FEATURE-Making sense of a world of English
(note offensive language in paras 18, 19)
By Mark Egan
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Have you ever arrived at a dinkum
Maori tangi in a jeepney feeling just a bit cack-handed? Ever
felt so hungry you would go to the black stump for a bangbelly?
Or have you ever felt bazodee at a toenadering?
Flummoxed? Perhaps a dictionary would help.
With almost 1 billion people worldwide speaking English --
some the queen's English, some pidgin English and many who are
still learning English -- a new dictionary tries to make sense
of the dizzying variations of what it calls world English.
Touted as the first all-new dictionary in more than 30
years, the Encarta World English Dictionary will arrive at
bookstores in August with the high hopes of being the
dictionary of choice for the new millennium.
In the age of e-mail and e-commerce, the tome can also
boast being the first dictionary ever printed simultaneously on
paper -- in the United States by St. Martin's Press -- and
electronically on CD-ROM, by Microsoft Corp.
The brainchild of England's Bloomsbury Publishing Plc., the
idea was to create a dictionary that encompass the myriad
strands of English using simple language so users would not
need a dictionary to read it.
"No one has covered world English," U.S. General Editor
Anne Soukhanov told Reuters in an interview. "We believe what
we are doing here is taking the realm of dictionary-making and
lexicography one huge, giant step forward."
The 400,000-ntry dictionary is the first to contain world
English terminology. For example, the word hotel in the United
States means a place to stay overnight, in Australia it means a
bar, while in South Asia it means a restaurant.
For readers on the run, definitions of commonly used words
appear with a short bold-face definition. And being published
on CD-ROM is another first. "We have a whole generation of
young people coming along whose first choice will be to read on
the screen rather than turning the page," Soukhanov said.
EASTER EGGS AND WORMS
The Internet has been a major influence on the birth of
words in the 1990s, with thousands of new entries such as
Easter egg (a hidden element in a computer program), IMHO
(e-mail speak for in my humble opinion) and worm (an invasive
computer program) making it into the World English Dictionary.
"The confluence of technology, fast-changing lifestyles and
the existence of chat rooms and Web sites have influenced the
language," Soukhanov said. With 85 percent of Web pages in
English and the Internet spreading like wildfire across the
globe, a world dictionary was needed more than ever, she said.
Using the technology of the 1990s, the book was compiled by
320 editors in 20 countries around the world in just three
years -- a break-neck pace for a dictionary.
In the 1960s, when Soukhanov was a fledgling lexicographer,
dictionary-making was very different. Wizened men in Dickensian
offices scribbled queries on filing cards while clerks typed
citations on manual typewriters, creating mountains of paper.
The years-long ordeal would create so much paper that
storage rooms had to be reinforced so as not to buckle under
the weight. But all that was before the age of the computer.
The World English Dictionary was created without paper.
Editors worked on new software and communicated via e-mail.
Citations were found in a word corpus -- a massive computerized
citations vault containing some 50 million words.
"Five years ago this could not have been done," Soukhanov
said, referring to the first use of a word corpus. "This
renders the 3-by-5 citation slips that had been traditionally
used to the same level as the model-T Ford."
SLURS WITH STYLE
Another sign of the changing times is that the dictionary
is probably the most politically correct ever written.
Last year Merriam-Webster Inc. agreed to change the way it
defined the racial slur "nigger" ... |
