Existing Latin English Dictionary example essay topic

An Examination Of How Far Elyot's Dictionary, An Examination Of How Far Elyot's Dictionary, Johnson's Dictionary And The Oxford English Dictionary In any discussion of the way in which dictionaries reflect their era we must consider three things: the intellectual environment which gave rise to a given dictionary; the factors that contributed to its compilation and how each one effected subsequent lexicography in England. Let us look first at the Renaissance to see how contemporary concerns about language helped shape the dictionaries of the day. The Renaissance, (circa 1500-1650), was a period of revolution. Changes were wrought in virtually every area of life and this necessitated a fitting development in the vernacular because every class of man wanted access to the fruits of the Renaissance; its influence would have been limited if works of the period had not been translated into English.

Thus the language grew to accommodate these changes and several key points heavily influenced this expansion: The ' Revival of learning' (that is, the renewed interest in Classical literature); the introduction of the printing press by Caxton in 1476; better education and the expansion of trade with the growth of the Empire; all these factors led to an awareness of the deficiencies of the vernacular to reflect such momentous changes. The printing press provided the literate public with dozens of replica texts but, without a recognised standard, spelling varied greatly, especially from writer to writer. Moreover the novice reader was still unable to understand the borrowed Latin words that littered the translations, so common in the sixteenth century. Thus, during the Renaissance dictionaries were either Latin-English or English-Latin.

Sir Thomas Elyot began the tradition of Latin-English dictionaries. Elyot, (1490? - 1546), was a true Renaissance spirit who compiled and translated books on education, language and government in the vernacular. His work led to a realisation of the inadequacies of the English language and its dictionaries when compared to the classical sources he translated and consulted.

Consequently in 1538 he compiled his own dictionary. In the preface to this dictionary Elyot criticised existing dictionaries in the vernacular, ' I well perceived, that all though Dictionaries had been gathered one of an other, yet nevertheless in each of them are omitted some Latin words,'. He claims that not only does his dictionary contain one thousand more words than any existing Latin-English dictionary, but it contained ' propre termes belongynge to law and phi sike, the name of divers heroes known among and also a good number of fishes founded as well in our ocean as in our rivers '. From this we can see that the nature of Elyot's dictionary was tailored to the changing conditions of life brought about by the Renaissance. He tried to cater for the intellectual awakening that took place at the beginning of the sixteenth century and the new areas of learning that it opened up to the readership such as science and law. How then did Elyot go about compiling such an innovative work, since he worked without an English precedent?

As Starnes (Footnote p. 51) says ' Elyot was a Humanist; and the authors he read and admired were, with a few exceptions, the ancient Greeks and Romans. It is quite natural, then, that in the compilation of his Dictionary Elyot should turn to those compilers who had been concerned largely with classical writers and with classical Latin. ' For this reason the only sources Elyot cites are classical, for example, Tortellius, Nestor, Perot tus, Varro and Festus, all of whom had written works on the ancient languages. This is characteristic of the age thanks to the revival of learning. His main source was the Latin Dictionarium (1502), by the Italian, Ambrosius Calepinus. Interestingly enough seven of Calepinus' cited sources are the same as those of Elyot, which suggests that Elyot drew on his sources by way of Calepinus.

More importantly though is Elyot's adoption of several elemental features from Calepinus which went on to serve as the basis for all subsequent dictionaries. Like Calepinus', Elyot's Dictionary (1538) entries are arranged etymologically. Among these entries are proper names, and the illustrations are supported by demonstrative quotations. We only have to compare entries to see how similar the two texts are. Elyot's Dictionary (1538) Calepinus' Dictionarium (1520) Diogenes a famous philosophers name.

Preface Instead, the spirit in which Johnson wrote was as a man who recognised the flaws in his vernacular but was realistic enough to see that wide scale linguistic reform, such as had been attempted during the sixteenth century by the likes of Smith, Hart or Bullokar, was impractical and overly ambitious. we laugh at the elixir that promises to prolong life with equal justice may the lexicographer be derided, who shall imagine that his dictionary can embalm his language, to enchain syllables, and to lash the wind, are equally the undertakings of pride, unwilling to measure its desires by its strength. Thus Johnson made the best of a bad situation, so to speak. ' It has been asserted,' he said, ' that for the law to be " known is of more importance than to be " right Change, . is not made without inconvenience, even from worse to better. ' pester reads thus; ' A multitude of writers daily pester the world with their insufferable stuff. (Dryden) ' He also includes some words which, although used by only one author, he considers to be worthy of common usage, such as ' a vernacular about which later linguists could make choices. In other areas too, we see a personal, even human element to his work. Given that it was his aim to faithfully record the language, it stood to reason that there would be areas of it with which he would be unfamiliar, such as technical terms or rural colloquialisms.

Often he openly admitted defeat, in the case of ' etch for example, which he simply explains as ' A country word, of which I know not the meaning. ' In this respect we see the nature of his approach; to do his best even in areas where he was not very well informed. Moreover it is a revealing comment about the experimental nature of the period. This applies too, to scientific terms. In his illustration of these we clearly feel Johnson's presence since, rather than omit them, he defines them in a ' language' he feels at home with.

For example, under ' Preface In the years to follow the prevailing opinion towards what a dictionary should be altered. It is helpful to examine this attitude to see the motivation behind the Oxford English Dictionary. Johnson's dictionary remained dominant. Chiefly he had looked back to the past to harness a linguistic model for the future. However Johnson had been concerned with etymology only to the extent that he distinguished between Germanic and Latin sources. Later lexicographers were more interested in the history of the language for its own sake to try and see how the vernacular had progressed.

The period leading up to the publication of the OED was characterised by this desire to trace the language back to its roots. In the late Eighteenth century the emphasis shifted to the spoken word, in contrast to Johnson who had been concerned chiefly with the written language and had paid little attention to areas such as pronunciation or dialect. In 1775 Richardson's dictionary worked with these new concerns in mind, hoping to explain the connection between words by way of etymology. His dictionary was more radical and less elitist than Johnson's, in the sense that it dealt with a broader range of words and was thus more comprehensive. In many respects it was the for runner for the OED. Certainly they both tried to tackle many of the same deficiencies that were becoming so evident in lexicography; aspects such as the lack of etymological knowledge.

In the latter half of the Eighteenth and the first half of the Nineteenth century several important events influenced the eventual compilation of the OED. In 1783 Sir William Jones discovered the link between Sanskrit, a language of ancient India, and Latin which completed the Indo-European family of languages. Alterations which had been wrought over the ages rendered languages seemingly disparate but as it transpired the Indo-European group of languages were all linked. Looking at this table for the verb ' to be' the line of derivation is self evident; Old English eom (am) im sum eim i a smi eart (art) is es ei asi is (is) ist est esti asti sindon (are) situm sumus esme n sm as sindon (are) sirup est is este sth a sindon (are) sind sunt eis i santi This link enabled linguists to establish rules applying to sound changes which assisted research in etymology. Without this discovery the OED would lack much of the information it provided on the history of the vernacular, which in turn made it an invaluable aid to research in the language.

In 1822 the philologist Jacob Grimm established a set of rules that accounted for the correspondences between some Germanic consonants and other languages in the Indo-European family. For example the letter ' p' in Latin and Greek became the letter ' f' in the Germanic languages. Thus instead of a disparity between the Latin ' piscus' and the English ' fish' it became apparent that the two words were of the same origin. Again ' Grimm's Law' was an essential discovery on the path towards the level of etymological knowledge that facilitated the compilation of the OED. Finally the establishment of the Philological Society of London in 1842, represented the spirit of these changes.

In 1857 at a meeting of the society a committee was established to collect all the words not already documented in a dictionary with a view to publishing a supplement to existing dictionaries. One of the members, Dean Trench, already renowned for his works on the language, read a paper to the Society "On Some Deficiencies in our English Dictionaries', a paper which set out the historical principles with which a dictionary should concord, viz. the recording of every word occurring in literature since the year 1000 with its etymology. Like Johnson before him, the editor A H Murray attributed primary authority to ' all the great English writers of all ages'. It was in this environment that the OED was born. However, although still the definitive British dictionary and an immeasurable improvement on the individual publications of the past, the OED is not critically unassailable.

For example, without the popularized interest in the history of the language, it seem unlikely that the thousands of volunteers that researched the dictionary would have done so. Although this was an essential part of its being, it obviously threw the doors open to human inaccuracies. It is not unlikely that words were omitted purely because they were overlooked or even due to a personal preference in texts researched. In fact many modern criticisms of the OED are over its dubious policy of lemmatisation: who decided, and how what would or would not be included? Since it would evidently be both impossible and misleading to include " every