thy thigh etc.

[Jim Rader]

Seems like this is drifting rather far from Indo-European, but...

I think the production people here (Merriam-Webster) would be very
surprised to hear that dictionaries--at least the monolingual general-
audience desk dictionaries that I think are at issue--have become
cheaper to produce.  I couldn't give you the figures because the
accounting people here would never give them to me, but I bet each
of the editions of our desk dictionary that have appeared since
1897 or so has cost more adjusted for inflation.  The size of the
editorial staff has slowly increased as means to create citations
have become easier and more and more new citations have to be
scanned.  Forty years ago starting editors were paid ridiculously
low wages and turnover was extremely high--now even an editorial
assistant with a fresh B.A. gets a tolerable wage plus medical
benefits, and given the vagaries of the American economy,
employees tend to stay, meaning they get annual raises.  Paper
costs more even adjusted for inflation.  Typesetting has been
digitized and is faster, but given the expense of software and
hardware, I doubt very much that it's cheaper, because everything
becomes obsolete so fast that the cash outlay just to keep up is
constant.  The typesetting for our Collegiate dictionary is
customized, so every time I decided to use a new diacritic-letter
combination for an exotic language etymon, it has be digitally
created--it doesn't matter that I myself can print out virtually any
combination possible by downloading free character sets from the
Internet--no good for the typesetter's purposes.

What really constrains commercial dictionary size is price.  It took
a long time for the $19.95 ceiling for an American hardbound desk
dictionary was broken--when a hardbound novel, undiscounted,
often sold for $24.95 or more.  Now we've reached $24.95,
ridiculously low for a fairly well-printed and produced book of 1,557
pages.  The profit margin on dictionaries is exceedingly small, and
dictionary publishers can only make money if they sell in
enormous volume.  Every new fascicle in a new edition squeezes
things tighter.  In this regard, comparison with a newspaper is
totally inappropriate, because in the last half century I suspect
many newspapers have at least trebled in price.  If our desk
dictionary had done that, we'd be out of business.

I could say a lot more about commercial dictionaries.  I'd rather
read about Indo-European, though....

Jim Rader

> [Douglas Kilday:]
> This _a priori_ economic argument only works if the processes required to
> manufacture dictionaries are stable in cost. During the past century and
> more, this has certainly _not_ been the case. Improvements in typesetting
> and reproduction, and more recently in information technology, have steadily
> driven down the actual cost of producing dictionaries. I believe this is the
> principal factor in the increasing size of desk dictionaries, _not_
> purported expansion of the lexis. When these costs have reached equilibrium,
> so will the size of a given brand of dictionary.

> I think a good analogy can be drawn with newspapers. Today's typical
> regional paper (circulation on the order of 20k-200k) is much larger and
> more colorful than its counterpart of 100 years ago. That doesn't mean that
> we have much more, and more colorful, news than folks did in 1900, or that
> our lives are much larger and more colorful. It reflects the much lower
> cost, with modern technology, of producing newspapers and reproducing
> photographs.