BENEMERITA Y CENTENARIA ESCUELA NORMAL DEL ESTADO
Major in Junior High School with an English Specialty.
L.L.I Ricardo Muñoz Ovalle.
Lluvia Torres Chávez
Evaluation
File 23
Dictionaries and Word Histories
What is the historical meaning of a dictionary and its content?
Nowadays dictionaries are the most common educational tools when you are trying to
get the meaning of a specific word in your own language or in a different one.
Dictionaries have transcended during the years as one of the most useful and viable
consult tools. But are these types of texts simple containers of meanings?
More than that we can find that dictionaries contain de history o a set of changes,
transcendental and fundamentally necessary to the development of our knowledge.
These changes (semantic, syntaxes, morphological) could possibly emerge from the
cultural, political or ideological conceptions of a specific period of time, and then
they persisted in some way.
The meaning and currently use of a determined word might represent the influences
and ideas of a society, maybe it is something we do not reflect all the time, we do not
imagine all the historical background that a word could have.
It is possible that a modern dictionary does not contain words or meanings as they
used to be, as the professor Seth Lerer illustrated in his lectures about The History of
the English Language, the way in which the words itself change meaning with the
past of the time and this at the same time provides an overview to the politics of
BENEMERITA Y CENTENARIA ESCUELA NORMAL DEL ESTADO
Major in Junior High School with an English Specialty.
L.L.I Ricardo Muñoz Ovalle.
Lluvia Torres Chávez
Evaluation
lexicography and the perception of the modern dictionary. A reflection that I really
enjoy from Professor Lerer was the following one.- “Dictionaries are not simply
objective or empirical recorders of meaning. They are narrative documents imbued
with the politics of nationhood and identity, concerned with describing—but
invariably prescribing—language. Further, they are documents that are enmeshed in
their own histories”.
How certain words change their meaning and they will probably change
meaning in the future?
Linguists and experts tend to shy away from offering explanations for why particular
changes have happened but currently we can find several studies and works of
linguistic theory and the history of language and we can clearly find that the semantic
changes of many words are closely related to; social pressure, the anatomy of the
mouth, contact among languages, and so on. We can document such changes in great
detail, and of course all the causes are invariably debatable.
According to the professor Lerer, -“the first of these principles involves the
relationship of ambiguity and limitation: If a word or form has two meanings so
incompatible that they cause ambiguity, one of the meanings dies out, or more rarely,
the form itself becomes obsolete. Homonymy and polysemy are subheadings in this
category”... He clearly states how individuals might not use certain words together to
avoid homonymy that is each of two or more words having the same spelling but
BENEMERITA Y CENTENARIA ESCUELA NORMAL DEL ESTADO
Major in Junior High School with an English Specialty.
L.L.I Ricardo Muñoz Ovalle.
Lluvia Torres Chávez
Evaluation
different meanings and origins a homograph, this could be a difficulty when
establishing meanings and uses of these words specifically. Very similar is the term
polysemy that refers to the coexistence of many possible meanings for a word or
phrase, definitely, being a linguist can be really hard and give you more than one
headache. In his lectures about The History of the English Language, Professor Lerer
gives a simple example of polysemy with the meaning of the word “uncouth ”which
is “unknown” he moves from a particular condition to a description grounded in that
condition. Something that is unknown becomes alien, strange, weird, rugged, rough,
and finally, uncultured, he mentioned we tend to exclude the word when we realize
about its meaning and depending on the circumstance and the contexts in which we
pretend to use that word. He also mentioned that another way in which words change
their meaning is through extension in lexis, in which metaphorical meanings or
figurative senses take over from older technical or literal meanings.
How do dictionaries reflect a hierarchy of meaning, and is this a problem?
When I first read this question a simple but common situation came to my mind, we
tend to take the first meaning that the dictionary offers to us when we are looking up
a word, even when those hierarchies of presented words do not reflect the actual uses
of that word in the actuality. As the Professor Lerer illustrated in his lectures, the use
of the contraction “ain´t”, experienced a shift in class; in other words, meanings and
usages might not change, but class affiliations or registers of meaning might. In a
clearly way he mentioned that in the 18th century, “ain’t” was used by polite society,
BENEMERITA Y CENTENARIA ESCUELA NORMAL DEL ESTADO
Major in Junior High School with an English Specialty.
L.L.I Ricardo Muñoz Ovalle.
Lluvia Torres Chávez
Evaluation
frequently in the form of ant; the OED considers ain’t a “later and more illiterate
form of ant.” And nowadays we possibly think that is a contraction coming from
suburban slang.
Unquestionably the use of the dictionary have transcended numerous periods of time
and without a doubt its use will be in a constant process of transformation exactly as
its content, we might think twice in the way we use words now because tomorrow
may refer two or three more concepts or in its worst case wont exist anymore.