In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

SURVEY OF THE READING PROGRAM OF THE MIDDLE ENGLISH DICTIONAR Y David Jost The work of a project such as the Middle English Dictionary is carried on quietly year after year in seeming isolation from commercial and academic pressures. The quietness and the geological time spans of such projects obscure the shape of what is passing within their semicloistered walls. The outside world, for example, has little idea of what pressures lexicographers face on such projects, such as those of time, space; and money met by Sir James Murray in doing the OED. More pertinent to what I have to say is the fact that even lexicographers do not always realize fully what gains for lexicography and for the pursuit of knowledge are being made by such projects. In the case of the MED the fruits of the editors' labors, the fascicules, appear regularly, and these gains are duly registered. I refer rather to the less publicly known accomplishments, such as the procedures used and goals set, for example, in the reading program of the MED, my topic for this paper. One remedy for this lack of information is the writing of papers and articles such as this one, which formulate the goals and procedures of such entities as reading programs so as to make them available for the use of other lexicographers. After nine years of service on the Middle English Dictionary and several months of research, I still consider myself an apprentice in its ways. What I have to say here about the reading program must be somewhat tentative. But I have read in the historical materials of the Dictionary and interviewed some of those who participated in the reading program over the years of the project to the extent that I am able in this paper to provide a blueprint for the study of the reading program. As must any historical dictionary, the MED bases its definitions and form sections on a large body of quotations that have been extracted from texts extant for the period it covers. In the body of the dictionary the citations that confirm 201 202The Reading Program of the MED and illustrate definitions and forms come from this same large body of quotations. The process by which these quotations are gathered is known as the reading program. To the casual observer the only evidence of the massive labor that has gone into the gathering of these quotations is row upon row of file cabinets containing shoe boxes of alphabetically arranged citations. The MED has over 3,000,000 such citations. What has determined that this number of quotations exists in these cabinets and that these particular citations and not others reside there? To answer these questions we must understand the scope of the reading program and its methods. Scope refers to the breadth of the efforts of the reading program: what chronological period is covered, what language, what body of texts, and within each text what materials are to be extracted. The chronological and language criteria seem obvious from the title of the work, Middle English Dictionary. Closer investigation reveals that the term Middle English requires careful definition if it is to be used as a guide in deciding whether a given text or word is indeed Middle English. The years 1100 and 1500 are the rough boundaries of Middle English as far as the MED is concerned. But some early texts that fall within this period are not read because the English in them has been considered Old English, while others falling in the period that appear to be copies of OE texts are read. Sherman Kuhn, the editor of the MED from 1961 to 1983, has addressed the question of how one should deal with texts from this transition period: It would seem . . . logical ... to have readers for two dictionaries, an OE and a ME, working simultaneously, the one excerpting only the "OE words," the other only the "ME words." But the striving after an appearance of logic . . . can create new problems for the lexicographer, who must deal with the work of scribes who were neither trained in logic nor aware of modern historical linguistics. David Jost203 The practical approach...

pdf

Share