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Chapter 11 - Coggle Diagram
Chapter 11
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Corpora, computers and the internet.
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It was less than twenty years ago that computers were first used to manage the massive database of words and citations amassed.
These twenty years have revolutionized the field in many ways. Editing copy is only one, rather pedestrian, area in which technology has reshaped dictionary making. The use of corpora has brought astounding improvements (and challenges) to the lexicographical process, and the development of affordable and portable multimedia has generated a range of dictionary products that would have dazzled, or more likely terrified,
Aside from transforming access routes, format and multimedia resources in the end result, technology has had a massive impact on the core processes of collection, selection, construction and arrangement through the creation of lexical corpora and the development of associated software.
Authority or record?
For your lexicographer, having written his dictionary, comes to be considered “as one having authority,” whereas his function is only to make a record, not to give a law.
The idea that the lexicographer should provide a full and faithful record of English speech as it falls from the lips of uneducated labourers, unruly teenagers, rural dialect users, ‘non-native’ speakers, gang members and others who may not aspire to the epithet ‘great’ would probably have appalled him.
Almost a century later, many educated speakers in countries with long literacy traditions still succumb to the ‘spell’ of language, allowing the monolithic myth of a single correct version of each language to mould our attitudes to vocabulary.
Dictionary compilation
Compiling a dictionary used to take a very long time. The OED saga, for example, was initiated by the Philological Society of London in 1857, but the last volume of the first edition didn’t appear until 1928, over seventy years later. Advances in technology over the past few decades have sped up the glacial flow of earlier lexicographical practice, but still the path from inception to publication is a slow one.
That’s less than one letter of the alphabet per year, indicating that even with modern tools, lexicography remains a lengthy process.
What takes so long? Well, to a certain extent this will depend on the type of dictionary being written and this, in turn, will normally depend on an identified demand or need.
Lexicography.
Lexicography, the science and practice of dictionary-making, is a vibrant field, currently experiencing rapid growth as a result of the spectacular advances in technology of the last few decades.
Lexicography is closely associated with an area of descriptive linguistics called lexicology, it is the academic study of words: their spoken and written forms, their syntactic and morphological properties, and their meanings; in a particular language or in human language in general; both at a fixed point in history and as they change through time.
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