#lexicographer

hmmmmm i'll do the lexicographer cus why not (

Trollnoun palace is a texture pack mod ive been working on (and will continue to work on!) which will replace all the sprites and text to fit the theme of alternia! im going to be doing multiple updates adding more to the mod each time V1: playable characters. (out now!) V2: nobody and a few other enemies. (out soon) V2.5: adding homestuck based words to the wordlist. V3: cut scenes and dialogue. (this and V4 might switch) V4: couple more enemies, character spells, and tiles. V5: more enemies and bosses. V6: spells. V7: Backrounds.

ill prob do more smaller updates to fix issues and stuff but that's a rough outline of what im planning on doing V1 download:

Also i got permission from @ciirulean for this project to be subbmited to FRAF so if you wanna help this project out please do that! (just link to this post or the github page)

February 7th 1837 saw the birth of James Murray, first editor of the Oxford English Dictionary.

A couple of things that I love about this, 1; a Scot was the first editor of the most famous English dictionary, a 2; the picture of Murray, he just looks the part!

He was certainly something of a prodigy as a child, despite his humble background. Born in the Borders village of Denholm, near Hawick, the son of a tailor, he reputedly knew his alphabet by the time he was eighteen months old, and was soon showing a precocious interest in other languages, including—at the age of 7—Chinese.

Thanks to his voracious appetite for reading, and what he called ‘a sort of mania for learning languages’, he was already a remarkably well-educated boy by the time his formal schooling ended, at the age of 14, with a knowledge of French, German, Italian, Latin, and Greek, oh and of course Gaelic, along with a range of other interests, including botany, geology, and archaeology. After a few years teaching in local schools—he was evidently a born teacher, and was made a headmaster at the age of 21—he moved to London, and took work in a bank.

e soon began to attend meetings of the London Philological Society, and threw himself into the study of dialect and pronunciation—an interest he had already developed while still in Scotland—and also of the history of English. In 1870 an opening at Mill Hill School, just outside London, enabled him to return to teaching. He began studying for an external London BA degree, which he finished in 1873, the same year as his first big scholarly publication, a study of Scottish dialects which was widely recognized as a pioneering work in its field and was the first ever sustained history of the Scots tongue.

Only a year later his linguistic research had earned him his first honorary degree, a doctorate from Edinburgh University: quite an achievement for a self-taught man of 37.

In 1876 Murray was approached by the London publishers Macmillans about the possibility of editing a dictionary, he accepted the challenged and it was generally thought the publication would take around ten years to complete and run to 6,400 pages, in four volumes, he undertook the work while still teaching at Mill Hill, although he did enlist help in several assistants.

Five years later- no- he hadn’t finished it, he was a genius but not that much, they published the first volume, A-Ant, to steal the words from a future film, they were going to need a bigger book!“ The team sent out the call for volunteers all across the country. one American man, William Chester Minor, even responded from his prison cell in Broadmoor while serving a life sentence for murder. still suffered from paranoid delusions, some saw his work on the Oxford English Dictionary as a form of therapy. Minor became a regular collaborator with Murray as he sent his notes to the editor every week for 20 years. Every letter Minor signed with the closing, “Broadmoor, Crowthorne, Berkshire.

Murray soon had to give up his school teaching, and moved to Oxford in 1885; even then progress was too slow, and eventually three other Editors were appointed, each with responsibility for different parts of the alphabet. Although for more than three-quarters of the time he worked on the OED there were other Editors working alongside him—he eventually died in 1915—and although he had a staff of assistants helping him, it is without question that he was the Editor of the Dictionary.

It was not until 1928 that C. T. Onions and William Craigie finally finished the main text. In terms of the methodology he developed, The Oxford English Dictionary is largely Murray’s creation; as the ‘Historical Introduction’ to the OED states, ‘to Murray belongs the credit for giving it, at the outset, a form which proved to be adequate to the end’.

In his private life Murray married an Ada Agnes Ruthven and they found time to have 11 children together, all of whom reached adulthood, and unusual occurrence back then. Some even helped him in the compilation of the OED. The third pic is great and shows him astride a huge ‘sand-monster’ constructed on the beach during one of the family’s holidays in North Wales.

An interesting article about a very extensive Latin dictionary in the New York Times. Excerpt: 

When German researchers began working on a new Latin dictionary in the 1890s, they thought they might finish in 15 or 20 years.

In the 125 years since, the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae (T.L.L.) has seen the fall of an empire, two world wars and the division and reunification of Germany. In the meantime, they are up to the letter R.

This is not for lack of effort. Most dictionaries focus on the most prominent or recent meaning of a word; this one aims to show every single way anyone ever used it, from the earliest Latin inscriptions in the sixth century B.C. to around A.D. 600. The dictionary’s founder, Eduard Wölfflin, who died in 1908, described entries in the T.L.L. not as definitions, but “biographies” of words.

The first entry, for the letter A, was published in 1900. The T.L.L. is expected to reach its final word — “zythum,” an Egyptian beer — by 2050. A scholarly project of painstaking exactness and glacial speed, it has so far produced 18 volumes of huge pages with tiny text, the collective work of nearly 400 scholars, many of them long since dead. The letters Q and N were set aside, because they begin too many difficult words, so researchers will have to go back and work on those, too.

Dictionaries sound so authoritative it can be difficult sometimes to imagine that they are written by real people. One of the people who make dictionaries happen is Jane Solomon. Jane’s lexicography work has also taken her into the world of emoji, and now picture books. Jane is on Twitter (@janesolomon), and blogs at Lexical items. She also has a book out April 30th 2019 The Dictionary of Difficult Words, a delightfully illustrated collection of tricky and wonderful words.

What did you study at university?

I was an English major and a linguistics minor at Northwestern University. I was going to do a double major, but I was a bit burnt out by my senior year and a wise wise advisor told me that my work in a linguistics lab and the undergraduate research grants I got in linguistics would make it clear to anyone looking at my resume that I had a strong interest in linguistics. He told me I was a "minor plus," and no one would care that I wasn't a major after I had been working for a few years. I don't know that this is the right decision for everyone, but it was definitely the right decision for me.

As an undergrad, I worked in a child-language acquisition lab as an assistant to grad students. We used a methodology where we essentially acted out stories with toys for four year olds in an attempt to extract linguistic insight. My favorite linguistics class was historical linguistics because I got to spend quality time looking up words in the OED for the problem sets.

What is your job?

I'm a Linguist in Residence at Dictionary.com. I research and write definitions and work on other lexicographical content like Word of the Day and Word of the Year. Sometimes I write articles about language. I also consult on projects that require linguistic expertise, like last year I collaborated with our analytics team to rebuild our trending dashboard from scratch.

I also do a lot of media interviews for my job where I communicate what it is that we lexicographers spend our time doing for a general audience. Outside of my work at Dictionary.com, I'm on the Unicode Emoji Subcommittee. This is the group that reviews emoji proposals and makes recommendations on what new emoji appear on our devices.

How does your linguistics training help you in your job?

The research skills I learned as an undergraduate have come in extremely handy with my current work. In my English classes I learned how to do close readings of texts. This is something I do all the time as I look over examples of words in context in order to distill their meaning into concise definitions. As an undergrad linguistics student, I was often asked to look at a data set and find the patterns in that data. Modern lexicographers use corpus research to help understand patterns in language. When I write definitions and example sentences, I'm always thinking about the colocations of words so I can help present the most useful constructions to people looking up the word.

Do you have any advice you wish someone had given to you about linguistics/careers/university?

I wish I had done more computational linguistics and NLP as an undergrad. As I've gotten more into corpus research, I've discovered that this is something I'm really interested in. I know people don't always like to talk about money when they're talking to students about careers, but your earning potential goes up if you can pair linguistic research with a computational skill. This is something I have come to appreciate now that I live in one of the most expensive regions in the world.

Any other thoughts or comments?

I spent much of 2018 writing a book called The Dictionary of Difficult Words. It's a children's book, but it's for adults too. As the name suggests, it's a dictionary with only difficult words in it. It's highly illustrated, and for each letter, there's a beautiful full-page illustration with more information that can be read as an alphabet book within the dictionary. The first monolingual English dictionaries were dictionaries of difficult words, so I compiled the word list in that tradition. The amazing illustrations are by Louise Lockhart.

Previously:

Interview with a School Linguist

Interview with a Journalist

Interview with a PR Consultant

Interview with an Agency Owner & Executive Editor

Interview with a Freelance Editor, Writer and Trainer