Chasing the Sun: Dictionary-Makers and the Dictionaries They Made - Hardcover

Green, Jonathon

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0805034668 ISBN 13: 9780805034660

Publisher: Henry Holt & Co, 1996

Synopsis

A history of the dictionary explores the reasons behind the creations of dictionaries, the motivations of their creators, and how biases seep into the work

About this title

Review

Word-collecting is an ancient practice that began nearly 4,500 years ago in pre-Babylonian Sumer. In Chasing the Sun, prominent British lexicographer Jonathon Green gives an account of his kind, tracing the history of dictionary making from the clay tablet to the CD-ROM. Green also examines--and debunks--the so-called impartiality of lexicographers. No matter how zealously they may protest, dictionary makers are never the passive recipients of linguistic law. They do have an agenda. As Green puts it, they are always "playing God. Or if not God, then at least Moses, descending from Sinai with the tablets of the law."

From Kirkus Reviews

Everything we could want to know, and more, about the long history of dictionary writing. Green is Britain's top slang dictionary writer, so this isn't a dry study of lexicography. If it is overly long, it is because we are given too much gossip about dueling definers, sniping censors, and petty etymologists. Before they were self-declared guardians of culture with powdered wigs, compilers of glossaries wanted to teach the necessary foreign terms for trading with and ruling over neighboring friends and foes. Green credits the Sumerians with the first such lexicons, and for many centuries dictionaries offered polyglot vocabularies for merchants and artisans. (Calepin's 11- language dictionary would be the standard until the 1500s.) There was no French-English vernacular dictionary until a royal intermarriage in 1514 made it necessary. The first Italian-English lexicon is seen as surpassing this achievement because many slang and obscene terms were included among the 46,000 headwords. Among the great lexicographers, Green is unhappy with Samuel Johnson's conservatism, criticizing him with pronouncements like: ``For all Johnson's achievements, his work is ultimately backward-looking.'' Green considers Noah Webster to be an insufferable prude. Biblically oriented Webster couldn't omit ``sodomy,'' but he defined it merely as ``a crime against nature.'' We also read about a statewide ban on ``obscene'' dictionaries in Texas. It can be fun reading about the ``F'' word but less so the great fuss made about the inelegance of words like ``lengthy.'' But ironically, for all his criticism of Dr. Johnson's conservatism, Green is guilty of defending anachronistic 19th-century German theories of etymology that have themselves been supplanted by new evidence of the monogenesis of world language. What might have been a lively book on hot cultural issues gets bogged down in lexicographers' name-calling and shop talk. (8 pages b&w photos, not seen) -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Edition details

• Publisher: Henry Holt & Co
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0805034668
• ISBN 13: 9780805034660
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 510