An index to over 1,400 known lexical works in the period may be searched by date, author, title, subject, and genre. A complete word-list of the lexical database may be browsed. Queries on the lexical database may be restricted by date, author, title, type of lexical work, and subject. The size of search contexts is adjustable. The primary LEME database offers simple and advanced searches, including regular-expression and sub-string queries, and proximity and Boolean searches. ![]() Yet he does not provide the electronic data on which his extracts are based and any English lexical expression in the explanations of huge bilingual dictionaries by the likes of Cotgrave, Florio, Minsheu, and Thomas Thomas, is hard to find and thus easily overlooked. The OED has expanded its coverage of authors, thanks to Schäfer's achievement. It surveys 133 printed glossaries to 1640 and provides new evidence for 5,000 OED entries. Clarendon Press published Schäfer's Early Modern English Lexicography in 1989. Jürgen Schäfer observed that Early Modern English quotations in the first edition of the OED predominantly come from major authors and overlook information in monolingual glossaries. ![]() Even a monumental work that covers 1500 years, however, necessarily selects lexical evidence. That is, quotations support every definition. Why compile a database of old dictionaries when English has the great Oxford English Dictionary? It gives an authoritative scientific account of the history and meaning of all English words, based on corpus-linguistic principles. Encyclopedic or topical works, such as herbals and books of reference in medicine or law, sometimes offer logical definitions of things in subject-complement ("is-a") form. Most LEME lexical texts have word-entries that open with a headword and close with an explanation of that headword, but explanations of words also appear inside informative treatises and literary editions with marginal glosses or notes that explain terminology. Historical lexicons also take many different forms. Only in 1623, with Henry Cockeram's hard-word lexicon, did the term "dictionary" (first employed in English by Sir Thomas Elyot in 1538 for a bilingual lexicon) acquire a sense like that we take for granted today. The notion of an English-only, monolingual lexicon was late in coming. Lexical information takes many forms in this period because the dictionary was an emerging genre. LEME incorporates some of what he hoped to create. What Fries could not have imagined eighty years ago was a technology that would store all these quotations as distinct word-entries in searchable form. Fries, would have recognized LEME to be a source of "contemporary comments" that illustrate word usage. The scholar who proposed the latter, Charles C. For this reason, LEME is not a period dictionary like The Middle English Dictionary or the yet unrealized Early Modern English period dictionary. Any contemporary's testimony about the meaning of his own words has an undeniable authority. Their lexical insights, which may at times seem misguided to us, shaped the history of our living tongue. ![]() Texts of word-entries whose headword (source) or explanation (target) language is English tell us what speakers of English thought about their tongue in the period are served by the Short-title, Wing, and ESTC catalogues. Lexicons of Early Modern English ( LEME) is a historical database of monolingual, bilingual, and polyglot dictionaries, lexical encyclopedias, hard-word glossaries, spelling lists, and lexically-valuable treatises surviving in print or manuscript from about 1475 to 1755.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |