大學英語自學教程(上冊) unit 12 詞典是如何編纂的
12-A. How Dictionaries Are Made
It is widely believed that every word has a correct meaning, that we learn these meanings mainly from teachers and grammarians, and that dictionaries and grammars are the supreme authority in matters of meaning and usage. Few people ask by what authority the writers of dictionaries and grammars say what they say. I once got into a dispute with an English woman over the pronunciation of a word and offered to look it up in the dictionary. The English woman said firmly, “What for? I am English. I was born and brought up in England. The way I speak is English.” Such self-assurance about one’s own language is fairly common among the English. In the United States, however, anyone who is willing to quarrel with the dictionary is regarded as either eccentric or mad.
Let us see how dictionaries are made and how the editors arrive at definitions. What follows applies only to those dictionary offices where first-hand, original research goes on - not those in which editors simply copy existing dictionaries. The task of writing a dictionary begins with the reading of vast amounts of the literature of the period or subject that the dictionary is to cover. As the editors read, they copy on cards every interesting or rare word, every unusual or peculiar occurrence of a common word, a large number of common words in their ordinary uses, and also the sentences in which each of these words appears.
That is to say, the context of each word is collected, along with the word itself. For a really big job of dictionary writing, such as the Oxford English Dictionary, millions of such cards are collected, and the task of editing occupies decades. As the cards are collected, they are alphabetized and sorted. When the sorting is completed, there will be for each word anywhere from two or three to several hundred quotations, each on its card.
To define a word, then, the dictionary editor places before him the stack of cards illustrating that word; each of the cards represents an actual use of the word by a writer of some literary or historical importance. He reads the cards carefully, discards some, re-reads the rest, and divides up the stack according to what he thinks are the several senses of the word. Finally, he writes his definitions, following the hard-and-fast rule that each definition must be based on what the quotations in front of him reveal about the meaning of the word. The editor cannot be influenced by what he thinks a given word ought to mean. He must work according to the cards, or not at all.
The writing of a dictionary, therefore, is not a task of setting up authoritative statements about the "true meanings" of words, but a task of recording, to the best of one's ability, what various words have meant to authors in the distant or immediate past. If, for example, we had been writing a dictionary in 1890, or even as late as l919, we could have said that the word "broadcast" means "to scatter" (seed, for example), but we could not have stated that from 1921 on, the most common meaning of the word should become “to send out programs by radio or television.” In choosing our words when we Speak or write, we can be guided by the historical record provided us by the dictionary, but we cannot be bound by it, because new situations, new experiences, new inventions, new feelings, are always forcing us to give new uses to old words. Looking under a “hood,” we should ordinarily have found, five hundred years ago, a monk; today, we find a car engine.
【課文譯文】
詞典是如何編纂的
人們普遍認為每個詞都有它正確的含義，這些含義我們主要是從老師和語法學家那裡學來的 ，而且詞典和語法在釋義和講解用法方面是絕對的權威。很少有人會問詞典和語法書的編者又是根據什麼權威來說那些話的。一次我和一位英國婦女就一個詞的發音發生了爭執，我提出查查詞典。這位英國婦女固執地說：“查詞典有什麼用?我是英國人，我生在英國，長在英國，我說的是地道的英語”。這種對母語的自信在英國人中相當普遍。但在美國，如果有人想跟詞典爭個對錯，那他不是行為古怪，就是精神有問題。
讓我們來看一下詞典是如何編寫的，編輯們又是如何給詞下定義的。下面的過程不適用於那些簡單地照抄現有詞典的人而適合於那些詞典編輯部的編輯們，他們利用第一手資料，進行最基本的研究。編寫字典之初要閱讀大量的同時代的.文學作品或者詞典要包括的學科內容。編輯們在閱讀時，會把有趣的和少見的詞，常用詞的不常見及特有的用法及許多常用詞的一般用法抄在卡片上，同時也抄下含有這些詞的原句。
這也就是說，每個單詞都是與這個詞的上下文是一起收集的。詞典編輯是一項非常巨大的工作。例如《牛津英語詞典》的編輯們就收集了數百萬張卡片，編輯工作歷經數十年。卡片收集完成後，按字母順序進行分類。分類完成後，每個詞將有數目在兩三個到幾百個之間的引語(作為例句)，每句引語均寫在其卡片上。
然後是給詞下定義。詞典的編輯面對一堆解釋該詞的卡片，每張卡片代表著某個文學流派作家或歷史要人對該詞的應用。他認真地閱讀這些卡片，刪掉一些，重新閱讀其他部分，然後按照他認為屬於這個詞的幾個意思把這堆卡片再分類。最後，他按照“嚴格”的原則即給每個詞下定義必須根據他面前的引語所表達的這個詞的意思來寫出詞的定義。編輯不能受他認為某個詞應該是什麼意思的影響。他必須依據卡片編輯，否則的話就徒勞無益。
因此，詞典的編寫不是一項確定某個詞“真正含義”的權威性評述的工作，而是一項記錄工作，是盡編輯所能，記錄下對於古代或現代作家來說這些詞所表達的含義。例如，我們是在1890，或者是1919編寫一部詞典，我們可以說單詞“broadcast”的意思是“播撒”(種子)。但如果我們是1921年或者在這之後編寫詞典，就不能那樣寫。這個詞最常見的意思變成了“通過廣播電視傳播節目”。當我們說話或寫作選詞時，我們可以用詞典提供給我們的歷史記錄作指導，但決不能被束縛住，因為新形勢、新經歷、新發明、新感覺總是迫使我們創造新詞來代替舊詞。查一下“hood”這個詞，我們會發現，500年前該詞條下的意思是“修道士”，而今天，它的意思卻是“汽車發動機”。
