EModE_5(Neoclassical)
November 10, 2008
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Questions
for Next Time, chapter 13 1. What was Johnson’s opinion of
Americans? 2. What are some words that were
imported from 3. How does Webster connect language
and patriotism? 4. Who came up with “logocracy” and
what does it mean? 5. What are Mencken’s three hallmarks
of American English? 6. What is Webster’s opinion of fixing
the language? 7. What are Webster’s chief
contributions to American English? 8. How does Douglass connect Webster
and freedom? 9. What is “lexical cohesion” in
Webster and Dickinson? 10. What does a steam train have to do
with |
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Chapter
12 on Samuel Johnson and The Dictionary 1. What three diseases might Samuel
Johnson have had been tormented with? p.
167: OCD; Tourettes; Depression 2. What social or cultural position
does SJ claim for lexicography or the lexicographer? p.
168: slow, lowly toil, harmless drudge, who does not expect praise just hopes
to avoid blame. 3. What were some of the achievements
of SJ’s Dictionary? p.
168: 1) regularized spelling; 2) regularized grammatical forms; 3) codified
and sanctioned pronunciations; 4) broadened vocabulary of everyday speech; 5)
attempted to curb and excise slang and colloquial expressions; 6) in use of
quotations affirmed a canon of English literature and critical appreciation a
product and teacher of taste shaped
the English of its time and for a century afterward 4. What year was it first published? 1755,
fourth edition was substantially changed and published in 1773 5. In the dictionaries previous to
Bailey’s (which was previous to SJ’s) what rule seemed to govern the selection
of definitions? (The example concerns
the world mother.) p.
169: most of the earlier dictionaries were only interested in the new and
unusual meanings, the hard word meanings, so the example of mother is that
the definition is of a disease. Bailey
and then SJ list familiar as well as unfamiliar definitions. 6. What happened to SJ’s patronage from
Lord Chesterfield? p.
172: there was not much help from 7. What is the link between
lexicography and colonialism? p.
171: SJ seems to describe his Plan to
conquer the English language – to survey, invade, settle, civilize, conquer,
subject – in a manner similar to language used by the colonizers to describe
the new world. 8. What does it mean to “fix” the
language and how did SJ change his position on this concept? p.
170-172: SJ’s plan (1747) is to fix the language, that is, preserved, as in
fixed in amber or plastic or concrete.
He states in his plan the goal to ascertain the proper meaning and
form of the language and then set it down for permanent keeping. However,
by the time he got to the publication of the Dictionary in 1755 he realized
that language is by its nature change and thus (p. 172) mutable, transitory,
“sublunary,” under the “domynacioun of the moon.” 9. If you ardent or experiencing ardour
in the first meaning, what are you? p.
177: you are one hot puppy! This
definition may also show one of the several semantic changes that happen in
language; the first meaning is abandoned in favor of the latter, in this case
as in most cases, figurative meaning. 10.
Explain the underlining philosophy of British empiricism from Locke
and Hume and how that informs the philosophies of language behind Robert
Lowth, Joseph Priestly, and Samuel Johnson? Restoration and Eighteenth Century The single philosophy behind all of
them is empiricism but the version of Lock and Lowth is much more
positivistic and must more optimistic about its explanatory power that that
of Priestly and Hume. The difference
might be explained as a shift from prescriptive assumptions based upon the
empirical observations versus a more cautious descriptive approach. |
General characteristics of this period
apply to the interest in ascertaining
and fixing the English Language.
Politics:
Queen E 1558-1603; King James I
1603-1625; Charles I 1625-1649
English Civil War 1642-1651; Interregnum
1649-1660 (Oliver Cromwell 1653-1658; Richard Cromwell 1658-1660)
Charles II 1660-1685; James II 1685-1688;
Bloodless Revolution William III, Mary II 1688-1702; Queen Anne 1702-1714 à the Georges.
Dates: 1642, 1649, 1660, 1697 (Dryden's
Essay on Projects), 1712 (Swift's Proposal for Correcting), 1714 (Death of
Queen Anne), 1755 (Johnson's Dictionary), 1761 (Sir Joseph Priestly's Rudiments of English Grammar), 1762
(Bishop Robert Lowth's Short Introduction
to English Grammar), 1776/1789 (Revolutions)
Influential historical items:
The "Spirit of Age": Increase
in passion for order, reason, classical restrain, conservatism, permanence,
science, reason, balance, order, and restraint.
Recognize that English was unruly;
therefore, it had to be disciplined or ascertained: They thought it needed a
grammar.
The result was the movement to ascertain the language:
ASCERTAINMENT
1) to reduce to rule and establish
standards
2) to refine, polish, improve
3) to fix permanently.
Dryden's quote (Preface to Troilus -
1679) -- "we write by guess, more than any state rule"
1. The problem of refining: Swift's
hatred of the following:
A.
Clipped words
B.
Contractions
C.
New words
2. Desire to fix the language by many
including Samuel Johnson.
3. One option to fix the
language was to follow the examples of
Since the Royal Society has been
established in 1660, they tried to develop it there.
December
1664 proposed a 22-member committee to meet regularly to improve upon the
English language.
Dryden suggested the same in his Essay on
Projects, 1696.
The interest waxed and waned but
culminated in Swift's infamous “Proposal for Correcting, Improving, and
Ascertaining the English Tongue” (1712).
Swift generated the most support and
perhaps would have succeeded had it not been for Queen Anne's death in 1714 and
the victory of the Whigs and the Hanovarian kings.
4. The Interest in the Academy ideal
decreased.
A.
Unimpressed with the French example. See
SJ’s response.
The interest in an academy decreased
further as Englishmen became less enchanted with imitating the
B.
General loss of faith in the idea of fixing any language.
As they lost faith in the ideal of fixing
a language
C.
A increasing desire for and interest in liberty.
They associated an academy with a loss of
personal liberty.
Since the neoclassical desire was still
influential, conservative substitutes for academy appeared in three forms:
1. Lexicography -- Dr. J's Dictionary
1755.
2. Grammar -- Bishop Lowth's Short
Introduction to Grammar 1762.
3. Rhetoric and Orthoepy -- Thomas
Sheridan British Education 1756, a
revival in the art of speaking might cure all the ills of
DICTIONARY STORY
Appendix 1
from Dan Mosser’s HEL Web Site
More on dictionaries
The earliest attempts to explain words in
7th Marginal glosses in manuscripts
later
9th century interlinear glosses.
English-Latin
1100 Velum sheets with list of words
glossed for young monks
1200 Alexander Neckham --trilingual
English-Latin-French, De nominibus utensilium
1400 English-Latin, 12,000 words
Proptorium Parvoloriam Sive
Clercorum
1480 Caxton, 52 page, French-English
Vocabulary List
1483 Catholicon, English-Latin 8,000
The earliest
dictionary-like tools in English are the Old English glosses, such as one finds
in the Lindisfarne Gospels: Old English "glosses" written above or
beside the Latin text of the Gospels to allow Anglo-Saxon readers easier access
to the Latin text (just as students today might annotate a text of Shakespeare
or a foreign-language text). Sources like the Lindisfarne Gospels were
invaluable for the recovery of Old English by antiquarians.
As early as
1582, in the Elementarie (a list of about 8,000 English words, but with
no definitions), Richard Mulcaster had called for a dictionary which, in
addition to providing for English words "the right writing, which is
incident to the Alphabete, wold open vnto us therein, both their naturall
force, and their proper use." But not until 150 years later, in Nathaniel
Bailey's Universal Etymological English Dictionary (1721), did anyone
try to list all the words in the language. The earliest English dictionaries
were not dictionaries at all in the modern sense, but rather lists of Latin
words and their English equivalents or lists of "hard words" in
English.
By end of 16th century, the
listing of words in alphabetical order had been established in Latin-English
dictionaries, and this principle was adopted by makers of English dictionaries.
Some landmarks in early English lexicography (dictionary-making) are:
·
·
Edmund Coote, The English Schoolmaster, 1596
o
o
a list of hard English words with simple definitions
·
·
Thomas Thomas, Dictionarium Linguae Latinae et Anglicanae, 1589
o
o
a Latin-English dictionary, based on Thomas Cooper's Thesaurus Linguae
Romanae et Britannicae
·
·
Robert Cawdrey, The Table Alphabeticall of Hard Words,1604
o
o
Cawdrey was a schoolmaster (like Bullokar, Mulcaster, and Coote) who had to
come to grips with problems of spelling, pronunciation, and meanings of English
words. Today, Cawdrey's Table would be regarded as a plagiarized version
of Coote's English Schoolmaster, but Cawdrey had nearly twice as many
words in his work and had expanded about half of the definitions borrowed from
Coote with information from other sources, such as Wilson's Arte of
Rhetorique and Thomas's Latin-English dictionary, from which he derived
definitions for Latin borrowings from English definitions of a Latin word.
Cawdrey's title page identifies his intentions and audience (see Barber 106-7; Starnes
& Noyes 13):
§
§
A Table Alphabeticall, conteyning and teaching the true writing, and
vnderstanding of hard vsuall English wordes, borrowed from the Hebrew, Greeke,
Latine, or French. &c. With the interpretation thereof by plaine English
words, gathered for the benefit and help of Ladies, Gentlewomen, or an other
unskilfull persons. Whereby they may the more easilie and better vnderstand
many hard English wordes, which they shall heare or read in Scriptures,
Sermons, or elswhere, and also be made able to vse the same aptly themselues.
·
·
John Bullokar, An English Expositor, 1616
o
o
Twice as many entries as Cawdrey, still with a focus on hard words
·
·
Henry Cockeram, The English Dictionary, 1623
o
o
The first to call itself an English Dictionary, but still in the hard word
tradition
o
o
Indebted to Cawdrey, Bullokar, and Thomas.
o
o
Extends scope of dict. by adding lists of Gods, plants, trees, etc. (an
"encyclopedic" feature)
·
·
Thomas Blount, Glossographia, 1656
o
o
Intends his text to be useful not only to "the more-knowing women and the
less-knowing men" and the unlearned, but also to the "best of
scholars" and "to all such as desire to understand what they
read."
o
o
Greatest debt owed to Thomas and a work by Francis Holyoke, Dictionarium
Etymologicum
o
o
May have introduced words into the language which were not already in use
o
o
First English lexicographer to attempt etymology ("true meaning of a word
according to its origin: fr. Greek etymos "true")
·
·
Edward Phillips (a nephew of John Milton), The New World of English Words,
1658
o
o
Approximately 11,000 entries
o
o
Drew on Bullokar, Cockeram, Blount, and others. Disparages Blount, probably to
conceal his debt to him. In 1673, Blount published A World of Errors Discovered
in the New World of Words, or General English Dictionary, and Nomothets, or
Interpreter of Law-Words and Terms in which he exposes Phillips' wholesale
theft
·
·
Elisha Coles, An English Dictionary, 1676
o
o
Copies a great deal from Phillips
o
o
25,000 words
Between 10-12,000 new words
were introduced during the Renaissance, about half of which have become
permanent part of English language.
In 1730,
Nathaniel Bailey produced his Dictionarium Britannicum. It encompassed
48,000 words and became the standard English dictionary until Samuel Johnson,
using Bailey's work as a foundation, produced A Dictionary of the English
Language (1755). Johnson conceived his plan for the dictionary with the notion
of "fixing" the language. In his Plan of a Dictionary of the
English Language (1747), addressed to "the Right Honourable Philip
Dormer, Earl of Chesterfield," he states:
This,
my Lord, is my idea of an English dictionary, a dictionary by which the pronunciation
of our language may be fixed, and its attainment facilitated; by which its
purity may be preserved, its use ascertained, and its duration lengthened.
In the end, he settled for
less.
In the Preface to his Dictionary
he concludes:
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 with 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, that it is in his power to
change sublunary nature, or clear the world at once from folly, vanity, and
affectation.
Although Johnson is
frequently accorded the credit for being the first to devide and number a
lexical item's various senses, the practice can be found in use in Benjamin
Martin's Lingua Britannica Reformata of 1749 and in earlier bilingual
dictionaries. Whatever else Johnson's Dictionary might have been, it was
unquestionably suited to the needs and tastes of his time and his society, and
it was the first to be referred to as "The Dictionary."
Johnson expresses his sense
of the lexicographer's (sometimes contradictory) duties in his Preface:
Every
language has its anomolies, which, though inconvenient, and in themselves once
unnecessary, must be tolerated among the imperfections of human beings, and
which require only to be registred, that they may not be increased and
ascertained, that they may not be confounded: but every language likewise has
its improprieties and absurdities, which it is the duty of the lexicographer to
correct or proscribe.
Some have complained that
Johnson allowed too much of his own personality to intrude into his
definitions, but the examples usually cited are rather exceptional:
nowise -- This is commonly spoken and written
by ingorant barbarians, noways."
As
George Campbell (Philosophy of Rhetoric 1776) later noted, "These
ignorant barbarians…are only Pope, and Swift, and Addison, and Locke, and
several others of our most celebrated writers."
excise -- a hateful tax levied upon
commodities, and adjudged not by the common judges of property, but wretches
hired by those to whom excise is paid.
lexicographer -- A writer of dictionaries; a harmless
drudge, that busies himself in tracing the original, and detailing the
signification of words.
oats -- A grain, which in
Whigs -- the name of a faction.
One of the more remarkable
features of Johnson's dictionary project was his relationship to Lord
Chesterfield, who promised patronage but delivered only verbal allegiance:
I
had long lamented, that we had no lawful standard of our language set up, for
those to repair to, who might choose to speak and write it grammatically and
correctly . . . . The time for discrimination seems to be now come. Toleration,
adoption, and naturalization, have run their lengths. Good order and authority
are now necessary. But where shall we find them, and at the same time the
obedience due to them? We must have recourse to the old Roman expedient in
times of confusion, and choose a Dictator. Upon this principle, I give my vote
for Mr. Johnson to fill that great and arduous post. And I hereby declare that
I make a total surrender of all my rights and privileges in the English
language, as a freeborn British subject, to the said Mr. Johnson, during the
term of his dictatorship. Nay, more; I will not only obey him, like an old
Roman, as my dictator, but, like a modern Roman, I will implicitly believe in
him as my pope, and hold him to be infallible while in the chair; but no
longer. (The World. November 28, 1754; quoted in Finegan 23)
Johnson's Dictionary
was an important touchstone for Noah Webster in his development of An
American Dictionary of the English Language.
Oxford English
Dictionary (which began life as the New English Dictionary on Historical
Principles), took 46 years to complete. The need for better dictionary begins
to become apparent around the middle of 19th century. In 1857, spurred to
action by Richard Chenevix Trench, Dean of Westminster, the Philological
Society decided that rather than appoint a committee to collect words not
listed in existing dictionaries with intention of publishing a supplement to
Johnson and his competitors, that an entirely new dictionary was needed. Trench
had read two papers to the Society under the rubric "Some Deficiencies in
our English Dictionaries." These papers contained an expostion of a plan
for a dictionary based on historical principles. The Society passed
resolutions in January 1858 calling for a new dictionary, and in 1859 issued a
"Proposal for the Publication of a New English Dictionary by the
Philological Society."
The two primary aims of the
Society were to record every word attested in English from about the year 1000
and to illustrate the history of each word through the use of illustrative
quotations. To collect the data, the Society solicited volunteer readers to
comb texts and send in their gleanings, on slips. Some 6 million slips were
collected in all. The Early English Text Society was founded by Frederick J.
Furnivall in 1864 to edit texts of medieval manuscripts in order to make the
data they contained available to the volunteers.
Herbert Coleridge was
appointed as the first editor of the OED in 1859, but he died at age 31 in
1861. He was succeeded by Furnivall, then 36, but Furnivall had too many other
interests to do a proper job. James A. H. Murray entered the project and, in
1879, a contract was drawn up with Oxford University Press for the financing
and publication of the dictionary with
In 1884, the first
installment of the dictionary, consisting of part of the letter A, was
published in fascicle form. By 1900, four-and-a-half volumes, up to letter H,
had appeared. Great delays resulted in final installment's not being published
until 1928, 70 years after the Philological Society's resolution was passed.
The job had, of course, been
too much for one man, and in 1887 Henry Bradley had joined the staff. Bradley
later became co-editor, and still later, on
The completed first edition
was contained in 10 volumes (later reissued in twelve volumes), totaling 15,487
pages, in three columns, with 240,165 main words. The first supplement was
published in 1933. Three new volumes of supplementary material were issued
between 1972 and 1984 (100 years after the publication of the letter A).
In 1989, a second edition, edited by John Simpson and Edmund Weiner, was
published, filling 22,000 pages in twenty volumes.
In 1992 a CD-ROM edition of
the work was published, and an online edition is planned for publication in
October 1999. At present, the entire dictionary is being updated for the first
time since the work of the early editors, with a planned completion date for
this third edition of 2010.
THE AIMS OF THE GRAMMARIANS
Out of this mid-century impetus arises
the tradition of prescriptive grammar -- i.e. establishing laws for settling
matters of usage:
1. Codify principles and rules
2. Decide disputed cases
3. Point out common errors
The results of the grammarians --
prescriptive grammar:
1. lay/lie
2. would rather instead of had rather
3. different from / instead of different
than or to
4. between you and me / instead of
between you and I
5. larger of two / instead of largest of
two
6. perfect / not more perfect
7. his doing / him doing
8. contra double negatives
9. shall will /
Simple
futurity: shall 1st; will 2nd and 3rd
Promise will 1st; shall 2nd and 3rd
METHODS OF THE GRAMMARIANS
1. analogy to reason
Double negative
2. etymology
Decimate
3. Analogy to Gk and/or Latin
Split infinitive.