euralex
EUROPEAN ASSOCIATION FOR LEXICOGRAPHY

EURALEX NEWSLETTER

Autumn 1999

Editors: Carla Marello and Rosamund Moon. Address for correspondence and contributions: Carla Marello, Corso Unione Sovietica 115, I-10134 Torino, Italy. E-mail: marello@cisi.unito.it and rosamund@moon.eu.org

The EURALEX Newsletter

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 Carla Marello at the above address, or e-mailing the editors.
The annual deadlines
winter (December)15 September
spring (March)15 December
summer (June)15 March
autumn (September)15 June

The EURALEX Web Site

The URL of the EURALEX web site is http://www.ims.uni-stuttgart.de/euralex.

Contents

Ole Norling-Christensen

It is with deep sadness that the Executive Board of EURALEX announces the death of Ole Norling-Christensen, EURALEX's President, who passed away on 30 June 1999 after a long and painful illness. Although we had known for some time that Ole was seriously ill, this came as a great shock to us and we wish to express here our gratitude for his work in EURALEX, both as President and as a Board member over the last few years. We will certainly miss his energy, his Olympian calm and his many useful and sensible ideas and suggestions. We have lost more than a president or a colleague.

The Board would like to offer their condolences to his family, all his friends and colleagues in Copenhagen and elsewhere, and especially to Anna Braasch, who informed us of this sad event and was so close to him.

A tribute to Ole will appear with the next issue of IJL.

Krista Varantola and the EURALEX Board
1 July 1999

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Malcolm Skey

Malcolm F. Skey, lexicographer, died in a tragic accident in Turin on 13 September 1998. He was born on 12 October 1944 at West Coker, Somerset, and grew up in Bristol. He read History at Oxford (Merton College), and after a stay in France, moved to Turin, where he worked for the leading Italian publisher Einaudi and other publishing firms. He made himself a reputation as an expert on the `gothic' novel, to which he devoted a monograph (Il romanzo gotico, 1984); he also prepared anthologies of ghost stories (1996, 1997, 1998) and translated into Italian works of Poe, Beckford, Mary Shelley, Dickens, and many others.

The reason he is being remembered here is his remarkable work as a lexicographer. He published in 1977, with Società Editrice Internazionale, Turin, a bilingual Italian dictionary (Dizionario Inglese Italiano/Italiano Inglese), subsequently marketed in Britain by Oxford University Press (see my review in the TLS of 3 September 1982). This was not a tired, derivative compilation, but a fresh and innovative work, with original features which made it stand out among comparable works of that period. Perhaps the most noticeable was its sensitivity for different registers, its particular interest in everyday, idiomatic, colloquial expressions, and the felicity of their renderings in both languages. Another striking aspect was that the dictionary did not attempt to address equally English and Italian users (with sometimes unhelpfully anodyne results), but was clearly intended for Italian readers, which made it often more interesting to consult for a sophisticated English user as well.

Malcolm Skey, whom I had originally met as I was one of Einaudi's authors, was a very pleasant man, who hid under a slightly awkward manner, a warm and attractive personality and a keen and distinguished mind. He will be missed by all his many friends.

Giulio Lepschy

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EURALEX 2000

The ninth EURALEX International Congress will be held in Stuttgart, Germany, from 8--12 August, 2000. Details and circulars can be found on the EURALEX Web site. We hope that circulars will soon be available there in French and German, as well as English.

The list of topics for papers has been revised and expanded, and is now as follows:
1. Computational lexicography and lexicology (N.B.: This is different from, e.g. COLING or ACL, in the sense that EURALEX invites papers on lexicographically relevant computational work, rather than any or all computational linguistic topics relating to the lexicon.)
2. Phraseology and Collocation
3. Historical and Scholarly Lexicography, and Etymology
4. Bilingual Lexicography
5. The Dictionary-Making Process
6. Lexicography for Specialized Languages - Terminology and Terminography
7. Reports on Lexicographical and Lexicological Projects
8. Dictionary Use
9. Lexicological Issues of Lexicographical Relevance
10. Other topics

See the Summer 1999 Newsletter (in IJL 12/2) for fuller information.

Contact address

Congress Organizers EURALEX 2000
Dr. Ulrich Heid
Universität Stuttgart
Institut für maschinelle Sprachverarbeitung, IMS-CL
Azenbergstrasse 12
D-70174 Stuttgart, Germany

Fax: +49 711 121 1366
E-mail: elx2000@ims.uni-stuttgart.de

Important Dates

9 November 1999: Deadline for receipt of preliminary versions of papers by congress organizers
15 February 2000: Dispatch of notifications of acceptance/rejection
15 April 2000: Deadline for receipt of camera-ready papers for inclusion in the Proceedings

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News from DSNA

The Biennial meeting of the Dictionary Society of North America took place at the University of California, Berkeley, May 26--29, beginning with a pre-session Wednesday evening on `An American National Corpus: Would It Revolutionize Dictionary-making?' led by Sue Atkins and Michael Rundell, with lots of interesting visual aids. About 75 or 100 people attended -- about double what we expected. Over the next three days, 36 presentations were made in ten sessions. The final session was a panel discussion on `Why Dictionary Editors Make the Decisions they Do', with Elizabeth Knowles (Oxford University Press), Joseph Pickett (American Heritage), Jesse Sheidlower (Random House), Sidney Landau (Cambridge University Press, U.S.), and Victoria Neufeldt (Merriam-Webster). A dinner excursion on a boat in San Francisco Bay was enjoyed on Friday evening. Included among exhibits was one from EURALEX, in exchange for the DSNA exhibit at the EURALEX congress in Liège last summer. There were 125 participants from 11 countries (U.S., 94; Canada, 4: and 27, a record, from other countries).

At the end of this meeting, the Society welcomed its new officers and Board Members: President, Joan H. Hall (Dictionary of American Regional English); Vice-President and President-Elect, Richard W. Bailey (University of Michigan); Board Members-at-Large, Anatole Liberman (University of Minnesota), and Erin McKean (Scott-Foresman).

Edward Gates

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Latvian Bilingual Lexicography: A Report

Latvian can serve as a model or testground for the situation when a small language which was suppressed and almost doomed to extinction tries to gather strength and enter the modern world. This is taking place in a time of continual change and very limited funding for language proliferation and studies. Profound and far reaching processes came about as a result of the remarkable changes of the 90s, including the democratization of the language (written and publicly spoken) with all its positive and negative effects. Abolishing censorship and passing over to a market economy in Latvia meant abolishing linguistic censorship and to a great extent also editing. So the written word at last came to reflect the real/spoken language. Media are full of new words, old `bad' words, and the language has become much more open to change, variation, wordplay and new patterns. This has also changed the way the language is reflected in dictionaries -- it can be seen in the last volume of the Dictionary of Literary Latvian (1997) covering letters U V Z, so that the last volume looks strikingly different from the other seven (Latvieøu, 1972-1991), purified and censored.

The greatest change since the restoration of independence has been the increased importance of English. Though the main foreign language at school, its teaching under the Soviets reminded one of Latin tuition. Now it has become an active direct contact language as well as intermediate contact language. It has also replaced Russian as a model or source language for word-formation and terminology. In fact for Latvian this is the third big change in this century -- from German to Russian, and now to English.

Because of the sudden and fast overhaul of the language, some linguists in mid-90s even suggested that lexicographical work should stop for a time until the language stabilizes, yet of course it went on and modern Latvian lexicography has reached the turn of the century with the following characteristics. First, it has overcome the malady of purism and prescriptivism. Second, it has overcome the amateur stage which set in after the collapse of centralized dictionary-making. Third, the emphasis is mainly on terminology which can be explained by a turbulent, not to say violent, development of terminology connected with reorientation toward the western (mainly English) models, and necessity for the fast development of Latvian terminology after years of exclusion from certain spheres (military, aviation, shipping).

For the general scene it should also be stated that all the big Latvian dictionaries are monodirectional -- targeted at the Latvian audience. One typical change in the larger bilingual dictionaries is the freer reflection of lower layers of vocabulary -- colloquial, slang, taboo. The English-Latvian Dictionary (Birzvalka, 1995) was the first to introduce in the English part non-standard lexis which in the Soviet system was taboo. So most of the `four letter words' in English can be found but they are still prudishly supplied with neutral or even scientific Latin counterparts in Latvian. The Latvian-English Dictionary (Veisbergs, 1997) went a step further by including most of the Latvian taboo words as well. Foreign loans are less ostracized where Latvian wording sounds ridiculous or where foreign loans have become widely accepted. The idea of revised editions published yearly or biennially seems to have struck root at least for the English language. Thus the English-Latvian Dictionary (1995), published 30 years after the previous edition, has had a third edition in 1997. The Latvian-English Dictionary (1997) is going to be published this year again after very thorough updating, revising and supplementation. It had a similar prehistory -- the previous dictionary published (Turkina, 1982) was a slightly updated edition of the 1963 dictionary (Turkina, 1963).

Revised or new large scale German dictionaries have not for the time being been published, though work is under way on a new German-Latvian dictionary. The same applies to Russian dictionaries. The dictionaries published are reprinted versions of the 80s or even 70s.

We will soon see a modern French-Latvian dictionary that will be a reworking of the computerized version of Hachette's French-English dictionary.

A large Lithuanian-Latvian dictionary was published (Lietuvieøu, 1995), and all Scandinavian languages at last have been covered by medium size dictionaries published by a specialist company (Lumholts, 1995; Kaàevska, 1996; Pajula, 1997; Denmark, 1998).

There has been an abundance of terminological dictionaries, mainly in those spheres that are relevant and that had little Latvian use under the Soviets: Dictionary of Aviation, Land Forces Military Dictionary (English/American, 1998), Dictionary of Social Welfare (Sociâlâs, 1998), and numerous others.

Some minor points that distinguish the new generation of dictionaries. The front matter in all dictionaries seems to get shorter, no doubt reflecting a common sense approach and evidence of the reluctance of users to refer to it. There are still issues to be resolved - for example the gender issue. Latvian, being a synthetic language where gender is shown by suffix, continues the tradition of using masculine only in one side of dictionaries. Thus the Latvian-English Dictionary is fully masculine (with the exception of words where feminine forms are irregular). In English-Latvian dictionaries, stereotyped gender has been assigned to Latvian equivalents, e.g. typist f., dancer f., director m., prime minister m.

Electronic English-Latvian-English dictionaries are available on the Internet -- one run by the Tilde company http://www.tilde.lv/dictionary the other on an anonymous http://dictionary.site.lv. Both of them are based on English-Latvian Dictionary (1995) yet supplemented by various sources. For the time being these dictionaries are, however, rather clumsy variants of the printed ones as no serious editorial work has been invested. This is especially glaring in the Latvian - English part which often contains long descriptive phrases as main entries (Latvian translations for English entries that do not have equivalents in the printed variant) as well as little differentiation of synonyms (again the impact of the source language being English).

The forthcoming accession to the EU has lead to the establishment of the Translation and Terminology Centre. Apart from the main task of translating about 100,000 pages of European texts, it will try to massproduce and standardize terminology. Its success will to a large extent determine the viability of the new terminology, so cooperation with lexicographers is most essential.

Lexicographers in Latvia often have to work in a medium where there exist conflicting ideas of what the Latvian language is really like. The only radical way out of the problem is by means of a Latvian corpus that would in quantitative terms show the present state of the language. However this work so far has not been started and one reason for it might be a certain reluctance of seeing the language as it has become, for it will certainly not be what people want it to be, nor even what it seems to them to be.

References
Birzvalka I. (1995) . Rìga: Jâða sèta
Dannemark N., Baerug R., Kaàevska I. (1998) Latvisk-Norsk, Norsk-Latvisk Ordbok. Rìga: Norden
Kaàevska I. (1996) Lettisk-Svensk, Svensk-Lettisk Ordbok. Rìga: Norden
Lomholt, K., Lediða, R. (1995) Lettisk-Dansk, Dansk-Lettisk Ordbog. Rìga: Norden.
Latvieøu literârâs valodas vârdnìca (1972-1997). Rìga: Zinâtne.
Lietuvieøu - latvieøu vârdnìca (1995) Rìga: Zinâtne
Pajula M. (1997) Latvia-Suomi-Latvia sanakirja. Rìga: Norden
Sociâlâs nodroøinâøanas terminu skaidrojoøâ vârdnìca angîu un latvieøu valodâ (1998) Rìga: Kamene
Øulcs V., Lìcìs A. (1998) English/American-Latvian, Latvian-English/American Land Forces Dictionary. Rìga, EAI,
Turkina, E. (1963) Latvieøu angîu vârdnìca. Rìga: LVI.
Turkina, E. (1982) Latvieøu angîu vârdnìca. Rìga: Avots.
Veisbergs, A. (1997) Latvian-English Dictionary. Rìga: EAI.

Andrejs Veisbergs

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Scottish National Dictionary Association

The Scottish National Dictionary Association (SNDA) has begun a major project to produce electronic versions of the Scottish National Dictionary (SND) and the Concise Scots Dictionary (CSD). The SND is the standard historical dictionary of modern Scots from 1700 to the present; it comprises ten volumes published between 1931 and 1976. The CSD condenses the information in the latter and also covers medieval Scots. The electronic versions will be updated to include new entries drawn from the SNDA's research files. The text of both dictionaries will be encoded in SGML/XML to allow sophisticated searching and will be output on the Internet. It is hoped that the first section of the electronic SND will be available for public access in autumn 2000. For more information, contact: Susan Rennie, Scottish National Dictionary Association.

Susan Rennie
Scottish National Dictionary Association
George Square, Edinburgh EH8 9LD, Scotland
Tel: +44 131 650 4149
mail@snda.org.uk
Web site: http://www.snda.org.uk

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Dictionary of American Family Names

Report on work in progress

The first draft of the text of this forthcoming major reference work is now complete and is being edited. It consists of short articles on the origins of over 60,000 American surnames, compiled by an international team of over 30 scholars, led by Patrick Hanks at Oxford University Press. The names for entry were selected from a frequency study conducted in the 1980s by the Linguistics Research Department at AT&T Bell Laboratories, using data supplied by Donnelley Marketing. Every name borne by more than 100 families in the United States gets an entry. In addition, some family names of lower frequency have been included on grounds of historical importance, general interest, or special pleading. The draft text is currently being read and commented by specialist advisers. The advisers' comments will be integrated with the rest of the text in the coming year.

The editorial team is:
Editor in Chief: Patrick Hanks
Managing Editor: Kate Hardcastle
Advisory Editor: Marion O. Harris
Assistant Editors: Clare Bland, Louise Jones, Gabor Batonyi

Special Contributors and Advisers:
For Jewish-American names: Dr Alexander Beider
For names of German origin: Prof. Juergen Eichhoff and Dr Edda Gentry, State College, PA
For names of Dutch origin: Dr Charles Gehring, New Netherland Project, Albany, NY
For names of French origin: Prof. Susan Whitebook, Burlington, VT
For names of Italian origin: Dr Enzo Cafarelli, Rome, Italy
For names of Hispanic and Iberian origin: Prof. Dieter Kremer, Director, PATROM Project, University of Trier, Germany
For names of Irish origin: Dr Kay Muhr, the Queen's University, Belfast, Northern Ireland
For names of Scandinavian origin: Mr Olav Veka, Brummunddal, Norway
For names of Polish origin: Prof. Aleksandra Cieslikowa, Krakow, Poland
For names of Czech origin: Prof. Dobrana Moldanova, Prague, Czech Republic
For names of Russian origin: (not yet appointed)
For names of Hungarian origin: Dr Gabor Batonyi, University ofBradford, England
For names of Greek origin: Ms Johanna Kolleca, Athens, Greece
For names of Finnish origin: Dr Kate Moore, Helsinki, Finland
For names of Chinese origin: Dr Mark Lewellin, Washington, DC
For names of Japanese origin: Dr Fred Brady, Salt Lake City, UT
For names of Korean origin: Dr Gary Mackelprang, Salt Lake City, UT
For names of East Indian origin: Prof. Roque Miranda, Kuvempunagar, Mysore, India
For names of Islamic and Arabic origin: Mr Salahuddin Ahmed, Sydney, NSW, Australia

The project is associated with a `Diagnostic Database of American Names', a corpus containing over 216 million forename+surname pairs (tokens, not types). The ethnicity of family names is checked by computing correlations between family names and the associated forenames, insofar as the latter are of known ethnicity. The database also provides information on relative regional density of settlement. It will come as no surprise that most Japanese and Korean Americans are found on the West Coast. But settlement patterns can sometimes yield valuable clues as to the origin of names whose morphology does not betray the language of origin. If a surname is found mainly in Pennsylvania and Ohio, it has a significant chance of being German. A surname found mainly in Minnesota and Louisiana is more likely to be French, while most names of Dutch origin are still thickest on the ground in the Hudson Valley.

Patrick Hanks <phanks@oup.co.uk>

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Lexicography and Dictionary Research at Exeter

Information on courses (Diploma, M.A., Ph.D. and InterLex), bibliographical references, cross-links to other sites and the latest Newsletter are available on the recently updated website of the Dictionary Research Centre, http://www.ex.ac.uk/drc/.

Reinhard Hartmann
Director, Dictionary Research Centre
School of English
University of Exeter EX4 4QH
Great Britain
Tel: +44 1392 264302
Fax: +44 1392 264361
E-mail: r.r.k.hartmann@exeter.ac.uk

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Verbatim

VERBATIM has finally got its non-profit status in the United States, and is planning a few events/activities in late 1999 and 2000. First, we are going to be setting up a part of our web site where lexicographical or linguistic projects can post calls for volunteers and support. People who would like to post calls should email me at editor@verbatimmag.com. Also, we will be holding a symposium (most likely near NYC, but possibly also in the UK) in 2000 about English usage in the new millennium (or something like that). This will be geared towards the layperson, or as lay as the average VERBATIM reader gets. People who are interested in attending or participating should also email me. Our web page is now up and the URL is http://www.verbatimmag.com. Some time in 1999 back issues (after Vol. VII) will be available electronically to qualified researchers, and all subscribers.

Erin McKean
Editor, VERBATIM: The Language Quarterly
editor@verbatimmag.com
 Web site: http://www.verbatimmag.com

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NOMLEX project report

NOMLEX (NOMinalization Lexicon) is a dictionary of English nominalizations currently under development by the Proteus Project at New York University under the direction of Catherine Macleod. NOMLEX seeks not only to describe the allowed complements for a nominalization, but also to relate the nominal complements to the arguments of the corresponding verb. The complements of the nominalization are described in terms of the COMLEX Syntax verb subcategorization patterns of its associated verb. See the COMLEX Syntax Manual for information on the verbal complements. We identify both the main verbal arguments (subject, direct object, and indirect object), which may map into a variety of nominal positions, and the oblique verbal complements, which map more directly into nominal complements. The argument correspondences are specified through a combination of explicit information in the lexical entries and general linguistic constraints on the correspondences. We have more than 800 entries of several types of lexical nominalizations. These were selected from lists of frequently appearing nominalizations in our corpus (which includes Brown and The Wall Street Journal). We released the alpha version of NOMLEX on January 15, 1999 and a small update to the alpha version (the Alpha 2 version) on March 12, 1999. The latter is downloadable from our web site http://cs.nyu.edu/cs/projects/proteus/nomlex/index.html, and is freely available for use by all. We would appreciate feedback from this usage to macleod@cs.nyu.edu.

A sample entry follows: 

(nom      :orth "promotion"
          :verb "promote"
          :nom-type((verb-nom))
          :verb-subj ((n-n-mod) (det-poss))
          :verb-subc ((nom-np :object ((det-poss)(n-n-mod)(pp-of)))
                      (nom-np-as-np :object ((det-poss) (pp-of)))
                      (nom-possing :nom-subc ((p-possing :pval ("of"))))
                      (nom-np-pp :object ((det-poss) (n-n-mod) (pp-of))
                                 :pval ("into" "from" "for" "to"))
                      (nom-np-pp-pp :object ((det-poss) (n-n-mod) (pp-of))
                                    :pval ("for" "into" "to") :pval2 ("from"))))
Catherine Macleod, Ralph Grishman, Adam Meyers, Leslie Barrett and Ruth Reeves
New York University

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Forthcoming events

November
11-13, Beirut, Lebanon: 6e Journées scientifiques, Le Réseau Lexicologie, Terminologie, Traduction de l'Agence Universitaire de la Francophonie (AUPELF-UREF), sur le thème `L'éloge de la différence: la voix de l'Autre'. Les Journées seront précédées, du 8 au 10 novembre 1999, par un Séminaire sur Sémantique et Automatisation, animé par Georges Kleiber (Université de Strasbourg), Gaston Gross (Université de Paris-Nord), et Franz Günthner (Université de Munich). Info: André Clas, GRESLET, Département de linguistique et de traduction, Université de Montréal CP. 6128, Succursale: Centre-ville Montréal, Canada H3C 3J7. Tel: +1 514 343 7047. Fax: +1 514 343 2284. E-mail: clasand@ere.umontreal.ca.

25-26, Groningen, The Netherlands: Conference on Languages in Contact. Info: John Nerbonne, Department of Linguistics, University of Groningen, Oude Kijk in 't Jatstraat 26, 9712 EK Groningen, The Netherlands. E-mail: nerbonne@let.rug.nl.

December
27-30, Chicago, USA: 1999 MLA (Modern Language Association of America) Convention. The Lexicography Discussion Group of the MLA will present a session on `The Dictionary and the Classroom', chaired by M. Lynne Murphy of Baylor University. Web site: http://www.mla.org/convention/.

2000

April
26-29, Maastricht, The Netherlands: 3rd International Maastricht-Lodz Duo Colloquium, `Translation and Meaning', Maastricht session. Info: Drs Marcel Thelen, School of Translation and Interpreting, Hogeschool Maastricht, P.O. Box 964, 6200 AZ Maastricht, The Netherlands. Tel: +31 43 3466 471. Fax: +31 43 3466 649. E-mail: m.m.g.j.thelen@ftv.hsmaastricht.nl. Web site: http://ftvmaastricht.congres.nedweb.com.

August
31 July-4 August, Luxembourg: COLING 2000, 18th International Congress on Computational Linguistics. Pre-congress tutorial: 29-30 July, Saarbrücken, Germany. Post-congress workshop: 5-6 August, Nancy, France. Info: Web site: http://www.coling.dfki.de/

8-12, Stuttgart, Germany: 9th EURALEX Congress. (See the Summer 1999 newsletter for the First Circular and Call for Papers.) Web site: http://www.ims.uni-stuttgart.de/euralex.

September
21-24, Lodz, Poland: 3rd International Maastricht-Lodz Duo Colloquium, `Translation and Meaning', Lodz session. Info: Prof. Dr habil. Barbara Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk, Department of English Language, University of Lodz, Al. Kosciuszki 65, 90-514 Lodz, Poland. Tel: +48 42 36 63 37. Fax: +48 42 36 63 37, +48 42 36 63 72. E-mail: duoduo@krysia.uni.lodz.pl. Web site: http://ftvmaastricht.congres.nedweb.com.

November
13-16, Lisbon, Portugal: VII IberoAmerican Symposium of Terminology. Organizing association: RITerm - Red Iberoamericana de Terminología (IberoAmerican Terminology Network). Info: Carla Sacadura Cabral, ILTEC, Rua Conde de Redondo, 74-6, 1150-109 Lisboa, Portugal. E-mail: csc@iltec.pt.

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