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
The sad news of Werner Hüllen s death last May came as a shock to me, as I have many pleasant memories of joint ventures such as mutual visits, participating in conferences hosted by the two of us, and contributing to each other s publications.
Werner Hüllen is well-known better in Germany than in the English-speaking world for the most impressive range of interests he developed and displayed in the course of his busy life, moving from philosophy to philology (university studies in Cologne), from general language teaching to TEFL (professor at Neuss Teacher Training College), and to ever wider aspects of applied linguistics (professor of English at Trier University and professor of English didactics at Essen University, the latter from 1977), and his ability to find and make connections between all of them, all the time. These multifarious pursuits were first publicly acknowledged by a two-volume festschrift dedicated to him on the occasion of his 60th birthday. As one of the more than 90 scholars taking part in that venture, I was struck by the many subjects covered by us in reaction to his involvement with them: several aspects of linguistics, literary criticism, foreign language teaching practice, and language learning and teaching research, the uniting bond being a concern for the study of performance as an effort to assess what goes on in real language communication between real people.
But that was not all, by a long shot. In the five years before his retirement in the early 1990 s, and during the time since then, Werner Hüllen has gone on doing research and publishing and editing several books on an even wider set of topics. These have included a survey of the field of English as a foreign language in German schools (1987), an investigation of meaning and knowledge in lexical semantics (1988), a reflection on the treatment of language by members of the Royal Society (1989), a handbook on foreign-language teaching (1989), papers on the historiography of linguistics (1990), conference proceedings on the onomasiological tradition in lexicography (1994), another handbook on English as a foreign language (1995), a two-volume encyclopedia on languages for specific purposes (1998-99), an account of the topical tradition in English dictionaries (1999), a history of Roget s Thesaurus (2004), and a thematic journal issue on onomasiological dictionaries in Europe (2005).
In all these projects, what has impressed us most has been Werner Hüllen s ability to build bridges. Throughout his working life he has been interested in the connections between philosophy and language, between past history and present trends (his honorary positions included the presidency of the Henry Sweet Society), between language science and language learning (he initiated the book series Language in Performance in 1989), within the language-learning context between school and university (he was editor of the influential journal Neusprachliche Mitteilungen aus Wissenschaft und Praxis from 1972 to 1982), between language and literature (his doctorate was on the poet Theodor Däubler), between lexical theory and lexicographic practice, between ordinary (semasiological) lexicography and thesaurus (onomasiological) lexicography, and above all between German and English.
Partly due to his early training in the philosophy of science, Werner Hüllen s overall concern was to question and explore basic assumptions and facts, e.g. on why and for what sorts of purposes early glossaries might have been compiled. In his critical evaluation of other people s findings and views he has always been constructive and good-humoured; indeed he has shown a talent all his life to bring people together.
We shall all miss him. But although he has left us, he has left us much to remember him by, and to build on in future. For lexicography, this includes a greater awareness of the mutual relations with linguistics and the recognition of the relative importance of the onomasiological approach.
R.R.K. Hartmann
IJL Impact Factor
Since 2005 an impact factor is calculated for International Journal of Lexicography. The impact factor is the average number of times articles from the journal published in the past two years have been cited in a given year as stated in the Journal Citation Report. Citations to journals listed in JCR are compiled annually from the JCR year s combined database, regardless of which JCR edition lists the journal and regardless of what kind of article was cited or when the cited article was published. Each unique article-to-article link is counted as a citation. Citations from a journal to an article previously published in the same journal are compiled in the total cites. More information can be found at http://www.kfupm.edu.sa/library/ISI/PDF/JCRDISC.pdf
After a very successful Euralex conference in Barcelona we look ahead to the next conference, which will be held in Leeuwarden, the capital of the Dutch Province of Friesland. Friesland is a bilingual community, where both Frisian and Dutch are spoken. The conference will be hosted by the Fryske Akademy (Frisian Academy), the scientific centre for research and education concerning Friesland, its people, its language and its culture. The main lexicographic undertaking of the Fryske Akademy is the multi-volume scholarly Wurdboek fan de Fryske taal (Dictionary of the Frisian Language). Frisian being a lesser used language, the organizers hope to highlight the lexicography of small and lesser used languages at the conference in 2010. The conference will be from 6 to 10 July. More information is to be found at http://www.euralex2010.eu.
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Lexicographical Corpus of Portuguese
The Lexicographical Corpus of Portuguese (CLP) is a database of
electronic lexicographical texts in Portuguese. It contains the electronic
transcription and edition of some of the most important dictionaries from the
17th and 18th centuries. The selected texts are generally considered the most
important monuments of Portuguese dictionary tradition for their dimension,
their reception and their documental value. The database includes
▪ Jerónimo Cardoso, Dictionarium iuventuti studiosae (1562,
aliás 1551); Dictionarium ex lusitanico in latinum sermonem (1562);
Dictionarium Latinolusitanicum (1569/70); Breve dictionarium
vocum ecclesiasticarum (1569); De monetis (1569, aliás
1561)
▪ Pedro de Poiares, Diccionario Lusitanico-Latino de Nomes Proprios (1667)
▪ Bento Pereira, Prosodia Tesouro (1697)
▪ Rafael Bluteau, Vocabulario Portuguez e Latino (1712-1728)
▪ António Franco (F. Pomey), Indiculo Universal (1716)
With this project we made available, in a digital format, the complete text of
these dictionaries and it is now possible to retrieve all the words they
contain. The CLP/Diciweb intends to become a source of information for
linguistic and literary studies, assisting the reading of literary and
non-literary texts of classical and modern Portuguese. We intend to gradually
enlarge the database, adding bilingual dictionaries, as well as grammatical and
orthographical texts that are currently being studied and edited by master and
PhD students.
Telmo Verdelho and Joăo Silvestre
Universidade de Aveiro - Portugal
http://clp.dlc.ua.pt
clp@dlc.ua.pt
Oxford Bilingual School Dictionary Workbook: Northern Sotho and English (2008)
In the March 2008 EURALEX newsletter we briefly reported on Africa s first fully corpus-based dictionary. Since then, several AFRILEX members (among them Elsabé Taljard, Gilles-Maurice de Schryver and Mamokgabo Mogodi) joined forces to write an accompanying workbook, again covering the language pair Northern Sotho and English. As was the case for the dictionary, the workbook also derives all its data from corpora. Especially exciting was the development of corpus-based grammatical sketches which support the workbook exercises as well as the use of the dictionary itself. Publisher link: http://www.oxford.co.za/
TshwaneLex Lexicography Software Free Upgrade Announcement
With the aim of phasing out older versions of TshwaneLex, TshwaneDJe HLT is offering a free single-version upgrade of every license for all users. TshwaneLex, developed in South Africa, is a professional off-the-shelf software application for compiling dictionaries. For more information visit: http://tshwanedje.com/
Forthcoming events
2009
October
22 24, eLexicography in the 21 st century: New challenges, new applications, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium, Organizers: Prof. Sylviane Granger and Dr Magali Paquot. Information at elexicography@uclouvain.be.