[euralex] Re: End of print dictionaries at Macmillan
- From: "Dr. Nazih Kassis" <nazih@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <michael.rundell@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, 'José Aguirre' <jaguirreuk@xxxxxxxxx>, <euralex@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>, <gillesmaurice.deschryver@xxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 9 Nov 2012 10:23:38 +0200
Dear All,
Change and development is inevitable in our progressive world! There is no harm
in having digital dictionaries online! They will be available all over the
world simultaneously on the Internet. Our students in the future will be happy
to have them, as they will be available to them (on their mobile) wherever and
whenever they need them. Bilingual and multilingual dictionaries will be also
available. I suppose all the information in the present paper dictionaries will
be uploaded also online! The user will have access to any dictionary in
seconds! At home, we will have them on our computers! They are friendly and do
not cause strain to the eyes (as we can enlarge fonts!), while paper
dictionaries are in small script, which is tiresome!
The only worrying thing is if these dictionaries will be available through paid
subscription or free of charge! The students buy a paper dictionary once in a
few years, but they will have to pay for subscription to more than one
dictionary every year, which will be very expensive to them!
Don't worry! Be happy to have digital dictionaries online, if they are free of
charge!
Dr Nazih Kassis, lexicographer,
The Academic Arab College for Education,
Haifa,
Israel
+ 972 4 9884843
+ 972 507 665668
From: euralex-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:euralex-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On
Behalf Of Michael Rundell
Sent: Thursday, November 08, 2012 4:45 PM
To: José Aguirre; euralex@xxxxxxxxxxxxx; gillesmaurice.deschryver@xxxxxxxx
Subject: [euralex] Re: End of print dictionaries at Macmillan
Dear All
I don't think there's much to be gained by making a point-by-point response to
Jose Aguirre's lengthy denunciation of Macmillan, but I need to comment on one
of his assertions:
>>Sorry, but the one thing the Internet could do without is one more blog on
>>language issues full of trendy words but no real substance.>>
Unfortunately he fails to refer to the blog itself
(http://www.macmillandictionaryblog.com/), so I'd like to come to the defence
of the 100-plus writers who have made such interesting contributions to it over
the years. We have been fortunate to have exellent posts from people such as
David Crystal, John Wells, Stan Carey, Robert Laine Greene of the Economist,
Jeremy Harmer, and Vicki Hollett. The blog features regular articles on
developments in language technology (from well-known figures such as Adam
Kilgarriff and Paul Cook) or pragmatics (see e.g. the piece by Simon Williams
and Jules Winchester on corporate apologies). An excellent recent series is
Gill Francis's posts on unexpected developments in English grammar (Gill is a
well-known grammarian, of course:
http://www.macmillandictionaryblog.com/author/gill-francis). There is also a
regular series on common errors, drawing on learner-corpus research done by
Sylviane Granger and her colleagues in Louvain.
I imagine these people would be a little offended to see their posts written
off as 'of no real substance'. But - as with any material provided free on the
web (there are no ads on our blog by the way) - if Mr Aguirre and his students
don't find anything here that interests them, then of course they are free to
ignore it.
all best
Michael
----- Original Message -----
From: José Aguirre <mailto:jaguirreuk@xxxxxxxxx>
To: euralex@xxxxxxxxxxxxx ; gillesmaurice.deschryver@xxxxxxxx ; Michael Rundell
<mailto:michael.rundell@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Wednesday, November 07, 2012 1:57 PM
Subject: Re: [euralex] Re: End of print dictionaries at Macmillan
I'd like to reply to some of Michael Rundell's arguments in favour of the
online dictionaries.
First, as for web connectivity, Wikipedia, quoting the International
Telecommunications Union, states that in 2011 65% of the world population "Not
using the Internet" as opposed to 35% "Using the Internet".
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_access]. I.e., roughly two thirds of the
world don't access the web. By a strange coincidence, richer countries tend to
have better Internet access; (we'll probably have to wait until mining
companies get wider mining rights to see the situation improve). My main point
is that this "paperless" "Second Revolution" in lexicography has to do more
with money and marketing strategies than anything else.
Secondly, digital dictionaries can be divided between "online dictionaries"
(that require Internet access) and "electronic dictionaries" (that require just
an electronic device that can run that dictionary). Commercial ads in an
electronic dictionary would quickly be labelled adware and would be frowned
upon by anyone from here to Antarctica. Commercial ads in an online
dictionary... well, what do you expect? surely someone has to pay for that!.
Yesterday I wrote in a hurry and thought this would be about suscription fees,
Michael Rundell himself pointed out that would be unlikely even if desirable.
Both types of digital dictionaries have some advantages over paper
dictionaries, but only some. And by saying this I don't advocate going back to
living in caves. Your online dictionary will be of no use when -for any number
of reasons- you are not online. Your electronic dictionary will usually get you
the information you want faster than your paper dictionary. Usually, but not
always. If you have to switch on your computer, by the time your operating
system finishes loading I will have found in a paper dictionary the entry we
were looking for. Even with your computer switched on already, if I jot down a
random Chinese character on a piece of paper for both of us to look up, 10
times out of 10 I will find it in a paper dictionary before you do in your
digital dictionary.
As for browsing, well, it might seem we use the same word, but in reality we do
not mean the same. Browsing a page on a printed dictionary can give a certain
amount of unquantifiable information, about relevance and place of an entry
word in a list of lemmas, etc. Your idea of browsing in fact means "clicking".
And this is the key to the whole "revolution". In an online dictionary you can
click everywhere. In fact, you should click anywhere. A click is a "hit". If
you want to place your ads somewhere on the internet, you want to find a
website that attracts more "hits" than others, so that more people will see
your ads. You can even have your website design geared to attracting hits. For
instance, do not provide a scrollbar with a list of lemmas. Scrolling down is
not "clicking", when you scroll down you do not hit. Make anything clickable
and you'll generate more hits, more hits will mean higher fees for more ads.
That is the "Second Revolution" in lexicography.
Let me quote from the "Stop the presses – the end of the printed dictionary"
(http://www.macmillandictionaryblog.com/bye-print-dictionary):
"The digital medium is the best platform for a dictionary. One of its
advantages is that we can now provide all kinds of supplementary resources –
like this blog."
Non sequitur. Like in "This is the best basket to carry apples. One of its
advantages is that we can now put into it all sorts of fruits and vegetables."
But let's have a look at the blog.
One of the jewels of that blog seems to be Kerry Maxwell’s weekly Buzzwords
column, which "has been keeping us up-to-date with changes in the language for
almost ten years.". Well, it seems to amount to one post per week, each devoted
to one word. From the list, I chose just one recent entry, "Higgs boson", where
it is defined as:
"noun [countable]
in physics, a particle (= an extremely small piece of matter that is part of an
atom) that could explain where mass (= the amount of matter that something
contains) comes from."
Then, one single quotation from CNN dated 5th July 2012:
'It's like molasses! But sort of like the air! Yet it also behaves like fans of
Justin Bieber! Everyone's talking about the Higgs boson, even though there's no
really great metaphor for describing what it is and how it works. We know that
this particle is responsible for the fact that matter - i.e. the stuff we are
made of - has mass.'
Using a printed copy of the Oxford English Dictionary Additions Series, vol. 2,
I could, at a glance, find a quotation for "Higgs boson" dated 1974. Of course
the CNN quotations is much more fun (it even manages to mention Justin Bieber
and Higgs on the same paragraph) and cooler than the ones that have been
appearing in Physics literature for the past 40 years. No mention of who Higgs
may be or what a boson might be. Seriously, is this all you could come up with?
Is this keeping us up-to-date with changes in the language? I can't help but
think of what John Algeo and his colleagues from "Among the New Words" could
have done had they had the digital resources that you seem to have at your
disposal.
The final pearl of the blog is the Open Dictionary where users can send their
own entries. You wrote: "Thirty years ago, the arrival of corpus data sparked a
revolution in the way of dictionaries are created.". It must have been a pretty
short-lived revolution when you need user-made examples like this one to
illustrate the use of "graph" as a verb: "This site has graphs that graph
what's what."
Sorry, but the one thing the Internet could do without is one more blog on
language issues full of trendy words but no real substance.
You wrote: "Finally getting rid of the paper constraints, and starting to
exploit the true power of the digital medium -- and to be able to do just that
-- is nothing less than a revolution."
The main constraint of a paper dictionary used to be the space available to
each entry. Now, the online dictionary reproduces verbatim the whole entry for
the word"dictionary" exactly as it was printed in my 2002 paper copy of
Macmillan English Dictionary for Advanced Learners. When I showed this
definition ("a book that gives a list of words in alphabetical order and
explains what they mean") to some of my students, those from European countries
had nothing to comment, while my Korean and Chinese students were scratching
their heads trying to reconcile that with their own dictionaries. Koreans,
after some interesting discussion, agreed that they could accept it provided
they were allowed to stretch the meaning of "alphabetical" quite a bit. In
Chinese lexicographic tradition based on Kangxi radicals this definition just
would not work, words are not arranged in alphabetical order and yet they are
dictionaries. Michael Rundell mentioned that it was this kind of young
"cohort", or "market segment" that they were trying to reach. Well, if you
intend to wean them off their Naver and Daum bilingual dictionaries, you'll
have to do much better than that. When I wrote yesterday about "recycling old
stuff over and over again to diversify their products", I meant exactly this: a
2002 definition lifted from a printed dictionary is "released of all its paper
constraints" and placed verbatim on an online dictionary. The remaining
differences between the online version and the paper one are: there is a
clickable button to hear the pronunciation (remember, 1 click = 1 hit) -but
this has been around in electronic dictionaries for the past 20 years-; also
you can click on a number of words to go to their definitions (1 click = 1
hit). You can also click on a thesaurus entry for every sense of the word that
will show a list of 10 items (of course you can click on the "more" button to
see more, but you won't get any sense discrimination between related words,
just a list of words with their definitions... ). Bear in mind, while you do
all this clicking, that the page is almost empty of any useful information, all
that space could have been designed to accomodate a better "user experience"
without any clutter at all, but that wouldn't generate clicks (remember, no
clicks, no hits). So, please, tell me, what was new in all this, where was the
revolution, where is "the true power of the digital medium" exploited here?
I wish Macmillan all the best in whatever business model they choose, but let's
be clear about this, despite all media hype and shock headline therapy, the
Second Revolution in lexicography has not happened.
Best wishes
José Aguirre
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