Kernerman Dictionary News • Number 15 • July 2007
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Shin'ichiro Ishikawa, Kosei
Minamide, Minoru Murata, Yukio Tono (eds.) English Lexicography in 326 pp. ISBN 4-469-24522-4
The first chapter has six papers that consider elements
in the entries. Three of the six are on neologisms. In Akasu’s paper, he
examines neologisms that appeared as new words in the addenda to the 1942 Idiomatic
and Syntactic English Dictionary and the first Oxford Advanced
Learners Dictionary in 1948, finding many military terms in this narrow
area. Ishikawa’s paper, a data based analysis of neologisms, illustrates the
use of a large corpus to substantiate the staying power of the word. He uses
Metcalf’s FUDGE factors to establish the neologism and adds one more factor,
longitudinal changes in frequency of the word’s appearances in the corpus.
This factor recommends that no sharp decline should occur from year to year
for at least three consecutive years. To illustrate this, he takes ten words
from the mid to late 1990’s, of which only two are still current, blog and hazmat, and looks at Lexis Nexis and I found the next paper by Gally to be of personal
interest for me as a lifelong learner of the Japanese language. He looks at
the entries with ‘Japanesey words’ (culturally bound items) in J-E
dictionaries, which is one of only four papers devoted to J-E in this
collection. He addresses culturally bound words, among them native plants,
like kudzu, native fish, like yaritanago, a small carp, traditional
clothing, like kimono, which has
become a loan word, and more complex items, like ronin, a high school graduate studying on his own to try a second
time to pass the college entrance exam, and moe, infatuation with an attractive female anime cartoon character. I enjoyed reading this critical account
that is mainly descriptive rather than analytical. This is one
lexicographical issue that applies to Japanese who want to translate from
their language into English and to non-Japanese studying the language. This
problem of missing or confusing information in J-E entries is an important
lexicographical issue for dictionary publishers in The second chapter has five papers that are analyses of
elements in the microstructure of bilingual E-J and monolingual English
dictionaries. The first two topics are frequency markers and the need to
highlight bound morphemes in headwords. We learn from Aizawa that frequency
markers for entries in E-J learners’ dictionaries may be occasionally
unreliable, and that experts on vocabulary acquisition recommend that
lexicographers focus on an upper limit of four to five thousand words as a
core vocabulary in learners’ dictionaries. This recommendation is not heeded,
of course, by publishers who often boast of 80,000 to 100,000 entries. In the
second paper, Iyanaga promotes the inclusion of morphological information in
English entries to enhance students’ vocabulary building skills, and in the
third paper by Hasegawa, we find a quantitative analysis of the Oxford Dictionary of English Idioms.
The fourth paper by Dohi focuses on a comparison of two early 20th
century English dictionaries, the Pocket
Oxford Dictionary of Current English (1924) and the Concise Oxford Dictionary of Current English (1911). This
section, veering away from E-J bilingual lexicography, highlights the
anglophile tendencies of this society of academic lexicographers of English. The fifth paper, by Snowden, ‘Reverse Authenticity in
J-E Dictionary Entries with English Originals’,
investigates J-E entries with examples of English origin, rather than
Japanese. Since some of them sound quite quaint to the native ear, Snowden
searched them using Google, which is a very simple but effective tool now. In
a Kenkyusha J-E large collegiate desk 4th edition (Kenkyusha’s
New English-Japanese Dictionary, 1974), he found that one example,
“violence recoils upon the violent”, under mukuiru (return, repay), was lifted from a Sherlock Holmes novel
from 1893. The author claims that many of these English examples are
back-translated into Japanese, which is then used to extract various Japanese
words to be used as headwords in the J-E dictionaries. Thus, he calls this
practice “reverse authenticity”, since the Japanese word or phrase to be
encoded is not from a Japanese source, but the English example is from an
often literary English source. The second example for mukuiru gives us this beauty: “affection is not poured forth
vainly, even though it meets no return.” Snowden turned this line up via
Google from a work by Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of the Christian
Scientists. This phrase, “meets no return”, was then back translated to
Japanese and used for mukuiru
(return). The fact that this quote sounds unnatural to some native English
speakers is beside the point for the Japanese editors. This practice
eliminates the need to glean original natural Japanese from native speakers
or invent original examples. This shortcut is what I have suspected for a
long time, so this topic is of great personal interest. Snowden states: “The
problem of back translation…remains a big one for J-E dictionaries.” (p. 154)
These poorly translated entries lead to stilted, awkward English, often
marked by an inappropriate register or style, not only for colloquial English
conversation, but also for standard written English in the 21st
century. Snowden also notes that there has been a tendency, over the last
part of the 20th century, toward very frequent use of quotes from
famous literature with no attribution in J-E dictionaries. Snowden notes that
the editors “adjust the wording just enough to avoid accusations of wholesale
plagiarism.” (p. 150) The third chapter on E-J dictionaries and pragmatics
contains four papers. These range from an analysis of three discourse
markers―after all, however, and so―to a paper on pragmatic considerations for relative clauses,
and a fine paper on expressions of apology and gratitude. The fascinating
paper by Otani on the treatment of thank you (arigato) and I’m sorry (sumimasen) delves into the underlying cultural constructs and
felicity conditions that create “the emotional gulf behind the apology
expressions between the two languages.” (p. 212) She then compares five E-J
and three J-E dictionaries and finds that the Genius E-J and J-E
(Taishukan) and the Luminous E-J (Kenkyusha) treat the pragmatics of
‘I’m sorry’ more completely and accurately. As for ‘thank you,’ all three J-E
dictionaries gloss it as arigato
without any culturally appropriate information. In this well thought out
paper, Otani demonstrates certain strengths in the E-J treatments of apology
and gratitude, as well as clear weaknesses in some of the J-E treatments and
in two E-J dictionaries. The fourth chapter with two papers is on dictionaries
and gender. The first paper by Uchida on gender variation is a corpus survey
on ‘actually’, the intensifier ‘so’ plus an adjective, such as ‘so pretty’
and ‘lovely’, which are more frequently used by women. The second paper, by
Ishikawa, is on non-sexist language, such as chair person for chairman
and fire fighter for fireman. Actually, Uchida has composed a
very lovely paper that nicely illustrates how corpus survey research can
strengthen the ‘word sketches’ that Tono recommends in his opening chapter. The fifth chapter on ‘Dictionary [sic] and Education,’ pedagogical
applications of lexicography, has six papers. These topics vary quite a bit
and cover a lot of ground: first, incidental learning that concludes that
silent reading is better than note-taking; second, the acquisition of
prepositions, noting the complexity and the partial overlapping of the
English ‘at’, ‘in’, and ‘on’ with the Japanese ni and de in various
contexts; third, the acquisition of metaphors in verb and particle
combinations that are spatial, such as ‘turn over’, ‘turn up’ and ‘give away’
or ‘give up.’ The next three papers are also varied: guessing meanings of
unknown words in monolingual English dictionaries; the frequency of unknown
words and its effect on reading comprehension; and evaluating electronic
dictionaries used at the college level compared to paper dictionaries. This
last paper by Yamada Shigeru on student evaluations of monolingual English
learners’ dictionaries by university students is more thoughtful than the
typical survey on attitudes. The students used three web-based dictionaries
by Overall, we can see how far Japanese bilingual
lexicography has come in forty years since the mid-1960’s.
The frustrating situation with J-E dictionaries that I encountered in 1975
included poorly translated examples, and vague, polysemous entries, with
little attention paid to natural conversational English. The result was my
odd eigo kusai nihongo, ‘Japanese
that smells like English,’ and strained attempts at stilted conversations.
Editorial practices of 30 or 40 years ago included much copying of other
poorly constructed dictionaries, little sense of frequency of expressions or
high frequency collocations, and a focus on wide ranging vocabulary coverage
at the expense of better treatment of culturally relevant words that would
enlighten users of Japanese bilingual dictionaries. Happily, the newest generation of lexicography research
from Don R. McCreary
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