37.1564, Reviews: West meets East: Geoffrey Williams, Mathilde Le Meur, Andrés Echavarría Peláez (eds.) (2025)

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Subject: 37.1564, Reviews: West meets East: Geoffrey Williams, Mathilde Le Meur, Andrés Echavarría Peláez (eds.) (2025)

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Date: 26-Apr-2026
From: Lelija Socanac [lelijasocanac at gmail.com]
Subject: Lexicography: Geoffrey Williams, Mathilde Le Meur, Andrés Echavarría Peláez (eds.) (2025)


Book announced at https://linguistlist.org/issues/36-1785

Title: West meets East
Subtitle: Papers in historical lexicography and lexicology from across
the globe
Series Title: World Histories of Lexicography and Lexicology
Publication Year: 2025

Publisher: Language Science Press
           http://langsci-press.org
Book URL: https://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/458

Editor(s): Geoffrey Williams, Mathilde Le Meur, Andrés Echavarría
Peláez

Reviewer: Lelija Socanac

SUMMARY
This book is both a selection of papers from the International
Conference for Historical Lexicography and Lexicology (ISHLL) held in
Lorient, France in May 2022, and the first in a new book series
dedicated to the field. The new series is a result of collaboration
between two sister associations, International Society for Historical
Lexicography and Lexicology (ISHLL) and the Helsinki Society for
Historical Lexicography (HSHL). The volume contains texts in English
and French that provide insights into historical dictionaries, their
compilers and users based on evidence from numerous languages across
the globe. The chapters seek to provide a world perspective in the
scope of languages covered, moving from the  West to the East.  They
represent linguistic diversity through a variety of language
combinations.
The first chapter “On closure and its challenges: Examining the
editors’ proofs of OED1” by Lynda Mugglestone represents an entirely
new look at the genesis of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) using
the recently discovered final Editors’ Proofs that show the process of
closure in detail. Signed and dated, as well as richly annotated, they
offer a complex account of the final stages of the making of the OED,
documenting the working practices of different editors. Across the
proofs, the underlying dialectics of choice and change are made
visible, presenting the possibility of new forms of exegesis as well
as alternative histories that undercut the apparent certainties of the
published text.
In “Dictionaries in the web of Alexandra: On the dangerous fragility
of digital publication”, Daphne Preston-Kendal discusses long-term
access to data in a situation where a dictionary may be constantly
updated, but where no paper reference edition exists. Because there is
only one complete copy of the dictionary held on the publisher’s
servers, readers have no guarantee that the entry they load today will
have the same content as when they viewed it previously. The ability
to publish the most recent research immediately and perform ongoing
revision of a dictionary is a great benefit of digital publication,
but readers have no way to go back and see how an entry has been
revised and when. Moreover, if the publisher loses interest for
whatever reason, they may simply take the website offline, at which
point nobody can use the dictionary anymore and it becomes effectively
lost to history. Market forces and changing institutional interests
can also pose a danger to the long-term accessibility of dictionaries
under the centralized digital publication model. Moreover, in this
model the dictionary may become vulnerable to political attacks. An
alternative model for digital publication of scholarly work is also
analyzed, according to which, if a project closes down or becomes
unavailable, its users gain the further right to re-host the entire
publication on a public website to ensure that general access to the
text remains available. The conclusion is that we must save our
dictionaries from the ‘Web of Alexandria’, a disastrous loss of
knowledge caused by the failure to make and distribute duplicate
copies of works which were held in one central location (Victor 2015).
“A dictionary of the languages of medieval England: Issues and
implications” by Gloria Mambelli deals with the complex issue of
triglossia through the analysis of three historical dictionaries of
English: the Middle English Dictionary (MED), the Anglo-Norman
Dictionary (AND), and the Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British
Sources (DMLBS). The author looks at a situation where a literate
medieval Englishman had to master his variety of English in addition
to Anglo-Norman, the language of the court, and Latin, the language of
the church, law and administration. Middle English, Anglo-French and
Latin showed mutual borrowing and shared lexis as a result of
multilingual practices, which makes them difficult to handle from a
lexicographic perspective. Starting from the assumption that
“monolingual lexicography in a multilingual environment does not work”
(Trotter 2000: 4), the author analyses the treatment of these
languages in the three major historical dictionaries where the same
word is recorded in different historical dictionaries, although in
different forms, since spelling was not standardized at the time. From
a lexical viewpoint attempts at a clear distinction of language
identity is futile, for such distinctions were blurred in medieval
England (Hunt 2011: 64). We cannot assume that what is perceived as
separate now, after centuries of standardization, was regarded as
separate or separable in the Middle Ages. Rather, it can be assumed
that medieval speakers might not have been aware of language
boundaries. The author advocates the compilation of a multilingual
dictionary, which could provide a more accurate perspective on the
linguistic situation of the time.  The aim of the contribution is to
encourage further research on the possible ways to reproduce the
fuzziness of language boundaries in the post-Conquest period.
“The treatment of English high-frequency verbs in the ‘Promptorium
Parvulorum’ (1440)” by Kusujiro Miyoshi deals with the work of the
medieval monk and grammarian Galfridus Grammaticus, the probable
compiler of the first English-Latin dictionary, teaching children
literacy and Latin. The contents of the dictionary are available in
its modern reproduced version, which was published by the Early
English Text Society in 1908. The author concludes that the
‘Promptorium’, which was compiled as a ‘storehouse for children’ in
the 1440’s, three centuries before Johnson’s Dictionary, is the first
dictionary that treated quite a few high-frequency verbs,
distinguishing their senses, indicating their conjugated forms, and
listing their relevant idiomatic phrases.
In “Disattributing the ‘Encyclopédie’ article on ‘définition en
logique’ from Jean-Henri-Samuel Formey”, Alexander K. Bocast discusses
the issue of whether the ‘définition en logique’ in the great
Encyclopedia by d’Alembert and Diderot can be attributed to Formey, a
German pastor of French Huguenot origin, and concludes that Formey is
not the author of the article. When Formey did write on definition in
other places, he used Wolffian terms to invoke Wolffian concepts.
These are absent from the article on ‘définition en logique’, which
proves that he is not the author of this text.
The contribution “Project Cleveland” by Alenka Vrbinc, Donna Farina
and Marjeta Vrbinc looks at the lexicographical production of
Slovenian immigrants in the USA in the early 20th century. The paper
analyzes the macrostructure, with some glimpses at microstructure, of
six Slovenian-English, English-Slovenian dictionaries and reference
works targeted at the Slovenian immigrants who arrived before World
War I, in order to determine their role in the  language assimilation
of this immigrant community. There are important lessons to be learned
about how immigrant communities achieve integration through language
while maintaining their own cultural identity. The reference books
examined were published in very small print runs and are dispersed in
various libraries and archives. Not all have been digitalized and some
are in poor condition. Therefore, the authors conclude that their
study and preservation is of utmost importance.
In “The Incorporation of proper nouns of non-Slavic origin into the
16th-century Slovenian literary language,” Alenka Jelovšek shows how
proper nouns from other cultures, including those using different
scripts, were integrated into the Slovenian language. The author
analyzes proper names based on printed works published between 1550
and 1595. Their authors used various strategies for transferring
proper names of Latin, Germanic and Semitic origins into Slovenian. As
the Slovenian Protestants translated mainly Luther’s works, and some
also used Latin translations of the Bible, the use of proper names was
highly influenced by those languages. In some cases, proper names were
transferred in their original form, but generally they were at least
morphologically adapted. Lacking an established tradition, the
translators applied various strategies of transfer, which resulted in
a high degree of variation. The findings provide further insight into
issues of language borrowing and adaptation of loanwords, contributing
to Slovenian contact linguistics by including previously rarely
considered material.
The chapter entitled “Dictionnaires manuscrits dans l’histoire de la
lexicographie croate: Des recueils de mots aux trésors linguistiques
et cultureless” by Ivana Franić discusses the status of manuscript
dictionaries compiled in Dubrovnik between the end of the 16th and the
beginning of the 19th century. The author shows that manuscript
dictionaries, although they do not have the communication potential of
their published counterparts, represent an important link in the
development of lexicography. Only by comparing manuscript dictionaries
with published ones will it be possible to highlight the mutual
influences of models in lexicography, since each dictionary can be
considered as a sum of dictionaries that preceded it and a model for
dictionaries that follow.
The paper “Ėvaluer la dette: l’étendue de la presence de Richelet dans
le ‘Dictionnaire universel’ de Basnage (1701)” by Clarissa Stincone
discusses the second edition of the ‘Dictionnaire universel’ by
Antoine  Furetière (1690) which was revised and updated by Henri
Basnage de Beauval in 1701. Basnage introduced a number of
lexicographic elements that Furetière had not taken into account, such
as comments on orthography and pronunciation, quotations, indications
of domain, usage and frequency, notes on grammar such as verbal
inflections and syntactic constructions, as well as collocations.  In
this respect, he acknowledges his debt to ‘Dictionnaire de l’Académie
franҫaise’, but fails to give full justice to Richelet’s ‘Dictionnaire
franҫois’ (1693) for language and grammar related entries that he used
to a great extent in his work.  The aim of this paper is to assess the
extent to which Basnage drew inspiration from Richelet by analyzing
the common features of the two dictionaries, while seeking to
understand the reasons why Basnage neglected to refer to Richelet.
In  “De Félibien à Boutard: l’évolution du dictionnaire artistique
entre le XVIIème et le début du XIXème siècle” Rosa Cetro charts the
development of French art terminology from the 17th to the beginning
of the 19th century. The first lexicographic description of this
terminology was written by historiographer André Félibien (1619-1695).
The chapter aims to show the evolution of the art dictionary based on
a corpus of five monolingual French dictionaries covering a century
and a half (1676-1826). The evolution of this type of dictionary
reflects changing audiences from a restricted élite to a wider public.
The challenge faced by the authors is the extent of the fields
covered, ranging from architecture through painting and sculpture, to
music and poetry. The author analyzes the macrostructure and
microstructure of the dictionaries focusing on syntactic and semantic
categories, types of definitions, as well as indications of domain and
usage in comparing the five dictionaries.
Georgios (Yorgos) Kassiteridis discusses “La valeur pragmatique des
langues dites “orientales” dans le ‘Dictionnaire universel de Trévoux’
(1721)”.  A remarkable feature of the “Dictionnaire” is the increased
occurrence of words from non-European languages, such as Hebrew,
Arabic and Syriac, referred to as “oriental languages”.  The use of
“oriental languages” can be associated with the tradition of Critical
Biblical Studies which examines the Bible in a philological-historical
manner by comparing different textual versions written in various
languages. This 1721 edition demonstrates an increase in religious
terminology, but also reflects input from other fields such as
geography, botany and onomastics. The chapter aims to identify the
role of “oriental languages” in order to gain a better understanding
of the lexicographic tools and to capture the ideologies related to
these languages in the eighteenth century.
Agata Pawlina’s “Musical terms of Greek and Italian origin in Ottoman
Turkish lexicography” presents 64 musical terms of Greek and Italian
origin collected from ten Ottoman Turkish dictionaries dating from the
period  between the 17th and the 19th centuries. Italian loanwords
belong to New Ottoman Turkish and they were adopted during the initial
period of the Westernization of Turkish musical culture in the 19th
century. The Westernizing reforms are perfectly reflected in the
Ottoman Turkish lexicography of the period. On the other hand, musical
terms of Greek origin are far less numerous and they belong to the
oldest stratum of the language. In her analysis, the author uses a
sociocultural understanding of lexicography by seeing the
lexicographer as an active observer of the culture of the people who
use a particular language.
In “Exploring the unique method for encoding sinograms in the first
known Chinese-Polish dictionary”  Andrzej Swoboda analyzes the first
bilingual Chinese-Polish dictionary by Doman Wieluch dating from 1936.
The macrostructure and microstructure of the dictionary are outlined
and compared to other monolingual and bilingual dictionaries from
various periods. Wieluch’s encoding system which aimed at solving the
actual problems of contemporary non-native speakers and learners of
Chinese is analyzed in detail. Although it was inspired by some
earlier works of Western scholarship, it was the first method of
analyzing and transcribing sonograms to be applied in the creation of
a Chinese-Polish dictionary. Its groundbreaking character is clearly
indicated by the fact that the dictionary was written at a time when
no such publications existed. Today, however, both the dictionary and
its encoding system are largely forgotten. The encoding solutions
proposed may have been too complicated or too arbitrary, and the
system was not sufficiently popularized. However, it is important in
the history of Chinese-Polish lexicography.
The chapter on “Les travaux lexicographiques de Carlo da Castorano et
ses tentatives pour faire imprimer un dictionnaire européen de
chinois” by Mariarosaria Gianninoto and Michela Bussotti traces the
origins of dictionaries of Chinese by European missionaries between
the 16th and the 18th centuries. Castorano (1673-1755) was a
Franciscan who tried without success to publish a trilingual
Latin-Italian-Chinese dictionary. The chapter describes the
elaboration of this dictionary by situating it in the context of the
development of Sino-European lexicography. Chinese lexicographic
tradition is one of the oldest uninterrupted traditions in the world,
the first lexicographic works dating back to the 1st century BC. This
tradition is primarily represented by monolingual dictionaries. The
first Chinese dictionaries in the Western tradition were compiled by
missionaries at the end of the 16th century in Manilla and responded
to the need to learn Chinese. The challenges faced by the authors of
such dictionaries primarily involved the inclusion of a
non-alphabetical writing system and Chinese characters in dictionaries
based on the alphabetical order. Most of the dictionaries retained
both Chinese characters and their equivalents in the Latin script. A
special feature of Castorano’s dictionary is the inclusion of everyday
words as a result of his interest in spoken language, as opposed to
Chinese lexicography, which was based exclusively on written sources.
In spite of all his efforts, Castorano’s dictionary was never
published.
In her chapter on “The bilingual dictionary as a mediator between West
and East: The beginnings of English-Polish lexicography” Miroslawa
Podhajecka discusses the beginnings of English-Polish lexicographical
tradition focusing on the earliest manuscript dictionary compiled in
1799 by an anonymous author. At the time, English enjoyed very little
recognition in Poland, and only German, French and Latin were taught
at schools. The author’s lack of expertise was exhibited by leaving
many English words untranslated into Polish and by failing to employ
the full linguistic repertoire typical of an educated native speaker
of Polish. Unable to match English headwords with their Polish
equivalents, he resorted to bilingual dictionaries hoping to find
helpful solutions in French or in German.
The chapter on “Lexicon Lapponicum Bipartitum…ungarice scriptum:
Hungarian aspects of North Saami dictionary writing” by Ivett Keleman
describes the work of two astronomers: Maximilian Hell (1720-1792) and
János Sajnovics (1733-1792), who travelled to the island of Vardø to
observe the transit of Venus, and who discovered at the same time the
affinities between Saami and Hungarian. The author analyzes their work
on a dictionary using Hungarian spelling conventions and complementing
the entries with Hungarian data. Sajnovics’s publication on the
linguistic affinity between Hungarian and Saami languages is
considered one of the fundamental works of Finno-Ugric studies and
comparative linguistics today. The manuscript of the dictionary,
however, disappeared without a trace
In his chapter on “Les examples dans les dictionnaires
franҫais-hongrois à travers les siècles” Gábor Tillinger analyzes the
structure of French-Hungarian dictionaries starting from 1844. He then
traces the choice of examples and points to the particularities
encountered in comparing two very different language structures.
Covering the period between 1844 and 2007, examples show different
socio-cultural contexts. The analysis also includes a comparison with
other bilingual dictionaries having French as the source language.
In her chapter entitled “Sul finir d’imparare la Grammatica Francese,
fa d’uopo studiar il Dizionario delle Frasi”: Deux recueils
phraséologiques bilingues franco-italiens de la première moitié du 19e
siècle”, Michela Murano analyzes two French-Italian phraseological
dictionaries published in Naples in the first half of the 19th
century. Their authors believe that knowing phraseology is
complementary to the study of grammar and is indispensable to
perfecting the knowledge of French.  The chapter presents the macro
and micro structures of the dictionaries, which contain lessons for
current practice.
The chapter “Lexicon of Oriental Words in Ancient Greek” by Rafal
Rosól covers two millennia of the history of Greek, i.e. the lexis
dating from a time between the Mycenaean period to the 6th century AD.
The languages covered reflect the incredible melting pot of
civilizations in the Middle East up to the end of the Roman Empire.
The aim of the chapter is to present the Lexicon which is currently
being prepared in both electronic and book form. The Lexicon will
contain common words that derive from Anatolian, Armenian,
Austroasiatic, Cushitic, Dravidian, Egyptian, Hurro-Urartian,
Indo-Aryan, Iranian, Kartvelian, Phrygian, Semitic, Sino-Tibetan and
other Eastern languages. It will also include vocabulary of uncertain
provenance.
The final chapter, “The discovery of a Russian-Tajik dictionary” by
Abdusalom Mamadnazarov and Bahriddin Navruzshoev analyzes the
peculiarities of the Russian-Tajik Dictionary (RTD) by Sh.
Khatymtayev, published in 1899, and recently discovered in the library
of the Tajik National Academy of Sciences. The analysis is carried out
on the basis of a single preserved copy. The RTD is a thematic
dictionary which contains 1370 entries divided into 49 topics. The
dictionary suffers from serious deficiencies, mainly because it fails
to arrange either the topics or the headwords inside the topics in the
alphabetical, or any other systematic order. The dictionary contains
the vocabulary of the Russian and Tajik languages of its time and is
of interest as a historical, lexical and dialectological record of
these languages in general, as well as of the Bukhara region and
colloquial speech in particular.
EVALUATION
The book contains contributions that provide insights into historical
dictionaries, their compilers and users using evidence from numerous
languages and historical periods. It provides an excellent overview of
the field, and it offers a collection of articles that are
interesting, informative, and well written. The editors have
successfully presented the current trends in the field of historical
lexicography by putting together a series of papers that analyze
historical dictionaries of languages from across the world, literally
moving from West to East and representing a linguistic diversity
through a variety of language combinations. In my view, a special
merit of the book is that it includes discussions on historical
dictionaries of lesser known languages (e.g. Saami, Tajik) and
language combinations (e.g. Chinese-Polish).  The contributions show
that historical lexicography and lexicology are vibrant, dynamic
disciplines that allow us to better understand the development of
these disciplines reflecting contacts between very different languages
and cultures. Overall, this is a highly interesting, well-researched
and well-edited book, which will be of interest to anyone interested
in lexicography and lexicology in their historical and cultural
dimensions. As the first volume in the series on “World Histories of
Lexicography and Lexicology”, the book opens up great potential for
future research.
REFERENCES
Hunt, Tony. 2011. The languages of medieval England. In Michael
Baldzuhn & Christine Putzo (eds.). Mehrsprachigkeit im Mittelalter,
59-68. Berlin: De Gruyter.
Trotter, David. 2000. Multilingualism in later medieval Britain.
Cambridge: D.S, Brewer.
Victor, Bret. 2015. The Web of Alexandria. http:
//worrydream.com/TheWebOfAlexandria (14 May, 2023)
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Prof. Dr. Lelija Socanac is a retired professor at the University of
Zagreb, Croatia. She was the head of the Center for Language and Law
at the Faculty of Law, Zagreb (2006-2021). She coordinated several
international and national projects, and has authored and co-authored
numerous publications. Her research interests include legal
linguistics, historical sociolinguistics, historical lexicography and
lexicology, language policy and planning, (critical) discourse
analysis, contact linguistics and multilingualism.



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