[Corpora-List] "Tajweed" in English dictionaries and corpora

[Trevor Jenkins]

On 5 Mar 2013, at 11:05, Otto Lassen <otto at lassen.mail.dk> wrote:

> Atwell's understanding of the word "dictionary" is perhaps also political: a collection of words, preferably in print, which defines a nation. That may be the core of his problem. Is he right here?

Some believe that dictionary making is a political rather than a pure lexicographic act. The British author, TV and radio presenter Melvyn Bragg (aka the Labour supporting Lord Baron Bragg of Wigton) argued that in that very point in the TV programmes of his "Adventure of English" that Webster created his first dictionary was conceived as a political act to rest control of English from the English. Setting up American English as the control after the model of Académie Français for French.

In my own area of interest (signed languages) there is an on-going debate as to who owns the languages and therefore should be permitted to compile dictionaries. Is it first-language/native Deaf speakers or hearing "lexicographers"? An occasion of personal abuse toward Deaf people as audism or a specific instance of cultural/linguistic imperialism.

There is an alternative interpretation: that this is not political but an implicit islamification of English. But that's why I suggested in an earlier email that if islamic theological terms were to be included in English language dictionaries of right then so too must terms from all other minority religions (including Jedi of which there are some 180,000 self-labelling adherents according to the UK 2011 Census).

A further issue, which you repeated unqualified, is the appeal to a simple occurrence count from Google. There is no support for the claim that 1.7million of those are proof that the word is used in English; they only support the idea that 1.7million occurrences of the term can be found in Latinate transliterations. Until such time as someone analyses those occurrences for distribution across languages there is no claim that can be made for them for requiring the term's inclusion in English language dictionaries.

Regards, Trevor.

<>< Re: deemed!

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/corpora/attachments/20130305/eafea0cf/attachment.htm>
-------------- next part --------------
_______________________________________________
UNSUBSCRIBE from this page: http://mailman.uib.no/options/corpora
Corpora mailing list
Corpora at uib.no
http://mailman.uib.no/listinfo/corpora