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
Cobuild range than either approach has with the dictionaries produced during the 18th, 19th and earlier 20th centuries. At this stage of development the lexicographer's aim seems still to be mainly descriptive. Some hard word dictionaries were still produced in the early 18th century, such as Cocker's English Dictionary , largely based on Coles' 1676 work and other earlier dictionaries, but the trend was now generally towards inclusiveness. Bailey's Dictionarium Britannicum , 1730, covers about 48,000 words and gives guidance on stress and details of etymology as well as definitions and examples of usage. This is not the first dictionary to include etymology: Blount provides details of either the original word adapted into English, or, where the word has been adopted without modification, of the source language; even Coote's brief table shows language of origin, as described in section 3 above. It forms the sole subject of some earlier dictionaries: the Etymologicon Linguae Anglicanae (1671) deals exclusively with the etymology of English words, and purely etymological dictionaries continue to be produced up to the present day (e.g. Onions, 1966). The degree of importance attached to etymology as a source of information about headwords is, however, greatly increased from Bailey's time onwards, and it needs to be considered in some detail. 3.3 The role of etymology in monolingual English dictionaries Etymology has a complex and sometimes doubtful relationship with the description of meaning in monolingual dictionaries. It has in the past been given great prominence in general purpose monolingual dictionaries, but seems to be given less importance in modern dictionaries that do not concern themselves specifically with historical descriptions. None of the modern learner's dictionaries comments on the etymology of its headwords, presumably because it is not regarded as useful information for learners of the language. Its main danger, of course, is that it can be seen as providing a 'correct' prescriptive meaning, in a way which does not even need to rely on the lexicographer's intuition. The origin of the word 'etymology' itself reflects this problem: the Greek word 'etumoq' simply means 'true', and in many cases the original meaning of the source of a word has been considered to be the only possible true meaning of that word. Presumably this is because it can be considered as its first meaning, departures from 20
