Boston University

"The whole heart-rending history in a single retrospective glance": James Henry’s words and Virgil’s words

An attempt at three lines of thought that might come to constitute a habitable triangle.

First, to suggest that, despite the dangers of effrontery, those of us who markedly lack a particular field of scholarship may find ourselves able to profit honourably from the great scholars in the field.

Second, to recall that James Henry (1798-1876) was one such, one of Ireland’s – and Europe’s – authentically independent scholars. A poet of dark wit and bright charm, he set about a lifelong interrogation of the Christian religion. A controversially humane doctor in Dublin, he came to travel through Europe, through history, through languages dead and alive, and entered upon his Twelve Years’ Voyage of Discovery in the First Six Books of the Aeneis (1853). The twelve years were tripled, and the six books became all twelve books, issuing in his astonishing compendium Aeneidea (1873-1889). Vividly learnèd, extravagant, pertinacious inquiries into every line and almost every word of the Aeneid: those without Latinity should not leave these volumes to Latinists (of whom Christopher Ricks is not one).

Third, Henry has a recurring preoccupation with the ways in which we are so often faced, not with something that has built into it a direction, but with an axis. “The further meaning of f l u e r e, i.e. whether the flowing signified by that word is flowing in a good sense, or in a bad, is to be determined by the context only – RETRO SUBLAPSA REFERRI explaining as clearly and unmistakably as it is possible for words to explain, that the flowing is backward, or in a bad sense”. Nothing is further from Virgil’s mind than . . . Truly?

independent scholar

“Systems and Centos”: Ephraim Chambers and James Keir on Dictionaries

Historians of lexicography would hope that those who compile dictionaries would have something to say about their principles, methods, and justification for what they do. Such accounts are however not all that frequent, and scholar must perforce trawl the forematter entries of the dictionaries themselves to understand their structure. It is therefore refreshing to find extended comments on dictionaries, even if they are not from the pens of mainstream lexicographers. This paper, arising from my recent research on the history of English medical dictionaries, examines the comments made by two non-mainstream eighteenth-century lexicographers on the nature and function of dictionaries. These are Ephraim Chambers (1680?-1740), whose hugely successful Cyclopaedia was first published in 1728, and James Keir (1735-1820), who translated one dictionary of chemistry and later undertook an abortive one of his own, which was published, but only in part, in 1789.

A significant part of what Chambers and Keir had to say depends upon their having compiled and translated encyclopaedic dictionaries. The question which bothered both was not only what organising principles should drive their efforts, but whether and to what extent such principles should be invoked at all. Should such a work be a patchwork (a cento) depending simply on alphabetisation, or should it be internally coherent and systematic? The generalist Chambers and the specialist Keir came to disparate conclusions and achieved differing degrees of success.

University of Alberta

Romantic lexicography

I’d like to argue that the words classicism and romanticism  can be used as fruitfully of lexicography as they can of painting or of the other fine arts of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe, and to sketch some of the features which might define romantic lexicography.

I will begin by discussing the ways in which the romanticism of historians of art speaks to historians of lexicography. The generalizing tendency of classicism in art contrasts with Blake’s outburst against Reynolds that “To Generalize is to be an Idiot. To Particularize is the Alone Distinction of Merit.” Just so, the ideal of the most classicizing of all dictionaries, the Dictionnaire de l’Académie française (at least in its seventeenth- and eighteenth-century editions), which sets up a generalized metropolitan usage as its norm, contrasts with the ideal of the citation-rich and even dialectally oriented dictionary as practised by John Jamieson (1808 and 1825) and others.

I will go on, still with graphic art in mind, to think about the relationship between romanticism and the archaic in lexicography. When the classicizing dictionary quotes, it is from the classical authors. When the romantic dictionary quotes, the authors whom it most especially seeks out are archaic, not classical. This concern with the archaic is what brings Jamieson and Charles Richardson together (in contrast with Johnson?), and gives them something in common with contemporary developments in the lexicography of ancient Greek.

I will then explore the relation between romantic literature and romantic lexicography by looking at some English-speaking imaginative writers and philologists who took an interest in both. These will include James Boswell, who was a lexicographer of spoken Scots in the 1760s and 1770s and an observer of the Ossianic controversy; Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who planned ancient Greek and English dictionaries; and Richard Chenevix Trench, a friend of Richardson’s best student, John Mitchell Kemble, a careful reader of Richardson, and, with Coleridge’s grandson Herbert, one of the begetters of the Oxford English Dictionary, a work in which the tension between romantic and classicizing lexicography was, and is, unresolved.

Australian National University, Australian National Dictionary Centre

Exploring Lexicography, Dictionaries, and Dictionary Publishing as Cultural Heritage and Cultural Memory

Dictionaries serve to record language; in doing so, they become texts that not only reflect the time and place of their creation, but also can be seen to be invested with value as recorders and conveyors of history, heritage, and even memory. This paper is inspired by work I have done on two very different sets of dictionary texts. The first set consists of dictionaries of First World War slang, particularly the famous Songs and Slang of the British Soldier: 1914-18 (edited by John Brophy and Eric Partridge). I have been particularly interested in the various editions of this text (produced over several decades), and the way in which each iteration can be seen to convey particular understandings of the First World War experience and the changing collective memory of the war. The second set is the two editions of the Australian National Dictionary, the second edition of which I am Managing Editor. My work as editor has prompted me to reflect on the value of a historical dictionary (especially, perhaps, of a variety of English) for society, and the way in which we could understand a historical dictionary to be a heritage object, both as a textual record and as a link to a language that people relate to on an emotional as much as intellectual level. I hope that this paper might provide some insights into the role of the dictionary in culture and society, as well as prompt reflection on some of the challenges of the lexicographer.

University of Glasgow, Historical Thesaurus of English

Profiles and Peaks: Lexicalisation, Focus, and Trauma in the History of English

The history of the English lexicon is somewhat different when one looks at it from the perspective of clusters of meaning. In this paper, I use the database of the Historical Thesaurus of English – which aggregates various lexicographical sources (primarily the OED) into semantic order – to describe lexicalisation profiles across the last thousand years of English. These profiles, which show the peaks and troughs of the number of words available at any given moment to lexicalise a concept in English, give us a complementary view to the standard history of the English language (which is one of gentle growth, with spurts of lexical increase during the English Renaissance, the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras, and the industrial revolution) by seeing the language as a result of the interaction and interrelation of multiple semantic fields.

Some of the stories of these fields range from the obvious to the subtle. They include the Early Modern shift towards a more scientific worldview – leading to disorder and decline in the lexicalisation of fields such as astrology, the attributes of God, and divination – and the more inconspicuous peak of lexicalisation of sin and wickedness in the 1600s, alongside purity, arrogance, and motivation. This latter phenomenon, of shifting granularity and bulk in a semantic field, can also be used to show what we can call a trace of concentrated attention on particular concepts, which supplements our measures of textual keyness with a wider view from the language period itself.

Overall, these changes in lexicalisation, affected by semantic pressure at the local and global levels, reveal areas of linguistic trauma – that is, sudden expansions or contractions in a semantic field – or cultural focus which are only easily revealed through a combination of digital techniques and new datasets, such as the Historical Thesaurus.