Ashgate Critical Essays on Early English Lexicographers

Three major developments in English lexicography took place during the seventeenth century: the emergence of the first free standing monolingual English dictionaries; the making of new kinds of English lexicons that investigated dialect or etymology or that keyed English to invented 'philosophical' languages; and the massive expansion of bilingual lexicography, which not only placed English alongside the European vernaculars but also handled the languages of the new world. The essays in this volume discuss not only the internal history of lexicography but also its wider relationships with culture and society.

Auteur

John Considine is Associate Professor of English at the University of Alberta, Canada

Contenu

Contents: Introduction; Part I Background: Lexicography in the early modern English period: the manuscript record, Ian Lancashire; Motives behind 17th century lexicography: a comparison between German and English dictionaries of that time, Werner Hÿllen; The early modern English tradition of 'hard words' and the Vindex anglicus (1644), Gerhard Graband; Defining English: authenticity and standardization in 17th-century dictionaries, Andrea R. Nagy; Dictionary English and the female tongue, Juliet Fleming. Part II Overview: The beginnings of English lexicography, Allen Walker Read; The beginning: English dictionaries of the first half of the 17th century, James A. Riddell. Part III Individual Dictionaries: What were Robert Cawdrey's hard words? Learned terms and A Table Alphabeticall (1604), R.W. McConchie; Women and the Godly art of rhetoric: Robert Cawdrey's Puritan dictionary, Sylvia Brown; The historical significance of Cockeram's treatment of verbs of high frequency, Kusujiro Miyoshi; The working methods of Thomas Blount, Jÿrgen Schÿfer; Authenticating the vocabulary: a study in 17th-century lexicographical practice, N.E. Osselton; Thomas Dawks's The Complete English-Man (1685): a newly-discovered 17th-century dictionary?, Edwina Burness. Part IV Encyclopedic Historical and Specialized Dictionaries of English: Captain John Smith's Sea Grammar and its debt to Sir Henry Mainwaring's 'Seaman's Dictionary', P.L. Barbour; 'New World of English Words': John Ray, FRS, the dialect protagonist, in the context of his times (1658-1691), Jo Gladstone; Theory meets empiricism: English Lexis in John Wilkins' philosophical language and the role of William Lloyd, Gabriele Knappe; A Physical Dictionary (1657): the first English medical dictionary, Jukka Tyrkkö. Part V Bilingual and Polyglot Dictionaries: The lexicography of the learned languages in 17th-century England, John Considine; Wordlists of exotic languages in 17th-century England, John Considine; The French-Engl