Dear John,
I don't think you should really talk about the history of English
dictionaries without mentioning Samuel Johnson. Although not the first, his
is the most famous or early English Dictionaries, published in 1755. He even
used wit and humour, defining a lexicographer as "..a harmless drudge, that
busies himself in tracing the original, and detailing the significations of
words". The second edition of his dictionary is contemporaneous with
Webster's.
I don't think the English have ever considered Webster's as anything other
than a dictionary of American English (which is indeed what it claims to be)
and so not reliable for either spellings or usages of English words. (01)
Regards (02)
Matthew West
http://www.matthew-west.org.uk (03)
-----Original Message-----
From: ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of John F Sowa
Sent: 21 May 2014 12:24
To: ontolog-forum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] Well written blog post re Words and
Dictionaries (04)
David and Pat, (05)
There are two major forces that drive the editorial policies of
dictionaries: (1) the intended audience, and (2) the publishers'
desire to stay in business. (06)
DW
> I submit the following blog post to your attention:
>
> http://jsomers.net/blog/dictionary (07)
From that blog
> [Most modern dictionaries are] all a chore to read. There's no play,
> no delight in the language. The definitions are these desiccated
> little husks of technocratic meaningese, as if a word were no more
> than its coordinates in semantic space...
>
> [Noah Webster's] Blue Backed Speller... was actually the most popular
> book of its time; by 1890 it had sold 60 million copies...
>
> In his own lifetime [Webster's] dictionary sold poorly and got little
> recognition... (08)
That's a clue why modern dictionaries are so terse -- before spelling
correctors, spelling was a major reason why people bought them. The
dictionary was NW's love, but the spelling book kept him alive. (09)
Among the small audience of educated readers, Webster's dictionary was
extremely desirable. In England, that audience was not happy that the major
dictionary of the English language was produced in America. That caused
them to produce the OED -- which struggled financially, but succeeded only
because of outside donations. (010)
In the US, the _Century Dictionary_ (of which my favorite philosopher C. S.
Peirce was an associate editor) was intended as a competitor to the OED. It
was an excellent dictionary -- but a financial failure.
You can download it (172 MB) for free from Google books. (011)
But note Roget's Thesaurus -- which is truly "no more than coordinates in
semantic space" -- was financially successful from the beginning. (012)
PC
> For anyone who is curious about the 1913 Webster's unabridged, there
> is a searchable version online at:
>
> http://machaut.uchicago.edu/websters
>
> There is also a zipped SGML-marked-up text (broken into individual
letters):
>
> http://micra.com/dictionary/mcide.zip (013)
Both the _Century Dictionary_ and the 1913 Webster's went out of copyright
and became the major resources for "terse definitions"
of cheap dictionaries during the 20th c. (014)
John (015)
_________________________________________________________________
Message Archives: http://ontolog.cim3.net/forum/ontolog-forum/
Config Subscr: http://ontolog.cim3.net/mailman/listinfo/ontolog-forum/
Unsubscribe: mailto:ontolog-forum-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Shared Files: http://ontolog.cim3.net/file/ Community Wiki:
http://ontolog.cim3.net/wiki/ To join:
http://ontolog.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?WikiHomePage#nid1J (016)
_________________________________________________________________
Message Archives: http://ontolog.cim3.net/forum/ontolog-forum/
Config Subscr: http://ontolog.cim3.net/mailman/listinfo/ontolog-forum/
Unsubscribe: mailto:ontolog-forum-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Shared Files: http://ontolog.cim3.net/file/
Community Wiki: http://ontolog.cim3.net/wiki/
To join: http://ontolog.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?WikiHomePage#nid1J (017)
|