (1604). He approaches his lexicographical work pragmatically, and pedagogically; as his title suggests, his aim is to equip his readers to speak and write elegantly, “teaching the true writing and understanding of hard usuall English wordes.” Unlike many of his contemporaries, some of whom we will discuss in this essay, Cawdry makes no attempt to prohibit such terms. In his words, he does not attempt to “banish all affected Rhetorique”; rather he wants to ensure that his readers are able to “watily speake, & with choise, utter words most apt for their purpose.”1 Cawdry’s descriptive approach can be contrasted with the more prescriptive lexicographical work of some of his successors. Asterisks are used, for instance, to deter the use of “old words” in John Bullokar’s English Expositor of 1616 and Henry Cockeram’s The English Dictionary, published ten years later. Such prescriptive dictionaries are totalizing, monumental, and impermeable. Descriptive dictionaries, on the other hand, are self-conscious, revisionist, and permeable. The analogy I wish to draw is between these two kinds of dictionary and two differing models for thinking about periodization. The comparison is necessarily a highly reductive one, but may, I hope, offer a framework for the broad-based conversation we are engaged in here. For what post-modern theories of periodization have taught us, if they can be classified as such, is the problematic nature of what might be termed a “prescriptive” method of conceptualizing history.2 The three “descriptive” characteristics I have noted—the self-conscious, the revisionist, and the permeable—are arguably the three methodological values privileged by recent formulations of periodization. Yet as recent lexicographical studies have shown, the relation between prescriptive and descriptive approaches to dictionary-making is more complex than any apparent binary opposition would suggest. In what John Ottenhoff describes as...
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Oct 22, 2019
Juhani Norri 
