The Whole World in a Book by Ogilvie Sarah;Safran Gabriella;
Author:Ogilvie, Sarah;Safran, Gabriella;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press, Incorporated
Published: 2019-08-15T00:00:00+00:00
Note that in defining orange the âborn definerâ encapsulated, for better or worse, the limits of compendious. Note too that the italic a in an otherwise roman leather marks it as silent and that in lether and opposit, characterized as âmore correctlyâ spelled than their headwords, and in orchester, a headword, Websterâs reformed spellings are displayed, one way of marking American English as distinct. Besides its use as a noun, Webster enters docket as a transitive verb, in respect of its use in some states, as he indicates in the preface. He borrows space from the line allotted to floscule to complete the entry for floret. He specifies the pronunciation of ch in orchester as k and marks opiniaster as obsolete. In the preface he boasts that he has included words newly invented in finance (e.g. dutiable, customable, irredeemable), science (pyrometer, gazometer), and medicine (vaccination), and in new forms of government (constitutionality of powers, irrepealability of laws, removability from office).12
The Compendious entries do not offer word histories, although in its preface Webster critiques Johnsonâs etymologies and promises a more complete dictionary of his own. His views of etymology had been influenced by Horne Tooke,13 and his indebtedness to him is manifest in Websterâs claim that the âHebrew, Greek and Latin languages, with the Teutonic and all its branches . . . proceeded from one parent stock; the identity of their origin being discoverable in the radicals of many words common to them allâ.14 Laird hypothesizes that Horne Tookeâs Diversions of Purley was given directly by Benjamin Franklin to Webster twenty years earlier, on the last day of 1786,15 ironically the same year Sir William Jones reported recognition of what we now call Indo-European and the Indo-European language familyâa critical insight of comparative philology that Webster to his dying day failed to credit, as we shall see.
As a young revolutionary enamoured of the possibility of an ideal nation, Webster had intended to write a dictionary of the âAmerican tongueâ (âa system of our own, in language as well as governmentâ). But by 1828, dismayed by what he viewed as the failure of the Revolution to achieve its potential, he saw value in perpetuating a âsamenessâ in British and American English: âIt is not only important, but, in a degree necessary, that the people of this country, should have an American Dictionary of the English Language; for, although the body of the language is the same as in England, and it is desirable to perpetuate that sameness, yet some differences must existâ.16
As to the etymologies promised in the Compendious, after starting his American Dictionary Webster spent a decade in the middle of a bespoke round table on which he had laid out word books, glosses, and dictionaries of twenty languages, walking and taking notes, identifying classes of words that shared radical consonant sounds and eventually incorporating those observations into a âsynopsisâ,17 some of whose contents formed the basis for AADELâs etymologies. He wrote:
But before I had finished [AADEL], I determined on a voyage to Europe, with the view of obtaining some books and some assistance .
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