Webs of Words: New Studies in Historical Lexicology [New ed.] 1443819522, 9781443819527

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Webs of Words

Webs of Words: New Studies in Historical Lexicology

Edited by

John Considine

Webs of Words: New Studies in Historical Lexicology, Edited by John Considine This book first published 2010 Cambridge Scholars Publishing 12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2010 by John Considine and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-1952-2, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-1952-7

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction ............................................................................................. vii Historical Lexicology John Considine Chapter One............................................................................................... 1 Diachronic Corpora: Seeing Histories of Words from another Angle Karel Kuþera and Martin Stluka Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 8 Why did Tudor England have no Monolingual English Dictionary? Ian Lancashire Chapter Three.......................................................................................... 24 Dat Boek der Wundenartzstedye: The Low German Translation of Hieronymus Brunschwig’s Buch der Cirurgia and its Rendering of Surgical Lexicon Chiara Benati Chapter Four ........................................................................................... 56 Cleaning up the Mess: The Case of English Balcony Mateusz Urban Chapter Five ............................................................................................ 65 Do Savages Get the Blues? William Colenso and the Nineteenth-Century Colour Debate Jane Samson Chapter Six .............................................................................................. 77 Biologisch vs. Biokoffie, Ecologisch vs. Ecotrend: Dutch Bioand Eco- Through the Ages in the Dictionary Vivien Waszink

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Chapter Seven.......................................................................................... 94 Masters, Mothers, and Barking Dogs: The Lexical Family of the Words for Grammar in China Tommaso Pellin Chapter Eight......................................................................................... 112 Historical Naming Strategies for Fauna in Trinidad & Tobago English/Creole Lise Winer Chapter Nine.......................................................................................... 141 The Third Edition of the OED and Lexical Transmission: Towards a Consistent Research Methodology Mirosáawa Podhajecka Chapter Ten ........................................................................................... 191 Should Portuguese Dictionaries Register English Words? Isabel Casanova Abbreviations......................................................................................... 200 Bibliography........................................................................................... 202 Contributors........................................................................................... 231 Index ....................................................................................................... 234

INTRODUCTION HISTORICAL LEXICOLOGY JOHN CONSIDINE

1. Historical lexicology and historical lexicography What is lexicology, and what is historical lexicology? Christoph Schwarze and Dieter Wunderlich introduced their Handbuch der Lexikologie in 1985 by commenting on the increasing interest of linguistic theorists in words in the years before the publication of their book, which had led to “eine eigenständige theoretische Disziplin der Lexikologie” (8), an autonomous theoretical discipline of lexicology. They then proposed that “Die Lexikologie ist die Theorie des Lexikons”—“lexicology is the theory of the lexicon”—and observed that Lexikon can mean “vocabulary of a language” or “dictionary”, and that lexicology is the study of the former. Fifteen years later, an English-language textbook suggested that Lexicology deals not only with simple words in all their aspects, but also with complex and compound words, the meaningful units of language. Since these units must be analysed in respect of both their form and their meaning, lexicology relies on information derived from morphology, the study of the forms of words and their components, and semantics, the study of their meanings. A third field of particular interest in lexicological studies is etymology, the study of the origins of words. (Jackson and Zé Amvela 2000, 1–2)

As Tommaso Pellin remarks in the opening paragraph of his contribution to this volume, it is possible to see two contrasting conceptions of lexicology: either as “the theoretical study of the abstract lexemes of a language and their organization” (as suggested by Schwarze and Wunderlich’s emphasis on Theorie and theoretische Diziplin), or as the “interdisciplinary study of the concrete usage of the vocables of a language” (as suggested in particular by Jackson and Zé Amvala’s special notice of the highly empirical discipline of etymology). Whether it is

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specifically etymological or not, historical lexicology must usually tend towards the more empirical pole. Just as the word lexicology goes back to the eighteenth century (see Considine 2007, viii) but has become increasingly current since the third quarter of the twentieth, so the phrase historical lexicology is not a new one, but has quite recently had a new lease of life. It appears to originate in French or German, in the nineteenth century: a review in French of an historical grammar of French (Rablet 1882, 76) remarks that “si la lexicologie historique a déjà été l’objet de plusieurs traités … nous n’avions encore aucune grammaire qui nous donnât l’histoire de la syntaxe” and an introduction in German to Romance philology included a short section on “historische Lexikologie” (Gröber 1888). The English phrase occurs at least as early as 1918, in an American article on “lexicological evolution and conceptual progress,” which draws on the thenavailable fascicules of the Oxford English Dictionary to demonstrate that between the early Middle English period and the nineteenth century, speakers of English developed an increasingly rich and subtle vocabulary for describing speech acts, from the twelfth-century and earlier ask, backbite, bemoan and so on to the post-1851 accredit, actionize and so on, the excerption of chronologically ordered lists of forms from the dictionary being described as an exercise in historical lexicology (Clark 1918, 198). In the decades thereafter, however, the phrase is rare: one occurrence (Barbier 1933, 125) is known to me, and comes like its Continental predecessors from the field of Romance philology. Indeed, historical lexicology is not attested in the academic journals available through the database JSTOR until after the Second World War. The first three attestations in JSTOR are all connected with Russian linguistic scholarship, as are all but one of the next ten; the earliest of all these attestations (Matthews 1949, 606) refers to a then-unpublished “Historical lexicology of Russian.” The author of the work whose title was thus translated was V. V. Vinogradov, whose support for Stalin’s rebuttal of the linguistic theories of N. Y. Marr in 1950, together with his appointment in the same year to the directorship of the Linguistics Institute, would make his voice an influential one. One of the points which Vinogradov made in support of Stalin was that the dictator’s “doctrine of the basic word stock laid the ‘Marxist foundations for historical lexicology and the history of word-formation’” (Ellis and Davies 1951, 255). Perhaps Vinogradov brought the phrase istoriþeskaja leksikologija into wide currency, and perhaps he formed it after French lexicologie historique: he was certainly influenced in other respects by French linguistic thought (see e.g. Cowie 1998, 213). The phrase continued to be used by Russian

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linguists after the era of Stalin, and a journal called Russkaja istoriþeskaja leksikologija i leksikografija was founded in 1972. During the second half of the twentieth century, historical lexicology and its equivalents came to be used increasingly outside the field of Russian studies. By the end of the century, these phrases were starting to appear in the titles of theses and books: La formation du vocabulaire gascon de la boucherie: Étude de lexicologie historique et descriptive (Fossat 1969); Historische lexikologie zum nordgermanischen Raum (Jacoby 1990); Diachronic prototype semantics: a contribution to historical lexicology (Geeraerts 1997). The association between historical lexicology and lexicography, already evident in the title of Russkaja istoriþeskaja leksikologija i leksikografija, recurs for instance in the subtitle of a German-language volume devoted to “historische Lexikologie und Lexicographie” (Holtus, Kramer, and Schweickard 1997), and in personal connections such as the eight years on the staff of the Woordenboek der Nederlandsche taal which Geeraerts saw as the source of his book (Geeraerts 1997, 5). As noted by Javier Díaz Vera in his introduction to a volume of “Studies in English historical lexicography, lexicology, and semantics” (Díaz Vera 2002a, vi–vii), work on historical English lexicology at the beginning of the twenty-first century was energized by two lexicographical projects, the Dictionary of Old English undertaken at the University of Toronto, and what was then the Historical Thesaurus of English undertaken at the University of Glasgow (Historical Thesaurus of the OED 2009). To these should be added the revision of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED3: see the sources cited by Mirosáawa Podhajecka in her contribution to the present volume), which has an etymological element lacking in the two projects mentioned by Díaz Vera. The First International Conference on Historical Lexicography and Lexicology (ICHLL) took place at the University of Leicester in 2002, organized by Julie Coleman; Díaz Vera’s point about the importance of the Glasgow Historical Thesaurus as a stimulus to historical lexicology is illustrated by the fact that Coleman’s doctoral thesis (published as Coleman 1999) was based on data from that project. The first ICHLL was intended as a successor to two round-table conferences of the 1970s, both of which had been primarily concerned with lexicography. Although lexicological papers were presented at the conference, for instance a study of the Old English noun (ge)laðung and an account of the English element in Croatian maritime technology (Kilpinen 2002; Pritchard 2002), it gave rise to a volume called Historical dictionaries and historical dictionary research, with no reference to lexicology in its title and no exclusively lexicological papers in its contents (Coleman and McDermott 2004). Its

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successor, which took place two years later at the Palazzo Feltrinelli in Gargnano, under the auspices of the Università degli Studi di Milano, organized by Giovanni Iamartino, gave rise to a volume entitled Words and dictionaries from the British Isles (Considine and Iamartino 2007), collecting papers from the conference which bore primarily on the English language. A reviewer pointed out fairly that despite the phrase “the British Isles” in the title, the contents were almost exclusively oriented towards England (Wild 2008, 446). The title’s emphasis on words as well as dictionaries, however, was appropriate: the volume did include lexicological papers (e.g. Pinnavaia 2007). Likewise, the third ICHLL, which took place in Leiden in 2006, organized by Marijke Mooijaart and Marijke van der Wal, included lexicological papers (e.g. Benati 2008) and recognized the separate importance of lexicology in its title, Yesterday’s words (Mooijaart and van der Wal 2008). The ten papers collected in this volume originate in presentations given at or proposed for the fourth ICHLL, which took place in Edmonton, Canada, in June 2008. The principal languages which they address are Chinese, Czech, Dutch, English (including the English / creole of Trinidad and Tobago), German, MƗori, Portuguese, and Russian. They are all primarily lexicological: two companion volumes present articles developed from presentations which discussed current projects in historical lexicography and from presentations which discussed the history of dictionaries (Considine 2010a, 2010b). The decision to offer three volumes all of which originate in the Edmonton conference has been taken with two ends in view: firstly, to make each volume as coherent as possible, and secondly, to ensure that contributors had the opportunity to develop their ideas as satisfying articles rather than simply writing up their presentations briefly for publication, as would have been necessary to keep a single-volume collection within bounds. Like other volumes with an ICHLL background, this is meant to be more than a proceedings volume (cf. Considine 2007, viii, and Wild 2008, 450).

2. Overview of this volume The chapters in the present volume are arranged in a very roughly chronological order of subject matter, although their historical depth tends to be such that there is extensive chronological overlap between them. The first, Karel Kuþera and Martin Stluka’s “Diachronic Corpora: Seeing Histories of Words from Another Angle”, draws on its authors’ work on the diachronic part of the Czech National Corpus, from the fifteenth to the twentieth centuries. It goes to the heart of one of the

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lexicological questions to which dictionaries tend not to give a satisfactory answer: when two forms of a lexeme, or two words of closely related meaning, coexist in a language, how may their relative frequencies change over time? As Kuþera and Stluka demonstrate, a number of possibilities can be seen playing out in the history of the vocabulary of Czech, from the relatively banal situation in which one variant survives alongside its overwhelmingly more frequent alternative, to various kinds of rivalry, some of which are very difficult to explain (and all the more interesting for that) while others can, at least tentatively, be mapped against developments in the history of the language which have left other traces. The corpus with which they worked was, at the time of their study, a small one, around three million words, and this led them to group their data by centuries in order to smooth out the potentially misleading effects of anomalous individual texts; work with a larger corpus would generate increasingly precise results, enabling the plotting of decade-by decade or conceivably year-by-year shifts in relative frequency. Historical dictionaries can of course make some approach to this sort of frequency mapping: the editor who notices a great wealth of occurrences of a particular form from a given period can comment on this in an entry, as the editors of the Oxford English Dictionary did in a number of instances. So, for instance, two figurative senses of cankered, “malignant” and “depraved”, are labelled as “Very common in the 16th cent.”, and the form chiefest is “very common in the 16th and 17th c., and still frequent in literary use.” However, the density of citation evidence which a historical dictionary presents for a given sense or form can only correspond very roughly with the frequency of that sense or form(see e.g. Brewer 2007a, 112–113). So, the evidence presented in OED can sometimes give a misleading picture of the history of a word because it is so loosely linked to questions of absolute or relative frequency. In a discussion of Chaucer’s contributions to English vocabulary, Carter Hailey (2007) argues, inter alia, that even when a word used by Chaucer can be shown to have been used by a previous writer, its frequency may have remained vanishingly low until Chaucer took it up, or reborrowed or reinvented it, and may then have risen significantly. The same—or, in the case of the reinvigoration of obsolete or obsolescent forms, the like—must be true of other widely circulated authors, for instance Walter Scott (foray or scantly) or perhaps P. G. Wodehouse (blotto or disgruntled). The movement towards indications of absolute frequency in dictionaries such as the Trésor de la langue française, together with the enormous potential explanatory power of elegantly-conceived frequency graphs like Kuþera and Stluka’s, suggests a way forward for the lexicological enrichment of

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historical dictionaries, provided that they register a language variety for which there is a substantial, and accurately dated, historical corpus. Kuþera and Stluka’s evidence begins in the fifteenth century; the next two papers in the collection address sixteenth-century texts. Ian Lancashire’s, indeed, might be said to address the absence of a certain kind of sixteenth-century text, as it asks “Why did Tudor England have no monolingual English dictionary?” The question is indeed a striking one: the first free-standing monolingual dictionary of English which was not overtly restricted to the coverage of vocabulary from a single subject-field was Robert Cawdrey’s Table Alphabeticall of 1604, and in view of the vigorous publication of texts in English in the sixteenth century, the fairly high quality of bilingual and subject-specific lexicography in England in the same period, and the modest scope of Cawdrey’s little book, one might well ask why he had no predecessors in the Tudor period, the long century which runs from 1485 to the year before Cawdrey’s Table was published. One answer might be that Cawdrey’s Table is really not a general English dictionary but a Fremdwörterbuch of borrowings from Latin, Greek, and French. In that case, the beginnings of general monolingual English lexicography might be redated in either possible direction. They might be seen as later than 1604, in the “Alphabetical Dictionary” of Lloyd and Wilkins (1668; cf. Dolezal 1985) or even in the despecialization of the wordlists of English dictionaries shortly after 1700. On the other hand, it might be argued, as Lancashire has done in the past, that some degree of specialization does not rule out the claim of a given dictionary to be a dictionary of English, and that therefore John Rastell’s Exposiciones terminorum legum anglorum of 1523 “has a reasonable claim to be the first printed stand-alone monolingual English lexicon, and John Rastell to be our first native lexicographer” (Lancashire 2004, 243). Yet another line of argument, on which Lancashire touches in the present paper, might be that overemphasizing monolingual lexicography confuses the issue: that there were excellent dictionaries of English in the sixteenth century in the form of the English–Latin sections of Latin dictionaries, in a tradition culminating in Rider’s of 1588, and that the fact that these explained English words in Latin rather than in English did not become important until the rise of a reading public who were interested in vernacular texts which used a difficult technical vocabulary but were ignorant of Latin. In that case Cawdrey’s dictionary, which is meant in particular for readers of Christian texts (see Brown 2001), might be compared to the Hebrew– English and Greek–English dictionaries published a few decades later for the help of Anglophone readers who wanted direct access to the Scriptures but did not know enough Latin to use Hebrew–Latin and Greek–Latin

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lexica. Lancashire also remarks in the present paper that the manuscript Old English–modern English dictionaries compiled in the sixteenth century are arguably monolingual; there seem to be no truly monolingual general wordlists of English from the sixteenth century. Most importantly, however, he here explores an argument which is more about the history of words and attitudes to words than about the history of dictionaries as such. On the one hand, features of the printed vocabulary of sixteenth-century English such as its unstable orthography would have presented a problem to monolingual lexicographers. On the other, the fact that the English vocabulary was growing rapidly might have been expected to stimulate its lexicographical record. Lancashire discusses this growth with reference to its documentation in the Oxford English Dictionary and also in the database Lexicons of Early Modern English, which he founded and edits, commenting on the ways in which LEME evidence supplements, and helps to modify, OED evidence, and encouraging his readers to reconsider the conventional arguments for a drastic sixteenth-century increase in the size of the vocabulary. He concludes by reflecting on a final possible reason for the absence of a general monolingual dictionary of English in the sixteenth century: the identification of the vocabulary of English by several contemporaries as defective in comparison to the vocabularies of Latin and even the more prestigious European vernaculars (cf. McConchie 1997, 14–61). In her paper “Dat Boek der Wundenartzstedye: The Low German translation of Hieronymus Brunschwig’s Buch der Cirurgia and its rendering of surgical lexicon”, Chiara Benati examines one particular document which illuminates the sixteenth-century lexicology of a European language. This is a version of the Buch der Cirurgia which was compiled by Hieronymus Brunschwig and first published in High German in 1497.1 The vocabulary of Brunschwig’s book, as transmitted through translations into other European vernaculars, influenced those vernaculars, due in part to Brunschwig’s own didactic procedure (for which see also Benati 2008). Benati quotes a typical passage in which he defines his subject as “chirrurgia das ist die hantwirckung in der wundertznie” [“chirurgy—that is, hand-working in the doctoring of wounds”], making a compound of hant “hand” and wirckung “working” to render Latin chirurgia “surgery”, which is from Greek kheirourgia, a compound of kheir “hand” and ourgia “force, operation”. This seems to be the original 1

Brunschwig’s name appears in English-language sources in various forms: OED, for instance, calls him variously (Jerome of) Brunswick, Brunswyke, and H. von Brunschweig; Roderick McConchie (1997, 22) refers to him as Hieronymus von Braunschweig.

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coinage of this word in German (cf. OED3 for the use circa 1400 of handworking in English): the first citation for it in DWB is from a later medical text, Jakob Rueff’s Trostbüchle of 1554. The reader of Brunschwig was being taught a vocabulary, and the lesson was learned across Europe. For instance, the English translation of the Buch der Cirurgia (1525) gives OED its first instances of fracture n., phthisis, spatula, and uvea. The Low German version which Benati studies here, published in 1518 and apparently known only from a single copy in Berlin, does not stand at the beginning of a long tradition of surgical writing in Low German, a language variety whose functions were to become increasingly restricted in the course of the next two centuries. Significant as it is as a monument of early modern Low German, and as an example of the negotiation between the vocabularies of Latin and of a vernacular language variety in early modern technical writing, it is also especially interesting as an example of the relationship between High German and Low German in the sixteenth century. Benati concludes that the maker of the Low German Boek der Wundenarztstedye is likelier to have thought of it as a new edition of the High German Buch der Cirurgia than as a translation. Mateusz Urban’s “Cleaning up the mess: The case of English balcony”, in methodological contrast to the three preceding papers, is an etymological study of a single word, or at least a single family of words. The immediate derivation of English balcony, borrowed no later than 1618 from Italian balcone, is clear enough, and Urban does not linger over it. (It is made even clearer, as Urban notes, when the original pronunciation of the English word, with stress on the second syllable, is considered—the poet Samuel Rogers, who died in 1855, remarked that “‘balcǂny’ makes me sick” [1856, 248: the diacritic indicates an unstressed vowel], on which remark Max Müller commented in 1861 that the new pronunciation was not yet universal, but was more common than the old [1862, 36].) However, the etymology of the Italian word is much less clear, and correspondingly much more interesting. The “mess” of Urban’s title is twofold. On the one hand, a possible cognate of balcony and balcone is Russian balagán “stall, mess”, so there is quite literally a mess to be cleared up in the etymological story—and here it is striking that a semantic development from “place in which potentially messy activities are carried out” to “mess” seems to have taken place several times, not only in balagán and the Polish burdel “brothel, mess” adduced by Urban but also in English shambles “butcher’s shop” (15th cent.), “slaughter-house” (16th cent.), “disgraceful state of confusion” (20th cent.). On the other hand, the etymology of balcone is particularly confused, with four different theories respectively proposing origins in Germanic, two different Persian forms,

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or Latin, and a related theory proposing a connection between one of the Persian forms and a widely distributed set of forms in languages ranging from Polish through Russian to Kirghiz and Kazakh, Buriat and Yakut. In clarifying the possible relationships between these forms, Urban extends the range of this collection to include a vitally important part of historical lexicology, namely etymological investigation—and, in parts of his paper, the romantic and demanding subfield of etymological investigation which addresses Wanderwörter, as in A. S. C. Ross’s classic tour de force on the family represented by English ginger (1952) and, nearer the present day, the work of Urban’s colleague at Krakow, Marek Stachowski, on etymologies such as those which include English mammoth (2000) and sabre (2004). But despite the breadth of its subject matter, which necessarily includes not only a great diversity of linguistic forms but also a short architectural history of the balcony, Urban’s paper stays faithful to its title and works on clearing up the mess, or confusion, of its subject matter with an elegant concision for which not all etymologists strive (see Malkiel 1993, 67–71 for an account of a counterexample). Just as Urban’s paper examines forms in languages spoken across Eurasia from England to Siberia, so Jane Samson’s “Do savages get the blues? William Colenso and the nineteenth-century colour debate” shows a lexicological question posed in the study of ancient Greek being transported in the nineteenth century to New Zealand. Goethe’s antiNewtonian investigations of ideas of colour from the 1790s onwards had led him to ask how colour was understood by ancient Greek writers. He was not the first modern scholar to touch on this question, and did not pretend to be, reprinting the De coloribus libellus, an exploration of the ancient words for colour published by Antonius Thylesius (Antonio Telesio) in 1528, as part of the historical section of his Zur Farbenlehre (Goethe 1810/1991, 640–653; for Thylesius on colour terms, see Osborne 2002). But Goethe’s arguments were vastly more elaborate, and more influential, than those of Thylesius, and the questions Goethe posed were taken up by a number of later writers, not least the statesman and classicist W. E. Gladstone, who proposed that as societies evolve, they develop more complex perceptions of colour. So it was that Homeric Greek became the only dead language discussed—if not as competently as it might have been—in Berlin and Kay’s Basic Color Terms (1969, 70–71; cf. Sampson 1980, 99 and 249n5). Samson traces the nineteenth-century development of this debate in a New Zealand context: MƗori society, it was suggested, had not evolved far enough at the time of contact with Europeans for its members to have

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developed a word for “blue”. The racist undertones visible in this suggestion are perceptible in other lexicological discussions: the paper of 1918 cited above as providing the first known use of the phrase historical lexicology in English claims that “savage races” or “savage tribes” do not have the vocabulary to express abstract concepts rather than particular colour words, but its evolutionary perspective and its interest in the language of “savage” humans are of a piece with one of the positions documented by Samson (Clark 1918, 177). Samson is an historian of missionary activity, and she keeps this context of both sides of the debate over MƗori colour terms clearly in sight; her paper contributes not only to lexicology but to the history of missionary linguistics (a flourishing area of inquiry: see e.g. Zwartjes and Koerner 2009, 202–205), and comments on the way in which missionary work on languages was to be overlooked or forgotten. The example which she cites as revealing “the occlusion of missionary contributions to the colour debate” is the contribution of W. H. R. Rivers to the reports of the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to Torres Straits, and this brings us back to Berlin and Kay, for whom Rivers’s work was an important source (Saunders 2000, 84). As Samson remarks in her conclusion, “developmental theories … formed in the context of modern colonialism” have had a surprisingly long life. Vivien Waszink’s “Biologisch vs. biokoffie, ecologisch vs. ecotrend: Dutch bio- and eco- through the ages in the dictionary” looks at two related case studies of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century proliferation of neo-classical compounds, in which elements from Greek and Latin are used to form words in the modern vernaculars which were not present in the ancient languages. After introducing the role of this kind of compound in the Dutch language, where it appears not to have been productive as early as in French and English, Waszink goes on to give an overview of the productivity of bio- and eco- in modern Dutch (there is interesting comparative material in OED3 s.v. eco-, an entry revised in 20092). In the third section of her paper, Waszink turns to the presentation of these elements which she has undertaken in the Algemeen Nederlands Woordenboek (ANW), a corpus-based, electronic dictionary of the Dutch language since 1970 (the coverage of the great Woordenboek der Nederlandsche Taal extends only to 1976). ANW “is not a clone of an existing printed dictionary, but … truly represents a new generation of electronic dictionaries” (Moerdijk, Tiberius, and Niestadt 2008, 18). Its entry structure naturally has room for all the usual elements of the 2

The OED3 entry for bio- is at the time of writing something of a muddle, consisting of elements from OED2, the 1993 and 1997 volumes of the OED Additions Series, and further additional material of 2007.

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dictionary entry—lemma, spelling, pronunciation, definition, and so on— and also provides systematic access to information about the morphology of the word; information about its semantic developments such as specialization and metonymy; and information about its semantic relationships such as antonymy. Moreover, the definition is supplemented by what its editors call a semagram, “the representation of knowledge associated with a word in a frame of … conceptual structure elements which characterise the properties and relations of the semantic class of a word meaning”, so that the semagram for entries for animals has conceptual structure elements, or “slots”, for sound, colour, size, build, parts, function, and so on (ibid. 19). Tommaso Pellin’s “Masters, mothers, and barking dogs: The lexical family of the words for grammar in China” discusses the words for grammatical concepts which were developed by writers in Chinese of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The concepts themselves were often derived from the Western grammatical tradition: before the nineteenth century, there was a strong and elaborate tradition of lexicography in China, extending to the lexicographical treatment of function words (Yong and Peng 2008, 314), but there was not a tradition of systematic grammatical analysis like those which had developed in India, the Arabicspeaking world, and Greece. This makes Pellin’s study an investigation of lexical interference as well as of a Sinological topic: Chinese writers on grammar were bound to consider grammatical terminology from the Western tradition, and their own terminology developed under its influence. After surveying the kinds of lexical interference from Western languages which can be detected in the grammatical terminology of a corpus of Chinese texts on grammar published between 1859 and 1924, he comments on these texts individually. The first, the Lading wenzi of Angelo Zottoli, is a grammar of Latin for Chinese readers in which the sense “interjection” is expressed by cuci, from cu “dog that suddenly jumps out from the grass and chases people” plus ci “word”, so the barking dogs of Pellin’s title really are there in the grammatical terminology. The early terminological experiments discussed here do not seem to have survived: like the products of lexical interference discussed by Pellin in an earlier paper, they might be seen as “messengers” from a different set of cultures, “and messengers are sometimes welcomed, and sometimes rejected” (Pellin 2008a, 265). The evidence on which Lise Winer draws in her “Historical naming strategies for fauna in Trinidad & Tobago English/Creole” likewise comes from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, though it extends much further into the latter than Pellin’s. Much of it was gathered in the three

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decades of Winer’s work on the Dictionary of the English/Creole of Trinidad & Tobago (DECTT, Winer 2009). An interviewer who asked Winer what attributes she needed in her work recorded the answer: “Sitzfleisch”, she says—the patience and persistence to sit on one's behind for hours doing tedious research. It also helps to have a strong interest in natural history since Trinidad has more flora and fauna than any other Caribbean country. (There are 500 different birds alone, from caciques to cornbirds.) But “you have to be a generalist”, she adds …her work runs the gamut of “fish, food, forest, frogs and flying things”. (Haldane 2003)

The present paper addresses a topic bearing on natural history: the names given to fauna in Trinidad and Tobago. Winer begins by setting out a general principle for explaining the distribution of imported and indigenous names for fauna. She then goes on to comment on her treatment of zoonyms in the DECTT, before offering an authoritative overview of the sources, kinds, and motivations—colour, resemblance, form, and the like—of Trinidadian and Tobagonian zoonyms. This is the latest in a long series of her scholarly contributions to the study of the language of those islands (cf. Winer 2007a), most or all of which must ultimately derive from the DECTT project. She remarks of the dictionary that “it is hoped that the inclusion of all common names [for fauna] in the DECTT will help to legitimize local zoonyms, and facilitate their use”. The possibility of DECTT’s making a difference to language-users in Trinidad and Tobago is likewise suggested in the observation made at its launch by the Creolist Lawrence Carrington, that it “fills a longstanding gap in the cultural self-knowledge and educational resources of this nation” (Carrington 2009). But Winer’s work in the present paper and elsewhere has evident relevance beyond a Caribbean context, suggested in her own comments on the possible analogies between her materials from Trinidad and Tobago and the zoonymic terminologies developed in the Englishes of Australia, South Africa, and elsewhere. The two last papers in the collection address lexicological questions— in both, as in Winer’s paper, in a lexicographical context—which bear on continuing developments in the English language and its relationships with other languages. In “The third edition of the OED and lexical transmission: Towards a consistent research methodology”, Mirosáawa Podhajecka discusses the documentation in OED3 and earlier versions of OED of words whose origins are, at least in part, Russian. This is a timely subject. The etymologies in OED1 were, from the beginning, clear-headed and often impressively learned, benefitting from the rapid progress of

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etymological studies in nineteenth-century Europe, the application of this work to the English lexicon in Skeat’s excellent Etymological dictionary (1882; cf. Malkiel 1993, 31 and Durkin 1999, 2–3), and the consultation of a wide range of experts on individual languages and groups of languages. But their makers were constrained not only by time but by the resources available to them, and OED3’s etymological team are making very striking advances on the work of their predecessors (see Durkin 1999). Podhajecka discusses this work and some of the problems it presents, for instance in the classification of more or less naturalized words of foreign origin, with reference to etymologies in the fully revised range in which Russian is cited, concluding that “the quality of the new etymologies is first-class”. She also asks what OED3 is omitting, identifying antedatings, variant forms, and unrecorded words located in the course of searching the Google Books database (for a complementary but very different approach to some of this material, see Leeming 1968–9). The methodological problems which Google Books presents are an important feature of Podhajecka’s paper. On the one hand, it gives access by keyword to an extraordinary wealth of texts, in multiple languages, with publication dates from the seventeenth and even sixteenth century to the present day. On the other, its metadata are often extremely problematic: a controversial article by the linguist Geoffrey Nunberg has called them “a train wreck: a mishmash wrapped in a muddle wrapped in a mess” (2009). Moreover, many texts are inaccessible to some or all users for legal reasons, and as Podhajecka remarks, the accessibility of some texts changes unpredictably. Notwithstanding the shortcomings of Google Books, Podhajecka’s findings show what can be done with the resource— at least by a patient and determined researcher who asks it the right questions about relatively uncommon lexical items. Isabel Casanova’s “Should Portuguese dictionaries register English words?” discusses the converse process to that which Podhajecka documents: the borrowing of English words into another language, in this case Portuguese (which is not, by the way, included in Manfred Görlach’s Dictionary of European anglicisms [2001], making its treatment here all the more valuable). Her argument opens with an account of the academy principle, by which the major officially sponsored dictionary of a language, a dictionary like those produced in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by the Académie française, the Real Academia Española, and the Academia Real das Sciencias de Lisboa (now the Academia das Ciências de Lisboa), would document the vocabulary of the prestigious standard variety of a language, omitting or stigmatizing low-status lexical items, and aiming to stabilize the language and to preserve its perceived

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purity. Whereas the successive editions of the Dictionnaire de l’académie française have maintained this principle, the Dicionário da língua Portuguesa contemporânea of the Academia das Ciências de Lisboa (2001) does not: it is generously receptive to anglicisms, “to the great consternation of the Portuguese intellectual elite” (Casanova 2008, 27). Casanova goes on to describe some of the orthographic and phonological features of recent English loans into Portuguese, concluding with a question—“what is the future for the relationship of Portuguese and English in the European context?”—and with the suggestion that “It is down to lexicographers to decide what role a dictionary should play for a language in crisis.”

3. Conclusion: historical lexicology in the present volume The contributions to the present volume belong to a number of subfields of historical lexicology, and show a number of techniques at work. One might say, to revisit Díaz Vera’s point about the importance of dictionary and thesaurus projects in stimulating work on historical lexicology—or to take up M. A. K. Halliday’s remark (2004, 20) that “the best source of information about lexicology is the dictionary or thesaurus”—that these contributions are variously related to the historical corpus or database, the historical thesaurus, and the historical dictionary. Kuþera and Stluka’s study of the historical frequency of morphological variants is based on a carefully selected historical corpus, Lancashire’s study of the sixteenth-century lexicon and the motives for its lexicographical representation makes extensive use of a database of early lexicography, Pellin’s study of lexical interference in a particular semantic field draws on a small corpus of grammatical texts, and Podhajecka’s study of loanwords and their lexicographical treatment draws on Google Books as, in its own way, a huge disorderly corpus. Benati, Samson, and Winer share with Pellin an interest in the interplay of words from given semantic fields, remote as the Low German, MƗori, and Trinidadian and Tobagonian Creole of their investigations are from the Chinese materials which he addresses. Waszink, Winer, and Casanova all write as lexicographers, and Urban’s etymological investigation responds in particular to the claims of lexicographers of the last two centuries. Different typologies of work in lexicology in general and historical lexicology in particular would of course bring the contributions together in different patterns. To return to the contrast drawn by Pellin and quoted at the beginning of this introduction, all ten papers share an interest in empirical evidence rather than in lexicological study at a highly theoretical level, and in the

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wide contextualization of the words which constitute this evidence in the social and cultural lives of their users. What Philip Durkin (2009, 237) says of etymology might be said of historical lexicology as a whole and as practiced in this volume: “Few areas of study offer points of contact with so many fields”.

CHAPTER ONE DIACHRONIC CORPORA: SEEING HISTORIES OF WORDS FROM ANOTHER ANGLE KAREL KUýERA AND MARTIN STLUKA

Detailed descriptions of changes in the lexicon of a language usually focus on such key points in the history of particular words as their origin (including, if possible, the time of their borrowing or coinage), the times of changes of their forms and meanings, and—where applicable—the time of their going out of use. As a broad generalization it can be said that the existing descriptions of histories of particular words are rather discontinuous, consisting, as a rule, of a limited number of points in time. In contrast, very little is known about periods between these key points, about changes in frequency of words over centuries, and about their coexistence with synonymous words and variants. The aim of this contribution is to show that even at their present, rather elementary stage of development, diachronic corpora encompassing the entire (written) history of a language seem to demonstrate a significant potential to broaden the traditional focus by making it possible to explore the history of a word as a continuum and to compare it with the histories of other words, variants, or forms. The Diachronic Part of the Czech National Corpus (DCNC: for details see ) is used here to show some of the possibilities, even though its exploitation is limited by its current size of about 3 million running words—a size which is too small to provide either adequate coverage of the seven centuries of Czech written texts or reliable information about changes of absolute frequencies of most words and forms. (One should be aware, however, that the DCNC, as well as diachronic corpora of other languages, may never be totally reliable in this respect: their data on history of words, especially the lower frequency ones, will inevitably remain skewed by the unequal representation

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of various text types, topics, literary styles etc. in the texts preserved from early language states.) To minimize the influence of the above-mentioned limitations, (a) the texts of DCNC were organized in 100-year clusters, which proved to be large enough to show the general tendencies rather than differences between individual texts; (b) the main focus has centered round high frequency words and forms, the use of which is largely independent of topics and literary styles; and (c) attention has been confined to comparison of relative frequencies in groups (mostly pairs) of coexisting synonymous words and forms, rather than their absolute frequencies. (To be more specific about (c) and to clarify what the graphs below show: if, for example, the absolute frequencies of the compared words A and B found in the DCNC in the fifteenth century were 60 and 140 respectively, their relative frequencies would be 30% and 70%; these percentages would then be plotted on the graph at the year 1500 and a line would be drawn to link each of the two points with the corresponding points at the years 1400 and 1600.)Fifty probes based on these principles revealed several cases of rather monotonous history characterized by synonyms or variants remaining in a stable state through the whole of their coexistence, with more or less constant frequencies and no marked tendency to change their positions. Figure 1.1 shows a prototypical example of such monotony, extending over the seven hundred years of coexistence of nikdy “never” and its infrequent variant nikda, which vanished completely from Czech written records around the turn of the nineteenth century, but still existed in spoken Czech in the twentieth century. Cases like this are quite remarkable from a general linguistic viewpoint, since they do not really correspond with the idea of language as an entity undergoing constant change, but may not be as interesting from the point of view of lexicology and lexicography dealing with the history of words of a particular language, since the long-term linear parallel coexistence provides practically no new information about the history of the words or variants except for the fact of parallelism itself. However, the probes into DCNC show that the most usual way of coexistence of two or more synonyms or variants is competition, not the type of monotonous parallelism shown in Figure 1.1.

Diachronic Corpora

3

Figure 1.1. Monotony: History of coexistence of the variants nikdy and nikda

Figure 1.2. Fluctuation: History of coexistence of the variants blíž/nejblíž and blíže/nejblíže “closer/closest”

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Chapter One

Figure 1.3. Fluctuation: History of coexistence of the variants aþ, aþkoli and aþkoliv “(al)though”

In some instances, for instance Figures 1.2 and 1.3, the competition may be rather complex, but generally, rivalry between two coexisting words or forms is characterized by much less erratic variation than in Figure 1.2. In such cases the data often reveal as yet unknown long-term tendencies or evident changes, not just undirected fluctuation:

Figure 1.4. Tendencies: History of coexistence of the variants -krát and kráte “time(s)”

Diachronic Corpora

5

Figure 1.5. Reversal: History of coexistence of the variants tehdy and tehdá “then”

Maybe this kind of information will be used in practice one day, being included in dictionaries alongside with details about words’ origins or changes in their meanings, but at present—scanty as they are—the data raise historical and lexicological rather than lexicographic questions. Even from the limited number of 50 probes into the DCNC it seems to be evident that competing words sometimes reverse their positions completely, or double-reverse them, with one of them falling out of use (as tehdy did, after a gradual 400-year decline, during the eighteenth century, as shown in Figure 1.5), but coming back again and pushing the other member of the pair (tehdá in this case) into almost complete oblivion. New facts like that call for clarification, which we may or may not be able to provide. The case of tehdy and tehdá seems to be relatively easy to explain: the turn of the nineteenth century, when the two variants started to reverse their positions, was the time of the Czech National Revival movement, when the Czech language was being reformed and enriched to have the necessary vocabulary and other qualities for use not only in everyday communication, but also in prose, poetry, and scientific texts. There are very detailed accounts of technical and literary words being newly formed or borrowed from foreign languages at the time, but what has been unknown is that the histories of some common Czech words were obviously changed then too, with less common or obsolescent words and variants like tehdy being chosen as poetic expressions valued for their out-of-the-ordinary stylistic qualities. This explanation must

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Chapter One

still be verified through additional observations, but it is already supported by the fact that the fifty rather random probes have revealed four more pairs of words which reversed their positions as rapidly at the same time: teprve/teprvé and teprva/teprvá “not until”; nejprv and nejprve/nejprvé “first”; (ne)jinak and (ne)jináþ “(not) in a different way”; and výše and vejše “higher”. Predictably, individual cases of similar competing pairs of synonyms and variants have also been found to reverse their positions at other times than the National Revival, and to find a plausible explanation for them may be more difficult. However, it does not seem unlikely that random reversals of positions in competing pairs of words or variants happen from time to time simply as part of continuous language variation, and as such many of them may not have any specific explanation at all. One more fact, in a way similar to these reversals, has been revealed by the probes into the DCNC: a set of eight pairs of competing words and variants has been found, in which each of the pairs shares a similar history with another completely unrelated pair from the same set. An example of two such pairs sharing similar history (nikdý and nikda “never” and dél/dýl and déle/dýle “longer”) is shown in Figure 1.6 on the following page. This is another fact demanding explanation, but obviously many more data are needed to find out if sets of similar histories like these arise by mere coincidence or reflect deeper tendencies influencing unrelated words and variants at particular times.

Figure 1.6. Sharing histories: Similar histories of two unrelated pairs of competing variants (nikdý and nikda “never” and dél/dýl and déle/dýle “longer”)

Diachronic Corpora

7

The above are all examples of new, as yet unknown facts about histories of words revealed by a rather limited number of probes into one rather insufficient diachronic corpus. They call for interpretation, they raise questions and do not provide answers, but they are facts, and however insignificant their number is at the moment, they seem to open up new vistas. Although further data will have to be accumulated to verify some of the above statements, it seems obvious that diachronic corpora promise to provide a firm basis for identifying both centuries-long trends in the histories of particular words and general tendencies of historical developments, and as such, they should become lexicographers’ tools in the future. More emphasis on the historical continuum of language and more emphasis on the study of words as competing and interrelated members of sets of synonyms (as well as other sets) can be named among the most obvious foreseeable contributions of diachronic corpora to historical lexicology and lexicography.

CHAPTER TWO WHY DID TUDOR ENGLAND HAVE NO MONOLINGUAL ENGLISH DICTIONARY? IAN LANCASHIRE

The General Editor of the Oxford English Dictionary a century ago said that “no one appears before the end of the sixteenth century to have felt that Englishmen could want a dictionary” (J. A. H. Murray 1900, 26). Is James Murray’s comment true, and if so, why is it? Richard Mulcaster, master of the Merchant Taylors’ school in London, published an English word-list of over eight thousand terms in his Elementarie in 1582. In it he distinguished between native or mothertongue vocabulary and those words that, though borrowed from a foreign language, had been enfranchised in English. Mulcaster proposed that someone use his word-list to make the first monolingual English dictionary.1 He believed that knowledge of the English language would be central to basic education in the future. Patriotism and a genuine love of English moved him to interrupt a good treatise on elementary education with page on page of sparsely-encoded columns of words. Mulcaster’s patron—the man who allowed the dedication of the Elementarie—was Robert Dudley, earl of Leicester. An oligarchy, the leading members of which were the Queen, her favorite Dudley, and her Treasurer, William Cecil, governed England in the 1580s. Dudley was dedicatee of a hundred books (F. B. Williams 1962, 58) and, after becoming Chancellor of Oxford University in 1564, helped to restore the University Press two decades later. Dudley admired dictionaries. For example, he successfully secured, with Christopher Hatton (Privy Councillor and Vice-Chamberlain of the Household), a monopoly, dated 1

Printed bilingual dictionaries with English headwords or explanations date from Promptorium Parvulorum (1499), for a history of which see Stein 1985, 91–106.

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April 25, 1580, for the printer Henry Bynneman to print “all Dictionaries in all tongues” (Eccles 1957, 81). Dudley welcomed having three dictionaries and a language handbook dedicated to him: the huge Latin– English Thesaurus by Thomas Cooper (an Oxford schoolmaster and bishop-to-be) in 1565; a revision of John Withals’s popular student Latin– English dictionary by Lewis Evans in 1574; a revision of Jean Crespin’s Lexicon Graecolatinum in 1581 by Edward Grant, headmaster of Westminster School; and John Florio’s Firste Fruites in 1578. Mulcaster may have thought that the dedication of the Elementarie to Dudley would incline him to influence Bynneman to publish a monolingual English dictionary. That hope would have been misplaced. The Queen’s Printer in December 1582, Christopher Barker, a man who had the monopoly on printing Bibles, described Bynneman’s privilege as being more “Daungerous to the Patentee; then profitable” because he would need capital in the amount of ten thousand pounds to survive, given that the market for big dictionaries was small, and the costs great (Eccles 1957, 81). Sir Thomas Smith’s grants of printing privileges in the mid-1570s, when he served as Secretary of State after Cecil, were “little short of catastrophic” for the book trade generally (Blayney 1997, 23). Bynneman died on 15 April 1583, after which the bookseller Ralph Newbery and his printer Henry Denham obtained Bynneman’s monopoly for printing dictionaries (Gadd 2004). Bynneman and Newbery, and then Newbery alone, published only new editions or versions of previously printed dictionaries. These included Cooper’s last edition of the Thesaurus (1584); the Verborum latinorum cum graecis anglicisque coniunctorum, locupletissimi commentarii of 1583, which substituted English for the French of Guillaume Morel’s Verborum latinorum cum graecis gallicisque conjunctorum, locupletissimi commentarii of 1558; a new edition of Jean Véron’s Latin–French– English dictionary of 1552, with the French left out (1584), and Hadrianus Junius’s Nomenclator, a new edition of a polyglot dictionary first printed in 1567, with added English material by John Higgins (1585). All these dictionaries are bilingual or multilingual, and none is original work. Bynneman’s will lists “olde” copies of Cooper, Morel, Véron, and Junius (Eccles 1957, 83). Why did no one make Mulcaster’s monolingual dictionary of English? The Tudor practice of creating a monopoly or patent for publishing dictionaries could be responsible. Although it relieved the printer of competition within England (and so theoretically encouraged dictionary production), he still bore a severe financial burden in that all his expenses would have to be covered by sales to a fairly small market. Printers could

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Chapter Two

rarely afford to shoulder the extra costs of publishing a new work. Old lexicons were proven commodities; they had made a name for themselves. Dead lexicographers did not need a living. The monopoly also prohibited small-operation printers from venturing into uncertain projects such as English-only lexicons. These facts appear to settle the question … except that Nathan Bailey, Noah Webster, and Oxford University Press found dictionary production to be highly lucrative. The potential market for an English dictionary, unlike ones in Greek and Latin, was huge. No one buys a monopoly unless expecting profit, and yet Bynneman, Newbery, and their successors must have had reasons to doubt the viability of a monolingual English dictionary. What were the risk factors? Mulcaster points to one. He describes his gift to Dudley as “an English ortografie” (sig. *3v) whose adoption he urged. I handle speciallie in it the right writing of our English tung, a verie necessarie point, and of force to be handled, ear the child be taught to read, which reading is the first principle of the hole Elementarie. For can reading be right before writing be righted, seing we read nothing else, but what we se writen? or can writing seme right, being chalenged for wrong, before it be cleared? I account the print as a statarie writing, and therefor incident to the same term. I haue trauelled in this point of our English writing, somwhat more then ordinarie. Wherein what my iudgement is, your honor maie perceiue euen by this my thus writing, which is as the common, tho more certain then the common, as my precepts will shew: bycause I write nothing without cause why, and most certain ground. For I haue sounded the thing by the depth of our tung, and planted my rules vpon our ordinarie custom, the more my frind, bycause it is followed, nowhere my fo, bycause nowhere forced. Whereby I do perceiue, why we ought to write thus, as the common currant is, without the alteration of either custom, or charact, tho with som correction of certain wants, and generall direction for the hole pen. (sigs. *4v-¶1r)

This passage emphasizes Mulcaster’s spelling system. He speaks of “right writing … without the alteration of either custom, or charact” and of “generall direction for the hole pen”, not about vocabulary and syntax. Mulcaster explains in his introduction to his word-table that he works, “not by rasing new characts, but by ruling old custom” (sig. X3v). He does not alter the alphabet. When Mulcaster suggests that someone learned make “one dictionarie” with “right writing, which is incident to the Alphabete” (sig. X4r), he means rules for headword orthography. Without them, no one would be able to find words in an alphabetical list. Only then does Mulcaster add “naturall force” and “proper vse” as matters of interest. Natural force refers to the association of the word-form, the name, with the

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thing named (an association that Adam made in following God’s command to name the animals). By proper use, Mulcaster refers to lexicographers’ job of “expounding their own words by their own language” (sig. Y1r), that is, explaining the meaning of words from the vernacular in the vernacular. By 1582, three people had already proposed a new orthography for English: Sir Thomas Smith in 1568, John Hart in 1569–70, and William Bullokar in 1580–81. Two of the three men, Smith and Hart, had strong links with Cambridge University, and with William Cecil, the Lord Treasurer, who patronized lexicographers like John Baret, a fellow of a Cambridge college and author of the Alvearie (1574), and Thomas Thomas, whose Latin–English dictionary (1587) supplanted Cooper’s and who was Printer to Cambridge University. Both dedicated their works to Cecil. If Cecil and Dudley—or their favourites—had publically butted heads on English orthography, a resolution would have been difficult, but disagreement between Cecil and Dudley is not known to have been a factor in the making of a monolingual English dictionary. The first man to recommend a new English spelling system, Sir Thomas Smith, had been regius professor of civil law at Cambridge when Cecil was a student there. Smith was Cecil’s choice to succeed him as Secretary of State and served in that capacity from 1572 to 1577. In 1568, Smith resurrected a treatise on systematizing English spelling that he had devised in 1542: he published De recta et emendata linguae anglicae scriptione, dialogus in Paris, where he served as English ambassador, beginning in 1562. He proposed “an entirely new alphabet of nineteen Roman, four Greek, and six English letters with ten vowels carrying long and short accents” (Dewar 1964, 19). Ironically, Smith’s treatise appeared in Latin—sufficient evidence of its intended audience, Elizabeth’s classically educated governors. Cecil would have had some sympathy with Smith’s position. The second spelling revisionist, John Hart, created Chester Herald on 18 July 1567, also had ties to Cecil and counted him “of long time ... my especiall good master” (Hart 1560/1955, 69). Hart’s treatise on revising English spelling, originally dedicated to Edward VI in 1551, had languished in manuscript until it was revised and printed as An orthographie in 1569, the year after Smith’s. Hart attacked the “lak of ordre emongest writers and printers: which now have the bridel, to run where euerry fantazi serveth, to the confusion of knoledge” (1551/1955, 115). He likened the effect of misleading orthography to the confusions that occur when learned people “of farre West, or North Countryes, which vse differing English termes from those of the Court” encounter the speech

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Chapter Two

of London, “where the flower of the English tongue is vsed” (1570/1955, 234). He compared letters of the alphabet to hastily-imported foreignlanguage terms, taught not by “the mother to the child” but by “stepmothers and strange nurses”. He thought foreigners “corrupted and aliened [English] from the nature” (1570/1955, 236), and he believed that English speech needed new alphabetic letters, which he thought to be terms of art, to denote its sounds unambiguously (1570/1955, 231). Smith and Hart resurrected books they had written a long time past, the former twenty-six years before its publication, the latter eighteen years. Although they must have had some encouragement from William Cecil, few greeted the ideas of Smith and Hart warmly. Even those who might have taken spelling as an important issue were skeptical. Smith’s Latin treatise reached only those whose minds were not on English. Hart’s Devonshire accent did not help his cause. Of the “learned sort” for whom Hart had printed An orthographie, “few ... thought it worth their labour to reade, and fewer” appreciated the economic merits of spelling reformation (1570/1955, 232). Undeterred, Hart then brought out a newly-written treatise, A methode or comfortable beginning for all vnlearned (1570), that put his spelling system to work. He promised that, with only a hundred hours of instruction, anyone could master it. He even recommended the posting of “the figures with their letters ... drawen on the walles, pillers, and postes of churches, tounes and houses” (1570/1955, 237). His hopes that the Queen or Cecil would enact a change in spelling, however, were disappointed. The third man, William Bullokar, had no university degree and no patron to whom he could dedicate his work, and so his spelling method had the least chance of winning favour. He completed the manuscript of his Booke at large, for the amendment of orthographie for English speech about 1573 and waited seven years to see how the schemes of Smith and Hart would fare. Hart died in 1574, and Sir Thomas Smith three years later; he was succeeded as Secretary of State by Sir Thomas Wilson, author of books on logic and rhetoric. Although Wilson had dedicated his Arte of Rhetorique to Mulcaster’s patron, Dudley, in 1553, Wilson left much of the Secretary’s business to Francis Walsingham, his second-incommand, who succeeded him in 1581 (Adams, Bryson, and Leimon 2004). The spelling issue gradually waned, and Bullokar finally published his Booke at large in 1580, when he promised to help add an English dictionary to his proposed grammar so that “Inglish speech shall be, the perfectest I knowe” and children between the age of seven and twelve years might at last be properly educated (sig. C1v; see also sigs. I1r, Q2r). This dictionary would have been narrow in function: it would have served

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to distinguish between homophones. Mulcaster took this dictionary proposal from Bullokar, before whom no one had proposed a monolingual dictionary for the mother tongue (R. F. Jones 1953, 157). Gabriel Harvey, who was sympathetic to Smith, wrote to Edmund Spenser in a letter that amending English orthography, as Smith had proposed, required general agreement, “publickely and autentically established, as it were by a generall Counsel, or acte of Parliament” (Harvey and Spenser 1580, 32), before he (for one) would change his ways. Smith had been in a position to promote change in 1573–1575 but did nothing. Mulcaster’s proposal, to adopt spelling rules but not alter the alphabet, struck a compromise that Gabriel Harvey might have accepted. If only a government act approved in Parliament could have effected a new standard, how would that bill have been written? It could not itself have listed rules. The Crown would have had to submit teachers and publishers to the decisions of a legislated, funded body. The emerging Society of Antiquaries would have been a suitable office, although it had no official status (Brede 1937, 561). Difficulty in getting agreement on a revised orthography for English might have delayed a monolingual dictionary. The lexicographer’s first task is to collect and spell the headwords, but with existing orthography in disrepute, and four revisionist proposals to choose from, none of which had support, choosing a spelling standard would have been problematic. Still, the issue need not have stopped an attempt. Lexicographers such as John Palsgrave (1530), Richard Huloet (1552), John Baret (1574), and John Rider (1588) devised bilingual lexicons alphabetized by English lemmas. However, there are other reasons for the failure of Mulcaster’s initiative. One is that no one saw a need for an English dictionary. When Hart had penned his Orthographie for Edward VI, the times were primed for language change, but not of the sort Hart had in mind. The English language had been used for translations of scripture under Henry VIII, and for the Booke of the common prayer of 1549. So many excellent works had been produced in English, such as Sir Thomas Elyot’s revised Latin–English dictionary and the translation of Erasmus’s Paraphrases vpon the newe testamente by Nicholas Udall and others (both 1548), that Hart’s loyalty to English was questioned. Some persons, he wrote, “wold persuade me not to speake of any mysuse in our inglish writing, whiche is of late brought to souch a perfection as never the lyke was seen” (1551/1955, 119). This heady national self-congratulation led to some abuses in vocabulary creation, which Thomas Wilson, yet unknighted, called inkhorn terms in his Arte of rhetorique (1553), a book that was to become a vade mecum for the Inns of Court. Arguably, an

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insufficiency in English vocabulary led speakers and writers to neologize or borrow terms from other languages. When Tudor presses codified knowledge about law, herbs, the human body, rhetoric, logic, geometry, and mathematics, usually by translating classical treatises into English, translators coined or borrowed words for concepts that had no English equivalent. Evidence from the Oxford English Dictionary has since been used to show that the language consequently experienced what Terttu Nevalainen describes as “the fastest vocabulary growth in the history of English in proportion to the vocabulary size of the time” (1999, 336). This growth should have increased the need for an English monolingual dictionary. New words created what is called the hard-word problem, about which much has been written. In Ordered profusion (1973), Thomas Finkenstaedt, Dieter Wolff, Joachim Neuhaus, and Winfried Herget used the first-occurrence dates of OED headwords in the Chronological English dictionary of 1970 (CED) to identify 1560–1660 as the peak period of the language’s vocabulary growth. Anne McDermott (2002) recently associated the CED rate of lexical expansion with the number of books printed year-by-year according to the Short-title catalogue (STC): that is, word-growth is associated with the key technology in creating the archival lode. Books are one of the few persistent quantitative measures in the period we have, and the most word-dense works are dictionaries. Ordered profusion (1973) and the subsequent study by Richard Wermser (1976) indicate that new words increase over the century from 1490–1509 to 1590–1609 by 75 percent. That is an astonishing rate of growth. It resembles the growth of lexicons more closely than that of all STC books. Glossaries and dictionaries do not explain why vocabulary increases but appear to respond to the presence of new words in the language. There emerges a market need for information about those words. That is, words become information, and lexicons supply it. Forty years after the publication of the Chronological English dictionary, OED3 allows us to recalculate these data. Using its advanced search function, we can retrieve word-entries from specific chronological spans according to a generous number of criteria. There are several strategies to determine, for any given time period, (1) all word-entries that are first citations, (2) all word-entries that are last citations, and (3) the active vocabulary. Once we know these numbers, we can measure the size of the vocabulary in any decade. For example, here is one way of estimating the national vocabulary for 1650–60. Count the number of firstcitation word-entries from 500 to 1649, add the number of new wordentries with a first citation from 1650 to 1660, and deduct the number of

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500–1649 first-citation word-entries that have no quotations from 1661 to 2008. John Simpson, the chief editor of the OED, offers another strategy (personal communication, 13 March 2008): “go to the Advanced search page (leaving ‘entries’ selected, rather than ‘quotations’), search for 5001660 in the first search field (by ‘quotation date’), AND 1650-2008 in the second search field (again by ‘quotation date’).” His result includes affixes and combining forms, which are not awarded “first dates” by the database, and so yields a slightly higher count. My method specifies the number of lost words. It is remarkably easy to generate this data today, compared to the 1960s when a German team of scholars had to create their own database. By 1500, English had just over 36,100 different word-forms, and 64,300 by 1600. This is an increase of 178 percent, three percent more than CED numbers in 1973. Lexicons of Early Modern English, which I edit, contributes towards answering how Early Modern English expanded. LEME now holds 575,270 word-entries from 166 lexical works, dating from 1480 to 1702, employing some 37 languages. The University of Toronto Press and the University of Toronto Libraries published it online in 2006, and it grows in size each year at .2 LEME teaches us some simple things about the Early Modern lexicon. The period had a different understanding of word-meaning than we do today (Lancashire 2002). Its glossographers explain English words with synonyms or translations as names for things, and their word-entries have no formal definitions. Second, without any published, alphabetized lexicographic record of English vocabulary, few persons alive then had an understanding of a standard English vocabulary: words came and went, and meaning changed fluidly and unrecordedly. Third, a lemmatized database of English words in dictionaries and other manuscript and printed works can tell us much about Early Modern English that we cannot find in the Oxford English Dictionary. 95.7 percent of the word-entries in LEME are not cited by OED. LEME has some preliminary results of the total number of words in Early Modern English in 1500 and in 1600. So far LEME has lemmatized nine lexical works up to the late 1520s. For 11,325 word entries from 1497 to 1527, LEME has 13,846 lemmas (as of June 14, 2008). We are also lemmatizing supplementary non-lexical works, such as Paston letters dated 1473, which offer 1,045 lemmas. For over 100 lexicons I have also

2 The public can search all word-entries freely. An annual institutional or individual license gives fuller research access to more lexical resources.

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lemmatized the English headwords. This in-progress lemmatization of LEME word-entries can be viewed in Figure 2.1. English Vocabulary 1470-1702

Total Cumulative Unique Lemmas Cumulative Analyzed Word-entries

140000 120000 100000 80000 60000 40000 20000 1698

1686

1674

1662

1650

1638

1626

1614

1602

1590

1578

1566

1554

1542

1530

1518

1506

1494

1482

1470

0

Figure 2.1: English vocabulary 1470–1702 in LEME (as of June 13, 2008)

By 1500 the lexical works—a small subset of the evidence, based on the Pepys MS of the Medulla Grammatice (ca. 1480) and Wynkyn de Worde’s edition of Promptorium Parvulorum (1499)—show 17,588 word-types. By 1600, they show 30,705 word-types: a 75 percent increase. LEME wordentries, then, basically confirm the CED findings. The ratio of word-types to word-entries is 17588:27870 and 30705:49187, or 1:1.59-1.60: that is, two new words to about three entries. OED numbers are 36,100 and 64,300 words, a 78 percent increase. These numbers probably amount to the same result.3 However, if we graph the ratio of first citations to total quotations in the OED, the increase on which CED, OED, and LEME agree may reflect, not a steep rise in vocabulary, but the consequence of printing technology. The figures on the y-axis of Figure 2.2 are totals per decade from 1500–09 to 1590–99. The three series show the number of OED first citations, the total number of OED word-entries, and the total number of OED quotations. The average ratio of first citation to total quotations is 1 in 7.2 with a standard deviation of 0.73. This regularity can be read as implying that new words increase according to how many OED quotations are 3

OED begins 1500 with 23,495 more word-types than are documented in my early lexicons, but most of these are Old and Middle English forms.

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available. If OED had used 60,009 quotations from 1500 to 1509 (as it did for 1590 to 1599), would this decade also boast 7,877 first citations instead of 1,901? Is expansion born of the different rate at which texts survive? Or was the vocabulary, in 1500, 80 percent of its size in 1600? The more quotations produced in a decade, the more new words they contain. We know that printing presses enabled the late 1590s to generate more texts than the late incunabular period, but can we be sure that many new words were not always there, and that the printing press simply enabled them to be recorded? An increase in first citations about 1500 would somewhat flatten the graph. English would not have experienced as great an accelerated growth. First OED Citations in Ten-year Periods 1500-1600 80000 60000

First Citations Word-entries Quotations

40000 20000 0

1500-09 1510-19 1520-29 1530-39 1540-49 1550-59 1560-69 1570-79 1580-89 1590-99

First Citations 1901

1239

2121

3676

3604

3165

3396

4748

4805

7877

Word-entries 10734

7145

10803

16528

14938

14414

15928

20031

21063

30359

16847

9073

16286

28299

22551

21245

24796

31485

33996

60009

Quotations

Figure 2.2: First OED citations in ten-year periods 1500–1600

Two factors will continue to change these numbers: continuing largescale antedatings of OED headwords, and the discovery of more hard words. Persistent antedatings of OED word-types in the early modern period suggest a steadier state in the language’s production of new words. Richard Bailey published in 1978 a collection of additions and antedatings to English vocabulary from 1475 to 1700, that had 4,400 entries, of which about 2,900 included antedatings.4 By 1980, Jürgen Schäfer’s analysis of OED sources showed that the early Oxford lexicographers had relied overly on citations from major authors in the late Tudor period, especially 4 Based on a hand-count of antedatings on twelve pages of the 330-page “Additions and Antedatings.”

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Shakespeare, and ignored lexically more inventive authors like Thomas Nashe. In 1989 Schäfer also demonstrated that OED overlooked information in hard-word glossaries from 1526 up to the mid-17th century. Among the approximately 5,000 word-entries in his Early modern English lexicography (1989) that add information to the OED are about 2,600 antedatings.5 By 1989 at least 5,500 OED early modern headwords, out of a total of 64,000, had been antedated. For decades it has been an international academic pastime to find uses of headwords earlier than attested in the OED. 183 articles since 1960 have documented such antedatings, 84 in one journal alone, Notes & Queries (these figures come from article databases at Toronto). More and more, we are finding that words actually occurred earlier than OED suggested they did. The impact of the word-list from the 20,000 STC books digitized by EEBO-TCP will be greater still. This process of antedating may spread vocabulary growth out more evenly through the Tudor period and diminish the “acceleration” effect. The growth-rate in the Tudor period will flatten somewhat unless the OED’s new sources produce a balancing number of neologisms. My lemmatization for LEME works yields steady runs of OED antedatings. I have just added to LEME Jeffrey Huntsman’s doctoral transcription of the Pepys MS of the Medulla grammatice (ca. 1480), a late version of a medieval Latin–English dictionary. It has 16,908 wordentries, only half of which include English words.6 Its scribes spelled oddly, and clearly did not know English exceptionally well. I have located 235 English words or phrases in the Pepys MS that antedate OED findings, or about 2.8 percent of the word-entries with English content. One is the word dixionare, antedating the first OED citation by about 45 years. Of a smaller group of word-entries, the 2,500 in John Stanbridge’s Vocabula (1510), 75 offer antedatings, for terms like angling rod (from 1552), barber-shop (from 1579), in adj. (from 1599, in the phrases in ryne and in barke, i.e. the inner rind and inner bark of a tree, translating those senses of Latin liber and codex respectively); quinch, n. (from 1571, adding a new sense “angina”), scumming, vbl. n. (from 1530), scythe stone (from 1688), strangurion (from 1547), and unweave (from 1542).7 Some phrases, such as she dove and honey season, are not found in the OED. I have not been able to identify about twenty words. Some seem bona fide, like fusor, given as a simile for bellfounder in the translation of Latin 5 Based on a hand-count of antedatings on twelve pages of the 177-page “Additions and Corrections.” 6 3,613 post-lemmatic explanations are English, and there are 5,413 instances of an otherwise Latin explanation having an English word. 7 The antedating for angling-rod was incorporated into OED3 in March 2009.

Why did Tudor England have no Monolingual English Dictionary?

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campanarius, and ulcerary (another form of ulcerative, perhaps). About four percent of Stanbridge lemmas contribute something to the OED. That antedatings somewhat reduce the steep increase in new words is not the only reason to question a notably sharp increase in English vocabulary. The early modern period begins with the introduction of printing to England, a technology that created a new phenomenon: an archival lode of English vocabulary. Printed books could freeze words, storing them where they could survive long after anyone ceased uttering them or writing them down. It was much easier to save words in Tudor England than in the pre-print period. Single manuscripts were expensive to produce and vulnerable to heavy loss, as the destruction of the monasteries in the late 1530s shows. In the late sixteenth century, the Early Modern lexicon began to bifurcate into a core (mother) tongue that people used, and a much larger archival lode that accumulated as information. Elsewhere I have called these the two tongues (Lancashire 2007). If part of the expansion of English occurred because a technology, printing, preserved words that would previously have disappeared, the increase in the national lexicon would have been less explosive. Words were not added so much as not lost. Does rainwater flowing through a downspout change because we direct it into a barrel rather than into the ground? An explosion of English vocabulary from 1500 to 1580 would have exerted pressure on publishers to make a monolingual dictionary. Neither Bullokar nor Mulcaster adduced new words as a reason to make such a dictionary. Was growth in part illusory, an effect of the archival lode? Was a monolingual lexicon simply an afterthought of men who wanted to revolutionize orthography? That no dictionary was forthcoming suggests that vocabulary growth did not reach a critical point until later, when the archival lode had become formidable. Contemporaries, of course, testified that English words grew in number. John Florio’s first dialogues for the teaching of Italian, for example, explained that visiting foreigners heard plenty of borrowed terms (1578, sig. N2v) and thought the English language was “woorth nothing” beyond Dover (sig. N2r). Schäfer’s evidence from hard-word glossaries confirms this; and Roderick McConchie observes that a hard-word expansion does not characterize other European languages of the time but is distinctively English (1992, 51). Although some of what Schäfer found may belong to the archival lode, Mulcaster admits that “enfranchised words” are “a great parcell of our ordinarie speche” (163) and that, if a yardstick be needed, most of “naturall English” words consist only “of one syllab” and that most multisyllabic terms are of foreign origin (153). Despite this concession, Mulcaster’s word-list encodes only about 150

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terms (under 2 percent, and none from the letter t on), as being enfranchised. He admits that examples of foreign words are everywhere, and scarcely need adducing. At one point in his chapter on enfranchisement, he points out that he has used eight in his previous sentence alone—“Verie, chapter, enfranchisement, affect, extraordinarie, foren [as an element in the following], forenism, constrained, vse” (156)— none of which is flagged in his world-list as enfranchised. Maybe Mulcaster only encoded recently borrowed foreign words. Florio’s remark hints at one other possible explanation for the failure of Bynneman, Newbery, and their successors in the dictionary-printing monopoly to publish a monolingual lexicon. This is a general feeling of shame or embarrassment at the state of the mother tongue.8 When Florio describes England as a land of confused tongues, he alludes to the Biblical account of Babel, whose pride the Old Testament God struck down by making its builders suddenly speak different languages. Mulcaster spends some time arguing that English has within itself the rules for its own consistent orthography, but he also says, of the practice of altering the spelling of foreign words that are absorbed by English, “there is no dishonor ment them, where these be made peres to our own” (157). This remark responds to persons who believe that English dishonors other tongues by taking words from them. Five centuries separate Tudor English and the world Englishes we have today. Having a vocabulary in excess of one million words today is not an admission of dishonour. In 1580 William Bullokar urged his countrymen, “Let vs Inglish not be ashamed, to wipe away, the dirt, filth, and dust, negligently suffered long time on the picture of our speech” (1580/1970, 14). People tend not to verbalize thoughts of shame, but their actions can be telling, particularly those of William Cecil, who was principal in governing England for Elizabeth over 35 years. He did not like the national tongue. Roger Ascham, Elizabeth’s tutor-to-be, wrote to him in 1548: I hope you will devote some of your time to cultivate the English tongue; so that men might understand that even our language allows a man to write in it with beauty and eloquence. (1865, li–lii)

If we are to trust a contemporary biography of Cecil, however, he “never read any Books or Praiers, but in Lattin, French, or Italian: very seldome in Englishe” (Hickes a1612/1732, 55). Cecil’s library has been dispersed, 8

R. F. Jones’s chapters on “The Uneloquent Language” (3–31) and “The Inadequate Language,” and “The Misspelled Language” (68–167) document how the English felt about their language in the Tudor period.

Why did Tudor England have no Monolingual English Dictionary?

21

and no authoritative catalogue survives, but a running account of his book purchases from January 1554 to December 1555 from the publisher William Seres lists not one English book; every one was a Greek or a Latin author, notably Cicero and Plato (Read 1955, 121). Cecil married twice, first Mary, sister of Sir John Cheke, the first Regius Professor of Greek at Cambridge, and second Mildred, the daughter of Edward VI’s tutor, Anthony Cooke, and a woman who by her death had earned a sterling reputation as an outstanding scholar of Greek in England. To all accounts, Cecil used English with exceptional skill, both in writing position papers and correspondence, and in spontaneous speech. However, Cecil had little faith in the efficacy of English to translate Pliny, according to a letter that his former secretary, Richard Eden, wrote him in August 1562. Eden admitted that, although English had once been “indigent and barbarous”, it had been “enriched and amplified” by many translations (Halliwell 1841, 2–3). Cecil also reputedly disliked English poetry and drama. His fellow Cambridge man Edmund Spenser addressed a commendatory sonnet in The faerie queene (1590, sig. Qq1r) to Cecil but got nothing for his trouble, and when Spenser came to publish Book IV, he attacked Cecil’s “frosen” heart for disapproving an epic poem about love (1596, book IV, proem, stanza 2). English did not enjoy the respectability of Latin. Grammar-school students could not use the vernacular, except in the exercise of double translation that so finely exposed the syntactic and lexical resources of English. First translate a Latin passage into English, then translate the English back into Latin (without looking at the original), and then compare the two Latins. Did one do well enough, or not? If not, blame English, where word-order and small words like prepositions and auxiliary verbs rather than inflections marked case and tense. Distinctions of gender in Latin could not be transferred to English. A Latin passage was compact, having many polysyllabic words (inflections adding to their length); a corresponding English passage used trains of monosyllables to achieve what Latin could manage with one multisyllabic word. Word-order in English was fixed, but parts of speech in Latin could be ordered variously to obtain different stylistic effects. Latin offered synonyms for a single sense, but less so English. In 1564 Elizabeth I spent a week at Cambridge University, seeing plays and hearing sermons and disputations. When the time came to express her thanks, on August 7, she proposed to make a speech in English. Elizabeth’s education had gifted her with half a dozen languages, Latin, Greek, French, Italian, and some Spanish, but her wish to address her countrymen in English, the chosen tongue of the nation’s scripture,

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liturgy, and statutes, made her a child of Henry VIII. However, Cecil, the duke of Norfolk, Robert Dudley, and Richard Cox, bishop of Ely, told her that “nothing might be said openly to the University in English.” She would have to address the assembled body, about 1,800 people, in Latin, and she did so (Rice 1951, 71; cf. B. Smith 1929). Edmund Coote, author of The English schoole-maister (1596), seems to have shipwrecked on a common prejudice against English. On 5 June 1596, Coote was hired as schoolmaster of the Free Grammar School of King Edward VI of Bury St. Edmunds, Suffolk, just seven months after publishing his textbook in London. After only eleven months of service, on 18 May 1597, Coote resigned. Why? Linda Hutjens writes (1997) that the governors hired Coote at their “will and pleasure” and that school regulations of 1550 specify that keeping a family, consorting with women, and instruction in any language (especially English) other than Latin and Greek, were forbidden. Whatever the cause, Coote had a demonstrated gift for teaching students English, not Latin; his textbook went through many editions in the seventeenth century. Yet he could not find anyone who would suffer its dedication. Robert Cawdrey drew from Coote’s glossary to publish in 1604 a stand-alone hard-word dictionary, a work dedicated to four ladies. If Bynneman and Newbery had looked, England already enjoyed a monolingual dictionary, ready to be printed or revised. Both Cecil and Matthew Parker, Archbishop of Canterbury, had during the 1560s used their resources to document the Saxon roots of English. Laurence Nowell, Cecil’s servant, produced the first manuscript dictionary of Anglo-Saxon. By his death, the archbishop had amassed more than five hundred manuscripts, including the Corpus Glossary, “the first dictionary of English” (Crankshaw and Gillespie 2004). On the basis of this library, Parker acted as patron to John Joscelin (his Latin secretary) and William Lambarde. Joscelin produced a scholarly Old English–Latin lexicon with some 20,000 word-entries, left unpublished at his death. Lambarde turned out a great edition of the Old English laws, Archaionomia, in 1568 (Bately 1992). Parker believed that “it was worth ones Pains ... to compare our Country Language, which we now use, with that obsolete and almost extinguished Speech; and while we are comparing them, to observe, how like they are, and almost the same” (Strype 1711, 535, translating Parker 1574, sig. A3v). Nowell’s lexicon would have served nicely as an etymological base for a monolingual English dictionary, but Cecil, Dudley, and the monopolists ignored it. It would not be incorporated into a printed book until William Somner published his Old English–Latin– modern English dictionary in 1659.

Why did Tudor England have no Monolingual English Dictionary?

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The cheerful Cornishman Richard Carew, in his essay “The Excellencie of the English Tongue” (which remained in manuscript until the 1614 edition of William Camden’s Remaines concerning Britaine) cited many then-perceived deficiencies of English as virtues. English, for one, had more letters than either Greek or Latin. Its heavy borrowing of multisyllabic words may have been “sufficiently notorious”, yet its “interiections are very apt and forcible” (1614, 37). Carew put an especially brave face on English monosyllables: And soe much for the significancye of our Landguage in meaning nowe for his easynes in learning, the same shooteth oute into towe braunches, The/one of others Learning our languadge, the second of our learning that of others, for the first the most parte of our wordes (as I haue touched) are Monasillables, and soe the fewer in tale, and the sooner reduced to memorye neither are we loden with those declensions, flexions, and variations, which are incydent to many other tongues, but a few articles gouerne all our Verbes and Nownes, and so wee neede a Very shorte grammer. (c. 1600-03, fo. 266r; cf. 1614, 39)

If this is the best that can be sincerely said for the mother tongue, then we can see why the oligarchy that ruled English, language scholars, and educated Elizabethans might have felt embarrassment. Until hard words became a serious-enough problem to persuade Thomas Blount to gloss them all in 1658, until spelling standardization was not the only compelling reason to compile a monolingual English dictionary, it could wait. Even Shakespeare did not speak warmly of his mother tongue.

CHAPTER THREE DAT BOEK DER WUNDENARTZSTEDYE: THE LOW GERMAN TRANSLATION OF HIERONYMUS BRUNSCHWIG’S BUCH DER CIRURGIA AND ITS RENDERING OF SURGICAL LEXICON CHIARA BENATI

1. Dat Boek der Wundenartzstedye The still inedited, titleless print preserved at the Staatsbibliothek in Berlin (Jg 3484) and known as Dat Boek der Wundenartzstedye1 is the Low German translation of Hieronymus Brunschwig’s Buch der Cirurgia, the first surgical handbook printed in German. This compilation of classical, Arabic, medieval, and late medieval sources, printed for the first time in Strasburg in 1497, seems to have been extremely popular in the sixteenth century, both within and outside the High German language area. This popularity is witnessed by the four High German editions which followed the first (Augsburg, 1497, 1534, and 1539 and Strasburg, 1513) and by a series of translations into other languages, such as English (London, 1525), Dutch (Utrecht, 1535) and Czech (Olmütz, 1559). In 1518 Brunschwig’s handbook also reached the Low German language area, where it was translated anonymously and printed in Rostock by Ludwig Dietz. The High German handbook consists of seven treatises (tractate), each of them further divided into chapters. The first treatise is aimed at outlining the role and the function of the surgeon, indicating which wounds can be healed and which are fatal. In the second and third treatise 1

I warmly thank the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin for providing me the photographic reproduction of the text I used for this study.

Dat Boek der Wundenartzstedye

25

the different kinds of wounds and their etiology are described following the a capite ad calcem (“from head to heel”) scheme. Accidental and wilful blows are dealt with in the fourth treatise, while the fifth and the sixth treatise are dedicated respectively to fractures and their reduction. The handbook ends with the so-called antidotarium, a collection of all the remedies which can be useful to a surgeon. The same structure is preserved in its Low German translation which, however, doesn’t include the anatomical compendium, Von der Anathomi, inserted in addendum to the High German original, nor the forty-eight woodcuts accompanying it and representing the surgeon as a teacher surrounded by his students while he’s showing them how to cope with different surgical pathologies. The only images included in the Boek der Wundenartzstedye appear in the third treatise and represent some of the instruments used by a surgeon, such as crepaturus, cavilla, paratoria, elevatoria, rugina, and lenticularia. We don’t know much about Hieronymus Brunschwig, the author of the Buch der Cirurgia. This text and his other works are the main sources for his biography. In the first edition of the surgical handbook he describes himself as Hieronymus Brunschwig, born in Strasburg and belonging to the family of the Sauler (Brunschwig 1497/1911, vi). Choulant (1858, 75) suggests that he could have been one of the travelling surgeons active in the fifteenth century who, during his last years, had settled down and had been working in his home town. Since he wrote, in addition to the Cirurgia, two distillation books (De simplicibus / Die eintzingen Ding and De compositis / Von den zusamengethonen Ding), he could also have been a travelling chemist or pseudo-chemist producing potions (Wieger 1885, 13). The description, in the eighth chapter of the second treatise, of the extraction of an arrow performed by Hans Meier of Strasburg during the Burgundian War of 1474–1477 allows the assumption that Brunschwig had fought on the side of the Swiss and Alsatian anti-Burgundian league against Charles the Bold (see also Gurlt 1898, 202).

2. Medical and surgical terminology in medieval and early modern German vernacular texts Even though examples of significant autonomous vernacular treatises are to be found in Germany from the eleventh century onwards (for example, the Thuringian Bartholomäus), the large majority of medical literary production and of scientific writing in general is in Latin or is

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translated from Latin, the language of science par excellence.2 For this reason, vernacular medical literature continues to be what Baader and Keil call a “dwarf on the shoulders of a giant” (1982, 26). As a consequence of this, medieval and early modern German lack terminology in both the medical and the surgical fields, and Latin (or Greek) loanwords play a fundamental role in identifying the key concepts of medicine and surgery. This phenomenon has been studied, among others, by Pörksen who, analysing the language of Paracelsus’ lectures, observed the continuous coexistence of Latin and vernacular in them and introduced the notion of Fachwerksprache “grill-work language”. In fact, he compares the function of classical medical terminology in vernacular texts to that of the wooden scaffold in the Fachwerkbauweise, which constitutes the structure of the whole building (Pörksen 1994, 61–65). In other words, the universally recognized medical vocabulary of classical origin represents a warranty against those potentially lethal misunderstandings which could arise from the use of the still precarious and arbitrary German scientific terminology. The language of Hieronymus Brunschwig’s Buch der Cirurgia also follows this pattern, as highlighted by Habermann (1996, 17). In two previous studies of mine, conducted on the terminology for anatomy, pathology, and surgical technique (Benati 2006, 2008), I pinpointed that Latin and Greek terms are often coupled with their vernacular counterparts and tried to demonstrate that Brunschwig had recourse to these bilingual couples more frequently than necessary. In fact, although some German glosses are nothing but hypernyms of their classical synonyms and can be disambiguated only thanks to these (for example cornee and panniculus are both rendered as fellin “membrane”), in other cases a cross-check of the occurrences in isolation of one of the terms (both foreign and German) composing the bilingual pair has shown that some of the glossed terms are clear and precise enough to be used alone without any risk. The high frequency with which these terms are translated or paraphrased in the surgical handbook can be ascribed to the author’s mainly didactic intent. His work was addressed, as stated in the preface, to all those wishing to learn the art of surgery: “allen den ginnnen die da begerent zĤ leren yn

2 The Bartholomäus was a twelfth-century compilation of mainly Salernitan sources which can be considered as belonging to the oldest genre of the German medical literature: the collection of recipes. This text had an extraordinary diffusion in the German-speaking area, where it would be the medical reference until the beginning of the fifteenth century (see Keil 1978, col. 609).

Dat Boek der Wundenartzstedye

27

chirrurgia das ist die hantwirckung in der wundertznie” (4).3 The repetition of the classical term chirrurgia together with its German equivalent hantwirckung suggests that Brunschwig probably wanted to make his audience familiar with that Latin and Greek terminology which was taken for granted by the learned medieval physician, but was completely unknown to the surgeons of the time, who were simple craftsmen with no university education.

3. Surgical terminology in the Boek der Wundenartzstedye on the example of the semantic field of pathology Up to now, all studies on German medical and surgical historical Fachsprache have focused on the High German language area, while no attention has been paid to the literary production—quantitatively not less relevant—of the Northern part of Germany.4 This being so, the Low German translation of Brunschwig’s surgical handbook represents the ideal basis for an investigation of Middle Low German medical and surgical terminology. In fact, not only is it long enough to be a suitable foundation for extensive research into Low German specific terminology per se, but the existence of its High German source allows one to draw a direct comparison between High and Low German surgical terminology, thus helping one to ascertain if at the beginning of the sixteenth century the two languages were mutually intelligible as far as the scientific lexicon was concerned.5 3

All High German quotations are from the facsimile edition of the Strasburg 1497 version of the text prepared by Gustav Klein (Brunschwig 1497/1911) and will, therefore, be indicated with the page number in parenthesis. Transcriptions follow the recommendations of Besch (1976). So, the original spelling of the Alemannic diphthongs and of the umlaut vowels has been maintained, as well as the original distribution of the graphemes , and , . In the same way, the original consonants have also been maintained, except that the reduplication of the nasal in unnd and unns is normalised in und and uns. The different graphemes for the dental spirant /s/, , and , have been faithfully reproduced, but the opposition between and has been eliminated. Capitalization and united or separated spelling of compounds are the same as in the original, as is punctuation. Abbreviations have been expanded only when it was absolutely clear what they stood for. 4 For a short account of medieval and early modern medical and surgical literary production both in High and in Low German see for example Haage and Wegner 2007, 196–207. 5 High and Low German have two different systems of periodization. For this reason, while Brunschwig’s High German original belongs to the period called

28

Chapter Three

In this study I will analyse the surgical terminology of the Boek der Wundenartzstedye, focusing on the example of the semantic field of pathology, that is to say of the vocabulary used by the Low German translator to indicate and describe all those symptoms, diseases, wounds, and traumata which are of interest to the surgeon or the surgeon’s apprentice learning from this handbook. Particular attention will also be paid to the role played in this vocabulary by terms of foreign origin, in order to verify if it can be compared to that played by classical terminology in the Buch der Cirurgia and if Middle Low German surgical Fachsprache can be defined as a “Fachwerksprache” as well. The analysis of the text has made it possible to identify a wide corpus of terms, both Low German and foreign, belonging to the semantic field of pathology. These will first be presented according to the word class (nouns and nominal phrases, adjectives and participles, verbs and verbal phrases) they belong to, and will then be compared to their High German synonyms to highlight differences and similarities in the surgical terminology of Brunschwig’s Buch der Cirurgia and of its Low German translation, Dat Boek der Wundenarztstedye.

3.1 Nouns and nominal phrases The largest group of pathological terms in the Boek der Wundenarztstedye is constituted by nouns and nominal phrases identifying wounds and other traumata, as well as their symptoms and outcomes. They will be presented here in two semantic subfields: (1) wounds and traumata and (2) symptoms and outcomes. In each case, a tabular presentation of the Low German words together with their English translation, one example of their use in the context of the surgical handbook, and the High German

Early Modern High German or Early New High German (Frühneuhochdeutsch, c.1350–c.1650), its Low German translation can be described as Middle Low German, a period extending from the reintroduction of the Low German written tradition at the beginning of the thirteenth century to the beginning of the seventeenth, when the Low German Schreibsprachen were progressively replaced by Early Modern High German. As stressed by Peters (2000, 1420), Middle Low German is both chronologically and sociolinguistically closer to Early Modern High German than to Middle High German, since both periods include the late Middle Ages and the beginning of the Modern Age. However, since not all German historical and etymological dictionaries include early modern forms, in the linguistic analysis which follows, Middle Low German terms will often be compared with their Middle High German equivalents.

Dat Boek der Wundenartzstedye

29

term used to express the same concept in the Buch der Cirurgia will be followed by notes on the words in the table. 3.1.1 Wounds and traumata LG expression and meaning apertura “open wound” beenbr ke “fracture” berouuinge des geledes “loss of a limb” bloetmal “bloody lesion”

brekinge “fracture” br ke der been “fracture”

dislocationibus “dislocation”

eyntfoldige wunde “simple wound”

Context Apertura / dat ys eyn upd ndinge eynes schaden (XVIIIr) Dat erste Capittel des vesten Tractates secht van allen beenbr ken ynt ghemeyn (CXXXVIIIv) dat ys eyne laminge / auer nuicht eyne grote berouinge eynes gheledes (XIVv) Du schalt weten dat dar ys groet und kleyn underscheyt twysschen lere der vorlesynge / underwisinge der geledere und der wunden und oek der bloemle (IXv) fractura / ys eyne brekinge (XVIIIr) Lanckfrancus deelet alle br ke der been in dre arbeyth / dar dorch de anderen mte yn dessen werke alle bewisen warden (CXXXIXr/CXXXIXv) Etlike ynwendich / alze de slynirige vuchticheyt / de dat gelich beholdet / de steet yn den dislocationibus / edder dat vorrenkingen edder vorr*ckinghe warden mach / so hir na gesecht wert (CLXVIIv) Dat ander capittel des drudden Tractates secht van den eyntfoldigen wunden ane vorkeringe der substanz (LXIIIv)

Equivalent in the Buch der Cirurgia apertura bein bruche

verlierung der gelyder beroubung des geledes bl*t runse

brechung bruch der bein

dislocationibus

einfeltige wunde

30 euulsio “laceration” excecata puncture “blind puncture”

fistel “fistula”

fractura “fracture” frustularis “comminuted fracture”

grote wyde wunde “big, wide wound” incisio “incision” olde wunde “ulcer” punctura “puncture” punctura simplex “simple puncture”

Chapter Three Euulsio / ys eyne uththeendinge (XVIIIr) So nu de neruus were gestyppet edder gesteken / so ys de wunde der huet beslaten / so heet se dan excecata puncture / edder vulnus / dat ys eyne wunde (XXIVv) Wente desse wunden de dar b ze synt / de werden gerne yn denem ende gekeret yn b ze floeth / alze fistelen unde ander schade (VIv) fractura / ys eyne brekinge (XVIIIr) Ichteswan werth dat ghebeen ghestot / toslaghen ghequetzet / alßo dath yd unghelyck bryckt / tospritzet tho st*cket / so dath ein st*cke effte st*ckeken edder meer van den anderen scheydet edder scheyden wert. Unde denne wert he ghenant frustularis / edder eyn tobroken st*cke been. (CXXXIXv) Dat ander kleyn / also sint oek grote und kleyne wunden (IXv) Incisio / ys eyne snidinghe (XVIIIr) Ulcus / dat ys eyne olde wunde edder schaden de alzovort vulet edder eytert (XVIIIr) Punctura / dat ys eyn steke (XVIIIr) Auer eyne wunde ys open und wert gheheten Punctura simplex / dat dar ys eyn eyntuoldich steeke edder blynder steeke (XXIVv)

euulsio excecata punctura

fistel

fractura frustularis

große wunde incisio alte wund oder schaden die ietz fullet oder eiert punctura punctura simplex

Dat Boek der Wundenartzstedye quetzinge “laceration”

rijs “laceration”

separatio “displacement”

snidinghe “incision” steke “puncture” swaringe “haematoma”

tobroken st* *cke been “comminuted fracture”

ulcus “ulcer”

So beh ret my nu toseggen van dez vallen / slaen / buten edder binnen / mith einer serynge edder quetzinge des flessches ane de wundinghe der huet (CXXXIv) Du schalt ock weten dat de bregen panne vnderwijlen tobrykt / alzo dat eyn deel nicht upsteyt unde dat ander deel nycht neddersteyt / wan dat ys / so ys yd eyne slychte rijß (Vr) Unde de stede des knyes / und der rygen der v te / und jn neenen anderen steden mach de vorr*ckinge scheen / sunderlick mach yn etlicken scheen eyn separatio edder euulsio (CLXVIIIr) Incisio / ys eyne snidinghe (XVIIIr) Punctura / dat ys eyn steke (XVIIIr) Darvmme de swaringe dure matris de nicht gereyniget wert mit honnige / dat bed*det den doet alze Paulus sprikt (LXVIIr) Ichteswan werth dat ghebeen ghestot / toslaghen ghequetzet / alßo dath yd unghelyck bryckt / tospritzet tho st*cket / so dath ein st*cke effte st*ckeken edder meer van den anderen scheydet edder scheyden wert. Unde denne wert he ghenant frustularis / edder eyn tobroken st*cke been. (CXXXIXv) Ulcus / dat ys eyne olde wunde edder schaden de alzovort vulet edder eytert (XVIIIr)

31 zerquetschung

riß

separaton separatio

schnidung stechung stich swertzung

zerbrochen stickelechter bein bruch

ulcus

32 upd ndinge eynes schaden “open wound” uththeendinge “laceration” versche wunde “recent wound” vesicam incisam “lanced bladder”

vorlesynge der ledere “loss of a limb” vorlesinge der substanz “loss of substance” verrenkinge “dislocation”

vorr* *ckinge “dislocation”

vorseringe des flesches “laceration of the flesh” vorwundinghe “wound”

vulnus “recent wound” wunde der vorgifftigen deer bytent “bite of a poisonous animal”

Chapter Three Apertura / dat ys eyn upd ndinge eynes schaden (XVIIIr) Euulsio / ys eyne uththeendinge (XVIIIr) Vulnus dat ys eyne versche wunde (XVIIIr) dat de hoghe arste Ipocras erkant hefft dar he sprak Vesicam incisam / de vorwundinghe der blazen (CXXIIIIr) Wente yd synt tweyerleye vorlesynge der ledere und iwyerleye blodmale (IXv) ane brekynge der breghenpanne edder vorlesinghe der substanz (LXIIIIr) In desser lesten tosamen f gynghe k*mpt edder mach eygentlick werden de vorr*ckinghe edder vorrenkinge (CLXVIIv) De orsake der vorr*ckinge sint etlike ynwendich / etliche uthwendich / alße vallen / slaen / edder unbequeme streckinge (CLXVIIv) So dy nu vor k*mpt eyn fulke openinge edder vorseringhe des flesches (XLr) Wert eyne vorwundinghe ouer dwerß uthwendich up der hant dorch der aderen wente up dat been (knaken) dat ys eyne wunde dar to vorlesinge etliker geledere (XIIIr) Vulnus dat ys eyne versche wunde (XVIIIr) Dat .xiiij. capittel des anderen Tractates wert seggen van den wunden der vorghyfftigen deer bytent (XLVv)

uff th*nung eins schaden ußziehung frische wund vesicam incisam

verlierung der glieder verlierung der substanz

verrenckung

verrückung

verseriinge des fleisches verwundung

vulnus wunde der vergifftigen thier biß

Dat Boek der Wundenartzstedye

33

apertura: non-assimilated loanword from Lat. f. n. apertura, -ae, appearing in the same form in the HG original. beenbr ke: compound < nt. n. been (< OS b n < Gmc *baina- “bone”, which develops the additional sense “leg” in OHG, mainly in compounds such as peinperga, peinpfîfa, peingarawi, peinziarida: see also DWB I col. 1831 and following) + m. n. broke (< OS bruki < WGmc *bruki- “fracture”: Kluge–Seebold s.v. Bruch1). The compound is still attested both in LG (Plattdeutsch Beenbrok, Du. beenbruek) and in HG (Beinbruch) in the specific meaning of “fracture of a leg”, rather than in the generic meaning of “fracture of a bone”, which continues in mod. HG in the simplex Bruch or in the compound Knochenbruch. The LG term differs from its HG counterpart by the presence of the monophthong /e:/ instead of the diphthong /ei/ in been and by the absence of the outcome of the second Lautverschiebung in br ke. berouuinge des geledes: f. n. berouuinge (deverbal from beroven “to steal, rob”) + genitive des geledes (nt. gilit, see MHG g(e)lit < OHG gilid, collective from Gmc *liþu- “part, member”: Kluge–Seebold s.v. Glied). In the HG original “loss of a limb” is indicated in two ways: beroubung des geledes—cognate of the LG expression—and verlierung der gelyder. bloetmal: compound < nt. n. blôt, blût (< OS bl#d < Gmc *bl#da- “blood”. This exclusively Gmc term, probably euphemistic, seems to have replaced the IE word for “blood”. It can be associated with the root *bhel- “to flow, swell, burst” and indicates the liquid substance in the human body gushing whenever one gets wounded: Kluge–Seebold s.v. Blut) + nt. n. mal (< OS ml, as second element of the compound h#Jid-ml, < Gmc *mæla- “spot, mark”: Kluge–Seebold s.v. Mal2). In HG the compound blutmal only occurs in the meaning of “stigma” and not to indicate a particular kind of lesion, less serious than a wound (DWB II col. 187). In the Buch der Cirurgia the same concept is rendered by the compund bl*t runse “blood flow from the wound” (< blut + runse “flow”: see also DWB II col. 189). brekinge: f. n., verbal derivate from breken “to break”, corresponding— without Lautverschiebung and with a different apophonic degree of the derivative suffix—to HG brechung, still used in mod. HG to refer to physical (“refraction”) and phonetic (“breaking”) phenomena (see also DWB II col. 352). br ke der been: m. n. broke + genitive der been. This expression corresponds to HG bruch der bein. dislocationibus: non-assimilated loanword from Lat. f. n. dislocatio, -onis, appearing in the same form in the HG Buch der Cirurgia.

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Chapter Three

eyntfoldige wunde: adj. eyntfoldig (compare MHG einveltic, einvaltec < OHG einfaltg, and also mod. HG einfältig and mod. Du. eenvoudig. This bahuvrhi compound was originally a semantic calque on Lat. simplex “simple” which progressively acquired a more negative connotation and finally started to be used in the meaning of “silly, stupid”: see Kluge–Seebold s.v. einfältig; Pfeifer 1999: 269; and DWB III col 173) + f. n. wunde (< OS wunda, f. n. from the Gmc adj. *wunda- “wounded”: Kluge–Seebold s.v. wund). The same structure can be found in the HG original: einfeltige wunde. euulsio: non-assimilated loanword from Lat. f. n. evulsio, -onis, appearing in the same form in the Buch der Cirurgia. excecata puncture: Lat. past part. excaecatus, -a, -um + f. n. punctura, ae, appearing in the HG original as well. fistel: f. n., partly assimilated loanword from Lat. f. n. fistula, -ae “small tube, cane, flute”, but also “fistula, ulceration”. The term Fistel is still in use in mod. HG in the meaning of “fistula”. fractura: loanword from Lat. fractura, -ae “fracture”, appearing in the HG text as well. In the assimilated form, Fraktur, the term still belongs to mod. HG medical terminology. frustularis: non-assimilated loanword from Lat. nt. n. frustulum, -i “small piece, fragment”, appearing in the same form in the HG handbook. grote wyde wunde: adj. grot (< OS gr#t < WGmc *grauta- “big, large”: Kluge–Seebold s.v. groß) + adj. wyd (< OS wd < Gmc *weida“wide”: Kluge–Seebold s.v. weit) + n. wunde. In the HG Buch der Cirurgia only the adj. groß (cognate of LG grot and differing from it only by the outcome of the HG Lautverschiebung) is present, while wyd has been added by the LG translator. incisio: non-assimilated loanword from Lat. f. n. incisio, -onis, appearing in the HG text as well. olde wunde: adj. old (< OS ald < WGmc *alda-, to-participle of *al-a- “to grow, nourish”: Kluge–Seebold s.v. alt) + n. wunde. Apart from the outcome of the MLG Verdumpfung /a/ > /o/ in front of -ld- and the final media in the adjective, this expression completely corresponds to its HG counterpart. punctura: non-assimilated loanword from Lat. f. n. punctura, -ae “puncture”, appearing in the HG text as well. punctura simplex: Lat. f. n. puncture + adj. simplex, as in the HG original. quetzinge: f. n. quessinge, verbal derivate from quetsen, quessen, quetten “to press, hurt, wound, damage” (see also MHG quetzen, quetschen). The etymology of this verb is unclear, since it cannot be compared with any other semantically similar term (Kluge–Seebold s.v.

Dat Boek der Wundenartzstedye

35

quetschen; see also DWB, XIII col. 2368). This term corresponds, in the Buch der Cirurgia, to the form with the prefix zer- (< MHG zer- < OHG zur-, zar-, zir-, but also, without the final liquid, zi-, OS and OFris te-: see also Kluge–Seebold s.v. zer- and DWB XXXI col. 732). rijs: the use of this term in the sense “laceration” in the Boek der Wundenartzstedye has clearly been calqued on the HG original, where the noun riß is present. Instead of employing its LG equivalent (and cognate without Lautverschiebung), m. n. rite, rete “tear, torn piece” (verbal abstract from riten < OS wrtan < Gmc *wreit-a- “to tear, scratch”: see also Lübben–Walther 299 and Kluge–Seebold s. v. Riß), the anonymous translator has recourse to a homophone, nt. n. rs “branch” (compare MHG rs < OHG (h)rs < Gmc *hreisa- “twig, wisp”: see also Lübben–Walther 303 and Kluge–Seebold s.v. Reis) and uses it—as feminine—in this new meaning. separatio: non-assimilated loanword from Lat. f. n. separatio, -onis, appearing both as separatio and as separaton (probably a spelling mistake!) in the HG original as well. snidinghe: f. n., verbal derivate from sniden “to cut” (< OS snthan < Gmc sneiþa-: Lübben–Walther 735). In the HG text, the term schnidung— whose spelling clearly indicates the palatalized pronunciation of the initial consonant cluster—is used to translate the Lat. loanword incisio. The substantive Schneidung in HG can be employed in this general medical meaning of “incision”, as for example by Paracelsus, or in the more specific ones of “castration” and “circumcision” (compare mod. HG Kastration and Beschneidung). See also DWB XV col. 1281. steke: m. n., verbal abstract from steken “to stick”, but also “to wound, injure” (< OS stiki < stekan < WGmc *stek-a-