Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 14, No. 585.
Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
<http://www.princeton.edu/~mccarty/humanist/>
<http://www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/>
Date: Thu, 11 Jan 2001 07:31:25 +0000
From: lachance@chass.utoronto.ca (Francois Lachance)
Subject: A sense of genre
Willard,
Subscribers to Humanist are no doubt aware of an impressive corpus of
Renaissance English dictionaries prepared by Professor Ian Lancashire and
which may be accessed using the following URL
http://library.utoronto.ca/www/utel/ret/ret.html
I was reading recently an article by Ian Lancashire, "Editing English
Renaissance Electronic Texts," collected in _The Literary Text in the
Digital Age_ edited by Richard J. Finneran (University of Michigan Press,
1996). I was impressed by the possibilities Professor Lancashire's work
with Renaissance dictionaries opens up for reflection upon the
intellectual history of lexicography.
A statement with echoes of McLuhan caught my attention and sent me off to
read Ian Lancashire's contribution to _English Language Corpora, Design,
Analysis and Exploitation_ ed. by Jan Aarts, Pieter de Haan and Nelleke
Oostdijk (Rodolphi, 1993) and then to the corpus itself . Unfortunately
his contribution to that volume entitled "The Early Modern English
Renaissance Dictionaries Corpus" where I found:
"Research problems in repurposing early dictionaries involve [...
tagging ... lemmatizing... and] better capturing the 'fuzziness of the
English Renaissance, which lacked formal lexicons and the notion of
'fixed' senses." (p. 19)
which I believe became by 1996 the following claim:
"When speaking about the various _senses_ of a word, Renaissance writers
mean, literally, those different sense experiences, or perceptions, to
which that word was conventionally applied as a sign. The very absence
of a Renaissance dictionary of the kind Johnson wrote is consistent
with this interpretation of how the period understood language." (p. 135)
Much of this becomes clearer in a text publish in the Computing in the
Humanities Working Papers series in 1994, "An Early Modern English
Dictionaries Corpus 1499-1659"
"These early dictionaries are written as if words were best explained
by identifying them with, or in the context of, things in the living
world that people can experience every day. There is little evidence
that these early lexicographers thought of general classes and select,
distinctive features or of a semantics that exists, conceptually,
apart from the everyday world into which the Renaissance citizen was
born, lived, and died."
http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/epc/chwp/lancash2/lan2_4.htm
The McLuhan echo reverberated with commonplace often attributed to Pound
via his reading of Levy_Bruhl ---- vernacular languages fall from the
concrete into abstraction. But I, myself, do not want presently to fall
into ideology critique. Neither do I have the breadth of reading
experience in dealing with this corpus not depth of learning sufficient to
assess Professor Lancashire's claim that Renaissance lexicographers did
not use referential definition or 'fixed senses'. I do want to ask if
Professor Lancashire's observations about the nature of the dictionary
entries might not also point less to a way of relating language and workd
and more to the difficulty of differentiating genres. How does a
researcher's understanding of a period's understanding of glossary, word
list, thesaurus, encyclopedia, affect the content modelling necessary for
developing an electronic edition. How much is the typographic convention
(absent in the Renaissance) of numbering separate meanings under a head
word a precursor of terminological databases (which usually cannot abide
the amibutuity of homographs and polysemy)? Has anyone aligned the rising
hegemony of the computational model in the 19th century and a history of
lexicography? If so, would this be an interesting case for the perenial
question you, Willard, tend with your gardens of words, which to
paraphrase the Ortus Vocabulorum (1500), like flowers, herbs, fruit by
which are strengthened bodies and by which spirits are refreshed, words
furnish the mind, adorn speech?
Does play/work with the computer help/hinder in rethinking the
concrete/abstraction pair?
--
Francois Lachance, Scholar-at-large
http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~lachance
Member of the Evelyn Letters Project
http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~dchamber/evelyn/evtoc.htm
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