Additional evidence for Nu

Philip Durkin. 2014. Borrowed Words: A History of Loanwords in English.

Lexical Borrowing in the Light of Digital Resources: Nyet as a Case Study

Abstract The mere appearance of a foreign word does not necessarily mark the birth of a loanword, which requires documented usage by the speech community. Relatively little research has been dedicated so far to the “prenatal” stage that would investigate the tentative infiltration of foreign-derived words. Nyet, a borrowing from Russian, is taken as a case in point. Although its first recorded instance in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED3) is dated to 1928, it had been increasingly recognized in English for several decades. This article focuses on textual attestations for nyet discovered in a range of digital resources, including British and American newspaper archives, and discusses thei…

Researching the Beginnings of Bilingual Polish-English and English-Polish Lexicography: An Introduction

American English Antedatings for Malossol

Roderick McConchie and Jukka Tyrkkö (Editors). Historical Dictionaries in Their Paratextual Context

Review of Roderick McConchie and Jukka Tyrkko (Editors).  Historical Dictionaries in Their Paratextual Context .

Erazm Rykaczewski’s A Complete Dictionary English and Polish… (1849): Uncovering the Compilation Process

This paper looks at Erazm Rykaczewski’s A Complete Dictionary English and Polish... (1849), one of the milestones in the history of English-Polish / Polish-English lexicography. Despite its significance for the bilingual user in Poland and English-speaking countries with large Polish diasporas, where it came to be reprinted over the next century, it has attracted little scholarly attention so far. Based on a comparative analysis of the bilingual dictionary and its assumed sources, the paper sheds some light on the methodology of compilation in which borrowing, adaptation, and translation turn out to have been the lexicographer’s main working practice. The findings are presented in a framewo…

Polish Americans in the History of Bilingual Lexicography: The State of the Art

This paper measures dictionaries made by Polish Americans against the development of the Polish–English and English–Polish lexicographic tradition. Of twenty nine monoscopal and biscopal glossaries and dictionaries published between 1788 and 1947, four may be treated as mile-stones: Erazm Rykaczewski's (1849–1851), Władysław Kierst and Oskar Callier's (1895), Władysław Kierst's (1926–1928), and Jan Stanisławski's (1929). Unsurprisingly, they came to be widely repub-lished in English-speaking countries, primarily the United States of America, for the sake of Polish-speaking immigrants. One might therefore wonder whether there was any pressing need for new dictionaries. There must have been, …

History in Lexicography and Lexicography in History: A Reappraisal

This paper aims to provide an overview of anglophone literature on historical lexicography. It begins by defining history and lexicography in order to explore possible relationships between them. What follows is a critical discussion of two analytical perspectives: “history in lexicography” and “lexicography in history.” The former seeks to explain what historical information is, how history has permeated dictionaries, particularly those compiled on historical principles, and why the historical dictionary needs to be re-interpreted along new lines. The latter, by contrast, attempts to identify the main elements involved in the writing of a history of lexicography. Since no historical accoun…

“English Self-Taught”: Self-Study Guides for Polish Learners of English (1860–1945)

The history of teaching English as a foreign language (EFL) has been relatively well described in specialist literature, yet the beginnings of EFL teaching to Poles have not received much scholarly attention. One of the consequences of this state of research is that a proportion of pre-1945 EFL textbooks aimed at native speakers of Polish remain unknown. The present paper seeks to shed some light on self-study books, popular nineteenth- and twentieth-century materials intended for self-instruction; relatively cheap and aimed at the mass market, they claimed to offer effective ways of teaching foreign language skills in a short period of time. I will analyze five selected books belonging to …