EUROPEAN ASSOCIATION FOR LEXICOGRAPHY
Editor: Paul Bogaards. p.bogaards@let.leidenuniv.nl
This quarterly Newsletter is intended to include not only official announcements but also news about EURALEX members, their publications, projects, and (it is hoped) their opinions, and news about other lexicographical organizations. Please try to support this by sending newsletter contributions to Paul Bogaards at the email address above. The deadlines for spring (March), summer (June), autumn (September), and winter (December) issues are respectively 15 January, 15 April, 15 July, and 15 October annually.
The URL of the EURALEX web site is www.euralex.org
Ladislav Zgusta passed away on April 27, 2007 at the age of 83. He was a brilliant but humble academic who eschewed self aggrandizement in favor of genuine accomplishments presented in an understated way. He was not the kind of man who would have wanted effusive tributes; thus, this memorial piece will attempt to focus on his stature in the field, his sense of humor, his effortless grace, and his charmingly whimsical joie de vivre. Donna M.T. Cr. Farina, his co-editor on Lexicography Today, reports that he repeatedly implored: ‘No obituaries for me!’ I promise no obituary for you, Professor Zgusta.
Zgusta was a classicist, a historical linguist, a relentlessly innovative lexicographer, and an archaeological explorer. He was equally familiar with Hittite, Ancient Greek and Latin, writing academic articles in Latin and analyzing all three. He was able to analyze lesser known ancient languages such as Altaic languages, Ossetic and others. The non-Indo-European languages he analyzed span multiple eras and time zones: Etruscan, and Lapp; Caucasic dialects, Dravidian, Turkish, several Semitic languages, Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Tibetan, and Malay; Swahili, Iban, Ngizim, Navajo, Nahuatl, and Athabaskan. The stockpile of modern languages he used for his academic writing included his native Czech, German, Dutch, Danish, Russian, French, and English. As an explorer, he traveled in little known regions of the Caucasus, a journey he called the ‘Caucasian extravaganza’. As a linguistic archaeologist in the 1950’s, he tracked down a number of Ossetic inscriptions inscribed in Ancient Greek on steles in the Arkhiz valley of the river Psysh, in what is now Georgia.
If he was asked how many languages he could speak, he would chuckle and deflect the question in a gentle way. With his repertoire of languages, he was able to write academic reviews, in fact, 647 reviews in all, of a startling variety of academic works, including hundreds of historical dictionaries and bilingual dictionaries. These comprehensive reviews, spanning sixty years, were often on pioneering dictionaries, for example, Lapp, Uzbek, Navaho, and Iban. His reviews of books were in many areas, historical linguistics, lexicography, phonetics, phonology, lexical studies, linguistics textbooks, and onomastics; moreover, the books Zgusta reviewed were written in ten languages, those above, plus Spanish, Italian, and French. His first book review (of a book on Hittite etymology) appeared in 1947 and his 647th book review (of a Serbo-Croatian to English dictionary) will appear this year, 2007.
Beyond his multilingual skills and his indefatigable work ethic, his lasting legacy for the field of lexicography is his Manual of Lexicography, a landmark in 1971, which has influenced and helped shape more than a few chapters in textbooks and hundreds of research articles on lexicography. The work on the manual was based on a massive nine volume Czech-Chinese dictionary developed between 1959 and 1967 that Zgusta planned, managed, and edited. The manual was also informed by work in Berlin between 1964 and 1970, when Zgusta was the managing director of a multi-volume Chinese-German dictionary project. Moreover, his editorship of the annotated bibliography, Lexicography Today: An Annotated Bibliography of the Theory of Lexicography (1989) was innovative, far reaching, and a bibliographical challenge, revealing the surprisingly rich and multifaceted nature of the field. He solely authored eight books in all, four on the onomastics of several areas within Asia Minor. He edited or co-edited another ten, including the co-editorship of the three volume International Encyclopedia of Lexicography. His founding editorial positions on Lexicographica, the Lexicographica Series Maior, and on Dictionaries energized the academic study of dictionary work. He published 152 articles between 1949 (on a Crete-Cypriot gloss and inscription) and 2006 (on the laryngeal and glottalic theories). As a researcher, he won two Guggenheim Fellowships in 1977 and 1984 and one National Endowment for the Humanities grant, as well as several grants and awards from the Czech Academy of Sciences in the 1950’s and 60’s and five grants in the 1970’s from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. He was one of 25 founding members of the DSNA and was a member of EURALEX.
As a teacher at the university level, Professor Zgusta was responsible for four courses, a required course, ‘History of Indo-European Linguistics’, and three electives, ‘Lexicography’, ‘Hittite’ and ‘Language and Human History’. At several Linguistic Society of America Summer Institutes and as a visiting professor in Europe and Asia he tended to teach Lexicography, Historical Linguistics, or Hittite. He was the major professor for a number of Ph.D. dissertations in Linguistics, among them, Sylvio J. Scorza: ‘Indirect discourse and related phenomena in Xenophon’ (1972) [Xenophon - a biographer of Socrates]; Fredric Thomas Dolezal: ‘The lexicographical and lexicological procedures of John Wilkins’ (1983); and Zacharia Salimu Marko Mochiwa. ‘Depletion as both a syntactic and semantic phenomenon: The case of Swahili’ (1988). These topics provide further evidence for the broad range of knowledge that was evident in his publications. Professor Zgusta served on dozens of Ph.D. committees in Prague and in Illinois, providing incisive and helpful advice.
His sense of humor revolved around punning, especially complicated cross-linguistic puns. After returning from a lecture series in India at a university in Mysore with specialists in Indo-Iranian Studies, he received a package back home at the University of Illinois Linguistics Department office from a secretary at the university that had sponsored him. The street address on the hand written mailing label was correct but the name read, ‘Ladies Love Zgusta.’ The office secretaries had some fun seeing this and still remember it. When Zgusta saw it, he roared. We might note that the secretaries also fondly remember him as ‘a perfect gentleman’. He liked to use sesquipedalian (a foot and a half long) words and admitted enjoying polysyllabic humor.
He also enjoyed a classically inspired variety of antonomasia. The usual examples are words such as a Romeo, a Lothario, and a Cassandra. Professor Zgusta spontaneously created dozens of names for those around him. Here are a few: ‘The Prelate of Bobbio’, Robert (Bob) Ilson, the former editor of the IJL, the ‘Slaves’, editors at Heidelberg University, connected with Lexicographica, and ‘The Amanuensis’, a special name for a functionary in that German institution. To give an example of the background behind this type of naming process, Ms. Crispissima was Zgusta’s constructed name indicating his figurative beatification of Professor Donna Maria Theresa Farina. On the title page of Lexicography Today (1989) she is listed as Donna M.T. Cr. Farina. The Cr. stands for Crispissima, based on Saint Crispin (also Crispian, Crispinus), the patron saint of cobblers, leather workers, and tanners. Zgusta created her name based on the name of a saint for cobblers because she compiled an exhaustive annotated bibliography on three by five cards that filled hundreds of shoeboxes in those days of pre-electronic database management. Her job was to manage and maintain the shoeboxes and apparently she did a superb job because he turned the saint’s name, Crispin, into a superlative for her, crispissima, to indicate her superlative capabilities.
Another favored protégé is Thomas B. I. Creamer, whose initials stand for the Bequeued Incredulity, which was meant to play upon the tendency towards hyperbole in ancient Chinese imperial dynasties, for example, your magnificence, the all powerful Emperor of the Middle Kingdom. This was without question apropos, since Mr. Creamer is an expert in Chinese and used to sport a ponytail, a queue of sorts. My own acronym was MDM, which no doubt helped him remember my name, but also was written out as ‘Million Dollar Man.’ The reason for this is that Linguistics at Georgia when I was director in the mid-1990's was a doctoral program that was strapped for cash. As the director I was obligated to search for assistantships and other financial support for the graduate students. He understood how difficult this job was. Although his moniker for me had an element of sarcasm, as did a few of the other names, I did not mind. It was a great honor to have a moniker bestowed on me. Thank you, Professor Zgusta.
As for an Old World sense of joie de vivre, his self-effacing charm and generosity were evident at a EURALEX congress in Zürich. The anecdote begins at Zürilex ’86 when the wine had run out near the end of the Congress Dinner. Professor Zgusta was surrounded by a group of former students and colleagues who were trying vainly to slake the thirst for wine that only desiccated wordsmiths understand. Several of his former students were scrounging around for more wine, looking high and low. Zgusta then quietly spoke to one of the Swiss waiters without attracting the attention of his protégés. The wine then flowed, bottle after bottle for all the parched lexicographers. After a while, it became obvious that he had purchased a case of wine for them. This is a wonderful example of his quiet unassuming grace and kindness. Although I was not an eyewitness, three of these dehydrated recipients have dryly recounted Professor Zgusta’s largesse to me.
My eyewitness example of his largesse follows: Professor Zgusta attended the DSNA meeting at Berkeley in 1999. On the dinner cruise on San Francisco Bay with five or six of us, he slapped down a one hundred dollar bill on our table in the most impromptu manner and announced he would pose a question. Anyone who answered it would win $100. Zgusta's question: ‘Today I walked up a hill to a spot overlooking the harbor [Telegraph Hill in San Francisco] and rested on a bench behind which there is the inscription: Fulgura praevertens vacuam vox permeat aethram (‘Outstripping lightning, let (the human) voice permeate the empty aether (atmosphere’). To whom is the bench dedicated?’ Mr. Steve Bladey of Omnilex answered, ‘Guglielmo Marconi.’ Zgusta grinned and handed him the $100 bill, which Bladey used to buy more wine for all of us at the table. In an email to me, he writes: ‘I believe Z. made the challenge knowing I could guess the answer - win the money - and use it to buy more Californian wine for the table, which I did. I believe it was his gracious way of providing the wine while relieving us of the guilt of drinking it all up.’ Bladey goes on to explain: ‘At our last meeting [Zgusta and Bladey] had shared a bus ride during which we had discussed my use of telegraphic codes in Chinese dictionaries and his interest generally in the alphanumeric and symbolic coding of languages. He described a variety of railroad, commercial, phonetic, and symbolic 'telegraphic' (including semaphore) systems as well as telegraphic code schemes for Asian languages. During that last conversation, among many other things, he spoke at length about the colorful life of Marconi, Marconi's Irish whiskey heiress mother, the wireless on the Titanic, Marconi's activities during wartime, and the fact that various Telegraph Hill(s) at ports were used for semaphore signaling to ships in harbor.’ We see again the combination of Zgusta's multiple academic and historical interests, combined with a pixyish, yet shy desire to cover up his kindnesses, making it clear that his kindness was unconditional.
‘No obituaries for me!’ the man said. I promised not to write an obituary for you, Professor Zgusta nor was it necessary to get bogged down in your incredibly prolific body of work It is difficult for any encomium to do justice to your marvelous sense of humor, self-effacing generosity, effortless charm, and heartfelt hospitality.
Don McCreary
University …..
Laurence Urdang EURALEX Award
The 2006 Laurence Urdang EURALEX Award
The winners of the 2006 Laurence Urdang Euralex Award have been decided. Three persons have received grants:
- Vasyl Starko, Volyn State University in Lutsk, Ukraine: English-Ukrainian Phraseological Dictionary
· Miriam R. L. Petruck, University of Berkeley, USA: A Frame-based Bilingual Hebrew-English Lexicon of Motion.
·
Cristiano Furiassi, University of Torino, Italy:
Publication of a dictionary of False Anglicisms in Italian.
Dr Vasyl Starko will use his award to support his work in compiling a dictionary of English-Ukrainian phrases. The work includes selecting citations from original sources for the dictionary entries, writing definitions, testing them against a range of examples, and writing full dictionary entries.
Dr Miriam Petruck will use her award to continue her ongoing lexicographical work developing a Bilingual Hebrew-English Lexicon of Motion. The methodology used is Frame Semantics and the objective is to create lexical entries for motion vocabulary in Hebrew, derived from a newspaper corpus, and including analogous material in English.
Dr Cristiano Furiassi is preparing the publication of False Anglicisms in Italian, based on his PhD dissertation from 2005. The book falls in two parts: a monograph on false anglicisms and a dictionary of false anglicisms in Italian. The award will be used for the completion of the remaining dictionary entries and doing the revisions needed to make the manuscript ready for publication to a wider audience.
The awardees will submit a report on the progress of their projects within a year after the presentation of the award. The LUA winners give an insight into the variety of projects that can be considered for the award.
The 2007 Laurence Urdang EURALEX Award
For 2007, Laurence Urdang is continuing his very generous award for unpaid lexicographical work. Applications for the 2007 award are welcome on all aspects of lexicography. The amount available for 2007 is GBP £1500 and will be granted in one or at most two portions varying in size from GBP £500 to the full amount. The award may be paid in GBP or in EUR. Applications must be received by 30 October 2007. Results will be announced by early 2008, and awards will be presented as soon as possible after the notification of results.
The key dates are:
30 October 2007 Receipt of applications
End January 2008 Notification of results
End February 2008 Presentation of Award(s)
Applications should take the form of:
1. A statement specifying the amount applied for;
2. A statement giving full details of the purpose to which the funds would be put, and an indication of expected tangible results (e.g. data, lexicon entries, publications);
3. A curriculum vitae including qualifications, details of previous lexicographical or related work, and publications;
4. One professional or academic reference (letter or details of a person to contact for receiving a letter);
5. Details of funding received or applied for in relation to the project for which the Laurence Urdang EURALEX Award is being sought.
2007 Laurence
Urdang EURALEX Award
Lars Trap-Jensen
EURALEX Assistant Secretary-Treasurer
Society for Danish Language and Literature
Christians Brygge 1
1219 Copenhagen K
Denmark
Fax: + 45- 33 14 06 08
Email:
ltj@dsl.dk
In addition, a full electronic version (ODT, Word, RTF or PDF) is required and should be sent to the above address. Please note that membership of EURALEX is a condition and only applicants registered as EURALEX members by Oxford University Press by 30 October 2007 will be considered eligible for the award. If you want to join EURALEX, please write (with a copy to the Assistant Secretary-Treasurer) to:
Ms Paula Thomson
EURALEX Membership Secretary
Oxford University Press
Journals Subscription Department
Great Clarendon Street
Oxford OX2 6DP
United Kingdom
Fax: +44-1865-267485
Email: paula.thomson@oxfordjournals.org
The Selection Panel consists of the EURALEX President, Anna Braasch, and two past presidents, Marie-Hélène Corréard and Thierry Fontenelle. Applicants should observe that a condition for the award is for LUA winner(s) to submit a report on the progress of their projects within a year after the presentation of the award. Further details on selection criteria and objectives of the Laurence Urdang EURALEX Award can be found on the EURALEX website (www.euralex.org).
1er Congrès mondial de linguistique française
Présentation de la thématique
"Lexique(s)"
L'étude du lexique français a connu au cours des dernières années de nombreuses évolutions, en interaction d'ailleurs avec bon nombre d'autres champs de la linguistique. La section Lexique(s) de la conférence se donne comme objectif de faire le point sur les approches actuelles de l'étude du lexique français et de présenter les dernières avancées les plus importantes.
Au-delà des seuls aspects lexicographiques qui vivent aujourd'hui une véritable révolution à travers le passage d'une production dictionnairique papier à une production sur support numérique qui s'accompagne de nouvelles structurations et explorations des informations, cette section souhaite fournir des regards croisés entre lexicologie, terminologie, lexicographie, métalexicographie et constitution de lexiques électroniques pour le traitement automatique de la langue.
La
section ‘Lexique(s)’ invite donc des soumissions d'articles originaux sur tous
les aspects de l'étude du lexique français : description ou modélisation, soit
dans une perspective historico-comparative, soit dans une perspective
synchronique. Cela inclut notamment :
- La lexicologie
- La lexicographie
- La métalexicographie
- La terminologie
- La veille lexicale
- Les lexiques électroniques et les ressources lexicales pour le TAL
- La composante phonétique du lexique
- La composante orthographique du lexique
- La composante morphologique du lexique
- La composante syntaxique du lexique
- La composante sémantique du lexique
- La composante étymologique du lexique.
Comité scientifique :
- Pierre CORBIN (Président, STL, Université de Lille 3 )
- Alain POLGUERE (Vice-Président, OLST, Université de Montréal)
- Jean-Marie PIERREL (Coordonnateur, ATILF, Université de Nancy & CNRS)
- Jean PRUVOST (Coordonnateur, LDI, Université de Cergy-Pontoise)
- Loïc DEPECKER (MoDyCo, Université Paris 3)
- Eric LAPORTE (IGM, Université de Marne-la-vallée)
- Robert MARTIN (Membre de l'Institut, Professeur émérite à l'Université
de Paris-Sorbonne) - Claude POIRIER (TLFQ, Université Laval, Québec)
Toutes les informations sont
disponibles sur le site : http://www.ivry.cnrs.fr/~ilfspip/spip.php?rubrique4
A new journal has been launched by the Editions Garnier (Paris). Neologica is devoted to the study of the phenomenon of neologism and is to appear once a year. It is edited by John Humbley (Paris 7, Laboratoire de linguistique informatique) and Jean-François Sablayrolles (Paris 13, LLI). Each issue will have a central theme (in the first issue this is ‘La nomination’) and a number of non thematic articles. In addition each issue will include an ongoing bibliography of neologism as well as book reviews. Although the journal is published in France, it will publish papers in French and in English, and all papers in French will be summarized in English.
The journal has a ‘comité de patronage’ a ‘conseil scientifique’ and a ‘conseil de lecture’. The first issue of Neologica, that has appeared in the first half of 2007, is introduced by Bernard Quemada (Sorbonne, CNRS et EPHE), who is a member of the ‘comité de patronage’.
Submissions will be evaluated by two anonymous reviewers. They can be sent to jfsablayrolles@wanadoo.fr and ines.sfar@lli.univ-paris13.fr.
Forthcoming events
2007
September
12-14, Ivanova State University, Russia: VII International school on lexicography. Information: Prof.. Dr. Olga Karpova, Ivanovo State University, English Philology Department, Ermak St., 39, Ivanovo, 153025, Russia, or Conference Coordinator Katerina A. Shaposhnikova. Tel.: +7 (0932) 37 54 02, fax: +7 (0932) 37 54 02, e-mail: lexico2005@ivanovo.ac.ru or omk@ivanovo.ac.ru.
2008
April
4, Troisième Journée québécoise des dictionnaires (Québec, Canada), sur le thème " Les dictionnaires de langue française : de la Nouvelle-France au Québec contemporain ". Pour tous renseignements : monique.cormier@umontreal.ca.
July
9 – 12, 1er Congrès mondial de linguistique
française (CMLF-08). Date limite de réception des propositions de
communication : 1er janvier 2008. Informations : http://www.ivry.cnrs.fr/~ilfspip/spip.php?rubrique4
15 –19 , Barcelona, Spain: 13th International EURALEX Conference. The conference will be hosted by Pompeu Fabra University. Deadline for receipt of abstracts: October 31, 2007. Please see the EURALEX website for details. Email: euralex2008@upf.edu.