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
I would like to thank the following persons who kindly accepted to review papers for IJL in 2007:
Back, M. (France)
Barnbrook, G. (U.K.)
Béjoint, H. (France)
Bowker, L. (Canada)
Clayton, M. (U.S.A.)
Daille, B. (France)
De Schryver, G.-M. (Belgium)
Dijkstra, A. (The Netherlands)
Dziemianko, A. (Poland)
Fellbaum, C. (U.S.A)
Fontenelle, T. (U.S.A.)
Granger, S. (Belgium)
Hannay, M. (The Netherlands)
Hausmann, F.J. (Germany)
Heid, U. (Germany)
Kilgariff, A. (U.K.)
Klöter, H. (The Netherlands)
Kuiper, K. (New Zealand)
L’Homme, M.C. (Canada)
Laufer, B. (Israel)
Lew, R. (Poland)
Marello, C. (Italy)
Moon, R. (U.K.)
Nesi, H. (U.K.)
Sansome, R. (U.K.)
Schutz, R. (The Netherlands)
Siepmann, D. (Germany)
Spencer, A. (U.K.)
Stebbins, T. (Australia)
Ten Hacken, P. (U.K.)
Van Campenhoudt, M. (Belgium)
Van der Meer, G. (The Netherlands)
Varantola, K. (Finland)
Williams, G. (France)
Paul Bogaards,
Editor IJL
2007 Laurence Urdang EURALEX award
The 2007 Laurence Urdang EURALEX Award winner is Mr. Anne Tjerk Popkema. Mr. Popkema is currently employed at Christian-Albrechts-Universität, Kiel, Germany, where, since 2004, he has been engaged in finishing the Altfriesisches Handwörterbuch (to be published December 2008), a project which was initiated by the late Dietrich Hoffmann in the 1960s.
Mr. Popkema plans to compile a glossary of Old Frisian words which are not recorded in the Altfriesisches Handwörterbuch. Some Old Frisian words fall outside the scope of this dictionary because they only appear as untranslated loan words in texts written in languages other than Old Frisian, e.g. in Latin or Middle Low German translations of Old Frisian legal texts and Latin, Middle Dutch or Middle Low German charters. With the Award Mr. Popkema will be able to supplement the stock of registered Old Frisian words with an estimated 150-250 main entries for words exclusively found in the non-Frisian sources, making up 1-2 % of the complete attested Old Frisian lexicon. The aim is to publish a lexicographical description of the Old Frisian remnants separately both online and in print.
The 2007 award is the last of its kind as further funding of the award is discontinued. The Euralex Board wish to thank Laurence Urdang for his very generous support for unpaid lexicographical work through many years.
Lars Trap-Jensen,
Assistant Secretary-Treasurer of EURALEX
László Országh was born in Szombathely (Hungary) in 1907, and died in Budapest in 1984.
Although his name was synonymous with his bilingual dictionaries (’an Országh’ = an English-Hungarian or a Hungarian-English dictionary) all over and outside Hungary, Országh’s oeuvre was not that of a lexicographer. It was he who insisted on being called a philologist, and vigorously refused to be restricted to the status of a ’linguist’. First of all he was, and remained to his last breath, a teacher, a teacher of the English language, culture and literature. As early as 1939 he published a 4-volume English language course for grammar schools, introducing – among the first in Europe – the phonetic symbols of the IPA which he consistently applied in his dictionaries as well. He started his teaching career at a Budapest grammar school, and was soon appointed lecturer at Eötvös Collegium, a high-standard elite residential institution for university students. While being a lecturer at the Pázmány Péter University of Budapest, he won a chair at Kossuth Lajos University of Debrecen (second largest city of Hungary) commissioned to rebuild the English Department where he was a head from 1946. However, in 1949, as we learn from John Jablonski (Dictionaries: Journal of the Dictionary Society of North America 24, 2003: 229), the Communist puppet government ’decided that teaching any western language would take place only at the University of Budapest. Universities in the countryside were confined to teaching only Hungarian and Russian.’
After an involuntary break which was held up by the Revolution of 1956, Országh returned to Debrecen taking over once again the chair of the English Department. The Revolution being brutally suppressed, as is well known, Hungarian-American relations turned cooler than ever. Országh, disregarding political barbarism, anticapitalism and an all-over anti-American attitude, introduced, against the grain, American studies as an academic subject, first in Debrecen, later country-wide, and wrote two most famous and successful textbooks: The History of American Literature (1967), and An Introduction to American Studies (1972, both in Hungarian). These publications proved remarkable feats in the context of the Kádár-regime, and certainly ’blew the fuse’, as the saying goes today, with the most conformist anti-American, anti-British and anti-’West’ leadership of Hungary, one of the Eastern-bloc countries. Nevertheless, Országh could keep his chair until his retirement in 1969.
As a lexicologist, all through his teaching career he was taking care of words of English origin in the Hungarian language. His major opus in lexicology was a monograph entitled English Elements in the Hungarian Vocabulary (1977, in Hungarian). He set himself no less task than the survey and analysis of over 1,000 words of English origin that entered the Hungarian language between 1612 and 1975.
Was it an eccentric claim not to rank himself among lexicographers? No one can tell. But his achievement in terms of figures speaks for itself: 7,400 pages of English and Hungarian bilingual dictionaries and 7,400 pages of a Hungarian monolingual dictionary, an unparalleled achievement superseding all lexicographers in the history of Hungarian lexicography, and one that won him a name among the noted lexicographers of the world.
The springs of his lexicographical activity also go back to his teaching English in a grammar school, when he began to feel a growing dissatisfaction with the existing dictionaries. Thus, making a virtue of necessity, he compiled his first dictionary (A Concise English-Hungarian Dictionary, 1948) which marked a new era of Anglo-Hungarian and indeed general lexicography. The adequate selection of vocabulary, the high quality of the choice of translation equivalents, the way he matched not only two totally different languages but two distinct cultures, and a modern way of representing English pronunciation as referred to above, were the main features that distinguished his dictionaries from those of his predecessors, and from any other contemporary bilingual dictionary. Based on a sound policy of compiling and editing, the climax of his achievement in bilingual lexicography was marked by the publication of his big, 2,300-page English-Hungarian Unabridged Dictionary (1960, rev. 1976), which contained more than 100,000 headwords and over 150,000 phrases, idiomatic expressions, phrasal verbs and sample sentences. In its counterpart, the Hungarian-English Unabridged Dictionary (1953, rev. 1963), Országh went into great depth in differentiating the various stylistic values by means of a fair selection of usage labels and sample sentences to help the Hungarian user find the proper equivalents when translating from his native language into English.
Although he made his name in Hungary as a bilingual lexicographer, he gained distinction as chief editor of the only major monolingual (ie Hungarian) dictionary of the 20th century, the seven-volume Explanatory Dictionary of the Hungarian Language (1959 – 1962). In the records of the history of world lexicography there had been few lexicographers, if any, who were so successful both at bilingual (commercial) and monolingual (scholarly) dictionary-making simultaneously. It was jokingly said of Országh: in the morning he worked on the monolingual, and in the afternoon, well into the night, he busied himself with the bilingual dictionary. And when asked which of the two was easier or harder – defining in the native language or finding target-language equivalents in a foreign language – he voted for the latter. For, although the monolingual dictionary is said to require a greater amount of scholarship than the bilingual often regarded, quite undeservedly, as a commercial rather than a scholarly undertaking, the latter has an unquestionable difficulty over against the monolingual: it has to compare (and contrast) not only two languages but two often widely different cultures and civilizations.
Most important among his writings on the theoretical aspects of lexicography apart from those mentioned already are: Problems and Principles of the New Dictionary of the Hungarian Language (1960, in English), Studies in Lexicography (ed. 1966, in Hungarian), and a fine and massive series started while teaching at Debrecen University: Hungarian Studies in English (1963 – , in Hungarian). From his numerous critical reviews of some of the excellent dictionaries of the world, mention must be made of one of his finest essays: The Lexicographical Method of Samuel Johnson (1956, alas, also in Hungarian).
For his outstanding contribution to Anglo-Hungarian lexicograpghy, he was awarded the gold medal of the Institute of Linguists, London, in 1970. And in 1978 he was awarded the honour of the Commander of the Order of the British Empire, the C.B.E.
Contributing to world lexicography: several English and American dictionaries had him on their editorial advisory committees or consulted him on diverse lexicographical issues, the most prestigious of these being the Oxford English Dictionary (in cooperation with Dr. Robert Burchfield) and the first and second Barnhart Dictionary of New English (friendship with Clarence L. Barnhart).
The Executive Board of EURALEX nominated László Országh, in 1984, as its first Honorary Member, however, his death occurred only a few days after this decision was made.
Much has been done in the last quarter of the 20th century, which we might refer to as the post-Országh period of English and American studies and lexicography. It must be borne in mind that ever since his death, Országh never failed ’mentoring’ his students, colleagues and the Hungarian users of his dictionaries. English, being by now the number one foreign language, is represented by numerous publishers offering an unbelievable variety of bilingual general and specialist dictionaries, with still the Országh dictionary trilogy, unabridged, concise and pocket, on the top.
It was upon his initiative, a few weeks before his death, to send a young lexicographer to Exeter (in 1983) representing Hungarian lexicography. And it was just five years later, in 1988, that the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and Akadémiai Kiadó (publisher for the Academy) hosted the 3rd International Congress of EURALEX, known and remembered as BudaLEX ’88 organized by the present writer.
The Dictionary Committee of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, chaired for some 20 years by Országh, has been rejuvenated to discuss and tackle lexicographical issues; it is also publishing a new series: Lexicography, and has created a new award the so called ’Outstanding Hungarian Dictionary Award’, in pursuit of raising the quality of bilingual, monolingual, and specialist dictionaries. The Linguistics Institute of the Academy is working on the Academic dictionary of the Hungarian language on historic principles. And, slowly though, lexicography is becoming an academic subject at universities, and quite a number of PhD theses are submitted at postdoctoral schools.
Then, ’since American Studies has become a regular part of the academic geography of Hungary, the László Országh Chair in American Studies was established first in Debrecen in the 1997 – 1998 academic year and now is a Distinguished Chair of the U.S. Fulbright Program throughout Hungary. The first free Fulbright Commission in Eastern Europe opened in Budapest in 1990; and the department that Országh rebuilt several times is now the Institute for English and Ameriacan Studies.’ (Jablonski 2003: 233)
We cannot but think thankfully of László Országh who had the guts to go his own way, never swerving, never giving up his principles, never yielding to the political elite, cruel and barbaric as they were. During the forty odd years of Soviet domination Országh could remain what he was born to be: a real gentleman, walking through perhaps the darkest period of the history of Hungary with an unequalled elegance.
Tamás Magay,
Gáspár Károli University,
Budapest, Hungary
This year’s Lexicom Workshop – led by Sue Atkins, Adam Kilgarriff, and Michael Rundell of the Lexicography MasterClass – will be held in Barcelona from 10th to 15th July, directly before the Euralex Congress. The event is being hosted (and co-organized) by Pompeu Fabra University, and will take place just off La Rambla – arguably the most famous street in Europe.
Lexicom is an intensive one-week workshop on lexicography and lexical computing, with seminars on theoretical issues alternating with practical sessions at the computer. Over the past eight years, Lexicom Workshops have attracted well over 200 people from all over the world, with backgrounds in lexicography, translation, computational linguistics, terminology, academic research, and dictionary publishing.
For a provisional workshop programme, go to www.lexmasterclass.com and follow the links. To register for the Workshop (and for information on prices, accommodation etc.) go to http://www.iula.upf.edu/agenda/lexicom/
The first Lexicom in the Americas is being planned for Mexico City in February 2009, immediately before CICLING 2009 (http://www.gelbukh.com/cicling/). Keep an eye on our website (www.lexmasterclass.com) for details.
A new book has just been published at Cambridge Scholars Publishing: Essays on Lexicon, Lexicography, Terminography in Russian, American and Other Cultures, edited by Olga Karpova and Faina Kartashkova. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007. 265 pp.
The book contains a collection of works devoted to the most topical issues of modern linguistics, including сross-cultural communication, various aspects of theoretical and practical lexicography, terminology and terminography.
Papers contributed are divided into four major sections. Cultural Aspects in Different Linguistic and Lexicographic Traditions deals with analysis of cultural aspects of language and lexicography with special reference to English, Russian, German, French, Arabic and other languages. User’s Perspective and Dictionary Use is devoted to discussion of research results in the field of user’s needs and demands received during social surveys in different countries. Terminology and Terminography reveals the latest tendencies in modern terminology formation, scientific knowledge engineering in languages for special purposes and professional communication, while New Dictionaries Projects presents models of new reference works.
All those and many other topics were discussed at the VI-th International School-Seminar Lexicon, Lexicography, Terminography in Russian, American and Other Cultures held at Ivanovo State University, Russia, September 12-14, 205.
Karpova Olga,
Ivanovo State University, Russia.
Oxford Bilingual School Dictionary: Northern Sotho and
English (2007)
Two decades after the
first COBUILD (1987), Africa now also has its first fully corpus-based
dictionary. In addition to modern features one has come to expect, such as star
ratings for the main vocabulary, the derivation of meanings from the uses as
seen in corpora, the ordering thereof according to frequencies, and the
exemplification by means of authentic examples only, the dictionary also
contains the first corpus-based dictionary mini-grammar which seamlessly
interacts with the dictionary articles. Supporting articles: http://tshwanedje.com/publications/ Publisher link: http://www.oxford.co.za/ (search for 'de Schryver')
The Oxford Guide to Practical Lexicography, by Sue Atkins and Michael Rundell, will be published by OUP in June 2008 (in paperback and hardback editions). This is a practical ‘how to do it’ textbook which draws on the authors’ experience at the sharp end of dictionary publishing, and on the many courses they have taught over the last 20 years or so.
A companion volume, Practical Lexicography: A Reader, edited by Thierry Fontenelle, was published in January 2008, and includes 22 seminal papers in the field.
For more information on both books, see their entries in the OUP catalogue at http://www.oup.com/uk/catalogue/?ci=9780199277711
http://www.oup.com/uk/catalogue/?ci=9780199292349
PangaeaLex: New Lexicography Portal
A portal to anything and
everything lexicographic, which lists especially that which is dispersed all
over the Internet. The current focus is on forthcoming lexicography conferences
and workshops, and readers are invited to submit material that they would like
to see listed. Address: http://pangaealex.org/
Les Éditions Champion ont ouvert un site dans lequel se trouve un grand nombre d'informations sur les bases de données et leur réalisation. L'adresse est www.champion-electronique.net
Champion Electronique publie des ressources en littérature, sciences humaines, sur la langue française et son histoire, qui sont disponibles en ligne via l'abonnement de la bibliothèque. Parmi les titres de notre catalogue :
- le Corpus de littérature médiévale des origines au 15e siècle
- le Corpus de littérature francophone d'Afrique noire, des origines aux Indépendances
- le Dictionnaire de l'ancienne langue française et de tous ses dialectes de Frédéric Godefroy
- le Dictionnaire Huguet de la langue française du 16e siècle
- l'Encyclopédie d'Yverdon ou dictionnaire raisonné des connaissances humaines
- le Corpus des dictionnaires des 16e et 17e siècles
- le Corpus des dictionnaires de l'Académie française (du 17e au 20e siècle)
Forthcoming events
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.
May
28 – 30, Marrakech, Morocco: LREC 2008, 6th Language Resources and
Evaluation Conference, Palais des Congrès Mansour Eddahbi. Conference
web site: http://www.lrec-conf.org/lrec2008/
June
19 –21, Edmonton, Canada: Fourth International Conference on Historical Lexicography and Lexicology . Information: john.considine@ualberta.ca
30 June - 3 July
Bureau of the Woordeboek van die Afrikaanse Taal (WAT),
Stellenbosch, South Africa: 13th International AFRILEX Conference, 'Printed
and electronic dictionaries and the future'. Keynote Speakers: Prof. Piet
Van Sterkenburg (the Netherlands) and Prof. Ngo Kabuta (DRC). Information:
Dr. W. Botha, Editor-in-Chief of the WAT, P.O. Box 245, Stellenbosch 7599,
South Africa. E-mail: wfb@sun.ac.za. Tel.: +27 21 887 3113, Fax: +27 21 883
9492. Website: http://afrilex.africanlanguages.com/
July
9 – 12, 1er Congrès mondial de linguistique
française (CMLF-08). Pour tous renseignements: 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.