Metaglossia: The Translation World

TOULOUSE (AFP) - Fils d'agriculteur, ancien agent technique d'Air France, Henri Goursau a écrit une quarantaine de dictionnaires, été couronné par le Livre Guinness des records et jongle avec ...

Lexicographer Jonathon Green explains the etymology of the f-word -- and how slang informs our speech
BY TOBY ASH, THE BROWSER
28 31
more

TOPICS: BALTIMORE, OXFORD ENGLISH DICTIONARY, SLANG, THE BROWSER, THE WIRE, LIFE NEWS

Before we look at your book selection, could you tell us what slang is?

Slang is difficult because everything about it defies simple classification. Nobody knows the etymology of the word slang. If you take slang to a linguist they try to define it within the boundaries of what they know as linguists, and very soon they discover they can’t find a specific register into which it falls.

I see slang as the counter-language. At its heart it’s down, it’s dirty, it’s grubby, it’s tart, it’s essentially subversive. It questions and deals with themes like sex, drugs, violence, rudeness, abuse, racism and so on and so forth. Slang is primarily concrete, but the one abstract that underpins it is that of doubt. It seems to me that slang is always doubting. It’s always questioning, it’s always cynical, it’s always undermining and it’s always been negative. It’s very thematic, which means it’s basically a lexicon of synonyms. There are 1,500 synonyms for having sex, 1,000 penises, 1,000 vaginas and 2,000 drunkards and drink-related words… and so on.

The Israel Supreme Court has ruled that the publishers ”Tarbut l’Am” (lit. culture for the people) should compensate the inheritors of the lexicographer Abraham Even Shushan for dictionaries sold since 1999.

Back in 1993, some 9 years after the lexicographer passed away, the descendents of Even Shushan, Dafna Shefer, Yuval Even Shushan and Miriam Even Shushan sued publishers Kiryat Sefer (Book-Town), and in 1998, Judge Esther Chayet, then of the District Court, issued an injunction against the publishers, preventing direct or indirect sales of the dictionary, and ordering that the inheritors receive 10 million Shekels compensation. However, the owner of Kiryat Sefer, Abraham Sivan, left the country and the plaintiffs never received anything.

The inheritors went on to sue the owners of Tarbut l’Am for continuing to sell dictionaries purchased between 1993 and 1998, but the court accepted that Tarbut l’Am purchased these dictionaries in good faith and were unaware of the legal proceedings. On Appeal, Judge Meltzer ruled that the copyright returned to the family on their terminating the agreement, and all copies sold by Tarbut l’Am after they were put on notice by the families that the books were illegal copies were considered as willfully infringing. The claim of purchase on the market is an acceptable defense only up until being warned that the copies were infringing, but couldn’t use that as a defense to keep on selling the books, and so continued distribution after receiving and Cease & Desist notice was considered actionable copyright infringement.

Samuel Johnson (1709-1784), the literary giant behind Rasselas and the first truly great English dictionary, had a cat. He actually had several cats over the course of his life, actually, but the only one we have information about is a black cat named Hodge. Johnson’s biographer, Boswell, hated cats, but grudgingly reported on Johnson’s fondness for Hodge.
I learned about Hodge serendipitously last week when my family was in London. We were making our way down the famous Fleet Street, oohing and aahing over the general Londonishness of it all, when we passed a sign that pointed down an alley, with the words “Dr. Johnson’s House.” We followed the sign, which led to about five more signs down five more alleys. Just as the situation was becoming ludicrous, we came upon a small courtyard with, yes, Dr. Johnson’s House. It seems like a nice place to visit, and though it was closed when we happened on it, during normal hours you can look around inside and even have tea. It was fun to run into a historical monument to one of the authors we read in the Great Books program at Torrey Honors Institute, even though we couldn’t go in and bask in the literary glow.

Veteran lexicographer G. Venkatasubbaiah on Saturday urged the Karnataka Samskrit University (KSU) to get traditional Sanskrit treatises translated into the Kannada to make the language richer and, enhance the people's appreciation of Sanskrit literature.

He was delivering the inaugural address at a two-day seminar, ‘Contributions of royal dynasties of Karnataka for the development of Sanskrit language and literature', jointly organised by the KSU and Sri Jayarama Seva Mandali here.

The seminar was the first of its kind in Karnataka, Prof. Venkatasubbaiah said, and added that people should know about the 2,000-year-old harmonious relationship between Kannada and Sanskrit.

The Jayarama Seva Mandali is organising a three-day event to mark lexicographer G Venkatasubbaiah’s 100th birthday celebrations this August.

Julie Moore is a freelance lexicographer based in the UK. After an early career as an English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teacher, working in Greece and the Czech Republic, she became involved in E...

La autora del Diccionario de Uso del Español, nacida en una familia rural, no obtuvo reconocimiento en vida a pesar de una carrera brillante. Una biografía la recupera del olvido.

«Vida de María Moliner» Pilar Rubio López
Asoc. Matritense de Mujeres Univ. 144 páginas. 10 euros, 5 eBook

María Moliner es un nombre que evoca familiaridad y respeto porque con esos sustantivos se identifica a la creadora del Diccionario de Uso del Español (DUE), una de las obras lexicográficas más importantes del habla hispana.

We might as well start this blog off with a confession: I never planned on being a lexicographer.

Until I got my job, wherein I primarily write and edit dictionary definitions for monolingual English dictionaries, I did not give a single thought to where the dictionary came from. (You’ll notice I say “the dictionary”; I wasn’t even aware that there were different dictionaries made by different companies.) The dictionary just was: if pressed, I might have told you that it had spontaneously generated and crawled out from underneath a pile of damp newspapers sometime in the 1800s. Don’t ask me how new words like “computer” and “automobile” made it into the dictionary—they just did, by, I guess, computer magic? The notion that a group of people sat down and spent eight hours a day writing the damn things was preposterous and absurd.

Download TTC TermSuite - UIMA applications for terminology extraction and alignment...

La langue française a beau faire l'objet de critiques perpétuelles de toutes parts, elle ne cesse de s'enrichir. Pour preuve, la 9e édition du Dictionnaire de l'Académie française qui dévoile, ce jeudi 15 ...

El lenguaje está vivo. Y las palabras, esas pequeñas islas de energía que componen su cuerpo crítico, permanecen en constante vibración. Cambian, se retuercen entre los límites de su estructura íntima del mismo modo en que colisionan con otras palabras en la búsqueda a veces frenética de una huida hacia nuevos horizontes expresivos.

Los neologismos son la prueba fehaciente de cómo la lengua crece y reacciona a los cambios culturales.

Sabiendo esto mejor que la gran mayoría de los hablantes de nuestra lengua, María del Carmen Méndez Santos, licenciada en Filología Hispánica y doctora en Lexicología, elaboró el tema de su tesis por la que obtuvo un sobresaliente cum laude: "Los neologismos morfológicos del español en el lenguaje de la prensa", texto que ya se transformó en un libro editado de 620 páginas por la Editorial Académica de Española. Para este profundo trabajo, María del Carmen, quien es profesora en la Universidad de de Vigo, utilizó como materia prima diarios hispanos y latinoamericanos incluyendo entre ellos al "Río Negro".

Le troisième tome du Dictionnaire de l'Académie française, qui comporte près de 4000 mots nouveaux, sera présenté par les académiciens jeudi 15 décembre.

Johnson’s Dictionary is the first great landmark in English lexicography. It supplied greatly improved etymologies, and, though it did not provide pronunciations, it was the first English dictionary to indicate the place of accent for the word entered. It was probably the most influential force in fixing English spelling, which at that time still exhibited much confusing variety....

For becoming a lexicographer, one should obtain Master’s degree in the concerned language. Doctorate degree in the concerned language will be considered as an additional qualification. Candidates who possess doctorate degree will easily get job in any publishing house. After gaining much experience by working as a lexicographer in any publishing house, one can start their own publication....

Cambridge University Press has just published Samuel Johnson in Context, a collection of 47 short essays about the great lexicographer and his world.