Language

dictionaries, grammar, spelling, language use, and slang

dictionaries, grammar, spelling, language use, and slang

Filthy English

June 23, 2011 by Roy Johnson

The How, Why, When, and What of Everyday Swearing

Dictionaries of slang and obscenity are often disappointing, because they define terms but shy away from discussing exactly how they are used in everyday life. Filthy English does the opposite. Peter Silverton not only tells you what swear words mean, but he illustrates and analyses their use in the very places for which they are designed – the street, the pub, the argument, the curse, and the insult. His analysis of swearing is delivered via an account of his own relation to language in 1950s UK and beyond.

The story goes down endless numbers of digressions – but fortunately he has an amusing and lively style, full of witty asides and one-liners. (“People from Maidenhead never laugh when telling you where they live”) This personal history spreads out into a very well-informed history of the words he is considering. But the humour is underpinned by a very scholarly sense of etymology.

He follows the well-worn tradition of presenting his observations in cod-serious, satirically po-faced categories: Chapter One – ‘Sexual intercourse and Masturbation’; Chapter Two – ‘Anuses, Faeces, Urine, and Other Excreta’. This makes what he has to say all the funnier.

He has a finely attuned ear for the subtleties of language, and spends a number of pages discussing the fine distinctions between calling someone a wanker or a tosser – despite the fact that the words appear to mean the same thing. He brings a sociological as well as an etymological knowledge to his analysis

What also makes this approach so attractive is that he is steeped in the popular culture of the last forty or fifty years in Britain. He recaptures some of its pivotal linguistic moments in vividly entertaining anecdotes from the world of television, sport, pop music, and political life.

He also considers very carefully the shock value or taboo-quotient on well known swear words (or swears as he calls them) as well as pointing to absurdities such as the fact that many people would find “Bugger that!” (anal intercourse) far less offensive than “Fuck that!” (normal sexual intercourse). This is matched by his intelligent sense of the history of language change and development:

Once we were a religious society and ‘damn’ was the word that could tear into our social and emotional fabric. As the Enlightenment edged religion aside, so sexuality became the locus of swear-power – fuck starting its rise in the nineteenth century, followed by cunt in the second half of the twentieth. Now it’s the nouns and epithets of group identity that are taking over – race words mostly, but also ones about religion and class.

It’s quite surprising how rapidly the meaning of a word can change. Spunk was originally the name for touch-wood, the stuff people carried round for starting fires. Then from the eighteenth century onwards it meant courage or bravery:

It was only in the late nineteenth century that the possession of those qualities came to be transferred to the quintessentially liquid expression of masculinity. It’s an intriguing psychological correlation: heroism and the vector of male DNA transmission. Jamaicans call it man juice.

He’s amazingly well informed on swearing in a number of languages from all over the world – which serves well to demonstrate the universality of the phenomenon. And he includes ‘hidden’ languages such as ‘mother-in-law languages’ (a form of avoidance speech) and the Russian unofficial language Mat (older than Russian language itself) which is based upon only four or five words and their infinite variations.

I was also glad to see that he’s smack up to date. In his discussion of the term ‘gay’ he notes that it’s rapidly becoming a general term of gentle teasing, in addition to its conventional use as a synonym for homosexual. One man invites his male friend out for a drink, only to be told he’s tired and wants to stay in. “Don’t be so gay” might be the response.

He finishes with a bravura excursion into psycho-analysis, where with an examination of what Freud and Ferenczi had to say about forbidden language adds up to the fact that these swear words are deeply attached to the most important parts of our bodies. People with Tourette’s Syndrome don’t shout out “Ankles! Shoulders! Opposite sex!”. They shout “Cock! Cunt! Fuck!”

For anyone interested in demotic language, this is a must. Silverton is entertaining from first page to last – and his apercus are backed up with erudition, scholarship, but more importantly with a healthy engagement with the language of everyday life on the streets of the UK and the rest of the world today.

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Peter Silverton, Filthy English: The How, Why, When, and What of Everyday Swearing, London: Portobello Books, 2010, pp.314, ISBN: 184627169X

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Fowler’s Modern English Usage

October 29, 2009 by Roy Johnson

reprint of the classic first edition

Fowler’s Modern English Usage was first published in 1926. It was an immediate commercial success, selling 60,000 copies in its first year, and it went on to become the most influential set of guidelines on grammar and the use of the English language of the twentieth century. There were later versions revised by Sir Ernest Gowers in 1965 and Robert Burchfield in 1996, but this is a facsimile of Henry Fowler’s original first edition, with an introduction by the linguist David Crystal that sets it in context.

It’s reproduced photographically from the original – so the entries are arranged in two columns on the page, which was the style for books of this kind at the time. This presentation strikes me as doubly appropriate, because it captures the old-fashioned nature of the original, and it accurately reflects the slightly pedantic tone of the contents. Fowler is not unlike his great lexicological predecessor Samuel Johnson in issuing his judgements wrapped around with ironic asides, which makes for interesting reading.

David Crystal’s introductory essay explains how the book came to be published, and how Fowler was an important transition figure between the old, traditional proscriptive grammarians and the new more tolerant descriptive schools which were to follow.

Strangely enough, Fowler, whose name has become a metonym for his Dictionary, is often used by prescriptivists as an authority to support their arguments – when the fact is that his work as a whole reflects a flexible, subtle, and relativist attitude to language and the way it is used.

Fowler deals with all the classic problems in English language, such as the which/that dilemma, the split infinitive, and ending sentences with a preposition. He covers issues that are difficult even for native speakers of English (such as the who/whom issue).

The central problem is the question of usage. If enough people say different from does that make it right? Fowler was working in the days before any giant collections of real data were being used as a source of evidence to support linguistic claims. And he was using printed sources, not spoken, which today are regarded as primary.

However, it’s difficult to predict if he is going to be prescriptive or relativist on any single topic. Crystal points out that there are plenty of inconsistencies within the Dictionary. On some issues Fowler accepts widespread common usage; at others he asserts that something is right or wrong based on nothing more than his own opinion.

It should be said that the Dictionary is not merely a listing of words and their definitions, as in the normal sense of the term. It’s a compendium of how terms are used grammatically, the problems they pose, and the cultural baggage that surrounds them. A typical entry which captures both his stern sense of what is right and his ironic attitude in trying to correct it is as follows:

aggravate, aggravation. 1. The use of these in the sense of annoy, vex, annoyance, vexation, should be left to the uneducated. It is for the most part a feminine or childish colloquialism, but obtrudes occasionally into the newspapers. To aggravate has properly only one meaning—to make (an evil) worse or more serious. The right & the wrong use are shown in: (right) A premature initiative would be calculated rather to a. than to simplify the situation; (wrong) The reopening of the contest by fresh measures that would a. their opponents is the last thing that is desired in Ministerial circles. It is in the participle (and a very stupid, tiresome, aggravating man he is) that the vulgarism is commonest.

You can probably find copies of the first edition Fowler in the few remaining second hand bookshops – but it’s nice to have this reprint to put it back into general circulation again.

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David Crystal (ed) Fowler’s Modern English Usage: The Classic First Edition, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009, pp.784, ISBN: 0199535345

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Gallimaufry

July 15, 2009 by Roy Johnson

a hodgepodge of our vanishing vocabulary

Michael Quinion is a word nerd. He’s an expert on obscure terms, word etymologies, and the origins of strange expressions. His last book Port Out, Starboard Home discusses myths and false explanations for the meanings of well known sayings, and he runs an excellent compilation of lexical back-history at World Wide Words. Gallimaufry is his latest collection of notes on ‘disappearing language’ – terms that are vanishing from common usage for a variety of reasons.

Some go because the object they describe no longer exists (liberty-bodice and sixpence) and some are meanings that disappear because the word is now used to describe something quite different (chaperone was in medieval times a sort of cap.) Mercifully, he splits up his offerings into themed chapters – on food and drink, health and medicine, entertainment and leisure, transport and fashion, then family names and communication.

In explaining the meaning of terms such as lamprey-pie, hog’s pudding, and flummery, he takes you into the realms of medieval cooking practices, the relationship of Latin and French to English linguistic development, and the eating habits of kings and commoners as they struggled to add nutrition and flavour to their diet of boiled wheats and gruel.

In no time this leads in its turn to the worlds of medicine, naval history, and eighteenth century nutrition. It’s unlikely that anybody will need to bring many of these terms back into general circulation, but it’s interesting to realise that spalling-poppy, biting assmart, and alexipharmic contain lexical elements which are still alive and well today, even though we have stopped using the herbal remedies to which they refer.

These are not just terms that have disappeared, but also the remote origins of terms which we still use today. For instance, you would never guess that the term slush fund originated in the mass of semi-liquid fat that floated on the top of boiling up unappetising salt pork on board a ship.

This all passes later into a form of social history when Quinion describes the forms of long-forgotten dances such as the cotillion, the quadrille, and the galliard. He then goes on to explain the distinctions between various nineteenth-century vehicles such as the landau, the barouche, the cabriolet, and the handsome.

It’s a gold mine for people who enjoy both arcane knowledge and the strange linguistic depths of the everyday world. For instance, he discusses old forms of measurement (of the rod, perch, and pole variety) and points out that ell, the old way to measure woollen cloth, gets its length (22-23 inches) as well as its name from the fact that this is the approximate distance from the shoulder to the wrist. The Old English term for the arm is ell, which is why in its turn the place where it bends is called the elbow.

Quinion is certainly a scholar. He gives meticulously drawn sources for his definitions and admits doubt or complete ignorance when supporting evidence is not available. He finishes with a selection of terms which are probably on their way out because of technological change: blotting paper, usherette, gramophone, and bus conductor will probably never be required again, even though they are probably still in the active vocabulary of older people today.

OK – you are either interested in old and possibly obscure words or you’re not. This is a cornucopia for those of us who are not ashamed to be counted amongst the lexical anoraks.

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Michael Quinion, Gallimaufry, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008, pp.288, ISBN: 0199551022

Grammar for Teachers

July 17, 2009 by Roy Johnson

essential guide to how English language works

The UK government’s latest policy on English teaching insists that it should be presented ‘across the curriculum’. What this means is that teachers of subjects other than English have to focus the language of their practice as part of normal classroom teaching and learning. This can leave teachers of chemistry, home economics, and physical education feeling rather exposed where formal grammar is concerned. John Seely’s latest book to the rescue! It is aimed at teachers in primary and secondary schools, and will also be useful for those preparing to teach modern foreign languages and English as an additional or foreign language.

And he’s well qualified for the job of explaining complex issues. His previous books include Words, The A-Z of Grammar and Punctuation, Effective Writing and Speaking, and Writing Reports.

These are all very popular books which introduce linguistic facets of everyday life in a straightforward manner. This one follows the same pattern. He explains how sentences are built up from subject, verb, and object (Elephants like grass) but puts his emphasis on recognising clause patterns. Then comes an explanation of different types of noun (proper, countable, uncountable) adjectives, verbs, adverbs, and all the other common parts of speech.

In keeping with all the normal rigour of language studies, nothing is examined beyond the length of a single sentence, and his explanations are all as simple and clear as possible. Despite this, there’s still quite a lot of grammatical jargon to take on board (clause elements, prepositional phrases, and modal auxiliaries).

A lot of what he offers is a common sense approach to explaining the categories of grammar – that is, what function a word is performing in any given statement. For instance, work can be a verb or a noun, depending on the context in which it is being used.

The book is in three parts. The first offers basic definitions and explanations; the second goes into more detail; and the third is a big glossary which explains all the technical terms used throughout the book. It also includes other terms that may be be particularly useful for teachers of modern foreign languages. There’s also an appendix explaining what’s required of teachers implementing the literacy strategy in primary schools.

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John Seely, Grammar for Teachers, Oxpecker Press, 2007, pp.172, ISBN: 095534512X

Greenspeak: Ireland in her own words

July 17, 2009 by Roy Johnson

Dictionary-cum-encyclopedia of all things Irish

If you parachuted onto the Emerald Isle, would you know what to do with a griffaun, a mether, or a dolmen ? Did you know that carrageen (Irish moss) can be used as food or as an HIV/AIDS preventative? And where would the taxi driver be taking you if he was going to TCD? Greenspeak is an interesting proposition if you’re interested in language, Ireland and its culture, or unusual dictionaries. Its a dictionary-cum-encyclopedia on all matters Irish, and it’s a beautifully illustrated.

Entries run from ‘The Abbey Theatre’ and ‘absentee landlord’ to ‘ziggurat’ and the fact that there is no letter ‘Z’ in the Irish alphabet. Did you know that the words yes and no do not occur in the Irish language? Instead, the main verb in the question is repeated – as in ‘Did you see her?’ – to which the reply is ‘I did’ or ‘I did not’. Some of the terms explained are Irish language pure and simple; others are English words which have a particular or coded meaning in the context of Ireland; others are explanations of Irish history and institutions.

All of them are illustrated by examples drawn from genuinely Irish texts. So for instance, the entry for the apparently innocent-looking expression ‘big house’ runs as follows:

big house, Big House 1. Anglo-Irish country house, the principal house of the former landed Ascendency and often surrounded by a famine wall. Many were burned down in the 1920s. They feature in books, which became a literary genre, starting with Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent (1800). note: use ‘Irish Big House’ not ‘big Irish house’. Equates with standard English ‘manor’ or ‘stately home’. 2. (Ulster) may refer to mental asylum. 3. (US slang) penitentionary. [1823 (Letters from the Irish Highlands) < teach mor ‘big house’] See Baltimore Oriole.

There are over 2,000 entries covering every aspect of Ireland from food to folklore, and poetry to politics. The chronology and etymology of each word is given, and there is an index of people’s names, a glossary of abbreviations and acronyms.

There is understandably a recurrent strain of relations with neighbours ‘across the water’, but plenty of detailed entries on Ireland’s indigenous language, art, music, literature, history, personalities, and geography.

I get the impression of a huge labour of love and scholarship on Paddy Sammon’s part, and anybody with the slightest interest in Ireland or matters Irish is missing a treat if they don’t see this handsomely attractive book.

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Paddy Sammon, Greenspeak: Ireland in her own words, Dublin: Town House, 2002, pp.240, ISBN: 1860591442

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Heinemann English Dictionary

June 26, 2009 by Roy Johnson

popular dictionary – especially useful for schools

My copy of the Heinemann English Dictionary markets itself as “The most comprehensive school dictionary”, but it has been an invaluable companion for many years. First and foremost, it is small enough to pop into a briefcase or even a large handbag – useful when you need to check a word in secret to save face!

Secondly, the layout is clear and easy to use, helpfully stating the relevant part of speech in full, instead of by abbreviations. I particularly like the way phrasal verbs are set out – if you look up the word pull, each of its variations – pull apart, pull down, pull up and so on – is listed on a separate line, making them much easier to locate. Compound words such as water-hole are shown as separate headings, rather than hidden amongst a myriad of other variations on a word.

On a point which may be minor to some (but not to me) it is worth noting that a sans serif font is used for all the header words. This is proven to make words more accessible to beginner readers. As a teacher of Basic Skills to adults, I also appreciate the fact that common errors are pointed out. For example, the definition of the word principal includes a warning not to confuse it with principle. I have not seen this in other dictionaries.

An easily understood ‘pseudo-phonetic’ guide to pronunciation is provided. For example, euphonious is ‘yoo-foe-nee-us’. But, for me, one of its chief strengths is that it not only gives etymological information wherever possible, and an indication of colloquial usage where this may not be clear from the definition or may be useful to non-native speakers of English (eternity -‘It took an eternity for the doctor to arrive’), but that it also adds little titbits of information on selected words.

For example, just browsing through, I discovered that flannel is thought to be one of the few words which English has acquired from the Welsh. As I live in Chester, near the border with Wales, this little gem has opened a number of unexpectedly interesting conversations on linguistics. Nor would I have known, without the aid of these boxes, that the word assassin actually derives from an Arabic word for someone who eats cannabis!

Another surprising finding was the entry for the suffix -ette, for which Suffragette was the first known example. These little boxes are known as ‘Language Study Boxes’ and were designed specifically with the National Curriculum in mind. But who said children have to have all the fun? Incidentally, these extended entries are also provided for all the main parts of speech, giving useful examples for children (and adults) to learn from.

If I have any criticism at all to make, it is simply that my edition is too old, and so lacking in some of the more recent terms in the world of Information Technology – but, frankly, you can forgive an old friend almost anything …

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Heinemann English Dictionary, London: Heinemann Educational, 5th edition 2001, pp.1248, ISBN: 0435104241

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How to choose a dictionary

November 1, 2009 by Roy Johnson

from pocket-size to the world’s largest reference

Dictionaries can be something of a personal matter. People become very attached to their favourite amongst the most-used of all reference books. However, a few guidelines on how to choose a dictionary can easily be established. The first thing to understand is that they are not all the same. They have their own characters and peculiarities, and they are created for different users.

Let’s start with the question of size. The smallest dictionaries, which you really can fit into your pocket, are only suitable for a quick check of spelling and meaning in most commonly used words. These are mini-books the size of cigarette packets, which often end up in your desk drawer. The Oxford English Minidictionary manages to pack 40,000 entries and 50,000 definitions into a miraculously small space – and throws in a few extra pages which offer solutions to common problems. Keep this in your briefcase, or take it along to the pub quiz, but for serious work you’ll need something bigger.

The Little Oxford Dictionary is the next size up. This is a more serious attempt to be useful, with 51,000 entries and supplementary information on each word, including how it should be pronounced. It also includes occasional panels of advice on grammar and good usage, plus a supplement of words which have come into the language during the 1990s. This is one for the desktop or your briefcase, and probably the smallest you can go if you are going to consult a dictionary regularly.

Collins offer an alternative to the Oxford domination of the dictionary market. Their books are popular because they generally make clear page layout a priority. The Collins Pocket Dictionary contains 44,500 definitions, plus advice on grammar and common problems. It claims to be ‘in colour’ – but all this turns out to mean is that headwords and their variants are printed in red – which makes the pages look as if they’ve got measles.

Amongst the ‘portables’, the Heinemann English Dictionary is specially designed for use in schools. Not only is each entry very clearly presented, but parts of speech are spelt out in full, not abbreviated as is usual in dictionaries. Pronunciation is explained, and there are pull-out boxes with gems of etymology on certain words. It has been created with the UK National Curriculum in mind – and has proved to be popular as a reference for the classroom.

The New Oxford Dictionary focuses on English as it is really used in the late 20th century. Compiled after in-depth analysis of computerized databases of current English, this dictionary is the first to base its coverage on the evidence of real English. A rapid-reference page design separates out parts of speech, word histories, and phrases. The most modern meaning of each word, as used by the majority of people, is placed first within each entry. Contemporary rules are given on question of usage, providing relevant advice on problems old and new. Word history notes explain the linguistic roots of words and tell the story of how a word’s meaning and form have changed over time. Modern pronunciations are also given, using the internationally recognized system.

If you are buying a dictionary for serious use, paperbacks can be a false economy. Very often, hardback editions only cost slightly more – and they will last you a lifetime. Treat yourself!

It’s official! The word techie – a devotee of technology – has made it into the Chambers Dictionary. And there are a slew of other net-specific words too, including netiquette, browsing, applet, spam, cybersex and cybercafé. It just goes to show how the world of computing and electronic communications has advanced and changed our world. Of course, there are also those other little things that have become part of our lives: Prozac, sound bite, cellulite…

Collins dictionaries have always scored well on contemporary relevance and accessibility. The latest ‘Millennium’ edition of the Collins English Dictionary has increased the previous content by twenty percent, and there are useful guiding headers at the top of the pages, and the headword entries are printed in a no-nonsense non-serif font which I find unexpectedly easy to read. Besides answering the questions usual to dictionaries there are many encyclopedic entries which make this a valuable work of general reference. It also carries notes on language use which might be studied by those who think they speak English correctly.

Collins also have on offer a ‘two-books-in-one’ Dictionary and Thesaurus. This carries 71,000 entries, plus a quarter of a million synonyms. Normal dictionary entries appear in the top half of each page, whilst the bottom half presents lists of synonyms and antonyms. This is a simple but very effective device which encourages browsing and learning about language. A useful choice if you need to combine two sources of reference in one.

The most popular of the one-volume desktop dictionaries is the Concise Oxford Dictionary. This contains explanations, pronunciation, and the etymology of over 40,000 headwords. It also adds notes on any disputed or controversial terms, and includes American spellings. This is a great favourite with writers and students, and a basic minimum for a civilized library. If you can only afford one dictionary – make it this one.

If you want an illustrated dictionary, Encarta has recently been released as one volume – to some acclaim. It represents both the diversity of English as a language spoken around the world, and an attempt to capture up-to-date usage. If you want a picture of an aardvark and details of zygotes – Encarta has them. It offers variant spellings, meanings, and pronunciations in more than 100,000 entries comprising some 3.5 million words. If, for example, your Asian correspondent asks you for your biodata, you can quickly and painlessly learn that she needs your curriculum vitae. There are more than 3,000 black-and-white illustrations and 10,000 biographical and geographical entries. This is Microsoft making good use of its linguistic database.

Moving towards the heavier, more serious resources for writers, students, and teachers who want the sort of books in their homes which are normally only available in libraries, the New Shorter Oxford is a firm favourite. It’s big, comprehensive, and scholarly, and is based on the monumental Oxford English Dictionary. All entries have been re-written to reflect contemporary usage. This is one which should be considered as a minimum for serious writers and researchers. It comes in two handsomely-produced volumes, which are a sound investment. Its also just been re-issued in a Oxford’s new easy-to-read format.

The Compact OED [an accurate but amazingly misleading title] is just about as far as you would need to go without being a library acquisitions officer or a professional lexicographer. It’s a two-volume version of the complete OED – but photo-reduced, so that the text is laid out in a font size of about six points. The volumes are issued as a cased set with a magnifying glass – and you’ll need it. But here’s the good news. It works. So you save on storage space, yet have access to the contents of the twenty volume version. I picked one up second hand, and use it all the time.

Of course when we get to the biggest and best dictionary of the English Language, and a towering monument of bibliographic scholarship – then it’s the complete Oxford English Dictionary. This is now twenty printed volumes and had become rather expensive to produce. There are the two options available. You can have the convenience, speed, and reliability of the whole database on a single disk. Keep it in your D: drive and the world’s biggest lexical resource can be summoned with a mouse-click. The alternative is to subscribe to the online version, which will be permanently updated. It’s worth noting that the OED editors have decided to adopt an all-inclusive policy. New English, slang, jargon, and even obscenities are all listed.

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In Other Words

July 10, 2009 by Roy Johnson

a language lover’s guide to intriguing foreign words

This is a book for people who love words – no matter what their origin. In Other Words collects some of the most intriguing and peculiar expressions from countries around the globe for which there are no easy English equivalents. There is an expression in Japanese for instance which describes the particular stress the people there feel when speaking another language. But translated literally, Yokomeshi is ‘a meal eaten sideways’. Yoko means ‘horizontal’ and meshi means ‘boiled rice’. The explanation (and joke) is that Japanese language is normally written vertically. Makes sense now, doesn’t it?

Entries are listed alphabetically by country, and the languages covered include East and West Europe, Nordic, Middle Eastern, African, Asian, and Creole and Pidgin languages. The entries for each group are prefaced by a short essay outlining examples of contemporary usages and problems.

Examples include explanations of terms which have been commonly taken up in English such as enfant terrible and doppelganger, as well as those special terms for which there is no English equivalent, such as the German Torschlusspanik (literally ‘door-shutting panic’) for which the nearest would be ‘fear of being left on the shelf’, and the Yiddish luftmensch – literally somebody who lives on air, but figuratively a person who sponges off those around him.

Actually, some of the examples he offers disprove his own thesis about translatability. The Italian attaccabottone (literally ‘button attacker’) is exactly as the person who in English ‘buttonholes’ you to relate some long tale of woe.

It doesn’t have the in-depth comprehensiveness of a reference such as The Oxford Dictionary of Foreign Words and Phrases, but it offers much longer and quite amusing explanations.

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C.J. Moore, In Other Words, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005, pp.127, ISBN: 0192806246

Language, Technology, and Society

May 28, 2010 by Roy Johnson

how technology interacts with speaking and writing

Most people think that writing and speaking a language are more or less the same thing – that writing is speech transcribed onto paper. The fact is that they are two different (though closely related) systems, and writing is an abstract system of symbols for representing the spoken language. There are some languages which are spoken but which have no written equivalents, and there are some languages (computer code for instance) which are never likely to be spoken. Richard Sproat in this wide-ranging study Language, Technology, and Society emphasises from the start that the most important connection between speech and the written language is the technological invention of writing. He takes the radical line that most written languages have built into them a strong element of encoding the sound of the language – including even Chinese, which many people imagine to be entirely ideographic.

He examines a number of languages – Arabic, Chinese, Phoenician, Egyptian – to demonstrate that they have this thing in common, even though some are written without vowel sounds, and some are written right-to-left in sequence. Next he covers the issue of decipherment – how we can understand ancient inscriptions such as the Rosetta Stone and Linear B. The examples he looks at add up to further evidence that even apparently ideographic languages such as Egyptian hieroglyphics were not properly decoded until it was recognised that they recorded the sound of a spoken language – even if improperly, and mixed with symbols and ideograms.

In a chapter on literacy he demonstrates fairly convincingly that the relative complexity of the writing system has little or no relation to rates of literacy. Chinese and Japanese children have to learn thousands of symbols representing the words and concepts in their language, as against the twenty-six or so letters learned by children in most western European languages.

it is remarkably simple to make the case that literacy is a product of economics and indeed, has little or nothing to do with the complexity of the writing system in use in a country.

To raise standards of literacy in a society, ‘all’ that’s required is to raise the living standards of its inhabitants.

There’s a chapter on the history of the typewriter – a technological phase which was quite short lived, but which has left us with the legacy of the QWERTY keyboard layout. Despite the fact that alternatives to this have been invented, QWERTY has prevailed, largely he argues, because it is quite good ergonomically.

He finishes with two chapters which are clearly dealing with his own specialism: (he worked at AT&T Bell Laboratories for eighteen years. The first of these is on speech recognition technology, and the second on machine translation (MT) which he argues has come a long way since it first began during the Cold War. But it still has a long way to go, as even Google will demonstrate if you ask it to translate a web page into a second language you understand.

There’s a full academic apparatus of endnotes, glossary, bibliography and annotated suggestions further reading, yet I was rather surprised that throughout the whole of this very thorough study he made no reference to some of the seminal texts on the relationship between language writing and technology. For these you will need to move on to Walter Ong’s Orality and Literacy, Henri-Jean Martin’s The History and the Power of Writing, and Jay Bolter’s Writing Space.

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Richard Sproat, Language, Technology, and Society, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010, pp.286, ISBN: 0199549389

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Lexicography: An Introduction

June 29, 2009 by Roy Johnson

how dictionaries are compiled and written

This book is an accessible introduction to lexicography – the study of dictionaries and how they are compiled. Howard Jackson provides a detailed overview of the history, types and content of everybody’s essential reference book. He starts with a very readable introduction to the grammar, structure, and history of the English language, then traces the development of dictionaries. This goes from their origins as lists of ‘hard’ (that is, foreign) words in the early Renaissance, via Dr Johnson’s famous attempt to ‘fix the meaning of words’ which when it appeared in 1754 carried a preface admitting that such an attempt was pointless.

Next comes the monumental Oxford English Dictionary, begun by John Murray in 1884, which took forty-four years to complete. He gives a detailed account of the editors’ attempts to be as systematic as possible, constructing their evidence from the work of volunteers. He covers the American tradition of democratic lexicography pioneered by Noah Webster in what emerged at the US popular option, Webster’s Third New International Dictionary of the English Language. There’s a careful explanation of the differences between shorter and concise dictionaries, and an account of what’s possible in the increasingly popular electronic dictionaries. These now commonly offer search facilities, sample pronunciations, and hypertext links between entries.

He discusses issues of range – what to include or exclude – how entries in a dictionaries are to be displayed, and how much detail is to be provided under each entry. This becomes most interesting when he tackles problems of including new terms, slang expressions, obsolete and taboo terms, and how much etymological history to provide.

The other highpoint is a consideration of the different ways in which words can be defined, when they have multiple meanings (horse, table, back) and often take their meaning from the context in which they are used.

Who will be interested in all this? Students and teachers of language, lexicographers of course, and anyone with an interest in the most popular source of reference in most cultures – the book (or CD-ROM) to which we turn when we need information on the spelling or meaning of a word.

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Howard Jackson, Lexicography: An Introduction, London: Routledge, 2002, pp.190, ISBN: 0415231736

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