The 2008 Laurence Urdang-DSNA Award

The Laurence Urdang–DSNA Award winner for 2008 is Traci Nagle, a Ph.D. student at Indiana University, Bloomington, for her project, "The Making of the Hobson-Jobson." The subtitle for Hobson-Jobson is A Glossary of Colloquial Anglo-Indian Words and Phrases, and of Kindred Terms, Etymological, Historical, Geographical, and Discursive. Dated 1886/1903, this work provides remarkable insight into the entry of Indian words into English, through the speech of British officers in colonial India.

[Update] Ms. Nagle used the award to fund two weeks of archival research in Scotland and England in June–July 2008. During her stay she was able to examine documents related to the 1886 Anglo-Indian glossary Hobson-Jobson and to its primary author, Sir Henry Yule, in the National Library of Scotland in Edinburgh, and in the British Library and the Royal Geographical Society in London. A side trip took her north of Loch Ness to the former home of Yule’s daughter, Amy. The home’s current owner has tracked down a wealth of information about Ms. Yule, but reported, sadly, that the personal papers of her and her father were most likely discarded in the 1960s by the University of Edinburgh. The 2009 DSNA meeting will feature the first product of this research trip: a paper offering new information gleaned from the publisher’s archives about the glossary’s unusual title.