[Lexicog] RE: [euralex] Re: Macmillan's recent announcement

Thu Nov 8 19:55:22 UTC 2012

Thanks, Geoffrey. Yours is prose!

> it downgrades the dictionary to being a simple database

That’s exactly what we should stop doing: the future is far more than that.

> it is a pity to reduce all lexicography to learner's dictionaries and
techie ambitions

True, we need new frameworks in which new types of data can be produced in
the first place. Here’s an interesting avenue: http://deb.fi.muni.cz/pdev/

All best,

Gilles-Maurice.

From: WILLIAMS Geoffrey [mailto:williams at univ-ubs.fr] 
Sent: woensdag 7 november 2012 9:59
To: claire_needler at hotmail.com
Cc: michael.rundell at lexmasterclass.com; euralex at freelists.org;
braasch at hum.ku.dk; krek.simon at gmail.com; gillesmaurice.deschryver at ugent.be;
s.bullon at macmillan.com
Subject: Re: [euralex] Re: Macmillan's recent announcement

Dear All,

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Real debate is interesting, but it is about how we value language.

Now I get back to work, my computer needs me. ;-) 

Best

Geoffrey

Le 06/11/2012 21:57, Claire Needler a écrit :

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?

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.

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.

Claire Needler
Once upon a time a lexicographer, because it was what I wanted to do more
than anything in the world.

  _____  

From: michael.rundell at lexmasterclass.com
To: euralex at freelists.org
CC: braasch at hum.ku.dk; krek.simon at gmail.com;
gillesmaurice.deschryver at UGent.be; S.Bullon at macmillan.com
Subject: [euralex] Macmillan's recent announcement
Date: Tue, 6 Nov 2012 15:32:21 +0000

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.

I think the arguments against abandoning print fall into two main
categories, practical and cultural/emotional.

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
transitional 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'.)

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.

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 then I am (a) in my sixties and (b) a
lexicographer. 

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 word sense 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). 

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.

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?

Michael Rundell

Editor-in-Chief

Macmillan Dictionaries

-- 

Professor Geoffrey WILLIAMS. MSc, PhD 
Director of Department for Document Management, Directeur du Département
d'Ingénierie du document
LiCoRN - HCTI : www.licorn-ubs.com / www.evalhum.eu 
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4 rue Jean Zay 
BP92113, 56321 LORIENT CEDEX
UNIVERSITÉ DE BRETAGNE-SUD 
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  _____  

New Book: European Identity: What the media say. Paul Bayley and Geoffrey
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