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<div class=WordSection1><p class=MsoNormal>Thanks, Geoffrey. Yours is prose!<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>> it downgrades the dictionary to being a simple database<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>That’s exactly what we should stop doing: the future is far more than that.<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>> it is a pity to reduce all lexicography to learner's dictionaries and techie ambitions<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>True, we need new frameworks in which new types of data can be produced in the first place. Here’s an interesting avenue: <a href="http://deb.fi.muni.cz/pdev/">http://deb.fi.muni.cz/pdev/</a><o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>All best,<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>Gilles-Maurice.<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1F497D'><o:p> </o:p></span></p><div><div style='border:none;border-top:solid #B5C4DF 1.0pt;padding:3.0pt 0cm 0cm 0cm'><p class=MsoNormal><b><span lang=EN-US style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Tahoma","sans-serif";color:windowtext'>From:</span></b><span lang=EN-US style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Tahoma","sans-serif";color:windowtext'> WILLIAMS Geoffrey [mailto:williams@univ-ubs.fr] <br><b>Sent:</b> woensdag 7 november 2012 9:59<br><b>To:</b> claire_needler@hotmail.com<br><b>Cc:</b> michael.rundell@lexmasterclass.com; euralex@freelists.org; braasch@hum.ku.dk; krek.simon@gmail.com; gillesmaurice.deschryver@ugent.be; s.bullon@macmillan.com<br><b>Subject:</b> Re: [euralex] Re: Macmillan's recent announcement<o:p></o:p></span></p></div></div><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'>Dear All,<br><br>What I find interesting about this whole discussion is that as soon as someone says that this is a pity, then the hoary old ancient and modern debate is reopened and we are shot down as Luddites.<br><br>No-one seriously disputes the value of e-lexicography, and certainly not me. No one disputes the commercial logic of Macmillan in going for online dictionaries. It is true that the economic model will be different and a commercial enterprise is above all about making money. However, many of us see the demise of the paper dictionary as a shame as it downgrades the dictionary to being a simple database rather than the vibrant cultural object that it is. Dictionaries museums already exist, real and virtual, but this does not mean that print is out. Much of the Eastern seaboards of the US is currently glad to have some paper to read in the absence of electricity. Paper is also a wonderful insulator when it is cold and a pile of dictionaries on a bed beats any l-pad in cold weather.<br><br>Dictionaries used in teaching maybe simple look-up tools, but that is the sign of a bad learner with no interest in the language. A good learner is curious and learns to value language. That is why libraries are so useful, which does in no way mean that online archives do not have their place.<br><br>So, if I am to be a dinosaur, I might as well say that motorised transport is driving the world to ruin. In many farming communities, for many tasks, the horse is making a comeback. It has a real use in forestry, but also in any slow work. These are not old-fashioned farmers, but those who have done their sums. Now for the quill. Well, the good news folks is that quills, which are notoriously difficult to cut and maintain, are back in fashion as people are rediscovering personalised writing and calligraphy. Personally, I find a fountain pen is easier to handle. People doing creative writing are finding that hand written texts give time to think, whereas copy-paste novels are only good for railway station readers. Teaching people to value language also means teaching them to write. Do we thus write them off as old-fashioned because they refuse mediocrity. There is room for mediocrity, it has always been with us, but quality is always there and those studying language rather than learning it as a tool will always find paper a useful tool.<br><br>As an aside, I am married to a technical translator. She avoids electronic dictionaries as much as possible; for her health because staring at a screen all day is dangerous for eyesight; and for the quality of her work as although she can produce vast amounts of text in a day, and has to to make ends meet, she is concerned with quality and the paper dictionary gives her time to think. Maybe she is a dinosaur too, but then you can ask her customers why they rely on her and her knowledge rather than having a possibly cheaper entirely machine assisted translator.<br><br>Macmillan has taken a commercial decision. Some of us think that sad, that is our opinion. Whilst being sad, we shall continue to observe and see how this effects lexicography in general. However, it is a pity to reduce all lexicography to learner's dictionaries and techie ambitions. Lexicography is a wide world, so their must be room for those who can use the added value of e-technical tools whilst retaining a love of other approaches to language.<br><br>I am not a techie geek, but I am essentially interested in electronic tools and what they bring to the digital humanities, which is why I do not like us being written off as a Luddite because we express a feeling of regret that the e-approach should be seen as the only approach. We can use machines, without being slaves to machines. I As I have said, lexicography is a broad chapel, you must allow us Quakers to be Quakers as we respect the right of the techie Pentecostals to their outlook.<br><br>Real debate is interesting, but it is about how we value language.<br><br>Now I get back to work, my computer needs me.<span class=moz-smiley-s3> ;-) </span><br><br>Best<br><br>Geoffrey<br><br><o:p></o:p></p><div><p class=MsoNormal>Le 06/11/2012 21:57, Claire Needler a écrit :<o:p></o:p></p></div><blockquote style='margin-top:5.0pt;margin-bottom:5.0pt'><div><p class=MsoNormal>Of course, I find the most shocking thing about this is that you are in your 60s Michael! Where have the last 20 years gone?<br> <br>As I was chatting about this issue over lunch yesterday, I was nostalgically referring back to drawers of index cards, which of course were long gone before my days as a fledgling lexicographer. I agree that for practical usage purposes online dictionaries are obviously the way to go. How brilliant to just be able to look stuff up on your phone whenever the need arises! That instantaneous grasp of a missing word, and hence better language usage, is surely what most dictionary users would want.<br> <br>Any lexicographer, or any other word lover, will still have their own roomful of dictionaries to wade through and enjoy the physicality of page turning and the wonder of discovering a new word, or more likely rediscovering a word long forgotten. Ah, just think, it's time to start planning a dictionary museum.<br> <br>Claire Needler<br>Once upon a time a lexicographer, because it was what I wanted to do more than anything in the world.<br> <o:p></o:p></p><div><div class=MsoNormal align=center style='text-align:center'><hr size=2 width="100%" align=center id=stopSpelling></div><p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'>From: <a href="mailto:michael.rundell@lexmasterclass.com">michael.rundell@lexmasterclass.com</a><br>To: <a href="mailto:euralex@freelists.org">euralex@freelists.org</a><br>CC: <a href="mailto:braasch@hum.ku.dk">braasch@hum.ku.dk</a>; <a href="mailto:krek.simon@gmail.com">krek.simon@gmail.com</a>; <a href="mailto:gillesmaurice.deschryver@UGent.be">gillesmaurice.deschryver@UGent.be</a>; <a href="mailto:S.Bullon@macmillan.com">S.Bullon@macmillan.com</a><br>Subject: [euralex] Macmillan's recent announcement<br>Date: Tue, 6 Nov 2012 15:32:21 +0000<o:p></o:p></p><div><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"'>I thought it was time I waded into this debate. Thanks to everyone who has contributed so many interesting and pertinent points. Much of what I have to say on the subject has already been said more eloquently by people like Gilles-Maurice de Schryver, Simon Krek, and Anna Braasch, and my colleague Stephen Bullon, but i'll put my two cents in anyway.</span><o:p></o:p></p></div><div><p class=MsoNormal> <o:p></o:p></p></div><div><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"'>I think the arguments against abandoning print fall into two main categories, practical and cultural/emotional.</span><o:p></o:p></p></div><div><p class=MsoNormal> <o:p></o:p></p></div><div><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"'>The practical argument is that not everyone in the world enjoys good (or even any) web connectivity. True (though becoming less true all the time). As any publisher would, Macmillan took soundings from its sales people worldwide to gauge future demand for print dictionaries (which of course varies wildly from place to place). The current, final print run takes account of these forecasts, and means we'll be able to satisfy that demand for some time to come. Another model (which we have already applied in a few cases) is that a local publishing partner can produce locally-printed versions of our dictionaries under licence: an elegant and efficient approach for which there may continue to be some demand over the next few years. But the process of digitization is unstoppable - surely we all believe that? - and we see these measures as contingencies, to respond to a <em><span style='font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"'>transitional</span></em> situation. (An aside: I seem to remember Sarah Ogilvie, in a plenary on endangered languages at Euralex 2010, mentioning that in remote areas of Western Australia, aboriginal people took advantage of the satellite technology installed by mining companies there, and all had mobile phones with bilingual dictionaries on them. So even thousands of miles from big cities, digital dictionaries are by no means 'exotic'.)</span><o:p></o:p></p></div><div><p class=MsoNormal> <o:p></o:p></p></div><div><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"'>This doesn't mean paper dictionaries will disappear any time soon: rather that, like vinyl LPs (as we used to call them) they will be more of a niche. There are many languages in the world that haven't yet benefited from the last big lexicographic revolution - the 'corpus revolution' that began in the 1980s - and publishers like Ilan Kernerman have provided excellent resources for what we (reluctantly) refer to as 'smaller' languages. But Macmillan produces dictionaries of English, and that most definitely is not a niche.</span><o:p></o:p></p></div><div><p class=MsoNormal> <o:p></o:p></p></div><div><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"'>The second argument, roughly, is that we all like delving into physical books, and printed dictionaries offer serendipitous discoveries as we idly browse them. Well, up to a point. But as Anna put it, 'most people are not lexicographers or lovers of words, for them a dictionary is just a tool'. The primary market for Macmillan's pedagogical dictionaries consists either of learners of English or people whose first language isn't English but who need to use English in their professional or academic lives (an enormous group). This cohort is predominantly young, and many are digital natives. The odds of a 19-year-old Korean undergraduate taking a paper dictionary down from a shelf in order to resolve a reference query are, like it or not, vanishingly long, and getting longer. Of course, I too appreciate the joys of browsing a dictionary, but<em><span style='font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"'> </span></em>then I am (a) in my sixties and (b) a lexicographer. </span><o:p></o:p></p></div><div><p class=MsoNormal> <o:p></o:p></p></div><div><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"'>Besides, as Simon noted, there are plenty of browsing opportunities in electronic reference materials. In Macmillan's online dictionary you can (a) click on any word in a definition or example sentence and go straight to the entry for that word; (b) click on the 'T' thesaurus button at any word, phrase or <em><span style='font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"'>word sense</span></em> and have access to relevant thesaurus data; (c) scroll down the pane to the right of the entry showing 'Related definitions' (thus at the noun 'box' you could also, instantly, look up entries such as box in, inbox, box room, box someone's ears, or think outside the box). </span><o:p></o:p></p></div><div><p class=MsoNormal> <o:p></o:p></p></div><div><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"'>There are winners and losers, upsides and downsides, whenever things change. But do we want to be like those people who wrote angry letters to the Times when motorized transport first came to London at the beginning of the last century, asking about the future employment prospects for people who made their living by clearing the horse manure from the streets (I am not making this up). As far as Macmillan is concerned, better to embrace a future that will come anyway, than to hang grimly on to a way of doing things whose time is passing. And the advantages of digital over paper are so great, and the opportunities this medium offers are only beginning to be exploited.</span><o:p></o:p></p></div><div><p class=MsoNormal> <o:p></o:p></p></div><div><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"'>And by the way, how would today's exchange of views have worked if we'd all stuck to quill pens and the postal service?</span><o:p></o:p></p></div><div><p class=MsoNormal> <o:p></o:p></p></div><div><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"'>Michael Rundell</span><o:p></o:p></p></div><div><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"'>Editor-in-Chief</span><o:p></o:p></p></div><div><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"'>Macmillan Dictionaries</span><o:p></o:p></p></div></div></div></blockquote><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><div><p class=MsoNormal>-- <o:p></o:p></p><p><b><span style='font-size:10.5pt;font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"'><br><strong><span style='font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"'>Professor Geoffrey WILLIAMS. MSc, PhD </span></strong></span></b><i><span style='font-size:10.5pt;font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"'><br><span class=style61>Director of Department for Document Management, Directeur du Département d'Ingénierie du document</span><br><span class=style61>LiCoRN - HCTI : <a href="http://www.licorn-ubs.com">www.licorn-ubs.com</a> / <a href="http://www.evalhum.eu">www.evalhum.eu</a> </span></span></i><span style='font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"'><br><span class=style11>------------------------------------------------------------------------</span><br></span><span class=style51><span style='font-size:9.0pt;font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"'><a href="mailto:geoffrey.williams@univ-ubs.fr">geoffrey.williams@univ-ubs.fr</a> </span></span><span style='font-size:9.0pt;font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"'><br><span class=style51>tél. +33 (0)2 97 87 29 20 - fax. +33 (0)2 97 87 29 31 </span><br><span class=style51>Faculté de Lettres Langues Sciences Humaines </span><br><span class=style51>et Sociales (LSHS) </span><br><span class=style51>4 rue Jean Zay </span><br><span class=style51>BP92113, 56321 LORIENT CEDEX</span><br><span class=style51>UNIVERSITÉ DE BRETAGNE-SUD </span><br><span class=style51><a href="http://www.univ-ubs.fr">www.univ-ubs.fr</a> / <a href="http://www.licorn.com">www.licorn.com</a></span></span><o:p></o:p></p><div class=MsoNormal align=center style='text-align:center'><hr size=2 width="100%" align=center></div><p>New Book: European Identity: What the media say. Paul Bayley and Geoffrey Williams (eds). Oxford: OUP<br><a href="http://ukcatalogue.oup.com/product/9780199602308.do">http://ukcatalogue.oup.com/product/9780199602308.do</a><o:p></o:p></p><p><o:p> </o:p></p><p><a href="http://www.univ-ubs.fr/" target="_blank"><br></a><o:p></o:p></p></div></div>
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