Bernhard Karlgren’s term for the language around 600AD as codified in the dictionary Ch’ieh yün. A snapshot, not a period.
Bernhard Karlgren’s term for the language of the Hênan region during the first Chou centuries (from 1028BC).
Using the Oxford comma when there is no ambiguity conveys the implicature that the writer fears criticism for failing to use it.
A term coined by John Simpson in 2001 which has delayed the completion of OED3 for twenty years.
See also OED3.
As a modifier, often pleonastic.
Example: the compact, inexplicit discourse style of research articles (2016)
The process of compiling a dictionary isn’t fundamentally different from writing other kinds of books. The lexicographer selects words he thinks exist in the language as lemmas and uses words he knows (or invents) to explain them. And just like in other types of writings, dictionaries may contain erroneous or nonce words.
Sometimes, however, dictionary evidence requires careful handling:Exceptions
Jespersen’s term for a now-superseded description of the changes undergone by long vowels in the history of Standard English.Bibliography
… vs historical lexicon
Thanks to a prolific series originally published by Scarecrow Press, historical dictionary no longer refers to a dictionary compiled ‘on historical principles’ in general usage.
Example: Greek Philosophical Terms: A Historical Lexicon
See also lexicon.
As a discipline, historical lexicology has Soviet origins.Bibliography
Not Murray’s first choice.
But …
… the wording 'arranged on an historical basis' continued to be used at least as late as 1925 (Gilliver spotted it in an advertisement in the Spectator 17 Oct 1925, p. 678).
***
(props Peter Gilliver)
K’ung Ying-ta of T’ang misunderstood the term ku hsün and the error persisted in most publications from the last century. Huang (1993), a paragon of independent thinking, corrects him. But Ch’i got it right as early as the 1940s.Bibliography
… vs logograph
When applied to the Chinese language, logograph describes only a subset of ideographs – unless logo- is coerced into covering bound morphemes, at which point the term becomes redundant.
An inefficient prose style can remain functional because it serves extralinguistic aims.
Example: The inexplicit prose style of research articles weeds out doctoral candidates who won’t conform.Bibliography
Bad kerning in a typeset document conveys the implicature that the type was set by a typist, not a typographer. Now largely taken care of by browsers if a well-made kerning table is included with the font.
Examples: The Chicago Manual of Style (17th edn), typeset by Graphic Composition, Inc., relied on a faulty kerning table; New Hart’s Rules (2nd edn), typeset in-house at OUP, used unkerned numerals.
The curiously precise ‘chiefly applied to a dictionary of Greek, Hebrew, Syriac, or Arabic’ in OED1, copied by Fowler and now ODE, was an accident of history.
Bartholomew Price had actually proposed ‘The Oxford Latin Lexicon’ for the Clarendon edition of Harper’s Latin Dictionary in 1878.
(props C. Stray)
With so many entries remaining unrevised after a quarter of a century’s work, OED3 should stop competing with dictionaries of current English such as ODE and focus on revising existing entries as a period dictionary.
New words and new senses can be more easily added in OED4 drawing on the material accumulated in successive editions of the corpus-based ODE.
The ideal roadmap for the OED is thus OED2 (updating) > OED3 (revision) > OED4 (updating) > OED5 (revision) and so forth.
See also dictionary of record.
ˈʌn.jənz
A genre of scholarly peer review which takes the form of a private letter addressed to the editor of a learned journal; the opposite of open peer review.
Reasons for using the genre include:
One or more political periods rounded off to the nearest century to hide the fact that they are political periods.
… vs phonemic loan
The term phonemic loan originated as a mistranslation from Mandarin in the writings of scholars who don’t understand English. Loanwords are never created on a phonemic basis.
An older term for the orthographic variant of an ideograph. See HuangSupplement s.v. 別字(1).
Punctuation indicators are first-class lexemes and should be subjected to the same analysis in a dictionary as other lemmata.
A little studied type of semantic change whereby a term ends up meaning the opposite of what it was coined to describe.
Source: Martin Fowler
Example: The core meaning of induce being that of ‘cause’, deduce has become the verb for induction in the sense of ‘inference’, in a sort of suppletion.Those that live in fear of Garner …
… can nevertheless still write things like 'whereas in principle historical dictionaries proceed by induction from quotations to definition, this is impracticable in the case of terminology: the changing senses of geek can be induced from quotation evidence'.
The principle that all the terms in a set should be defined in a dictionary regardless of frequency and consistently.
The idea of codifying best practice is an oxymoron.
The best typographers pick and choose from the best the history of printing has to offer, whereas a manual of style merely codifies what the publisher does in-house.
Example: Using close-set em dash in place of en dash conveys the implicature that one hasn’t studied any early books.
See also kerning.Bibliography
… on historical principles
Because the meaning of a technical term is by necessity prescriptive and can’t be deduced from context, the correct way to write a dictionary of technical terms ‘on historical principles’ is to write the history of how each term was defined in specialist dictionaries and scholarship.
Examples: R. L. Trask, A Dictionary of Grammatical Terms in Linguistics (London, 1993), superseded by OED3; Katie Wales, A Dictionary of Stylistics (3rd edn, London, 2011).
… in historical dictionaries
Trying to keep theory out of a dictionary is fighting a losing battle. The very act of definition writing is already theorising.
Example: OED3 keeps relying on the theory of ablaut and reconstructed PIE semantics in spite of having deleted all the PIE forms from its site.
A calque coined by Victor Mair to render the pre-modern fang yen into English.
Originally the title of a historical dictionary (cf. ‘然辭有引伸假借有沿革變遷舉甲不能遺乙有委不能無源’); in vulgar usage, a fancy way of saying tz’u yüan (‘etymology’).