A lexicographical whodunnit, 12 May 2023

Here is the abstract of the talk to be given by Dr. Fredric Dolezal at our Annual Meeting in 2023 (see the Events page for more details).

On First Looking into Louis-Lucien Bonaparte’s Copy of Wilkins’s and Lloyd’s Dictionaries: A Lexicographical Whodunnit

Fredric Dolezal, University of Georgia

While conducting a census of library holdings of John Wilkins’s Essay (1668), which includes topical and alphabetical dictionaries of ordinary English words and phrases, I discovered an intriguing copy which contains copious, even voluminous, handwritten manuscript notes that show a close reading and engagement with the lexicographic content of the print artifact, even to the extent of binding within the text interleaf pages to supplement and expand these notes. Especially interesting is the introduction of illustrative quotations into the Essay from a variety of literary sources – most notably from Jonathan Swift’s A Tale of Tub first printed in 1704 – which most likely precedes Samuel Johnson’s dictionary, and most certainly, the New English Dictionary edited by James Murray. Are we looking at the beginnings of a derivative work of lexicography? Is this a dictionary in progress by an as-yet unknown scribal hand? Or is it the passionate pursuit of an unnamed and unknowable arm-chair intellectual engaged in his or her own textual and semantic analysis? Along the way we will explore how ink, paper, watermarks and the transcribed illustrative quotations offer clues for dating the notes. The audience will be invited to participate in this forensic dictionary whodunnit.

Abstracts of upcoming talks

Here are the abstracts of the talks to be given at our February 2023 seminar (see the Events page for more details).

Nordic loanwords in the English language

Félix Duconseille (Strasbourg)

The goal of this work, as part of my internship during the second year of Master, was to list and index the loanwords coming from Nordic and Uralic languages in the English language, in order to analyse the usage restricted to each language and to certain periods of time. On the basis of the OED dictionary I filtered the loanwords by language of the etymon, then sort them chronologically and by field in order to identify if there were recurrent themes.

My main results were that the words from Danish, Norwegian and Swedish are principally related to the scientific field, and to the geology in particular, whereas those coming from Icelandic are related to the mythology, and the Faeroese loanwords are related to nature. As for the Finnish, loanwords also science terms, but are also related to the culture, as the sauna and the sisu for instance. However, concerning the Hungarian language, in its loanwords, the spelling of origin is regularly respected in English. Nonetheless, the Hungarian loanwords rarely have a clear etymology because of the other languages influences (Italian, Latin, Arabic, Turkish). Furthermore, it is important to note that words coming from Old Norse and Proto-Scandinavian have undergone few changes, and are as quite as the origin word in contemporary English, such as callcake and fast.

To conclude, my results show that the English language, as a Germanic language, had a direct impact with Danish, Norwegian and Swedish. Numerous words are related to a specific period of time, and to a very specific context. What is captivating is to notice that some words are used only in a single part of the English-speaking community, or that some words are used with a different spelling, or even another interpretation.

Defining Old English: periodisation in dictionaries of Old English from the seventeenth to the twenty-first century

Dr Rachel Fletcher

Since the Old English began to be established as an object of academic pursuit in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, lexicographers have been attempting to document its vocabulary. In doing so, they have helped to codify the idea of Old English as a period of linguistic history – a stage in the development of English that has certain characteristics and is exemplified by certain medieval texts. However, any attempt at defining precise periods in linguistic history faces an unavoidable challenge in the gradual nature of linguistic change, and historical lexicography is no exception. When we examine dictionaries of Old English more closely, it becomes apparent that their representations of Old English as a period are often unstable and inconsistent. This instability is particularly noticeable when it comes to identifying the end of the Old English period, the point that marks the limit of the dictionary’s coverage of the historical linguistic record.

Using examples from major dictionaries of Old English from the seventeenth century to the present day, I show how generations of lexicographers have wrestled with the question of when the Old English period ended. How have lexicographers reconciled – or failed to reconcile – the gradual nature of linguistic change with the definitive character expected of a dictionary? What can this tell us about developments in lexicography and in History of English scholarship, and what are the implications for the study of Old English today?

Faroese place names in Danish 17th-century documents, 17 May 2019

Here is the abstract of the talk to be given by Miro Metsämuuronen at our Annual Meeting in 2019 (see the Events page for more details).

Faroese place names in Danish 17th-century documents

Miro Metsämuuronen, University of Helsinki

I will present some aspects of my dissertation project, the final goal of which is to provide a description of the phonological development of the Faroese language. Faroese itself is a North Germanic language spoken in the Danish self-governed territory of the Faroe Islands and it derives historically from Old West Scandinavian.

Throughout the 17th and 18th century, land taxation registers and accounts were issued by the Danish bailiff’s office in the Faroes as a part of collecting annual lease on the crown’s land on the islands. The Faroese place names written down in these extant documents (from 1584 onwards) make up our most extensive source material for studying the development of the Faroese language before the end of the 18th century.

I will speak about the special challenges related to working with these documents, show examples and discuss ways of interpreting the place name material distorted by Danish spelling. I will also demonstrate how a simple HTML-interface can be employed for annotating poorly-structured (documentary) data sets, allowing the busy philologist to better concentrate on his research. Once finished, my thesis will hopefully even include a digitally compiled lexicon over the Faroese language fragments attested in the various sources.

Changing religious terminology in medieval England, 4 May 2018

Here is the abstract of the talk to be given by Prof. Olga Timofeeva at our Annual Meeting in 2018 (see the Events page for more details).

Vices and Virtues: Pastoral care and lexical innovation in the thirteenth century

Olga Timofeeva, University of Zurich

The religious life of western Europe around 1200 saw a remarkable re-orientation towards greater emphasis on moral instruction of the laity, especially, following the decisions of the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) and the spread of mendicant orders from the 1220s onwards (d’Avray 1985: 13–16). It was now obligatory that the Christians of both sexes confessed their sins and received the Communion at least once a year (Jones 2011: 2–3). Obliged to preach, instruct, receive confessions, and perform other spiritual ministrations in the vernacular, the clergy had to approach these tasks with an arsenal of English religious terminology that could name and explain the persons of the Trinity, the main points of the Creed, the seven deadly sins, the sacraments, the Ten Commandments, the formulas used in confession and baptism, and so on. In one of the key subdomains of the religious lexis – terminology for vices and virtues – a peculiar division of vocabulary along etymological lines was taking shape: English-based lexemes were used to denote sins (greediness, lust, pride, sloth, wrath), whereas lexemes to denote virtues were predominantly French in origin (charity, chastity, diligence, humility, patience, temperance). Whether these distributions have a sociolinguistic dimension is addressed in this paper. In particular, I aim at establishing the patterns that have determined survival and loss of old (English) lexemes and adoption of new (French) ones. I take into account frequencies of individual Old English terms (if available) in the DOEC and track geographic distributions of old and new terms in early Middle English, by means of LAEME mapping function. As in my previous study (Timofeeva fc), lexical change in the religious domain is reconstructed against the social changes within the church, such as the new ways of pastoral instruction and preaching, by examining the specificity of social networks within the clergy and between the clergy and secular communities.

References

d’Avray, David L. 1985. The Preaching of the Friars: Sermons Diffused from Paris before 1300. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

DOEC = The Dictionary of Old English Corpus in Electronic Form. 2009. Ed. by Antonette diPaolo Healey, with John Price Wilkin and Xin Xiang. Toronto: University of Toronto. http://tapor.library.utoronto.ca/doecorpus/ (accessed on 20 July 2017).

Jones, David. 2011. Friars’ Tales: Thirteenth-century exempla from the British Isles. Manchester Medieval Sources Series. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Laing, Margaret. 2013–. A Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English, 1150–1325, Version 3.2 Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh. http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/ihd/laeme2/laeme2.html.

Timofeeva, Olga. Fc. Survival and loss of Old English religious vocabulary between 1150 and 1350. English Language and Linguistics special issue for 2018.

Japan(ese) and dictionaries, 2 Feb 2018

Here are the abstracts of the two excellent papers presented at our most recent seminar, focusing on the latest and the earliest dictionaries from Japanese to a European language.

Uusi japani-suomi sanakirja, 2017
[‘The new Japanese-Finnish dictionary, 2017’]

Pirjo-Riitta Kuusikko

Japani-Suomi sanakirja on merkittävä Japanin ja Suomen välinen yhteistyöhanke. Se on toteutettu pitkälti ystävyysyhdistysten ja etenkin Japani-Suomi yhdistyksen puheenjohtajan Haruko Hayakawan tuella. Kyseessä on laajin ja perusteellisin tähän mennessä ilmestynyt japani-suomi sanakirja. Sen sana-artikkelit runsaine esimerkkeineen valottavat monipuolisesti japanilaista kulttuuria, ajattelutapaa ja historiaa.

Sanakirjan julkaisija on Japani-Suomi yhdistys (Tokio) ja tekijät ovat projektipäällikkö Petri Niemelä (PhD) ja Pirjo-Riitta Kuusikko (MA), jotka vastasivat sana-artikkelien laatimisesta ja tarkastuksesta, sekä leksikografi Hiroyasu Kato ja prof. Kingo Yoshida. Lisäksi lukuisat muut henkilöt myötävaikuttivat sanakirjan syntyyn.

Sanakirjaprojekti sai alkunsa jo vuonna 1997 Suomen Japanin Instituutin perustavassa kokouksessa. Vuonna 2004 julkaistiin 5000 sanan perussanasto CD-levynä, mutta vasta vuonna 2017, monien vaiheiden jälkeen, julkaistiin sanakirja koko laajuudessaan painetussa muodossa. Vuoden 2018 aikana on odotettavissa digitaalinen versio.

Sanakirjassa on yli 37 000 hakusanaa, yli 11 000 yhdyssanaa, yli 2000 sanontaa ja sananlaskua sekä yli 60 000 esimerkkiä. Sivuja on 1844. Hakusanat ovat virallisen japanilaisen kana-kirjoitusjärjestelmän mukaiset.

Sana-artikkelin rakenne on seuraava: hakusana, kirjoitusasu, lainasana, sanaluokka, käännösvastine, esimerkit, synonyymit ja antonyymit, yhdyssanat, sanonnat ja sananlaskut.

Sanakirjan hinta on 250€ ja se on tilattavissa seuraavasta osoitteesta:
http://js-sanakirja.net/index_fin.html

Vocabvlario da lingoa de Iapam (1603) and spellings of Japanese words in the letters of the English EIC merchants in Japan

Samuli Kaislaniemi

Early seventeenth-century English East India Company (EIC) merchants had a vested interest in learning local and regional languages spoken in the East Indies. In this light, it is surprising that the EIC did not invest in the creation of language-learning materials for its employees. In contrast, Catholic missionaries systematically studied and codified Asian languages, as part of their work in spreading the gospel, and established printing presses to disseminate the fruits of their labours. This study looks at whether EIC merchants in Japan might have had the use of a missionary-compiled dictionary.

The Jesuit mission press was established in Japan in 1590. By the time the EIC arrived in 1613, the press had been used to print at least 70 different works. One of these was the first dictionary from Japanese to a European language (Portuguese), Vocabvlario da lingoa de Iapam (1603). The EIC withdrew from Japan in 1623, but a sizeable corpus of documents from their venture survives. There is no explicit record of the EIC merchants having owned and used a copy of the Jesuit dictionary. This study looks at indirect evidence, the spellings of Japanese words and names in the letters written by the EIC merchants in Japan, and compares them with spellings found in the Vocabvlario. It finds that although the EIC merchants do not appear to have referred to the Jesuit dictionary for the spelling of Japanese words in general, their spellings of Japanese proper names shows clear influence from Portuguese.

Hapax legomena in diachronic corpora, 12 May 2017

Here is the abstract of the talk given by Dr Mark Kaunisto at our Annual Meeting in 2017.

Hapax legomena in diachronic corpora: neologisms or just rare words?

Mark Kaunisto, University of Tampere

The aim to quantify the productivity of derivational affixes, i.e. the potential that affixes have to produce new words, has attracted a great deal of attention from linguists in the last couple of decades. The same goes for the interest in tracking historical trends in the popularity of affixes; at some points, affixes may have been used more to produce new words than at other times. One method that has been used to this end is to examine the numbers of first citations of words with a given affix in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). However, this method has been criticized because of the inaccuracies and gaps in the dictionary. Instead, Baayen (1991) and others have focused on the occurrences of so-called hapax legomena or hapaxes in corpora (i.e., items occurring only once), the basic rationale behind this being the fact that neologisms in corpora are most likely found among low-frequency items. Different indexes indicating the degree of productivity of affixes have been proposed, with the number of hapax legomena playing a major role.

It has been observed that hapaxes in corpora are not necessarily new words, but that they may also include items which are just rare or even archaic. If we consider this from the point of view of diachronic studies, it is relevant to ask whether hapaxes in corpora representing different periods contain genuine neologisms in proportions which are similar from one period to another. The Early Modern English period (1500-1700), for example, is known for the great experimentation in the application of different word-formational patterns, resulting in a high number of superfluous lexical items, and many unnecessary words were later dropped from use. One could then assume that the ratio between recent coinages and other words among the hapaxes is not necessarily constant, but trends of lexical expansion and obsolescence may be reflected among such words in varying degrees. To examine the issue more closely, subsets of hapax legomena were examined in the three subperiods of the Corpus of Late Modern English Texts 3.0 (1710-80, 1780-1850, and 1850-1920). From each section of the corpus, hapaxes beginning with the letter m were first examined, and the dates of publication of the texts in which the hapaxes were found were compared with the dates of first citations of the words in the OED. In addition, hapaxes ending in ‑ity and ‑ness as well as ‑ic and ‑ical were analysed in a similar way. The proportions of hapaxes occurring in texts within 50 years of the first OED citations of the words OED were observed in each subperiod of the corpus.

Based on the results of the study, it is argued that the study of hapaxes in corpora and their first citations in the OED in combination could add to the accuracy in examining productivity of affixes, as attention is primarily paid to those hapaxes which were verifiably recent in the corpus. Although the OED is used as the basis of this verification, the result of such a process does not simply mean a general step towards embracing the OED data as such. As corpus hapaxes include many antedatings to the OED entries, combining the observations from corpora and the OED can be regarded as bringing the benefits of both resources together.

Latin neologisms, 20 Nov 2015

HSHL was privileged to hear a talk from Dr. Reijo Pitkäranta, docent in Latin at the Department of Classical Languages at the University of Helsinki, on November 20 entitled ‘Latinan uudissanat Turun akatemian dissertaatioissa 1642–1828’ (‘Latin Neologisms in Dissertations of the Academy of Turku 1642–1828’). These dissertations, dating from the foundation of the Academy until its removal to Helsinki, represent a large untapped source of lexical information about late Latin terminology. The paper identified and recorded new words as well as those which could be antedated from established dictionary sources, such as the Oxford English Dictionary, in both English and Latin.

Among the fascinating items Pitkäranta has unearthed are caffeomantia (1782), gas (1697; particularly interesting because of the scholarly disputes over the nature of gas in the eighteenth century), lexicographia (1646), pargasites (a local Finnish green inosilicate mineral from Pargas), and vitresco (1742).

A pargasite crystal

A pargasite crystal

It is of particular interest to see Pitkäranta’s material from the point of view of scholars whose work is almost exclusively in the vernacular tradition. Late Latin neologisms clearly have the ability to disseminate into the various vernaculars, even as late as the early nineteenth century, a fact not always clear from recent vernacular lexicography. The slow decline of Latin as a language of science has undermined its perceived value as a source, which makes Pitkäranta’s paper a timely reminder.

Symposium on Approaches to English Historical Lexicography and Lexicology — OX-LEX 4

The fourth symposium in the HEL-LEX series was held March 25th to 27th, 2015, at Pembroke College, Oxford. OX-LEX 4 — the acronym flexibly reflecting the host city — was a wonderfully successfully event both academically and socially, and the organisers Lynda Mugglestone, Philip Durkin, Kathryn Allan, and Edmund Weiner are to be congratulated for a conference where nothing went wrong and everything went right. Rarely able to resist a cheesy literary paraphrase, I believed myself very near heaven, during those languid days at Pembroke. With apologies I move swiftly on with the report.

Pembroke

It is no exaggeration to say that Oxford is the centre of the English-speaking world when it comes to historical lexicography, and given such a venue it was perhaps no surprise that the turnout of world-class scholars and professional lexicographers was truly outstanding. Three excellent plenary lectures by Clive Upton, Toni Healey, and John Simpson set a rhythm for the three days, each managing to entertain and to educate in equal measure. Indeed, the traditional HEL-LEX spirit of good-natured collegiality was in evidence throughout the symposium both during the sessions and between them. It is difficult and perhaps a little unfair to single out individual papers when the overall quality was so high, but a couple of intellectual highlights for me were Megan Tiddeman’s paper on the mixed-language business accounts of the merchant William Cantelowe and the joint paper of Ondřej Tichý and Jan Čermák on lexical obsolescence and loss. I was also most happy to chair a great session for Kathryn Lowe, Marta Sylvanowich, Ian Lancashire and Elisa Tersigni, and Hans Sauer. A final gem came post festum in the form of Peter Gilliver’s brief but masterful talk about the history of lexicography in Oxford, tracing the lives of lexicographers from John of Garland in the thirteenth century all the way to the present day.

Three HSHL members were in attendance: Rod McConchie, Janne Skaffari, and I. Rod and I gave papers and Janne bravely fought through a cold to spread the word about the society. Rod spoke about the medical doctor and lexicographer Robert James and his magnum opus, A Medicinal Dictionary (1743). James was a friend and collaborator of the most famous English lexicographer and Pembroke alumnus Dr. Samuel Johnson, and Rod’s fascinating paper delved deep into Johnsonian lore about the persona of James contrasting those stories with alternative contemporary accounts. Rod also gave a short introduction to HSHL at the closing session.

For my part, I presented a multilingual and corpus-driven perspective to Late Modern lexicography, discussing the work of the Multilingual Practices in the History of Written English project currently ongoing at the University of Tampere, some statistical methods for identifying dictionary-worthy phraseological units using a combination of frequency information and statistical association measures, and some early findings on how they relate to actual lexicographical practice in the eighteenth century.

In closing, it was a great thrill to see the HEL-LEX concept thriving. News about the time and place of the next HEL-LEX symposium will be officially announced in the not-too-distant future.

Historical lexicography in Helsinki, 27 Feb 2015

Dictionary-making is alive and kicking vigorously in Finland. The Institute for the Languages of Finland (Kotimaisten kielten keskus) has a number on its list of publications, and more are in progress. The newly incorporated HSHL held its first seminar on February 27. A large audience was privileged to hear two highly informative and entertaining talks by

Pirkko Kuutti
Pirkko Kuutti

and Heikki Hurtta
Heikki Hurtta

on two very significant dictionaries currently in progress, the Vanhan kirjasuomen sanakirja (Dictionary of Old Literary Finnish, of which two volumes, A–K, have been published), and the Suomen murteiden sanakirja (Dictionary of Finnish Dialects), eight volumes of which have been published to date, taking this work from A–KURVOTTAA.

Both of these projects have been long in gestation, springing from ideas originally mooted towards the end of the nineteenth century, but with the eventual provision of staff and funding, both have made good progress more recently. They both cover somewhat different periods, the Dictionary of Old Literary Finnish ending at 1810, while the Dictionary of Finnish Dialects regards contemporary dialect as part of its remit. The former indicates the depth and strength of publishing in Finland from the sixteenth century on, and the latter benefits from the painstaking work of Finnish dialectologists over the years, who have amassed one of the finest collections of such material anywhere.

It’s worth checking out the publications list of the Institute to see what splendid work the Institute has done and the range it covers.

Pirkko Kuutti

Heikki Hurtta

Rod McConchie

Webmaster’s note: See also the tweets from the seminar.

The brief history of HEL-LEX

Although the Helsinki Society for Historical Lexicography was founded in 2014, the idea that a new association devoted to historical lexicography and lexicology was needed had been developing over the preceding ten years. It all started in 2004, when at the initial suggestion of Prof. Terttu Nevalainen Rod McConchie sent an email around to colleagues at the Research Unit for Variation and Change in English at the University of Helsinki inviting those interested in the history of dictionaries to a meeting to discuss the possibility of organising a symposium on the topic. That initial brainwave soon led to the first of three successful symposia, all three organised by largely the same committee in 2005, 2008 and 2012.

The first HEL-LEX symposium, entitled “HEL-LEX: New Approaches in English Historical Lexis”, was held in Helsinki in March 2005. The symposium was organised in the Vuorikatu premises of the Research Unit for Variation and Change in English to which most members of the organising committee belonged. The symposium attracted a surprising amount of interest with participants from ten countries around the world and three world-class plenary speakers: Zoltán Kövecses, Gabriele Stein and Ian Lancashire. The selected proceedings of the symposium were edited by R. W. McConchie, Olga Timofeeva, Heli Tissari, and Tanja Säily and published in 2006 by Cascadilla Proceedings Project.

The second HEL-LEX symposium was held three years later, this time at Lammi biological station. Despite the remote location, or perhaps because of it, the second symposium managed to replicate the success of the inaugural meeting, again attracting participants from around the world. The plenary speakers were again leading figures in the field: Julie Coleman, Elizabeth Knowles and the late Dieter Kastovsky. The selected proceedings, again published by Cascadilla Proceedings Project, were edited by R. W. McConchie, Alpo Honkapohja, and Jukka Tyrkkö.

The third HEL-LEX symposium, the last to be held in Finland, followed the established model. Organised in March 2012 at Tvärminne biological station, HEL-LEX 3 was once again a success with the added attraction of a long walk on the frozen sea. For the third time in a row, the symposium also managed to invite superb plenary speakers: Michael Adams, Philip Durkin and Lynda Mugglestone. The proceedings volume, published by Cascadilla, was edited by R. W. McConchie, Teo Juvonen, Mark Kaunisto, Minna Nevala, and Jukka Tyrkkö.

Over the years, core members of the organising team had been discussing the idea of formalising the activities behind HEL-LEX in the form of a scholarly association. It was becoming clear that the time was approaching to let someone else organise future symposia under the HEL-LEX banner, and at the same time there was also a growing sense that the need of scholarship in historical lexicography, not only in English but across all languages, could be advanced by a society capable of organising events and promoting research. The idea of such an association was first given public voice at the closing discussion at HEL-LEX 3 and the proposal was met with encouraging enthusiasm. Delightfully, more than one member of the HEL-LEX family also stepped forward with an offer to organise the next meeting. In post-symposium discussions it was decided that organising the first HEL-LEX outside Finland would be trusted to Lynda Mugglestone and Philip Durkin at the University of Oxford. HEL-LEX 4, also known as OX-LEX, will be held in March 2015.