EModE_6_America

November 12, 2008

Homework Turn In

Paper Questions

Syllabus Change

Homework question 5 on “mother”: see below. (Also date of Johnson’s first 1755 – many said 1828)

Good web site on old dictionaries.

Journals: a lot of great material on ideas for papers, listening to strange language of students (slang), gamers; debaters.

Who speaks slang?

Go Back to two points from last time.

1. Neoclassical external history informing the development of prescriptive grammar.

Political, philosophical, and religious upheavals leading to a desire to control, rule, govern, and create peace.

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.

2. Empiricism and grammar –

Empiricism and Rationalism

Empiricism was in some ways a reaction to Continental Rationalism of Descartes and Leibnitz who argued that there are innate thoughts from which some of our knowledge comes.

But empiricism put source of ideas in sensation or experience.

if we are formed by experience, then shape experience to shape society; if our understanding of language comes from experience, then let’s not shape it in order to see what experience teaches us.

According to Locke, words are used as idea placeholders and as a means of communication; communication has two functions one civil or civic and the other philosophical.

For Hume language is much less clear and it tied up with his associationist theory of mind. Hume is committed to the moral purpose of communication, but is much more skeptical about the connection between words and ideas.

Later German philosopher Kant would demonstrate the need for both theories.

In twentieth-century linguistics, a strand of empiricism influenced the development of behaviorism and a form of linguistics based upon it (Leonard Bloomfield was perhaps the most famous of this lot); however, the most significant development came from a more rationalist camp of Noam Chomsky who argued for innate, university grammar.

Question for Next Time, Chapter 14 and 15

1. What reasons might explain the claim by Rev. Boucher in 1832 that there is no dialect in America?

2. What are the five or six original settlement regions?

3. Why was there a growth in regional dialects and dialect literature?

4. Pick one of the literature samples a make a case that it both does and does not represent actual dialect.

5. How does William Labov’s work counter that of the regional or areal dialect specialists?

Chapter 15

6. Why does Lerer consider Twain a good philologer?

7. Where did the word hello come from?

8. What is a hello-girl?

9. Is being a dude in Twain’s world a good thing or bad? How do you know?

10. What is “eye-spelling”?

Questions on Chapter 13

1. What was Johnson’s opinion of Americans?

p. 181: They are barbarians; the lowest; convicts.

Cf also J. Swift’s A Modest Proposal

2. What are some words that were imported from America? Why were they so imported?

p. 181: tobacco, chcolate, moose, squash, maiz – imported because the items were not known to England.

3. How does Webster connect language and patriotism?

p. 182: independent nation should have an independent language – pride in nation requires pride in language.

4. Who came up with “logocracy” and what does it mean?

p. 182-183: Washington Irving – rule by words;

this could mean that rather than following royalty or rules handed down America could decide everything by the words that they used.

5. What are Mencken’s three hallmarks of American English?

p. 183: 1. general uniformity

2. impatient disregard for rules

3. large capacity – even more new words.

6. What is Webster’s opinion of fixing the language?

p. 184-185: Quite impossible to stop the flow of language as it is stop the flow of the Mississippi. Also, words in ‘American are associated with new meaning and must be used as such.

7. What are Webster’s chief contributions to American English?

p. 185: American spelling (color vs. colour; public vs. publick; defence vs. defense)

Also syllabification.

8. How does Douglass connect Webster and freedom?

p. 185-186: from Webster and listening to others read Douglass learned to read – Knowledge unfits a child to be a slave”

9. What is “lexical cohesion” in Webster and Dickinson?

p. 187: word collocations in Webster’s definitions and Dickinson’s poetic use overlap. The example of Christ and sacrament and anneal, etc.

10. What does a steam train have to do with Dickinson, Webster, English, and 19^th-century America?

p. 188: The Dickinson poem about the train and its horrid, hooting stazas – and Twain and dialects and American England chugging wildly on, following the train of industrial and technological innovations and the new worlds and usages and phrases that are created by these innovations.

Notes from Dr. Edward Vajda; Western Washington University.

The Dialects of American English

The various Germanic tribes (Angles, Saxons, and Jutes) who invaded Britain after 437 AD brought with them their own dialects of West Germanic. These formed the basis for the emergence of later dialect areas. The submergence of the various British Celtic languages (of which Welsh is the only modern survivor) also lead to innovations in British English. The Viking invasions resulted in more Norse influence in the north than in the south, thereby contributing another layer to the existing dialects. Likewise, the Norman French invaders influenced the south more than the north, which came to be more conservative linguistically. The Great Vowel Shift of the 1500's didn't affect northern English dialects, which came to be called Scots English. Because of the long history of dialect creation in the English speaking areas of Great Britain, there are more dialects of English in Britain than in America, Canada, and Australia combined.

British colonization of other continents led to the establishment of various colonial, or overseas, dialects. These dialects developed because of the following factors: 1) the language spoken by emigrants who first established the colony was a particular variety of British English--the so-called founder's effect; 2) this may have mixed with some non-English language in the colony--the so-called substrate effect; 3) there may have been further mixing with other English dialects in the colony--the leveling effect of dialect mixing; 4) innovations in British English that did not occur in the more conservative overseas dialect, or conversely, innovation in the colonial dialect (for any of the three previous reasons) which did not occur in Britain.

The main dialect areas of the US can be traced to the four main migrations of English speaking people to America from the British Isles during the colonial period (1607-1775).

1. From 1629-1640 Puritan religious dissenters fleeing oppression from Charles I fled East Anglia and brought their distinctive twang (a sort of "flat sounding" nasal lengthening of vowels) to Massachusetts. The extreme conservatism and nostalgia for England helped maintain this dialect while the language of East Anglia changed (speech similar to New England can still be found in East Anglia. Today the 16 million or so descendants of the Puritans and many of their neighbors speak some form of this East Anglia derived speech.

Main features

--pronunciation of [O] in caught, bought

--low fronted [a] instead of back[A] in words such asfar, father (the so-called nasal twang)

--Deletion of syllable final [r], as in far pronounced "fah", Carter pronounced "Cahtah".

--Compensatory addition of [r] after a final schwa, as in Cuber (instead of Cuba). This trait developed after the colonial period.

--some lexical particularities, such as earthworm called an angleworm,pail rather thanbucket (either word is used in standard American.)

Influence on General American

--The New England dialect eventually influenced speech in many areas of the Northeast, from Main to Wisconsin, especially in the Chicago area.

--A large number of New England town, city and county names derive from East Anglia.

--Due to the influence of the Puritan Religion, Old testament first names are found in New England far more than anywhere else in the American colonies (Nathanial, Nehemiah, Joshua, etc.); New England also has a large share of Hebrew town names (Salem, Concord)

--gave us the word cuss from curse, originally a high class, [r]-less pronunciation

--gave us such words as conniption fit, scrimp, pesky, snicker.

--gave English such idioms as: sharp as a meat ax, big as all outdoors, cool as a cucumber. Since everyone was expected to know how to make Boston baked beans, today we also have the idiom to not know beans about. Also: Wouldn't touch with a ten-foot pole (rivermen used 10-foot poles to guide their ships).

Many idioms associated with sailing derive from the New England dialect, as one might espect: to lower the boom on someone, three sheets to the wind (meaning "drunk"), take the wind out of one's sails, and even cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey.

Unlike many other American regional dialects, New England speech was not affected significantly by any non-English language.

New York English, as a special variety of general New England speech, developed after the British took possession of the Dutch colony of Nieuw Amsterdam in 1664, leading to the rapid conversion of Dutch speakers to English. Dutch left a strong phonetic substrate, however, which sets Brooklyn speech apart from other northern dialects.

Features shared with New England speech:

--final [r] is dropped: beer = bee-ah

--caught, bought are pronounced with [O] rather than [A]

Main features deriving from the Dutch influence:

--interdentals become t,d. For instance, them, these, that become: dem, dese, dat (since Dutch has no interdentals)

--er => [schwa + y] thirty purple birds, thirty third street = uh in final position were =wuh

-- [oi] => [er] oil, oyster (a later compensatory development)

--I want you to (do something)-> I want you should (do something)

In connection with New York, it might be apropos to mention one of the ethnic-based dialects that undoubtedly contributed to the uniqueness of the city's linguistic soundscape: the language of the European Jews who came to New York in large numbers beginning during the last century.

Most immigrant groups who came into the US after the colonial period--in the 19th and 20th centuries--did not establish permanent ethnic dialects of their own. (Instead, they conformed to whatever the local dialect was.) But one group contributed heavily to New York English. Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, most of whom spoke Yiddish, added their own additional flavor to New York phonology and vocabulary.

The Ashkenazi Jews in Central Europe spoke a dialect of German called Yiddish. The Sephardic Jews of Spain spoke Ladino, a medieval dialect of Spanish. Yiddish especially has influenced New York speech and also contributed words than Americans of all dialects may use and know:

--many words and phrases from Yiddish that have come into General American English have a special twist of humor or irony: schmaltz, chutzpah, schlemiel, schlimazel, klutz (wooden beam), kvetch, yenta, schmuck, schnoz (big noze). Yiddish has even brought about minor changes in the phonotactic rules of English: which now allow the combination sh+consonant at the beginning of a word: example: schnook (dope).

--Standard American phrases originating in the Yiddish speaking community include: Get lost, What's up, I should worry, I should live so long, I need it like a hole in the head, You don't know from nothin', Pardon the expression, Enjoy.

--Rhyming slang: Deprecation is shown by means of partial reduplications such as Joe-schmo; or Oedipus-schmedipus, so long as he loves his mother.

Modern New York influence on General American, of course, is not confined to Yiddish origins. Even people who have never traveled to New York are familiar with this accent from watching TV. Recently, New York has given American English such terms as: Yuppie (young urban professional), and bag lady.

2. Let's move on to a very different dialect. From 1642-1675 the Royalists, also called Cavaliers, fled from the south and southwest England with their indentured servants and settled in Virginia when the English Civil War against Charles I began. They brought with them their south England drawl (a drawing out of the vowels); they also brought such phrases as aksed (instead of asked), and ain't (instead of isn't). Royalists later settled the Carolinas as well. Southern English speech laid the foundation for the development of American Tidewater speech, or Coastal Southern English.

A large number of features distinguish southern dialects as a group from their cousin dialects in the American north, as well as from modern British dialects in the south of England.

--the classic Southern drawl, caused when vowels become long or diphthongalized: house = ha:wse, eggs = ai:gz; some words even contain triphthongs: flowers. [fla:ierz]

--loss of final t, d after another consonant: an(d), tol(d)

--first syllable accented (rather than the second) in such words as: guitar, insurance, July, police, elope, etc.

--yall for you all

--bucket, not pail

Influence on General American--

Southern English has contributed and continues to contribute to General English a variety of highly colorful idioms: Mad as a rooster in an empty henhouse, Don't get crosslegged (Don't get mad.), tearing up the peapatch (on a rampage), kneewalkin' drunk, He's three bricks shy of a load. (dumb)

Other southernisms that made it into general American include

--snickerdoodles; tacky; varmint, from vermin, vittles > victuals.

--spitting image of > spirit and image of

--fink, ratfink > Albert Fink, an unpleasant railroad detective after the Civil War.

What is the origin of certain features of Southern English that cannot be traced back to dialectal differences among the original immigrants from the British Isles?

The upper class southern dialects and the dialects of the coastal southern areas (where few native Americans remained) were influenced by the English spoken by West Africans. Most linguists today believe these features derive from the influence of the speech patterns of the Africans brought to the 13 colonies as slaves between 1619 and 1808, when the slave trade was prohibited. This would include the southern drawl. Let's take a look at the ethnic dialect that has come to be known as Black English.

Black English developed in the Southern states when speakers of dozens of West African languages were abruptly forced to abandon their native tongues and learn English. Slaves from different tribes couldn't communicate with one another--in fact, masters deliberately tried to separate slaves who could speak the same language. Since the Africans had to communicate with one another, as well as with the whites, a kind of compromise language evolved on the basis of English and a mixture of the original West African languages. Such a makeshift, compromise language, used as a second language by adults, is known as a pidgin. When a pidgin becomes the native language of the next generation, it becomes a creole--a full-fledged language. The African-English creole in the American colonies evolved into today's Black English.

Black English was most influenced by the speech of the southern whites.

Features carried over from early Southern English into Black English:

--loss of final consonants, especially sonorants: po(or), sto(re) like aristocratic southern English.

-- use of double negatives, ain't, as in early English.

--loss of ng: somethin', nothin', etc.

Black English, in turn, gradually influenced the speech of southern whites--especially the children of the aristocratic slave owners. Given the social prejudices of the Old South, this seems paradoxical. However, remember that throughout all the slave owning areas, black nannies helped raise white children, and the children of blacks and whites played freely together before the Civil War. Since language features acquired in early childhood tend to be kept throughout life, Southern English naturally became mixed with Black English.

Let's look more closely at how Black English developed on the basis of West African Dialects. Whenever a group of adults is forced to learn a second language, the language learned retains many features of the original native language. Thus, the English of black slaves retained many features that were African and not present in English at all. The children of the slaves learned this form of English as their native language. Thus, on the basis of language mixing, a new dialect, called a creole, was born. This process--at least in some small degree-- characterizes the English of all Americans whose parents spoke English as a second language. But in the case of African Americans, due to the social separation they lived under from the very start, the differences were stronger and more lasting.

Main features carried over from West African languages.

--No use of the linking verb 'to be' or generalization of one form for it.

--emphasis on aspect rather than tense: He workin' (right now) vs. He be workin'. This is found in many West African languages.

--I done gone (from Wolof doon , the completive verb aspect particle + English 'done').

--Regularization of present tense verb conjugation: He don't, he know it.

--voiced th in initial position becomes d: dis, dey; in medial position it becomes v: brother > brovva. final voiceless th = f with =wif

A large number of West African words came into Standard American through the medium of Black English: bug (bugu = annoy), dig (degu/ understand), tote bag (tota = carry in Kikonga), hip (Wolof hepicat one who has his eyes wide open), voodoo (obosum, guardian spirit) mumbo jumbo (from name of a West African god), jazz (? Bantu from Arabic jazib one who allures), banjo (mbanza?), chigger (jigger/ bloodsucking mite), goober (nguba /Bantu), okra (nkruman/ Bantu), yam (njami/ Senegal), banana (Wolof). Also, the phrases: sweet talking, every which way; to bad-mouth, high-five are from Black English--seem to be either American innovations or loan translations from West African languages.

The speech of African Americans gradually became more like the speech of their southern white neighbors--a process called decreolization. (And the speech of the whites became slightly more like that of the blacks). However, in a few areas, the original African English creole was preserved more fully. There is one dialect of Black English still spoken on the Georgia coast, called Gullah, which is still spoken there by about 20,000 people; it is thought to represents the closest thing to the original creole.

After the Civil War, Black English continued to evolve and change, especially in the creation of new vocabulary. After the 1920's millions of blacks migrated to northern cities, where various varieties of Black English continue to develop.

There is one other notable southern English dialect. The Cajun French in Louisiana also adopted English with noticeable traces of their former language.

3. From 1675-1725 the Quakers, or Society of Friends, migrated from the north midlands of England and Wales to the Delaware valley. Their speechways--mixed with those of later German and Swedish immigrants--gave rise to the distinctive band of dialects spoken in parts of Pennsylvania and New Jersey.

--Phonetic features include the pronunciation of a back rounded [Å] in words such as caught, saw.

Also, the pronunciation of [E] instead of [œ] in bad, and, sack, etc.

--Retention of the syllable final [r] in all places.

Contributions to American English: great number of euphemisms. Speakers tried to avoid saying male or female names for animals that might have sexual connotations (bull, cock, etc.), and also avoided names of parts of the body: used rock instead ofstone (Old Eng. fortesticle'); chicken breast/leg =white meat, dark meat.

4. From 1718-1775 English speakers left North Britain and Northern Ireland and settled in the Appalachian backcountry. These people are called the "Scots-Irish." These were mostly Anglo-Saxons refugees of the Norman Conquest who had settled within the Celtic fringe of Britain. The true Scottish and Irish people were Celts who spoke Scots-Gaelic or its close relative Irish-Gaelic and most did not adopt English until the 18th or 19th century. The immigration of true Irish and Scottish peoples, beginning in the mid-1800's, had little permanent effect on American dialect formation.

One island of early Scotch-Irish English speech was left behind and preserved during the push west. This special, archaic variety of English is known as Appalachian English. It preserves many archaic features that date back to earlier stages in the development of English in Britain. Forms thought to be substandard today are actually the outmoded standard of yesterday. A good example is the use of double negatives such as 'not nobody.' Linguists have dubbed this variety of English as "American Old English" or "American Anglo Saxon". Other mountainous, relatively isolated areas of the American East show a similar preservation of archaic speech. Mario Pei, a popular writer on linguistics, said that "The speech of the Ozarks comes closer to Elizabethan English in many ways than the speech of modern London."

Main features--

--pronouns: hit (it), youns, (ye ones--Chaucer), (possessives) hisn, hern, yorn, theirn them used as an adjective in place of their; them boys.

--Retention of preposition in the progressive aspect: I'm a talking to you.

--propensity to use compound nouns: men-folk, man-child, kin folks

--exchanging parts of speech in comparison to standard English: It pleasures me, That was mighty fetchin' of you, She prettied herself up, I'll muscle it up (lift it up), He bigged her (made her pregnant); He daddied that child.

--Many colorful idioms. Slow as Christmas (slow in coming about), slick as a peeled onion (sly), His backbone's rubbin' his belly. (very hungry).

--fixin to, pert near, afeared, beholden (indebted), took sick, upped an, mess of (lot of)

--Rhyming euphemisms: swan, swanny = swear, land sakes alive, golly, dad blamed.

--Special distance words: This here, that there, that yonder.

--bag called sack; dragonfly called mosquito hawk, green bean called a snap bean; pail called a bucket.

Some southern features from the poorer classes are shared with the dialects of the rural midwest since poor southerners helped colonize the midwest. Also, some features of Appalachian English are shared with the speech of poorer southern whites for the same reason.

--ain't, use of double negatives--older "correct" version of English, avoided by the upper classes, who chose the innovative single negatives preferred by the British upper classes.

--ng = n: somethin, nothin, (also found in Scotch-Irish dialects of middle English: Celtic languages had no ng)

The "Scots-Irish" dialect of southern English mingled with Cherokee and other Native American languages in a band running from western North Carolina to Oklahoma and East Texas, giving rise to the so-called backwoods, or highlands, southern dialect, which is more faster and high-pitched than tidewater southern and more nasal than Appalachian English. Some of the phonological features of the backwoods southern dialects undoubtedly come from Cherokee and other Native American languages. The south was the only area in the East where Native Americans mixed significantly with the whites. This occurred mostly with the poorer whites on the frontier. Substrate features include: nasality, tensing of vowels [e] instead of [E] rather than diphthongization as in Tidewater Southern English.

Influence on General American--

-- highly expressive idioms: He can lick his weight in wildcats. Faster 'n greased lightning, can't hold a candle to, sharp as a tack, madder 'n a wet hen, tuckered out.

--Some words widely assumed to be of Appalachian origin are not: the word moonshine was coined in England, 'hooch' is of Native American origin. Words like redneck, cracker, hoosier were coined in Northern England and brought over; originally, they were not necessarily insults. The derogatory term Hillbilly was coined only in early 1900's.

5. Remember that dialects based primarily on geography are called areal dialects. One of the main researchers of areal dialects of the United States was Hans Kurath, author of the Dialect Atlas of America He found that there are four main dialect areas in the Eastern us: New England (including New York), Middle Atlantic, Backwoods, and Southern Tidewater; The three main dialectal divisions can further be subdivided into at least 27 subdialects. The original eastern dialects tended to become more leveled and to merge farther west.

General American-- After the Civil War the rapid and extensive move West of settlers from all dialect areas of the eastern US led to a leveling of eastern dialectal features and the creation of a more General American, or Middle American dialect. People who are said to speak "without an accent" are actually speaking with this leveled-out form of speech that developed from the mid-Atlantic stretching westward through the Ohio valley. Most features of Standard American developed from a levelled mixture of dialects mostly from the poorer classes along the middle Atlantic seaboard who immigrated west after the American Revolution to find a better life.

Main features:

1) retention of [r] in all places

2) pronunciation of [ae] in many words. Cf. British 'class' 'aunt'. Gives American English a flat sound to British ears.

3) vocab--stringbean (snapbean in the South), earthworm (angleworm), creek (not brook)

Origins--Derived from the speech of settlers moving west of the original 13 colonies into the Ohio valley and beyond. These people were of Scotch-Irish origin rather than upper class English, which explains the differences between Middle American and New England. The post-vocalic [r], which dropped out in the speech of the upper British classes, was retained in the English of the Scotch Irish and other originally Celtic speaking peoples of Britain. Competition between immigrants from Germany and the lower classes of the British isles in the push westward tended to level many of the differences peculiar to one or another smaller group of people. (The Pennsylvania Dutch are actually "Deutsch", in other words Germans.) The Middle American dialect area contributed the most to speech in western states and forms the basis of the speech usually considered as standard American today. There were, however, certain features that remained isolated and unique to one or another of the Middle American dialect group. This was especially true on the mid-Atlantic seaboard. Maryland adds [r] after [a] before another cons: [Warshington].

Now, this western, "leveled" English is itself showing signs of dialect genesis. The history of American English and of English is far from over.

What does the future hold for American dialects? Will they evolve into separate languages? Due to the levelling influence of mass communication and travel, probably not. In fact, dialectal divergence in the US seems to be slowing down. John Steinbeck, in his 1962 novel, Travels with Charley, in which he describes how he traveled by camper all over the US with a French poodle named Charley, expressed fear that American dialects would disappear because of the influence of mass communication. Most dialectologists, however, believe that dialects are here to stay, since they are acquired from parents at an early age. Thus the well established regional dialects of American English are not disappearing. In fact, the western, "leveled" English is itself showing signs of dialect genesis. So the history of American English and of English is far from over.

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 Italy (1582) and France (1635) and set up an Academy.

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 French Academy.

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.

SUBSTITUTES FOR ACADEMY

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 England. Owen Price, The Vocal Organ 1665 and Bishop John Wilkins, Essay Towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language 1668.

DICTIONARY STORY

Appendix 1

from Dan Mosser’s HEL Web Site

Glossaries

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.

The Renaissance works on orthography

Dictionaries of Hard Words

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.

Development of an Authoritative Dictionary

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 England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people.

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.

The Oxford English Dictionary

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 Murray as Editor. He died in 1915, reportedly in the midst of working on the letters T and U: he had just finished the section Trink to Turndown.

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 Murray's death, became chief editor. He died in 1923. William Craigie, who had joined the staff in 1897, and became the third editor in 1901. In 1914, Charles T. Onions became fourth editor. Murray and Craigie were knighted for their contributions.

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.