Corpora: Language Engineering Re-Revisited

[Tadeusz Piotrowski]

Yorick Wilks' rejoinder arrived after my summary had been posted.
Apparently he demolished one bit of the summary: the belief that LE was
indeed used in the sense of language planning, supported by two quotations,
one, from a non-technical text from the COBUILD Bank of English (message
from Krishnamurthy), and the other one from a general survey of linguistics
(message from Burnard). Professor Wilks was not impressed by the latter (the
lexicographer fallacy for him), and asked for a quotation from a
sociolinguist.

As a lexicographer I felt that there was something wrong with the
argument: I would think that a general textbook would be better
than a specialist text, in which the author is free to use idiosyncratic
terminology. A general textbook, one would feel, would use terms
that are indeed in actual use, not to confuse the reader.

But here is my point: looking for something else I opened Anthropological
Linguistics by William A. Foley (Blackwell 1997). There is a chapter (20)
entitled Standard Languages and Linguistic Engineering, about language
planning and the related issues. The phrase LE itself is used a couple of
times in the text (though it is not in the index).

True, this is not LANGUAGE Engineering, but this is of no consequence, I
suppose. The abbreviation is the same... The quote does show clearly that
the word engineering -- and that was crucial -- is occasionally used with
reference to language, and in particular to language planning.


Regards

Tadeusz Piotrowski
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