Lexicography

languagehat
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March 08, 2009
OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LEXICOGRAPHY.
The good people at Oxford UP sent me a review copy of The Oxford History of Engl
ish Lexicography; they must have been pretty confident I'd like it, because it's
an expensive two-volume set, and their confidence was not misplaced. This is th
e best reference history I've read in a long time, and I feel confident in sayin
g that if you love dictionaries, you need to set some time aside for reading it
(assuming you can convince your library to spring for a copy).
OUP's description says:
Part one of Volume I explores the early development of glosses and bilingual
and multilingual dictionaries and examines their influence on lexicographical m
ethods and ideas. Part two presents a systematic history of monolingual dictiona
ries of English and includes extensive chapters on Johnson, Webster and his succ
essors in the USA, and the OED. It also contains descriptions of the development
of dictionaries of national and regional varieties, and of Old and Middle Engli
sh, and concludes with an account of the computerization of the OED.
The specialized dictionaries described in Volume II include dictionaries of
science, dialects, synonyms, etymology, pronunciation, slang and cant, quotation
s, phraseology, and personal and place names. This volume also includes an accou
nt of the inception and development of dictionaries developed for particular use
rs, especially foreign learners of English.
That gives you an idea of the contents, but the only way to show you its excelle
nces is to quote extensively, which I shall do. (I will doubtless be posting fur
ther about the book, because I haven't even finished the first volume yet.)
From the first chapter, Hans Sauer on medieval glosses and glossaries, we learn
that "The first author who named his (Latin) compilation Dictionarius was appare
ntly John of Garland (c.1195-c.1272), but this title was slow to catch on. The l
arge and popular Latin dictionaries from the Middle Ages have titles such as Ele
mentarium (i.e. for beginners), Derivationes (i.e. assembling word-families), Ca
tholicon (i.e. a comprehensive collection), Medulla (i.e. the quintessence), etc
. ... The term 'dictionary' came to be used more frequently in the course of the
seventeenth century." Later he tells us that Johannes Balbus of Genoa was "the
first lexicographer to achieve complete alphabetization (from the first to the l
ast letter of each word)." Among the delightful trivia Sauer mentions are the "r
are Latin lemma... bradigabo (badrigabo) in Epinal-Erfurt 131, the meaning of wh
ich is unknown; it was glossed as felduuop (Ep) / felduus (Erf), the meaning of
which is also unknown," and "the so-called 'Tremulous Hand of Worcester'":
In the first half of the thirteenth century, a monk at Worcester with shaky
handwriting entered about 50,000 glosses in about twenty OE manuscripts, partly
in early Middle English, but mostly in Latin. Apparently, even in the early thir
teenth century, English had changed so much that Old English could no lonager be
readily understood and had to be explained. Why the Tremulous Hand took such pa
ins to do this is, however, not quite clear.
From Donna M.T.Cr. Farina and George Durman's chapter on bilingual dictionaries
of English and Russian (yes, there's an entire chapter on bilingual dictionaries
of English and Russian!), we find that "The first English translations from Rus
sian began to appear in the sixteenth century. By contrast, the first Russian tr
anslation from English, a geometry textbook, did not appear until 1625... The fi
rst English grammar to appear in Russian (1766) was published seventy years afte
r the first Russian grammar was printed in England." The first Russian lexicogra
pher of English was Prokhor Zhdanov (Ïðîõîð Æäàíîâ), who in 1772 published a bilingual dictio
appendix to an English grammar he translated into Russian, and in 1784 published
A New Dictionary English and Russian: Novoi slovar? Angliskoi i Rossiiskoi which
can be perused at Google Books! In discussing the late 18th and early 19th centu
ries, Farina and Durman say:
The number of English teachers, governesses, and nannies increased; this is
recorded in memoirs and travelogues published in Russian and in England, as well
as in Russian literature. English merchants in Russia were numerous as well. Ni
kolai Karamzin (1792) tells how in London he encountered a group of English merc
hants who had gathered to speak Russian in the coffee house of the stock morket;
it turned out that they had lived and done business in Saint Petersburg.
They provide detailed comparisons of the entries on particular words in a number
of dictionaries ("A comparison of related entries in Grammatin, Banks, and Alex
androv (Table 6.3.3) demonstrates how the Alexandrov dictionary indicates a word
's 'shades of meaning'").
In N.E. Osselton's chapter on "The Early Development of the English Monoligual D
ictionary," we find that Thomas Blount was "the first English compiler to provid
e etymologies for all (or nearly all) of the words entered," and JK's A New Engl
ish Dictionary (1702) "established once and for all the practice of including th
e everyday vocabulary of English alongside 'harder' words: his letter D begins w
ith a dab, a dab-chick, a dab-fish, to dabble, a dace, and a daffodell, and at t
he word girl he starts with the common meaning ('A Girl, or wench')." Nathan Bai
ley, in his Universal Etymological English Dictionary (1721), "devotes much atte
ntion to etymology, but he recognizes that this might put off readers with no kn
owledge of languages, and explains that the etymological information on each wor
d has been put within square brackets 'that they may pass it over without any ma
nner of Trouble or Inconvenience'." Benjamin Martin in 1749 developed the "usefu
l new lexicographical device... of putting unassimilated foreign words such as l
egerdemain and pronto into italics." It's fascinating to me to watch the feature
s of dictionaries that we take for granted come into existence over the centurie
s. Having taken us through the early 18th century, Osselton ends on this cliffha
nger:
In one way or another, the works of the early lexicographers thus came to in
corporate much of what we should expect to find in monolingual English dictionar
ies today. But pronunciation (beyond mere word-stress), the meaning of compound
nouns, set collocations, phrasal verbs, particles, abbreviations, idiomatic expr
essions (other than proverbs), irregular plurals, all kinds of grammatical infor
mation anything like a systematic coverage of these was to be for future generatio
ns of dictionary-makers.
I've barely scratched the surface, but further tidbits will have to await future
entries [2, 3]. I think I've given enough material to suggest why I love this b
ook so much that I've had to force myself to set it aside to do the editing by w
hich I earn my bread. The book even smells good not a minor consideration for me!
This is a true triumph of scholarship and another feather in the cap for Oxford
(I'm very much looking forward to the chapters on the OED). Posted by languageha
t at March 8, 2009 09:23 PM
Comments
The book even smells good not a minor consideration for me
OUP is notorious for impregnating its review copies with the scent of freshly ba
ked bread. Resist!
Posted by: mollymooly at March 8, 2009 11:26 PM
English, as usual, seems to be better served than most languages. Given that lex
icological traditions in other countries (I have in mind Chinese, Japanese, etc.
) have very different roots from those of English, it would be very interesting
to read a history of lexicography for those languages.
Chinese, for instance, is completely focused on the use of characters, which mea
ns that lexicography through the ages tends to be fixated on the number of chara
cters recorded. Any look at pre-modern dictionaries will show that the "word" (a
combination of one or more characters) was pretty much overlooked. I believe it
is only under the influence of Western lexicology that modern Chinese dictionar
ies started to list the meanings of combinations of characters.
In modern Japanese there is an interesting dichotomy between Chinese-style chara
cter dictionaries, which are almost like Chinese dictionaries translated into Ja
panese, and Western-style dictionaries, which list words ordered according to hi
ragana. These differences of approach have strongly coloured speakers' perceptio
ns of their own languages.
Posted by: Bathrobe at March 9, 2009 04:17 AM
"the first Russian translation from English, a geometry textbook, did not appear
until 1625...": slightly odd, given that geometry textbooks in English were ess
entially translations from Greek even into my boyhood.
Posted by: dearieme at March 9, 2009 07:33 AM
That's interesting, because Peter the Great wasn't born until 1672 (his birthday
is 9 June, one day after Frank Lloyd Wright's and mine).
Posted by: A.J.P. Iffy at March 9, 2009 07:56 AM
I find the random fact that there were translations from Russian into English in
the sixteenth century to be rather astonishing. Folkloric? Related to the Refor
mation? Anti-Catholic? Do tell.
Posted by: MattF at March 9, 2009 08:07 AM
Good question; the answer is probably in The Russian Theme in English Literature
from the Sixteenth Century to 1980, but Google Books won't let me see it.
Posted by: language hat at March 9, 2009 10:32 AM
geometry textbooks in English were essentially translations from Greek even into
my boyhood
The author / translator (Prince Ivan Elizar evich Al bertus-Dalmatskii / Àäüáåðòóñ Äîëìàöêèé)
gh his sources were Latin and English.
Posted by: MMcM at March 9, 2009 11:57 AM
Is the work of Giles Fletcher being counted?
Posted by: MMcM at March 9, 2009 12:12 PM
That's very interesting about Giles Fletcher.
During the same year, Giles was made chancellor of the diocese of Sussex and in
may the mayor.
Mayor of Sussex?
Posted by: A.J.P. Crown at March 9, 2009 12:39 PM
Oh, I like The Hakluyt Society. The President is Sir Roderick Impey Murchison &c
., &c. and the V.P. is Rear Adm. Drinkwater Bethune, C.B. His Excellency the Cou
nt de Lavradio is also on the board.
Anyone whose name is Drinkwater shouldn't become a Companion of the Bath.
Here is a picture of Sir Roderick Impey Murchison.
Admiral Drinkwater-Buffoon joined the Royal Navy at the age of thirteen, in 1815
. He retired fifty-five years later, having gained his C.B. in 1841 for service
in the first Anglo-Chinese war.
Heh. I deleted the "mayor" bit. What an awful article; somebody should do a comp
lete rewrite.
Posted by: language hat at March 9, 2009 01:31 PM
Finally, for MMcM, who speaks Portuguese: Count Lavradio.
I wasn't too sure about "chancellor of the diocese of Sussex", either.
The text next to the picture of Count Lavradio, apparently his diary, tells the
horrible story of the death of the queen of Portugal while giving birth to her 1
1th child.
Posted by: marie-lucie at March 9, 2009 04:24 PM
re "Diocese of Sussex," the C. of E. has never had a diocese so named, although
the Diocese of Chichester covers much of the same territory as is encompassed fo
r secular purposes in Sussex and might have been meant. (My sense is that it is
fairly unusual in England for diocesan and shire boundaries to track each other
perfectly for any substantial distance, but I don't know how close this particul
ar pair comes to being coterminous.)
Posted by: J.W. Brewer at March 9, 2009 05:06 PM
How about "chancellor"? What's that in the context of a diocese?
Thanks Marie-Lucie. It's interesting in the context of our other discussion that
Count Lavradio writes to Palmerston in French, and receives a reply from Lord C
larendon of the Foreign Office, in English.
Anyone whose name is Wylde shouldn't become a Groom of the Bedchamber.
No dia 23 Clarendon comunicou-me que a Rainha havia nomeado para ir a Lisboa
Lorde de Tabley, gentil-homem de sua Camara (Lord in Waiting) e que no mesmo pa
quete iria tambem o Coronel Wylde, groom of the Bed-Chamber do Principe Alberto.
Posted by: Grumbly Stu at March 9, 2009 05:34 PM

I think it's appropriate. They had about a dozen children.
AJP:(his birthday is 9 June, one day after Frank Lloyd Wright's and mine)
Whoa, hold the phone. For some reason I understood that AJP was some six months
older than me, so I didn't get too excited when he kept referring to himself as
"not young" and "very, very middle aged". Now it appears that I am actually olde
r than AJP by two days. I can see we're going to have to rework the semantics of
this age thing.
Posted by: Nijma at March 9, 2009 06:18 PM
That's interesting, did you know that sandwiched between our births was the Ital
ian general election of 7 June 1953? The Christian Democrats apparently won a pl
urality in both legislative houses.
If we had been born on 2 June 1953 we would have got some money, I've forgotten
the amount, it was the coronation of the Queen. Then on 19 June the Rosenbergs w
ere executed. It was an exciting month.
"Any look at pre-modern dictionaries will show that the "word" (a combination of
one or more characters) was pretty much overlooked. "
Well, that's probably because pre-modern dictionaries of Chinese were describing
the pre-modern form of the language in which most of the compounds we now call
words in Mandarin did not have lexical status. One of the first rules you learn
in reading Tang poetry is not toread anything that loos like a modern compound a
s a compound, because it will not in fact be that compound, just those two chara
cters co-occuring.
Posted by: Jim at March 9, 2009 06:59 PM
Now it appears that I am actually older than AJP by two days
Fret not, you're both younger than I am, which means you're officially young.
Bathrobe, can you expand on your point on colored perceptions? I'm not quite sur
e what you're getting at, but it sounds interesting. The current division of dic
tionary labor seems pretty logical and in-line with the realities of Japanese to
me.
Posted by: Matt at March 9, 2009 09:39 PM
o Coronel Wylde, groom of the Bed-Chamber do Principe Alberto.
- I think it's appropriate. They had about a dozen children.
When the queen of Portugal died, Queen Victoria sent two envoys, one of whom was
"groom of the Bed-Chamber" to Prince Albert. her husband. They were there to vi
sit the king, not the dead queen.
The queen who died was having her 11th child, a very difficult birth after ten w
hich had been easier. Victoria and Albert, fortunately, stopped at nine children
, otherwise Victoria might have died in childbirth too. Life was awfully hard on
women in those days, even the highest placed ones. The Indian queen for whom th
e Taj Mahal was built died having her 14th child.
Fret not, you're both younger than I am
I don't think this counts. Checking one of the few photos of Hat that is out the
re in the public, I would say that although he looks a bit scruffy, if the state
d date is accurate, Hat's state of preservation is so remarkable that in another
era he would be suspected of having a pact with the Evil One.
I LOVE the Hakluyt Society. I own 6+ of their books, and I'd own 10-20 more if I
could afford them.
Posted by: John Emerson at March 10, 2009 01:02 AM
George III's queen Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz had 15 children & died at a
ripe old age. (My great-grandmother, not a queen, rather a sharecropper, had 14
children & died at a ripe, slightly older age.)
Donna M.T.Cr. Farina: Hold the phone. No one else found this weird? Why the "Cr.
"? Certainly one sees Russians referred to as "Ya. Smirnov" or whatever, for the
obvious reasons. But that's not akin to what's going on here. Otherwise, I'm im
agining a distinction between her and a Donna M.T.Cl. Farina or something. Serio
usly, what is going on there?
Posted by: komfo,amonan at March 10, 2009 02:24 AM
I don't have much time to elaborate at the moment, but:
It's clear that the Chinese obsession with single characters reflects (and is ma
ybe responsible for) a low consciousness of the word in Chinese, taking into acc
ount, of course, Jim's comment about the monosyllabic nature of earlier stages o
f Chinese. The writing system in effect "freezes" native speaker perceptions of
the language in an earlier diachronic state.
The Japanese situation is also, as Matt says, in line with the realities of the
language. That is, the complexity of the language (writing and vocabulary) is re
flected in the split personality of its dictionaries. Kanwa jiten are a very str
ange beast. They are neither fully a dictionary of Chinese, nor fully a dictiona
ry of Japanese. They are something in between. They list words and allusions fro
m the Chinese classics, words from modern Chinese, and Chinese character compoun
ds from modern Japanese. If they did the same thing with English, you would get
an English language dictionary (English headwords), but with all the explanation
s in Japanese, explanations of archaic English meanings, some note of meanings a
s they have evolved in contemporary English, and also "Japlish" usages. It seems
to me to illustrate the nature of the Chinese-character script as an "alien" sc
ript that has been adapted and accepted into Japanese, but without ever severing
its roots with Chinese. This is nothing like a modern English-language dictiona
ry, which purports to be quite "democratic", not discriminating against any word
s once they have been naturalised into English, and noting "resident aliens" (no
t fully naturalised expressions) in terms of the way they function within the En
glish language -- their original meaning is usually given in an etymological sen
se, not as something that is still alive in a linguistic sense. English is taken
as primary; foreign language origins as secondary. This seems to me to be somew
hat different from the nature of the Kanwa jiten, which still in some sense take
s the original Chinese as primary.
Modern kokugo jiten, on the other hand, are equivalent to English-language dicti
onaries. That is, words are listed "democratically" according to their pronuncia
tion, with the meaning given in Japanese, not in terms of classical Chinese.
So I agree, the Japanese lexographic situation does in some way represent the hi
storical and linguistic situation. Which is why it is so interesting, of course.
Must run!
I hope you're not going out dressed like that.
Posted by: A.J.P. Crown at March 10, 2009 03:38 AM
As a further note on this, perhaps only tangentially related, it is interesting
that the Chinese Wikipedia article on ?? (machine), in addition to the introduct
ory note tracing ?? back to Greek mechine and Latin mecina, has a rather long se
ction on the concept and etymology of ?? in Chinese, replete with quotes from th
e Chinese classics (although the section is flagged as "original research"). May
be I am stretching the point, but the idea of reaching back to very early uses a
nd meanings of Chinese characters in order to explain a word that was originally
coined (or pressed into use) as the equivalent of an English one seems to me to
typify a clear tendency in the way Chinese apprehend words and their meanings.
This is not, I might suggest, unrelated to the general Chinese approach to lexic
ology, with its historical emphasis on the Chinese character and its usage withi
n the classical tradition.
Japanese Wikipedia, on the other hand, mentions in the definition that ?? was cr
eated during the Meiji era as an equivalent to English "machine" -- no Chinese c
lassical allusions. (It also notes that the same sense was earlier conveyed by t
he term ????, as a pre-Meiji, pre-Western inundation term with the same meaning
as ??.)
These are just idle musings, but I think that this is all the kind of stuff you
might include in a history of Chinese or Japanese lexicography :)
Marvelous, thank you! I have no argument with your summary. Re it coloring speak
ers' perceptions of their own language, I would characterize it as more of a fee
dback loop. The earliest Chinese-character dictionaries in Japan were explicitly
for dealing with Chinese--this was back when educated Japanese men (and some wo
men) were all expected to read, write, and speak it. These have gotten more conv
enient and picked up more Japan-centric information (ateji, names, etc.) over th
e years, but they're still basically designed for this purpose. The fact that al
l children are still forced to study a bit of classical Chinese in school helps
perpetuate this. So it isn't so much a representation of "Chinese as an alien _s
cript_" as "classical Chinese _language_ as a mistletoe-language on the tree of
Japanese", I would say.
Put another way, I don't think that most Japanese folks feel that kanji are fore
ign or alien, not even compared to kana-- but if you show them a two-kanji compo
und that exists in Japanesee, and say "yes, actually this is to be read as class
ical Chinese, verb-noun",?the two characters will immediately pop into the forei
gn zone, like an optical illusion of a cube/cube-shaped hollow.
Posted by: Matt at March 10, 2009 07:17 AM
Bathrobe and Matt, thanks very much for your enlightening comments!
the Chinese Wikipedia article on ?? (machine), in addition to the introductory n
ote tracing ?? back to Greek mechine and Latin mecina
Here's the Chinese Wikipedia article; somebody should fix the references to "Gre
ek mechine and Latin mecina," which should be Greek mechane (or, better, mekhane
) and Latin machina. I don't even know which is the Edit tab.
Donna M.T.Cr. Farina: Hold the phone. No one else found this weird? Why the "Cr.
"?
That is odd, isn't it? In the "Notes on Contributors" she's simply Donna Farina;
googling, I find her as Donna M. Farina and Donna M.T.C. Farina.
Aha, in a Dictionary Society memorial tribute to "Ladislav Zgusta, DSNA Founding
Member, 1924 2007," we find "Below are several accounts of his life and work, b
eginning with the personal reminiscences of Donna Crispissima Farina, a close fr
iend and colleague." So now we know what the Cr. stands for, if not why it's abb
reviated that way. (Interestingly, that's the only place on the internet where t
he phrase "Donna Crispissima" occurs, though that will now change.)
George III's queen Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz had 15 children & died at a
ripe old age. (My great-grandmother, not a queen, rather a sharecropper, had 14
children & died at a ripe, slightly older age.)
Sure, such women were exceptionally strong, but many other women died even with
their first child, or giving birth to their last child, like the queen of Portug
al.
Posted by: marie-lucie at March 10, 2009 11:21 AM
In Don Quixote, as I remember, the cognates of "machine" and "engine" (and "inge
nuity", I think) all seem to connote / denote something like "trap" or "trick".
(Don't know about the Greek or Latin). The root Chinese words for machines seem
more to mean "trigger" or "pivot" -- something that makes possible to do a lot o
f work with the expenditure of a small amount of energy.
I had all this worked out but lost my notes.
A Chinese word once said "English words don't have meanings" -- i.e., English wr
iting is phonetic (or pretends to be).
A JApanese science-PhD friend wrote his father with minimal use of kanji, and wa
s rebuked for that. Seemingly the syllabic and ideographic parts of the writing
system define two levels of discourse, or even two metaphysical realms -- the ea
rthy-lowly-common and the refined-civilized-superior, or something like that.
Posted by: John Emerson at March 10, 2009 12:14 PM
"Maybe I am stretching the point, but the idea of reaching back to very early us
es and meanings of Chinese characters in order to explain a word that was origin
ally coined (or pressed into use) as the equivalent of an English one seems to m
e to typify a clear tendency in the way Chinese apprehend words and their meanin
gs. "
Amen.
"Japanese Wikipedia, on the other hand, mentions in the definition that ?? was c
reated during the Meiji era as an equivalent to English "machine" -- no Chinese
classical allusions. "
Well, there's the problem right there. Who is going to admit that ji1qi1 was coi
ned by the Ocean Pygmies? Quick, go fangle up a Chinese etymology, as classical
as possible, and if that won't do and you must admit to foreign influence, let i
t be some foreigners we aren't ashamed of copying.
I'm an Ocean Pygmy and proud of it.
"I'm an Ocean Pygmy and proud of it."
Well, you should be. You are one of the proud, the few, the favored few whose et
hnicity is not written with an animal radical.
To the credit of the Japanese they didn't slavishly adopt that sideways insult a
s their ethnonym, as I understand.
Does someone mind explaining what on earth (or sea) is an ocean pygmy? This does
n't google at all. And "animal radicals"? People for the Ethical Treatment of An
imals (PETA)?
Here's the Chinese Wikipedia article; somebody should fix the references to
"Greek mechine and Latin mecina," which should be Greek mechane (or, better, mek
hane) and Latin machina. I don't even know which is the Edit tab.
When you use Firefox 3 with the Chinese Perapera-kun add-on, it's easy to find o
ut.
I think those edits have already been made (marked as ?) by 28481k.
Posted by: Christophe Strobbe at March 11, 2009 08:08 AM
I just love the OUP to pieces for sending you that book, and look forward to fut
ure posts. And yes, the smell!
Posted by: jamessal at March 11, 2009 10:26 AM
Nijma,
Ocean Pygmy is a translation for a term the Chinese applied to the Japanese. Sin
ce it applied to the Japanese, it developed two senes, "pygmy" and "pirate". The
re have been times when Japanese pirates were prettyactive off the southern coas
t.
Animal radical: The majority of Chinese charaters, han4zi4, are written with a c
hunk that reflects the phonetic value of the word (whenever the han4zi4 develope
d, which can be as long as 3,500 years ago, so the resemblance can be invisible
by now) and then with a chunk that reflects something of the semantic load of th
e word. Westerners started calling that piece the "radical" back in the 1800s an
d the term hasn't really been replaced even though it doesn't make any particula
r sense.
So words that refer to things you do often have a little attenuated picture of a
hand to the side, silk for colors naturally, grain for grains and such wood for
wooden things and so on.
Often ethnonyms were written with some phonetic rendering of the group's name fo
r itself, or someone else's name for them, with a radical to show that this was
a new word, not the word the phonetic rendering was borrowed from. For non-Chine
se ethnic group that was generally the radical for words refering to animals, fo
r obvious reasons. Nowadays the animal radical has been quietly dropped from mos
t of these.
So you can write "PETA" with the word for "fart" - "pi4" and "da4" - big, and ma
ybe add an animal radical to pi4.
Does someone mind explaining what on earth (or sea) is an ocean pygmy? .... And
"animal radicals"?
I am not familiar with these phrases either, or with the Chinese language, but a
s a guess: "ocean pygmies", which appears to be an insult, could mean "people as
unworthy of notice as primitive dwarfs, arriving from the ocean", and "animal r
adicals" may refer to some feature of the writing system used to distinguish app
arent homonyms - in this case "animal" is used instead of "human", yet another i
nsult.
These are almost shots in the dark, and I am ready to be corrected.
I didn't know Jim was dealing with Nijma's query. Thanks, Jim.
(Although not actually Japanese, I was born in Japan.)
Ah, thank you. "Radicals" makes perfect sense to me though. It comes from the sa
me place as "radish" and means "root". Political or religious radicals often cla
im the status quo has strayed from the correct path and they are returning to a
basic, more pure "root" teaching.
Re radical/radish, members of the Radical Party in France during the Third Repub
lic were supposedly called "radishes" by their critics for being symbolically "r
ed on the outside; white on the inside" (largely because they remained non-socia
list when socialism became the hip new thing on the Left). It had never previous
ly struck me that this might be a learned etymological pun in addition to the vi
sual image.
Posted by: J. W. Brewer at March 11, 2009 09:02 PM
Getting back to lexicography, the "Chinese character mould" is actually a very d
ifficult one to break. Most of the Chinese -> foreign language dictionaries that
I've seen adopt characters as the basis for listing entries. The ordering of th
e characters does vary, however. The traditional method is by radical (find the
radical, then find the character by counting the remaining number of strokes), b
ut the modern trend on the Mainland is to use alphabetical order (that is, chara
cters are ordered by pronunciation). The only exception I have seen is a Chinese
-Japanese dictionary published many years ago -- 1960s -- by Iwanami. This dicti
onary took the radical and, I later heard, rather controversial step of listing
words alphabetically according to the pinyin spelling. That is, to find the equi
valent to ?? (bother, nuisance), you did not look up ? and then search for the c
ompound ??, you looked up mafan alphabetically, as you would in an English-langu
age dictionary. The entry then gave both the correct characters and the Japanese
equivalents. Although the idea sounds like a good one, the usefulness of the di
ctionary proved to be rather limited, for several reasons:
*It was only useful for speech. Obviously it wasn't good for interpreting writte
n passages, and aspects of Chinese that are dependent on characters or the liter
ary language were not as well covered.
*The dictionary wasn't very large, meaning that a lot of vocabulary wasn't liste
d. This is the last thing you want in a Chinese dictionary!
*You had to be totally sure of the pronunciation to look a word up, which, as th
ose who study Chinese will realise, is not so easy as it sounds. Due to dialects
and unclear speech, it's often quite difficult to be sure what the correct pron
unciation is. And if you ask, somebody will end up writing the character for you
, anyway.
Dictionaries going the other way, i.e., Japanese to Chinese, virtually always ad
opt hiragana/katakana as the basis for listing entries, for obvious reasons. A d
ictionary that adopted a character-based approach wouldn't get you very far.
The situation for Chinese-Vietnamese dictionaries is analagous to that of Chines
e-Japanese and Chinese-English. But going the other way, the situation is somewh
at different. There is at least one Vietnamese-Chinese dictionary that adopts a
Chinese-character-like system in its arrangement of entries. The T? Di?n Vi?t Ha
n
Posted by: Bathrobe at March 11, 2009 09:05 PM
My extended comment was clipped :)
The T? Di?n Vi?t Han edited by Giao su Dinh Gia Khanh
Clipped again! Looks like the letters of the Vietnamese alphabet might be messin
g up my post.
JWB: Re radical/radish, members of the Radical Party in France during the Third
Republic were supposedly called "radishes" by their critics for being symbolical
ly "red on the outside; white on the inside" ... . It had never previously struc
k me that this might be a learned etymological pun in addition to the visual ima
ge.
It was not a "learned etymological pun", just an obvious everyday pun likely to
come to any speaker's mind, whether literate or not. The French words are radica
l/radis: shorten radical to radi (a common way of shortening French words) and y
ou get the pronunciation of radis (the s is silent). Saying or writing les radis
is totally ambiguous: les radicaux 'the radicals' or les radis 'the radishes'.
The red/white image follows from the pun, and proves appropriate to the alleged
political attitudes of the people in question, but the simple pun came first.
p.s. but it is true that both words derive from the Latin word for 'root', radix
, radicis. English radish is a borrowing from Old French.
"ocean pygmies", which appears to be an insult, could mean "people as unworthy o
f notice as primitive dwarfs, arriving from the ocean", "
You know, Marie Lucie, in this case I think it was just a reference to actual ph
ysical stature. Maybe Japanese were taller in former times, but as recently as t
he 1930s Japanese immigrants in California were sometimes less than 5 ft. tall.
males and females. I have since heard that part of the problem was a lack of cal
cium in the native diet, which hard to believe with a diet so heavy on fish and
presumably fish bones.
a lack of calcium in the native diet
I seem to remember something about a hereditary condition that makes it difficul
t for many Japanese to digest milk. I also seem to remember something about the
untouchable Ainu tribe not having a problem with this.
I have heard somewhere that Chinese are admonished not to put soy sauce on their
rice lest they stunt their growth like the Japanese (who do put soy sauce on th
eir rice).
Jim, the Japanese in question might have been considered as "primitive dwarfs"!
Nijma: difficult for many Japanese to digest milk
This is a widespread genetic condition for many Asians and Native Americans whos
e traditional cultures did not use milk or other dairy products as food. Most pe
ople in the West with that condition would have died very young and not transmit
ted their genes. The Ainus did not have domestic animals except dogs, so they wo
uld not have used milk products either.
The current thinking on lactose intolerance seems to be that a genetic mutation
in Northern Europeans caused them to be more likely to respond to milk intake af
ter weaning by continuing / resuming lactase production. Even among populations
without the mutation, and so tending to lactose intolerance, studies seem to sho
w that environment, that is milk consumption, is more important than genetics. T
he Ainu report a lower rate of lactose intolerance problems, but a study that ju
st measured found that they actually have lower lactase levels than ethnic Japan
ese.
Posted by: MMcM at March 13, 2009 12:16 AM
Though Christopher Strobbe commended my effort of editing the page, I made a sli
ght oversight on the spelling of machina as mechina, my bad.
On the issue of Ocean Pygmy: a still current ethnic slur by Chinese to Japanese
describes their legs as radish shaped from spending too much time on tatami, com
pared with (the ideal and relatively) long and slender legs of Chinese by sittin
g on chairs.
Posted by: 28481k at March 13, 2009 01:54 AM
Maybe Japanese were taller in former times,
This just reminded me that "In former times" is an expression I've heard quite o
ften in Germany and to an extent in Scandinavia, but not nearly as often by a na
tive English speaker. I suspect it is the Germans' translation for things that m
ight be better translated as "in the old days", or "in the past". Something like
, "In former times I used to take my washing to the laundromat" -- there's nothi
ng exactly wrong with it, I've just noticed that when it's used by Germans it so
metimes doesn't quite sound right. It is a perfectly acceptable English phrase,
of course.
Posted by: A.J.P. Cho at March 13, 2009 04:55 AM
I use 'ocean pygmy' to mean Icelanders, but that may be a quite local thing.
Posted by: A.J.P. Oh at March 13, 2009 04:59 AM
Actually, ??? (daikon-ashi = 'radish legs') is used by the Japanese themselves,
generally in a self-deprecating sense. Chinese women are usually praised as ????
??? (sutairu ga ii ='have a nice figure').
In former times I used to take my washing to the laundromat
JJ, I guess the kind of sentence the Germans had in mind when they said that was
Damals/Fruher habe ich meine Wasche zum Waschsalon gebracht.
The slightly-off quality of "in former times" in Germglish is something they lea
rn in school, I imagine. They learn that "Then I took my washing ..." and "Earli
er I took my washing ..." don't mean what the above German sentence means. Possi
bly they were not taught that the "I used to take .." idiom will suffice by itse
lf here. An extra "back then" or "when I was young and green" is optional in idi
omatic English.
There is a common tendency to think individual words are individually significan
t. That's why a German will think that "Damals/fruher", a significant adverb in
the German sentence, is missing in "I used to take ..", so something like "In fo
rmer times" needs to added back in.
Posted by: Grumbly Stu at March 13, 2009 11:24 AM
Grumbly Stu, you probably don't speak much English with Germans in Germany, but
have you ever noticed them using this expression?
I must admit it's mostly one person I know in Hamburg who says it all the time,
but it wasn't just him, and I think you're right that it's something they're tau
ght at school.
Posted by: A.J.P. The preferred term. at March 13, 2009 11:45 AM
It seems to me that "in former times" suggests "a very long time ago": "in forme
r times there were no laundromats or washing machines, women would do the wash i
n the local fountain", or such. Even without going that far, "in former times" u
sed by an old person about their youth suggests that there has been a radical, i
rrevocable change in society since then, such as "before the Russian revolution"
. One's younger days 10 or 20 years ago do not qualify as "in former times" for
me except if one's circumstances have changed very drastically in the meantime (
eg for refugees).
I remember that Germans used to say things like that 20-30 years ago, in former
times. Nowadays, different slightly-off expressions are in currency.
One all-time favorite is "I have / don't have the possibility to ...". I have ne
ver figured out why individual Germans find it so hard simply to say "I can / ca
n't ...". The general explanation, of course, is that the German Geist revels in
tumescent diction.
"The general explanation, of course, is that the German Geist revels in tumescen
t diction."
Davids Medienkritik had a discussion on that cultural diffenrece a couple of yea
rs ago.
"Actually, ??? (daikon-ashi = 'radish legs') is used by the Japanese themselves,
generally in a self-deprecating sense. "
Whereas the Chinese call the luo1bo tou2 - 'radish heads'. And it is slightly de
precating.
"One's younger days 10 or 20 years ago do not qualify as "in former times" for m
e except if one's circumstances have changed very drastically in the meantime (e
g for refugees). "
That is my sense of the experession, and the one I used it in. The days when Jap
anese were 5 ft or less are another age of Middle Earth.
"Donna Crispissima": salt and vinegar or cheese and onion?
hywl fawr
Posted by: dearieme at March 13, 2009 02:04 PM
That's right, but this guy would say things like "In former times we would charg
e our pencil sharpers to the office".
Posted by: A.J.P. Smoke Kools. at March 13, 2009 02:32 PM
He may have just latched onto "in former times" because it has the sonorous rotu
ndity of a politician's cliche. Gymnasium-educated German teenagers tend to talk
that way. I call it Abiturientendeutsch.
To be sure, average Germans don't tumesce in everday conversation. Except for th
e slang word "geil", which means horny but also awesome, cool etc. [doesn't "coo
l" date me!] Its root meaning is swollen, as in proud flesh (an elevated, disten
ded scar). Which reminds me that I want to reread The Way of All Flesh.
I'd forgotten that one. Every time this other guy would take a look at what we w
ere designing he'd say "geil!". And every time we'd design a very long building
he'd say "Lange lauft", length runs, which is some sort of sailing term for the
longer the better.
Posted by: A.J.P. Smoking is bad for you.. at March 13, 2009 05:12 PM
Cool is not dated, Grumbly Stu. It is still in general slang circulation (I thin
k).
Posted by: A.J.P. Smoking is bad for you. at March 13, 2009 05:15 PM
Yes, for some reason "cool" has stuck around for decades.

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Posted by: Grumbly Stu at March 9, 2009 05:34 PM

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