Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 1996. Vol. 1. Eger Journal of English Studies.(Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 24)
Geoff Barnbrook: From description to prescription and back again
plainly encyclopaedic entries. Many words, such as 'abdicate', 'capitall', 'celebrate' and 'effect' have several senses, which are given as an unannotated list. In the case of two words in the sample, 'veneriair and 'venerous', their similarity of meaning is such that they effectively share a dictionary entry. In considering these examples it must be remembered that this form of definition is still effectively a type of gloss, a list purely of words thought unfamiliar enough to the projected user of the dictionary to warrant inclusion, replaced by the most appropriate 'plaine English' word. No examples of usage are given, no guidance is given on selection of meaning where more than one sense is possible. There is a sense, therefore, in which the description of this dictionary and its immediate successors as 'monolingual English dictionaries' is inappropriate. Their purpose is to gloss words from a particular subset of English lexis, the new words derived from other languages, using words chosen from the mainstream of commonly used English lexis. Cawdrey in his prefatory address 'To the Reader' warns against the possible division of English: Therefore, either wee must make a difference of English, & say, some is learned English, & othersome is rude English, or the one is Court talke, the other is Country-speech, or els we must of necessitie banish all affected Rhetorique, and vse altogether one manner of language. (Cawdrey, 1604, p.2 of 'To the Reader') The Table Alphabetical! is, of course, a tool designed to help promote the unity of the language under these difficult circumstances. It is simply a description of the new lexis, uninfluenced by the considerations of lexical purity which split linguistic commentators around this period. The general approach used by Cawdrey remained the norm until dictionaries begin to deal with the more general vocabulary of English in the early eighteenth century. The style of definition used by Cawdrey is, however, by no means confined to the 17th century. Many of its features have been preserved in at least the smaller monolingual dictionaries being published now. Using The Oxford Popular Dictionary , a typical pocket-sized general purpose dictionary published in 1993, as an example, it is interesting to compare some modern definitions with Cawdrey's. Obviously, this is only possible where the word is dealt 16
