{"id":33,"date":"2019-10-31T16:15:54","date_gmt":"2019-10-31T16:15:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/leme.utoronto.ca\/?page_id=33"},"modified":"2025-08-01T02:00:47","modified_gmt":"2025-08-01T02:00:47","slug":"welcome","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/leme.utoronto.ca\/?page_id=33","title":{"rendered":"A Welcome and a Caution (2024)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Ian Lancashire, editor,<\/strong>
Isabelle Zhu, assistant editor,<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

with contributions from<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Julia DaSilva, Paramita Dutta, Xueqi (Sherry) Fan, Sharine Leung, Sky Li, Kristie Liu, Tim Alberdingk Thijm, and Shirley Wang<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lexicons of Early Modern English (LEME) is a research project about Early Modern English lexicography and lexicology. The database and corpus, their survey of language texts, the mapping of headwords in LEME texts with those in the OED, historical inquiry into how the monarch and his advisers determined what word-books shall be published, and above all the structure of a neglected genre \u2013 the word-entry \u2013 are the subjects of this research program.[1]<\/a> LEME texts came online as early as 1996 in the Early Modern English Dictionaries Database (EMEDD) as a response to interest from other researchers. Today LEME texts hold over 1.1 million word-entries in over 30,000 pages of text from 1475 to 1755. Coverage begins with late medieval manuscript vocabularies (legal, chemical, herbal, and Latin) and closes with Samuel Johnson’s great dictionary in 1755. Increased demand for the encoded texts themselves has led to the publication of the first part of the corpus, about half of more than 400 language texts surviving from 1475 to 1625 alone, excluding re-editions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Only\ntwo dozen of these texts are dictionaries, half of them bilingual Latin-English\nin nature, six of them bilingual French-, Italian-, Spanish-, Welsh-, and\nAnglo-Saxon-English, and only three are monolingual English hard-word\nglossaries derived from bilingual texts. Most LEME texts in this period are of\ndifferent genres: Latin-English grammars, hard-word glossaries, herbals,\nspelling lists, glossed texts, collections of definitions, concordances, and\nnearly two hundred antiquarian manuscript essays about etymologies delivered\nbefore the Elizabethan Society of Antiquaries. What do these texts have in\ncommon? They are all collections of word-entries, variously structured,\ndifferently purposed. Tudor-Stuart English education loved words, and its young\nmen spent years studying them to the exclusion of most other useful arts and\nsciences. Educators, lawyers, secretaries, courtiers, entertainers, and even\ntradesmen earned their living by their ability with words. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Studying (in grammar school) historical\nlanguages opened up to literate English people four centuries ago an amazing\nnetwork linking time-present English words (whether taken consciously from\nLatin and Greek, or descending from then, or simply taken from other current\nvernaculars) with such time-past words. John Florio\u2019s title, Worlde of Words<\/em> (1598, 1611), memorably\nannounces a revelation of the lexical entanglement of English with other\ntongues, driven by the general borrowing of foreign words by English speakers\nand writers. Borrowings led to the study of etymology, a tool by scholars that uncovered\nthe past of everything that had names. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

LEME\nis hardly alone in building an edifice of language texts in this period to\nassist research,. J\u00fcrgen\nSch\u00e4fer in Early Modern English\nLexicography<\/em> (OUP, 1989) analyzed hard-word glossaries up to 1640. He\nclaimed truly that they contributed many new words to English, thousands more\nthan (say) Shakespeare had. However, Sch\u00e4fer did not analyse multilingual\nlexical works, which map classical and modern continental languages to English,\nor spelling lists, herbals, and definitions. Sch\u00e4fer did not cover the period\n1641-1755 or release his digital texts. The Salamanca Corpus also disseminates\ndiachronic dialect texts in digital form from ca. 1500 to 1950, most of them\nlater than the Early Modern period. The\nEnglish Dialect Dictionary<\/em> (1898-1905) project, recently placed online by\nManfred Markus, creates a searchable database of a great\nlate-nineteenth-century dictionary based on the work of antiquarians going back\nto the Early Modern period. The Seville Corpus of Northern English includes\ntexts up to the sixteenth century, most very early. The original of diachronic\ncorpora is of course the Helsinki Corpus, which has inspired other Finnish\nprojects such as the Corpus of Early English Correspondence, the Corpus of\nEarly English Medical Writing, the Helsinki Corpus of Older Scots, and the\nHelsinki Corpus of British English Dialects. Another early diachronic example\nis the Lampeter Corpus of Early Modern English Tracts. Varieng at the\nUniversity of Helsinki offers up-to-date information on all these. The making\nand use of corpora dominate linguistics research in Europe but are less common\nin America. However, LEME is a close relative of  the Early English Books Online \/ Text Creation\nProject (EEBO\/TCP) because both have digitized lexical STC and Wing materials.\nLike EEBO, ECCO releases images of large 18th<\/sup>-century dictionaries,\nsuch as ones by John Kersey, Nathan Bailey, Samuel Johnson, and Joseph Nicol\nScott, but not their encoded texts, as LEME has. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

LEME does not exist to collect and\ndisseminate early lexical texts. It is a tool to  understand their word-entries. Attending to\nword-entries of the time closely enables us to recognize how different the\nEarly Modern view of language was from that of the past two centuries. The alien\nquality of the Early Modern view of language is betrayed by two oddities of\nusage: grammarians said that nouns were names<\/em>\nfor things, and rhetoricians explained that only things<\/em> could be defined. How then could words be explained or defined?\nWhere was word<\/em>-meaning? Today we go\nto dictionaries to understand what a headword means, and we find an answer in a\ndescription of the non-word thing it names and that ideation forms in our minds.\nThe Early Modern English, however, did not confuse the meaning of a thing\ndenoted or named by a noun, and the meaning of that noun. Thomas Wilson in his\nvade-mecum Art of Logic<\/em> (1550) solved\nthis concundrum for us by explaining that words were things too (!) and thus,\nlike other things that they named, they could themselves be defined. Yet the\ndefinition of a word consisted of only of other\nwords<\/em>. Wilson, following a humanist tradition, averred that the perfect\ndefinition of a word, in fact, was its etymology, the word from which it\nultimately descended. The unpacking of what appeared alien lay in the structure\nof the word-entry\u2019s double definition. This was a popular theme in the decades\nthat followed.[2]<\/a> It\nis perhaps no surprise that practical kings and counsellors had little enthusiasm\nfor delving into ancient word-histories by publishing monolingual English\ndictionaries. Even Sir John Sidney thought that it was absurd to think that his\ncontemporaries needed a dictionary to teach them their own language. We need\nnot muse for long why the etymon-obsessed Elizabeth Society of Antiquaries did\nnot last long in the reign of James I. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

This distinctly unmodern view of\nlanguage has implications for anyone studying it and its literature. For one,\nit calls into question any gloss of an Early Modern English word that assumes\nour own ideas about word-entries and meaning. We are free to impose our own\nideas on how word-entries worked on long-dead Early Moderns, but should we? For\nanother, it requires an encoding system for LEME lexical texts that respects\nthe beliefs of those alive four hundred years ago. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Before\nI leave you to these texts, a word about why LEME is giving them away. LEME is no free transcription\nservice. Our federal research agency does not require us to give\nour research materials away, although it probably will do so soon. Yet how\ncould anyone restrict access to a corpus whose texts are uncopyrighted and\nwhose semantics are archaic? I applied to SSHRC in 2016 to open up LEME and\naccordingly adopted a very generous Creative Commons license (Attribution 4.0),\nwhich enables everyone (commercial and research users) free access and\ndevelopment of XML-encoded texts. Our first shared encoded text has been my\nTEI-encoded transcription of Samuel Johnson\u2019s dictionary (1755), which I gave to\nthe University of Central Florida\u2019s NEH-funded Samuel Johnson edition in late\nDecember 2019. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

You too are most welcome to use our materials. Only remember that the cui bono<\/em>[3]<\/a> that launched LEME are those who wanted to learn from research about Early Modern English.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ian Lancashire<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Toronto<\/p>\n\n\n\n

21 January 2020
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

[1]<\/a> 31\nessays document this program (1992-2019), which gradually unravels a theory of\nEarly Modern word-entries that suggests a pervasive, unsettling anachronicm in\nour understanding.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

[2]<\/a>\nFor example, Blundeville 1599.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[3]<\/a> Latin “as a\nbenefit to whom?”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ian Lancashire, editor,Isabelle Zhu, assistant editor, with contributions from Julia DaSilva, Paramita Dutta, Xueqi (Sherry) Fan, Sharine Leung, Sky Li, Kristie Liu, Tim Alberdingk Thijm, and Shirley Wang Lexicons of Early Modern English (LEME) is a research project about Early Modern English lexicography and lexicology. The database and corpus, their survey of language texts, the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"class_list":{"0":"post-33","1":"page","2":"type-page","3":"status-publish","5":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/leme.utoronto.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/33","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/leme.utoronto.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/leme.utoronto.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/leme.utoronto.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/leme.utoronto.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=33"}],"version-history":[{"count":17,"href":"https:\/\/leme.utoronto.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/33\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2456,"href":"https:\/\/leme.utoronto.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/33\/revisions\/2456"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/leme.utoronto.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=33"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}