Early American "Rosetta Stone"

A fascinating article in National Geographic reports on attempts to decipher a slate found at the 400-year old site in Virginia. Researchers speculate that it may be a kind of lexicon, of English and Algonquian. The article includes a link to the interactive site on colonial Jamestown, one of the best historical sites on the web (that's your editor speaking, not National Geographic). Check it out: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/01/100113-jamestown-tablet-slate-american-rosetta-stone/

The Lexicographer's Dilemma

Jack Lynch's new book on the prescriptivist v. descriptivist schools of language description, The Lexicographer's Dilemma, gets an enthusiastic review from the Washington Post: http://tinyurl.com/yj86rod. And it gets a positive mention from the Boston Globe, http://tinyurl.com/ybw2kck
in a listing of new language books for the holidays.

Gnothi Seauton by Samuel Johnson

We'll continue our celebration of the great Cham's 300th birthday (coming up on Friday!) with a link to Johnson's poem, translated into English. All practising lexicographers should read it, and probably tack a copy over their desks. Here's the peroration:

What then remains? Must I, in slow decline,
To mute inglorious ease old age resign?
Or, bold ambition kindling in my breast,
Attempt some arduous task? Or, were it best,
Brooding o'er lexicons to pass the day,
And in that labour drudge my life away?

For the rest of the poem and a good contextualizing essay, see Carol Rumens' column in the Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2009/sep/14/poem-week-dr-johnson.

Dictionaries in Early Modern Europe

A new book from Cambridge University Press, John Considine's Dictionaries in Early Modern Europe: Lexicography and the Making of Heritage, has been favorably reviewed by Adam Smith in the Times Literary Supplement for 26 June 2009: 32-33. Considine's work draws on published and archival material to survey a wide range of dictionaries of western European languages (including English, German, Latin and Greek) published between the early sixteenth and mid-seventeenth centuries. Sorry, I couldn't find a link to this particular review in Times Online.