应《网络安全法》要求，自2017年10月1日起，未进行实名认证将不得使用互联网跟帖服务。为保障您的帐号能够正常使用，请尽快对帐号进行手机号验证，感谢您的理解与支持！

24小时热门版块排行榜    

小木虫论坛-学术科研互动平台 » 科研生活区 » 外语学习 » 【交流】陆谷孙教授为《英汉大词典》写的英文代序（全文）Part I【已搜索无重复】
31/1返回列表
查看: 633  |  回复: 2
只看楼主@他人 存档 新回复提醒 (忽略) 收藏    在APP中查看
当前主题已经存档。

清风出袖

至尊木虫 (著名写手)

[交流] 【交流】陆谷孙教授为《英汉大词典》写的英文代序（全文）Part I【已搜索无重复】

What Is Out of Sight Is Lost Forever?”

----In Lieu of a Preface

Lu Gusun



I begin by quoting Samuel Johnson’s remark when he commented on the widespread rural illiteracy in Scotland in his time (Vincent, 1989:48), suggesting that those who knew nothing of written language were doomed to live only in the present tense. With a twist — I have changed Dr Johnson’s full stop to a question mark — the remark is hereby quoted with a view to showing that although a tradition, that of Samuel Johnson’s included, is often “out of sight”, it percolates down and is not “lost forever”. Time being a continuum, willingly or unwillingly, consciously or unconsciously, all vagaries of fashion notwithstanding, we live to some extent in the shadow of what is “out of sight”. In the field of lexicography we therefore write, using a double entendre, in the past as well as the present and the future tenses.

However, if one cares to look ahead across the lexicographic landscape, what catches the eye, I presume, is the future tense writ large. Living in the computer age, when we consult a dictionary most of us “click, look and listen”.1 True, the trend unmistakably and irreversibly makes for dictionaries whose information is transmitted through such electronic media as computers, CD-ROMs, the Internet, or plug-in memory chips. A good many of them enable a speedier look-up of a wealth of data and are much user-friendlier with a multimedia combination of texts, graphics, images, audio clips, video clips, and animation, allowing greater user autonomy in virtual space or even soliciting user participation in or interaction with the dictionary text by cutting, copying and pasting, indexing, bookmarking, hyperlinking, up- or downloading, deleting, adding or fleshing out entries with a click of the mouse or a turn of the trackball in real time. There are online, user-written dictionaries without an editorial staff such as Wiktionary launched by Wikipedia in 2002, billed as future of lexicography, even though it is widely reviled as a lexicographic rumpus and flop (Lepore, 2006). No wonder when the Second Edition of The Oxford English Dictionary was published in 1989 in both p- (ink-and-paper) and e- (CD-ROM) forms, the sales ratio of p- to e- was approximately 1:10 (Mai,1994:123). Taking one step further from there, the OED Online which was made available in March 2000, boasting some twenty search options, not only incorporated its sizeable Additions in three volumes, but also ruled out the problem of CD-ROM wear and tear, creating in addition more look-up options by numerous pop-up windows for the purpose of customization. Therefore, it is hardly an overstatement to say that from now on practitioners of lexicographical art and craft will primarily “write in the future tense” and it is predicted with assurance that the dictionary market for tomorrow will teem with works like the OED Online. But the “future tense” lexicography, as it were, looks both backward as well as forward ---- no mistake about it. The December 2003 OED Online Update, for instance, pinned quite a number of words down etymologically by antedating, say, “nit-picking” from 1970 to 1961, and “noisy” from 1693 to 1609, obviating looking forward alone.

Machines are made by man. So are computers with their programs. However state-of-the-art the computer ware is, be it hard or soft or firm or whichever, in the final analysis it is always the wizardly liveware (people working the computer) or the “wet ware” (jocularly the human brain) drawing unceasingly on an accrual of human wisdom that ultimately counts. Put another way, he who writes in the future tense cannot do away with the present and the past tenses, and whatever is “out of sight” is NOT “lost forever”. Johnson, for instance, is very much alive not in that as a cultural relic his Dictionary sells at 10,000 to 30,000 USD (Hitchings, 2005:229n) apiece today, but in that as recently as in February 2000 seventeen U.S. Congressmen brought a federal lawsuit against the then President Bill Clinton, who, according to them, had no constitutional right to bomb the former Yugoslavia without Congressional authorization. An issue at stake was the exact meaning of “to declare” and that of “war”. A decision was thereupon reached to appeal to nonpareil dictionary authority and this authority was none other than Samuel Johnson of course! (O’Hagan, 2006:12-13) More interestingly, perhaps out of a propensity to revive inkhorn archaicisms, the owl in the hit Harry Potter book series is named Pigwidgeon (meaning a teeny thing), one of a panoply of quaint entry words Johnson’s Dictionary abounds in.

Most dictionaries of today ---- and of tomorrow presumably for that matter ---- provide grammatical and pragmatic information such as parts of speech, irregular inflexions, usage or register labels which are all taken for granted. But has any one ever paused to think who initiated the paradigm in the first place? In the 150-odd years of English lexicographical chrysalis prior to Johnson there had been some twenty-ish works ranging from Robert Cawdrey’s Table Alphabeticall to Henry Cockeram’s glossary of “hard words” (who was the first to call his work a dictionary) and to Nathan Bailey’s An Universal Etymological English Dictionary of 1721. It is interesting to note that the above-mentioned Table contained no entry words in the W, X and Y sections while the last left behind the perpetual laughing stock of defining “cat” as “a creature well known” and “black” as “a colour” and of circular definition or of ignotum per ignotius (“definiens” befogging “definiendum” in technical parlance or, plainly, explaining the difficult with the more difficult) aplenty so that “to wash” was “to cleanse by washing” and “to get” was “to obtain”. The learned world had to wait for Samuel Johnson to introduce grammar and pragmatics in his Dictionary of 1775, to which we are indebted even today after the lapse of nearly 250 years, although we may offer to disagree with him upon his legendary truculent diatribes about Whig politics and about oats being a Scottish human staple but an English horse fodder. The liberally used but sometimes misplaced “cant” label of his has spawned a multitude of usage or register labels we apply and will continue to apply in dictionary-making. Plus ça change indeed!

The Johnsonian lesson, as I see it, lies first and foremost in the lexicographer’s fervour in reading. Johnson had meant to plunder the wordlists from predecessors such as Nathan Bailey and Robert Ainsworth2. But the more he read with a view to ransacking quotable nuggets, the more was he carried away by reading over 500 authors spanning more than 200 years, so much so that his own wordlist ---- especially in the latter letters ---- eventually was generated in a large part by illustrations he had gleaned from reading. For a total of 42,773 entries he supplied approximately 110,000 quotations ---- only half of all he had collected, thus winning himself a fame of “a robust genius, born to tackle with whole libraries” (Boswell,1831:78). Johnson, having made a point of regulating an “undefiled” [sic] English language rather than indulging it, read eminent authors of a past age such as Shakespeare and Milton, setting an example of what I call "literary realism" (using REAL English from the assembled matter of literacy and canonicity) to be taken over by Sir James Murray’s OED3, who even went so far as to identify lexicography in terms of “a department of literature” (Hitchings, 2005:81). And it was his wide-ranging interest and unquenchable curiosity that induced Johnson to read vastly and variously about not only, say, Aristotle, Isaac Watts and John Locke, but also about exotic flora and fauna and about the then novelties such as coffee houses, spa towns, cricket, ginseng and tea. Living contemporaries usually didn’t pass muster with him, although later he relaxed his rule a little bit and even smuggled in some thirty of his own written samples marked as “anonymous”. His was not the kind of leisurely reading on the part of a connoisseur making fetishization of books, but that under an oil lamp in the prison house of learning for the specific purpose of enriching his dictionary with refined elegance of a bygone age occasionally interlaced with a smattering of novel “otherness” (according to him, for example, the number of possible combinations of the letters of the English alphabet is 1,391,724,288,887,252,999,425,128,493,402,200!) ---- a tradition reinforced by the OED afterwards, although the editors of the latter professed their interest in the non-canonical and ephemera of modern newspapers and magazines as well (Mugglestone, 2005:20-21). Today we are wont to speak of corpora painstakingly developed by teams working with scanners. To be sure, what we have in the end is a massive cache of riches. But remember: many men, many minds and many criteria, and scanning by machine is more often than not indiscriminate. Coming across such useless examples as “He is a muppet” under the entry word “muppet” in a prestigious British dictionary of the 2000s and a dubious one “I don’t want a cigar now, thank you, but I’ll take a rain check on it”4 under the entry “rain check” in another ---- both claiming to have derived from well-stocked corpora ---- we would undoubtedly be nostalgic about Samuel Johnson’s selective acumen in providing apposite illustrative examples. Quoting literary giants verbatim may appear DWEM-ish and snobbish by present-day standards, but in the age of ours when science and technology dictate, Johnson’s compendium of examples gives the reader a sense of transcendence over what is mundane and mechanical, doing credit to the sagacity of remarkable “wet ware” and breathing some uplifting air into the ambient feculence.

A tangential word or two by way of digression. “Reading maketh a full man”. While the Baconian saying still rings mellifluously in the ears of superannuated people of my age, it gives rise to a hackneyed ennui among modish computer-savvy young men and women who would rather spend days and nights browsing BBS websites or other web pages, emailing, chatting, blogging, googling, playing games on the computer. When they encounter an unknown word in English, they will simply highlight it and click on an electronic dictionary for an equivalent in Chinese. The result of using some low-quality handheld electronic bric-a-bracs and, worse, developing a learning strategy thereby, can be disastrous. Some of the grossly mistranslated English store signs and menus such as “Japanese Arrangement” for “Japanese Cuisine” and “cloud swallow soup” for “wonton soup” that are internationally and uproariously notorious are a case in point. As a pedagogue, I keep advising my students to read variously and viscerally so as to ensure a minimum of an information input of a million words a year while using a sizeable enough decoding dictionary and an annual output of at least 10,000 words with the help of a "radioactive" encoding dictionary. Learning means, above all, an adequate amount of reading plus writing using two different kinds of dictionary, or, in a nutshell, making one “fuller” in the Baconian sense of the word.

Besides being a purposeful reader with scholarly talons laid on every available book, what other qualities are required of a lexicographer? Using Samuel Johnson as an exemplar once more, he or she has to be a bibliophile or a man or woman of letters, not only keen on reading with gusto but also capable of writing with brio. Johnson himself declared that he WROTE a dictionary instead of compiling one. Approximately sixty percent of all Johnson's learned quotes in the dictionary and elsewhere were taken from Greek or Latin savants, with Horace accounting for the most of them (Hitchings, 2005:103). And his writing career began as early as when he wrote for Edward Cave’s Gentlemen’s Magazine in 1731, and, working to order, he could produce as many as ----wow! ---- 10,000 words at one go a day. He edited a complete Shakespeare with a now world renowned preface and proceeded to work on Lives of the English Poets otherwise known as Johnson’s Poets. His most learned essays appeared in the six-page Rambler, a magazine underwritten by the said Cave and a few others. It is in these essays that Johnson tried out a Latinate style fraught with words from his Dictionary: “adscititious,” “efflorescence,” “equiponderant,” ”quadrature,” ”terraqueous,” and “to superinduce”. Last but not least, integral to the Dictionary’s appeal is decidedly Johnson’s letter written on the 7th February 1755 to Lord Chesterfield, a disdainful lip-server of a patron who was now prepared to partake of the success of the project, a letter to salve the writer’s own acrimony as well as to admonish the imposter. Deservedly, it is a masterpiece of English prose, a sample of controlled rage and epistolary satire ---- satire in prose rather than in its Johnsonian definition of being always in verse. Being so regularly and enthusiastically given to words is admittedly going a long way to being a wordsmith worth his salt. But Johnson was a wordsmith of common sense rather than abstrusities. His observations about it being easier to translate homelier words like “bright” and “sweet” into another language in a bilingual dictionary than explain them in the mother tongue in a monolingual one and about linguistic corruption happening most frequently and flagrantly as a rule at the extremes of the social spectrum are worth more than tons of the now voguish academic gibberish. To me at least.

[ Last edited by 清风出袖 on 2007-8-20 at 22:02 ]
回复此楼

» 猜你喜欢
1楼2007-08-19 22:33:31
已阅   回复此楼   关注TA 给TA发消息 送TA红花 TA的回帖

清风出袖

至尊木虫 (著名写手)

【交流】陆谷孙教授为《英汉大词典》写的英文代序（全文）Part II【已搜索无重复】

★
wfcicsd(金币+1,VIP+0):辛苦了，谢谢

清风出袖

至尊木虫 (著名写手)
相关版块跳转 我要订阅楼主 清风出袖 的主题更新
31/1返回列表
普通表情 龙 兔 虎 猫 高级回复(可上传附件)
信息提示
关闭
请填处理意见
关闭