What you may not have known about dictionaries in the lecture “Dictionaries: Myths and Reality”
Dictionaries - one of the most ancient and most famous achievements of world linguistics. But how much widespread ideas about dictionaries correspond to reality? Who makes the dictionaries? How was it done before and what has changed in the new, computer age? Do dictionaries all know - and if not, then who knows better than them? Is it always worth trusting dictionaries, is it possible to do without them completely and what will the dictionaries expect in the future?
Boris Leonidovich Iomdin, Ph.D. in Philology, is a lecture ; V. V. Vinogradova of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Associate Professor at the Institute of Linguistics, Russian State University for the Humanities, Associate Professor at the Faculty of Philology of the Higher School of Economics.
The first similarities of dictionaries appeared in the XXV century BC. at the Sumerians. These were the so-called glosses: the meanings of unfamiliar words were written on the margins of the manuscripts. Well, the first known to us full-fledged dictionary, which is a separate book, appeared in China in the 20th century BC. It is called Erya (爾雅 [Ěryǎ]) and consists of 2,094 entries. A total of 13,113 characters are interpreted in it, written on 19 staanings - bundles of 20-30 bamboo planks, 1 cm by 20-40 cm in size. Today’s most complete Chinese dictionaries contain interpretations of about 60,000 hieroglyphs, and educated Chinese speakers for their life learn on average about 10,000 characters. So, despite the antiquity, the Erya dictionary can be called quite complete. Since there is no alphabet in Chinese, vocabulary entries in it are ordered by subject: kinship terms, housing, utensils, musical instruments, celestial bodies, territories, elevations, mountains, water, grass, trees, insects, fish, birds, wild animals, Pets.
Around 100 AD Shuōwén Jiězì appeared - the first dictionary where the hieroglyphs were broken down by keys: grouped by the basic graphic elements of hieroglyphs, which simplifies the search for interpretations of hieroglyphs in cases where even the approximate meaning of the word is unknown. The dictionary contains 9353 characters, its author is known: Xu Shen.
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The earliest extant Slavic dictionary is the so-called alphabet book. It was created in 1282 as an appendix to the Kormchi book and containing interpretations of 174 words. Well, the very first printed dictionary was published in 1596 as an application to the grammar of Lawrence Zizania.
It contains a translation of 1061 words from the Old Slavonic language into Old Russian .
For most of its history, dictionaries were literature exclusively for professionals, and among ordinary people were not particularly popular, and were not particularly accessible. The boom of dictionaries that is being observed now began to manifest itself only in the mid-twentieth century, when it became clear that the dictionary is not just a book explaining incomprehensible words, but in some sense a conductor of culture. One of the surveys conducted in the 1990s in the UK showed that at least one explanatory dictionary exists in 90% of British families. More than cookbooks (70%) and the Bible (80%).
Entire families of dictionaries have arisen, compiled by single groups of authors according to the same principles:
The first step in compiling a dictionary is to collect a word list, a set of words that will be included in it. Next you need to make definitions of all these words. To do this based only on one's knowledge (introspection) is not the most effective way, although some of the work is done in this way. A more complete picture can be obtained by interviewing native speakers. Also, information is obtained through experiments on native speakers. And the fourth method is case studies.
Until computers gained widespread use, the definitions were recorded on cards, of which the files were made. The hardest thing was to find examples of the use of words in fiction. Academician A. A. Zaliznyak spoke of this in the following way: “It is already difficult for current young people to imagine that this work was done manually. “This is an unthinkable absurdity - to do this kind of work without a computer,” I had heard. In fact, the working tool was four bread trays, obtained in a nearby bakery; each consisted of 25 thousand cards of thin paper. "
With the spread of the computer, it became possible to form the corpus of the language: sets of texts available for searching and grammatical markup. Now you can find a variety of options for the use of a word in just a couple of seconds. This has produced a real revolution in the work on dictionaries.
The corpus differs from the electronic library in that it does not have access to the full texts, it cannot simply be read. But at the same time there is a powerful full-featured search, focused on linguistic research. The largest corpus of Russian-language texts is the national corpus of the Russian language . It includes more than 500 million words. It contains a variety of texts, including examples of oral speech, which were previously very difficult to access.
If we consider dictionary definitions of similar words in isolation from them, it is not always possible to determine exactly which word is meant. Definitions in natural language may be too vague and general. But if you describe the words in any formal language that does not allow ambiguity, it will be very inconvenient for a person to read such definitions. Many scientists are working on finding a compromise that would eliminate this problem. For example, Anna Wezhbitska. She is creating a universal semantic meta-language. Anna believes that there is a small core of basic universal values - semantic primitives. They are expressed in all languages and understandable to everyone. And already with their help, you can describe all the other words. The current version of this language contains about 60 words:
As you can see, there are the most common pronouns, numerals, logical connectives and verbs that express the main actions. To describe a complex concept, one can resort to the use of logical chains, which collectively indicate one particular word. Consider this with the example of the word excited:
Or using the example of the word ashamed:
The metalanguage must contain a small but sufficient number of units. However, interpretations from elementary values alone are too difficult to understand. It is possible to compromise: to include in the definition more complex words combined from several primitives, while not allowing synonymy and homonymy.
After watching the lecture to the end, you will learn what the principles of compiling dictionaries are, what other problems today arise before compilers of dictionaries, and how they are trying to solve them.
Boris Leonidovich Iomdin, Ph.D. in Philology, is a lecture ; V. V. Vinogradova of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Associate Professor at the Institute of Linguistics, Russian State University for the Humanities, Associate Professor at the Faculty of Philology of the Higher School of Economics.
How did dictionaries arise and develop?
The first similarities of dictionaries appeared in the XXV century BC. at the Sumerians. These were the so-called glosses: the meanings of unfamiliar words were written on the margins of the manuscripts. Well, the first known to us full-fledged dictionary, which is a separate book, appeared in China in the 20th century BC. It is called Erya (爾雅 [Ěryǎ]) and consists of 2,094 entries. A total of 13,113 characters are interpreted in it, written on 19 staanings - bundles of 20-30 bamboo planks, 1 cm by 20-40 cm in size. Today’s most complete Chinese dictionaries contain interpretations of about 60,000 hieroglyphs, and educated Chinese speakers for their life learn on average about 10,000 characters. So, despite the antiquity, the Erya dictionary can be called quite complete. Since there is no alphabet in Chinese, vocabulary entries in it are ordered by subject: kinship terms, housing, utensils, musical instruments, celestial bodies, territories, elevations, mountains, water, grass, trees, insects, fish, birds, wild animals, Pets.
Around 100 AD Shuōwén Jiězì appeared - the first dictionary where the hieroglyphs were broken down by keys: grouped by the basic graphic elements of hieroglyphs, which simplifies the search for interpretations of hieroglyphs in cases where even the approximate meaning of the word is unknown. The dictionary contains 9353 characters, its author is known: Xu Shen.
')
The earliest extant Slavic dictionary is the so-called alphabet book. It was created in 1282 as an appendix to the Kormchi book and containing interpretations of 174 words. Well, the very first printed dictionary was published in 1596 as an application to the grammar of Lawrence Zizania.
It contains a translation of 1061 words from the Old Slavonic language into Old Russian .
The heyday of lexicography
For most of its history, dictionaries were literature exclusively for professionals, and among ordinary people were not particularly popular, and were not particularly accessible. The boom of dictionaries that is being observed now began to manifest itself only in the mid-twentieth century, when it became clear that the dictionary is not just a book explaining incomprehensible words, but in some sense a conductor of culture. One of the surveys conducted in the 1990s in the UK showed that at least one explanatory dictionary exists in 90% of British families. More than cookbooks (70%) and the Bible (80%).
Entire families of dictionaries have arisen, compiled by single groups of authors according to the same principles:
- Random House Webster, Barnhart, American Heritage (USA);
- Oxford, Chambers, Collins, Hamlyn, Longman, Macmillan (United Kingdom);
- Le Robert, Larousse, Tresor (France);
- Duden (Germany);
- Dictionaries of the Academy of Sciences (USSR, Russia).
- ALS - Dictionary of modern Russian literary language in seventeen volumes.
- M. –L .: Publishing House of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, 1950–1965.
- MAS - Dictionary of the Russian language in four volumes. / Ed. A.P. Evgenieva. M .: Russian language, 1981-1984.
- SOSH - Ozhegov S.I., Shvedova N.Yu. Explanatory dictionary of the Russian language. Ed. 4th M .: Russian language, 1997.
- BTS - Great Dictionary of the Russian language / Comp. S.A. Kuznetsov. SPb., 1998.
- SS - Explanatory Dictionary of the Russian language with the inclusion of information about the origin of words / Ed. ed. N. Yu. Shvedova. M., 2007.
- NBAS - Large Academic Dictionary of the Russian Language. Ch. ed. A.S. Gerd. St. Petersburg., 2012. At the moment, 21 volumes have been published, starting with the word “do” and ending with the word “five”.
How dictionaries are made
The first step in compiling a dictionary is to collect a word list, a set of words that will be included in it. Next you need to make definitions of all these words. To do this based only on one's knowledge (introspection) is not the most effective way, although some of the work is done in this way. A more complete picture can be obtained by interviewing native speakers. Also, information is obtained through experiments on native speakers. And the fourth method is case studies.
Until computers gained widespread use, the definitions were recorded on cards, of which the files were made. The hardest thing was to find examples of the use of words in fiction. Academician A. A. Zaliznyak spoke of this in the following way: “It is already difficult for current young people to imagine that this work was done manually. “This is an unthinkable absurdity - to do this kind of work without a computer,” I had heard. In fact, the working tool was four bread trays, obtained in a nearby bakery; each consisted of 25 thousand cards of thin paper. "
With the spread of the computer, it became possible to form the corpus of the language: sets of texts available for searching and grammatical markup. Now you can find a variety of options for the use of a word in just a couple of seconds. This has produced a real revolution in the work on dictionaries.
The corpus differs from the electronic library in that it does not have access to the full texts, it cannot simply be read. But at the same time there is a powerful full-featured search, focused on linguistic research. The largest corpus of Russian-language texts is the national corpus of the Russian language . It includes more than 500 million words. It contains a variety of texts, including examples of oral speech, which were previously very difficult to access.
What is missing dictionaries
If we consider dictionary definitions of similar words in isolation from them, it is not always possible to determine exactly which word is meant. Definitions in natural language may be too vague and general. But if you describe the words in any formal language that does not allow ambiguity, it will be very inconvenient for a person to read such definitions. Many scientists are working on finding a compromise that would eliminate this problem. For example, Anna Wezhbitska. She is creating a universal semantic meta-language. Anna believes that there is a small core of basic universal values - semantic primitives. They are expressed in all languages and understandable to everyone. And already with their help, you can describe all the other words. The current version of this language contains about 60 words:
- I, YOU, SOMEONE, PEOPLE, SOMETHING, BODY
- KIND, PART; THIS, THE SAME, OTHER
- ONE, TWO, SOME, ALL, MANY, FEW
- GOOD, BAD; BIG, SMALL
- THINK, KNOW, WANT, FEEL, SEE, HEAR
- SAY, WORDS, TRUE
- DO, HAPPEN, MOVE, TOUCH
- BE, THERE IS, HAVE; LIVE, DIE
- WHEN, NOW, BEFORE, AFTER, A LONG TIME, A SHORT TIME, FOR SOME TIME, MOMENT
- WHERE, HERE, ABOVE, BELOW, FAR, NEAR, SIDE, INSIDE
- NOT, MAYBE, CAN, BECAUSE, IF
- VERY, MORE; AS
As you can see, there are the most common pronouns, numerals, logical connectives and verbs that express the main actions. To describe a complex concept, one can resort to the use of logical chains, which collectively indicate one particular word. Consider this with the example of the word excited:
- (a) X felt something because X thought something
- (b) sometimes a person thinks:
- (c) "I know now: something very good will happen
- (d) I want it to happen
- (e) I can't think about things
- (f) something good
- (g) X felt something like this
- (h) because X thought something like this
Or using the example of the word ashamed:
- (a) X felt something because X thought something
- (b) sometimes a person thinks:
- (c) "people can know something bad about me
- (d) I don’t want people to know this
- (e) smt bad about me
- (f) when I think about it
- (g) smth bad
- (h) X felt something like this
- (i) because X thought something like this
The metalanguage must contain a small but sufficient number of units. However, interpretations from elementary values alone are too difficult to understand. It is possible to compromise: to include in the definition more complex words combined from several primitives, while not allowing synonymy and homonymy.
After watching the lecture to the end, you will learn what the principles of compiling dictionaries are, what other problems today arise before compilers of dictionaries, and how they are trying to solve them.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/213461/
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