Noah Webster

One American who objected to the personal style of S.Johnson's dictionary was a sober, pious New Rngland schoolmaster, named Noah Webster. "Johnson was always depressed by poverty", he said tartly. 'He was naturally indolent and seldom wrote until he was urged by want. Hence... he was compelled to эгсрагс his manuscripts in haste".

The judgment was hard, but so was Noah Webster. In his view dictionary making allowed no compromise, permitted no weakness. Webster set a standard for excellence in dictionary making that ontmues to this day.

During the Revolutionary war he joined the state militia in 1777 marched to the fighting at Saratoga. By the lime his company arrived, though, the battle was over. Webster and other men turned around and marched home again.

He attended Yale College and five years after graduation, in 1783, published his Blue-Back Speller, America's first speller, grammar, and reader. It was a tremendous success.

The money the book earned freed Webster from the need to work for a living. He could spend his time doing what he really wanted - — write dictionaries.

Го train for the task, he set about studying languages and in time he learned twenty-six, including Sanskrit.

He was aware of differences between British and American English, and said that American English had grown apart from the mother tongue.

In 1806 Webster published Л Compendious Dictionary of the English Language. By Compendious he meant "concise, brief, a summary". Like many writers of his day, however, Webster never used a short, clear word where a long, hard one would do. And like most dictionary makers, he was fond of elegant, obscure words.

Of the 37,000 words in Webster's Dictionary about 5,000 were native to America. Squash, skunk, raccoon, hickory, caucus, presidency, apple-sauce, and bullfrog arc examples.

He also began recording words as he heard people use them.

He also simplified spelling rules (favor instead of favour, public, music instead of publick, musick), dropped one / in traveller, and transposed the last two letters in English words like centre, used hed for head. Some of these changes were adopted, and some were rejected.

The Compendious sold well, but it was only a warm-up for Webster's next project: An American, Dictionary of the English Language. He worked for it for the next 22 years; it was finished in 1821 when he was 70. He was afraid not to survive to write the last word. It was zygomafic,

The dictionary carried 12,000 American words not registered in Johnson's dictionary.

There was a lot of criticism for including "low" words.

Unlike his speller and first dictionary, though, Webster's two-volume dictionary did not sell well. Its price of $15 was more than people wanted to pay for a dictionary.

Despite advanced age and dwindling funds, he started on yet a third dictionary. For another 12 years, working alone in his study he revised his 2-volumc work.

In it he changed the spelling of words that people objected to (wimin, lung) as now he felt a dictionary should mirror the language as people used it, not as a dictionary maker would like to see it.

In 1840 Webster finished his last dictionary. It carried 5,000 more words. [Jut he couldn't find a publisher for his work. So, ever independent, ever walking his own path, he borrowed money from a bank, found a printer, and published it himself. He placed a price of $15 on his dictionary, but again people wouldn't pay it.

Bankrupt and on his death bed three years later, the old wordsmilh suddenly sat up, told his grown children that a "crepuscule" was falling over him, settled back on his pillow, and died. He might have said "twilight", but he chose instead to pay a final loving tribute to special words.

Webster's children faced the problem of what to do with the unsold copies of his last dictionary and how to pay off the printer, George and Charles Merriam of Springfield, MA.

The debt was paid off when the Merriam brothers bought the dictionary and legalised the name of Merriarn-Webster. They neglected, however, to legalize the single name Webster. Today, if a company wants to publish a dictionary and use the name Webster in the title, it can do so. The name can be used by anyone. But the G. and C.Mcrriarn Company, the publisher of the Merriam-Webster dictionaries is the only company today that continues Noah Webster's work.

On September 24, 1847, the two Merriam brothers brought out the first Merriam-Webster dictionary. Since that year, the company published new editions in 1864, 1890, 1909, and 1934.

In 1961 the company published Webster's Third New International Dictionary of the English Language, Unabridged. The language had grown enormously since Webster's day. The last word of 450,000 words in it was zyzzogeton, the word that would have delighted the old wordsmith.

(From The Story of the Dictionary by Robert Kraske,

___________ N. -Y.: Harcouil Hracc Jovanovich, 1975, pp.15- 18)

Lexicography in Britain and lexicography in the USA have their own traditions and distinctly different identities. American dictionaries, for example, in contrast to the British tradition set by S. Johnson, present encyclopedic information: [hey provide pictures, entries for real people and fictious characters, many geographical entries and detailed taxonomies for flora and fauna. American dictionaries usually give information discriminating among synonyms while British usually just list synonyms.

Yet, British and US dictionary producers have recently begun to cooperate and exchange principles for the sake of both. Some leading publishing companies, like Longman and Merriam-Webster, have entered partnerships, the result of which are new British-American dictionaries: the Longman New Universal Dictionary (1982) and the Longman

Dictionary of the English Language (1984). Both of them made wide use of the text of

the American Merriam-Webster English Collegiate Dictionary. Another example of

cooperation, this time from east to west, is in the field of learners' dictionaries: the

Oxford Student's Dictionary of American English (1983) was based on the British

Oxford Student's Dictionary of Current English (1978) (seeR. llson in/Суша 1999: 83-

84/).;

p. How modern dictionaries are made. Some problems of lexicography!)

In the 80's computer applications radically altered the painstaking manual methods of compiling dictionaries. Now there are numerous prestigious computerized language databases like British National Corpus, Cambridge International Corpus, Longman Written American Corpus, and Longman Spoken American Corpus, that guarantee a full, representative picture of written and spoken modern English. These corpora radically changed the potentials of lexicography concerning size, type and updating of dictionaries, and search for the entries.

But computers are only convenient and effective tools that may help to achieve the tasks the compiler sets. A new dictionary is and has always been designed by lexicographers.

The kind of a dictionary to be compiled depends mainly on the compiler's professional intuition. The compiler should be aware of the achievements of academic lexicography, of market needs and funding sources because making a new dictionary is an expensive publishing operation. It requires enormous effort and is a time-consuming job for a team of professionals.

Compilers of any dictionary face the same lexicographical problems. First of all, they need to decide:

1) which lexical units should be entered in a dictionary,

2) what information should be given about them, and

3) how to present the lexical items and information about them in the most efficient way.

Handling these problems requires solid lexicological knowledge and an innovative mind. Different approaches to these decisions accounts for variances among dictionaries. If decision-making policies are scientifically grounded they are thoroughly described in the dictionary preface. Let us consider these problems more thoroughly.

Поиск по сайту: