Editorial
Philosophy
The
Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue (DOST) has been compiled over a period
of some eighty years according to the historical principles laid down in the
Oxford English Dictionary
(OED).[2]
During the first phase, a methodology based on that of the OED was established.
The three subsequent main phases are identified as those periods which saw
substantial innovations affecting the constitution of the published dictionary.
A general outline of how the editors responsible for the dictionary text during
these different periods perceived their task and the changes they introduced is
given below. The years in which the post was held and the letters for which
they had overall editorial responsibility are listed.
Phase
I 1925-1955,
A-I
Sir
William Craigie
Sir
William Craigie, who was Joint Editor of OED from 1901-1933, saw the historical
dictionary of Scots that he initiated as part of a process of filling out the
history of English and thus allowing comparisons to be made between the various
historical ‘periods’ of English. In a paper entitled ‘New
Dictionary Schemes’, read to the Philological Society in London on
4th
April
1919,[3] he
put forward an ambitious proposal for a series of period
dictionaries:
Dealing
as it
[sc.
OED] does with all periods of English, from the seventh century to the
twentieth, it has been impossible for it (beyond certain limits) to devote
special attention to any one of these. Yet each definite period of the language
has its own characteristics, which can only be appreciated when it is studied by
itself, and which are necessarily obscured when it merely comes in as one link
in the long chain of the language as a whole. To deal adequately with each
period it is necessary to take it by itself and compile for it a special
dictionary, as full and complete as may be. When this process has been
completely carried out for all periods, the task of comparison will be a fairly
simple one.
He
says of the Scottish material in OED:
While
the older Scottish tongue has thus received very generous treatment in the
Dictionary, the appearances it makes there are necessarily scattered and to a
great extent subject to accident. At the best, it is submerged in a great mass
of earlier, contemporary, and later English with which it has little in common.
Considered by itself it is a very definite thing, beginning with the fourteenth
century, flourishing as a literary medium from about 1375 to 1600, and
maintaining a precarious existence in writing till towards the close of the
seventeenth century, when a new period definitely sets in and continues unbroken
down to the present day.
Craigie’s
editorial policy for the dictionary of Scots, which he began editing in 1925, is
outlined in the Preface to Volume I of DOST:
This
dictionary is intended to exhibit and illustrate the whole range of the Older
Scottish vocabulary, as preserved in literary, documentary, and other records,
down to the year 1600, and to continue the history of the language down to 1700,
so far as it does not coincide with the ordinary English usage of that century.
Words not found before 1600 are also included when they are not current, or are
not used in the same sense, in English of the period, or when they have some
special bearing on Scottish history or life. For reasons of space as well as to
indicate the relative importance of the words, those having only a limited
currency are printed in smaller type. For the same reason, two methods of
presenting the illustrative quotations have been adopted, the briefer form being
employed for words which are not of historical importance, or do not differ
materially in form or sense from the modern English equivalents. The difference
between the two methods will be obvious on comparing the entries on
Abbasy,
Abbay,
and
Abbot
with those on
Abak,
Abhor
or Abide
(sc.
which are edited by the ‘briefer’ method). The dictionary, it will
be obvious, is not merely a linguistic record. A large number of the words it
contains are of historical or legal interest, are intimately connected with the
older life of the Scottish nation or are descriptive of the special features of
the country. The history of many of these has hitherto been imperfectly traced,
and much light is thrown upon them by the fuller evidence here
provided.
Although,
as is evident from this quotation, Craigie’s aim was to produce a
dictionary which was not merely a linguistic record, his basic intention, in
keeping with philological theory of the time, was linguistic. An important part
of the overall scheme mentioned above was to allow linguistic comparisons to be
made between the different strands and periods of
English.
A
historical dictionary as defined in the
Preface to Volume I of OED provides the history of a
language:
The
Dictionary of the English Language is not a Cyclopaedia: the Cyclopaedia
describes
things; the
Dictionary explains
words, and deals with the description of
things only so far as is necessary in order to fix the exact significations and
uses of words.[4]
It
is all the more remarkable, then, that Craigie was so willing to include
information about the history of the society in which the language functioned as
part of his stated aim. That such was his vision from the start, may be inferred
from his proposal for the dictionary of Middle English set out in his ‘New
Schemes’ paper mentioned above:
A
complete dictionary of Middle English would be a work of marvellous richness and
interest, not merely in respect of the language but for the light it would throw
upon the manners and customs of the time.
From
our point of view, however, the crucial factor is that he saw his dictionary as
part of a scheme to complete the history of English. The examples of
‘historically unimportant’ words quoted above are unimportant
because Craigie says of them that they ‘do not differ materially in form
or sense from the modern English’. Where, however, the word expressed
some aspect of society unique to Scotland, Craigie took it as part of his remit
to include it. The same approach is to be seen in his limitation of
17th
century material to that which did not coincide in sense or usage with
17th
century English. For material first recorded after 1600, he only included
words, senses or usage unique to or of particular relevance to
Scots.
Craigie
was one of the long line of practitioners of comparative philology, the
scientific study of language founded by early
19th
century scholars such as Jacob Grimm. As such, his interest in a series of
period dictionaries was principally to allow philological comparisons between
the different stages of English. The philological science which underpinned the
whole enterprise of the OED was particularly concerned with the derivation of
words or word elements, whether as part of the Germanic inheritance, with
cognates in other early Germanic languages such as Old Frisian, Old Dutch or Old
Norse, or else, as loanwords, from less closely related sources such as Latin or
French, or unrelated sources such as Arabic or Chinese. In particular, the
explication of relationships within the Indo-European family of languages
provided the rationale and determined the methodology of comparative philology
developed throughout the
19th
century.
The
primacy of this aspect of linguistics in Craigie’s experience seems to
have been the source of another characteristic of his style of editing, that is,
his predilection for separating ‘words’ into a number of separate
entries depending on their spellings and his perception of them as having come
from different etymological strands. Thus there are five separate entries
associated with the various orthographic or phonemic strands of
Gif
v.,
give. In this respect Craigie has not followed the usual OED method which is
rather to keep all historical variant forms together under the modern English
spelling, except when there are other reasons for making a separation. For
example,
Sir
and
Sire[5]
although etymologically the same, are
separated into two entries in OED because they have come to be two separate
words in meaning, spelling and pronunciation in modern English. Similarly
Wake
and
Watch,
‘a spell of watching, a vigil’, though sharing a meaning are, due to
their very different form and pronunciation in modern English, kept separate.
However all the variant spellings of
Give
are kept together in the OED entry. Craigie goes to the extreme of giving
separate entries for
Christal(l
and
Cristall,
Divide
and
Devide,
and many
other similarly trivial spelling
variations.
Craigie’s
etymologies are frequently full and interesting, but they are unsystematically
put
together.
On the other hand
he
showed himself aware of the dangers of
putting too much value on the datings of earliest recorded forms. For OED, on
which he, as later editors, largely depended in this regard, was itself
unreliable, having drawn on materials that were immediately available rather
than on a planned collection of quotations. In his 1919 paper Craigie
says:
This
[sc.
Scots] fills even a larger space in the dictionary
[sc.
OED] than is strictly due to it, for the simple reason that so much of its
vocabulary was readily accessible through glossaries, and by Dr Jamieson’s
Dictionary. The result undoubtedly is that Scottish quotations frequently
appear where English ones would have been available, if the ground had been as
well prepared. The effect of this may often be misleading, conveying the
impression that for a century or two a particular word or sense was only current
in Scotland and was unknown in England. There are a clear number of such cases,
but it would be rash to use the evidence in the Dictionary as proof of
particular instances.
Despite
these and similar shortcomings - mostly attributable to the age rather than the
scholar - Craigie’s work provided a sound editorial basis which would be
developed and refined by his successors. Much of his methodology and approach
were still in use when editing was completed in what had become a very different
world.
PHASE
II 1955-1986
Professor
Adam J. Aitken, J-O, Q
Professor
A.J. Aitken, in the Preface to Volume III, endorsed Craigie’s principles
in the following terms:
The
basic editorial methods remain, with only minor modifications, as he
[sc.
Craigie] devised them.
He
was nonetheless aware that the coverage of the language provided in Volumes I
and II was inadequate. Aware of gaps in the Dictionary’s corpus, he added
many sources to the collection and had others, already excerpted,
re-read:
In
1952, dissatisfied with the coverage of the existing collection, I launched a
new reading programme, with more than 50 new voluntary excerptors, reading both
printed editions and, mostly on microfilm, manuscripts. This greatly increased,
not far short of doubling, the size of the collection for the letters still to
be edited, and added also to the supplementary material for earlier letters,
bringing the total collection to well over 1 million
examples.[6]
Aitken,
in fact, more than doubled the list of sources. To
c600
titles listed in Volumes I and II he added another
c700.
He wanted to produce a dictionary that was as complete a
record
of the language as was within his power. He had transcripts made of a great many
inaccessible works (such as Adam Abell’s
Roit or Quheill of
Tyme).
This
procedure of excerpting new material continued throughout the life of the
project. The corpus was never completely closed, for whenever a new source
became available its usefulness to the Dictionary was assessed and quotations
excerpted. However the period of substantial effort came to a conclusion in
1963, ‘when all reliable modern printed works containing a substantial
body of Older Scots text plus enough manuscript material to complete the
geographical and topical spread for at least part of the
period’[8]
had been excerpted. After this the reading programme was allowed to fall
off.
In
1964, Aitken undertook a further initiative with regard to the
Dictionary’s corpus:
Paul
Bratley [of the Edinburgh University Computing Service] and I created the Older
Scottish Textual Archive of computer readable Older Scots texts, of about a
million words in length, partly as source of a composite concordance for use in
the Dictionary.[9]
In
1984 a copy of the Older Scottish Textual Archive, the contents of which are
listed in the Preface to Volume IV, was transmitted to the Oxford Text Archive.
This Archive was the forerunner of the many corpora which exist
today.
Aitken also widened the scope of
the editing. Under his regime sense analysis was refined and the illustration
of usage came more and more to be considered an important part of an entry. His
attitude is set forth in a hand written note found among the Dictionary’s
records:
Since many readers consult the dictionary for precise
definitions of archaic and Scots words and technical terms, the present editor,
commencing with the letter J, has departed from Sir William Craigie’s
cautious and conservative practice in this respect of providing brief,
generalised, often portmanteau definitions, and has aimed at a more elaborate
subdivision by usage, with fuller, more precise and more detailed definitions,
sometimes accompanied by brief notes of an encyclopaedic nature when the
material for this lay to hand. Further, it has been a principle to supply as
far as possible those quotations which are most helpful in this direction.
As
regards coverage, Aitken aimed at exhaustiveness for the pre-1600 linguistic
record. At the same time, however, he continued Craigie’s policy of
filtering out material belonging to the
17th
century along the lines indicated above. He likewise continued to distinguish
between entries published in large type and those in smaller type. But he
removed the subjective element in the choice between large-type and small-type
entries by introducing an automatic criterion: small entries were those
evidenced by
five
or fewer quotations.
Aitken
systematised the presentation of material in the etymology. He regularly
supplied comparative examples from both Middle English (ME) and Early Modern
English (e.m.E), where they were available, whereas Craigie had often cited only
ME. Aitken organised the information according to its closeness in location and
dating to the Scots. Northern examples were cited first, and if the first Scots
example coincided with the Middle English period, taken as 1150-1470, he
referred to the English cognates by the formula ‘ME and e.m.E.’
When the earliest recorded Scots example coincided with the Early Modern English
period, 1470-1700, the form ‘e.m.E. and ME’ was used. Aitken
developed the etymological section in such a way as to give a miniature survey
of the history of the word, e.g., the etymology of
Na
wayis
adv.
phr.
gives the forms in northern, then midland, then early
ME.[10]
This entry also illustrates Aitken’s approach to the Craigie policy of
separating entries. Aitken reduced the number of separated entries, retaining
the method only for major phonemic variants, especially where one was unique to
Scots. For instance,
Na
wayis and
No
wayis are kept separate as are
Raiso(u)n
and
Reso(u)n.
In
recognition of the many improvements Aitken introduced, the staff of DOST
contributed the article ‘A re-editing of GIF’ to his Festschrift
volume The Nuttis
Schell: Essays on the Scots
language.[11]
This article illustrates how different the
text published under the regimes of Aitken and Craigie had become despite the
similarity of their stated aims.
Aitken’s
pursuit of extreme rigour in lexicography permeated the entire enterprise.
Amongst much else,
he
put in place an exceptionally thorough
system for the checking of quotations prior to publication, the basics of which
were still being applied at the completion of the work.
Dr.
James A. C. Stevenson,
P,R,
Sc,
Sch,
Sk
Dr
James A. C. Stevenson further refined
the
illustration of meaning and semantic and
grammatical usage.
He
continued the trend
towards
further and more detailed analysis of the
entries, particularly with regard to their grammatical structure. He sought
especially to capture the intricacies of syntax and semantic usage, which
inevitably increased the amount of material printed, especially in the more
complex entries. His philosophy, which echoed Aitken with respect to the scope
of the Dictionary, may be deduced from his notes for a talk given in the
1970s:
But
the aim of DOST is not simply or even chiefly the definition of unfamiliar or
obsolete terms. It could rather be described without undue pretension as an
attempt to provide a key to the whole range of Scottish culture from 1200-1700.
There is an abundance of useful and curious information, much of it not
available elsewhere, on every aspect of life in these five centuries, and the
quotations are sometimes supplemented by references to authoritative treatments
to be found elsewhere.
[12]He
also remarks, in the same talk, on another aspect of editorial work that is
sometimes overlooked:
An
editor’s work may also link up fascinatingly with the post-1700 era
covered by the Scottish National Dictionary (SND). Already in the earlier
period there are signs of the emergence of dialectal variety in Scots, and these
are carefully watched for. Occasionally a word seems to disappear underground,
and to come to the surface again in the later period, so that modern Scots too
is of interest to DOST.
An
example of the former is to be found in
Tre
n.
where the spelling variant
terey
exhibits the introduction of an
epenthetic
vowel between
r
and another consonant. An example of the latter is to be found at
Brod
n.2
4 where the only definition offered is ‘A board in various senses’.
A number of different collocations are included in an undifferentiated group of
quotations, some of which mean ‘the covers of a book’, others
‘the shutters of a window’. Both these senses are exemplified
explicitly in the SND entry
Brod
n. In the case of the former, the DOST evidence extends the recorded period of
usage by two centuries.
Stevenson
tackled a number of previously intransigent problems in regard to the management
of the dictionary materials, especially the process whereby previously used
citation slips were made available for the later letters of the alphabet, known
as ‘sending on’. While ‘sending on’ had always been a
part of the editorial process, hitherto the editorial assistants had reassigned
slips only from copy, unused slips and duplicate slips after publication.
Stevenson employed students on a temporary basis to copy the citation slips
required further down the alphabet from the material awaiting publication. He
then systematised this practice, incorporating it into the regular duties of the
editors as a task to be carried out at a specific point in the process of
editing. He also revised some of the rules of layout of the published material,
simplified some references and modernised some abbreviations. The letter codes,
(a),
(b),
etc. which signalled the tense structure in verbs were replaced by
pres.,
p.t.,
etc. Some works, e.g.,
Maitl.
F., which had previously been referred to
by poem number and line were now given page and line references and some
redundancies were pruned, e.g.,
Boece
iv
ii 87b became
Boece
87b.[13]
Dots were omitted from abbreviations where there was no likelihood of confusion,
as, in unbroken sequences of capital letters (e.g., ME, OED), and
adj.
replaced
a.
as the abbreviation for adjective.
PHASE
III 1986-1994
Margaret
G. Dareau, remainder of
S,
T-Z
Developing
further the approaches of Craigie and Aitken, Margaret
G.
Dareau took the view that the Dictionary
might be more useful to all its users if the centrality of the language in
society was treated as one of the fundamentally important elements of the
editing process. A comparison of Scots material with the English word as
exemplified in OED is essential to the editing process, but great care must
always be taken in handling the two closely related sets of material. If the
process of constructing an entry relies too heavily at the outset on the
parameters of the OED entry, the opportunity to reveal the natural development
of the word by a consideration of the Scots material on its own terms may be
lost. Thus, from around the beginning of
S,
while not neglecting the essentials of etymology and linguistic history, the
functioning of the word in society has been given as much importance as its
purely linguistic nature. It is intended that the Dictionary should make it a
primary objective to display the history of medieval and early modern Scottish
society as it is recorded in the language of that society. In a paper entitled
‘DOST and Older Scots
Scholarship’,[14]
she outlined the change in
approach:
The
changes we have made away from this narrow nineteenth-century perception of
language make the Dictionary a more useful tool to a wider variety of users.
What has happened is in effect a shift towards a greater emphasis on the
sociolinguistic aspects of language analysis.
Further,
the material has been organised to display whatever aspect of the word seemed
most important to the history of Scots, comparison with English being treated as
a secondary matter. Thus,
Service
n.
is defined firstly in its relation to the social order whereby land is held in
return for service to a superior rather than, as in OED, ‘The condition of
being a servant; the fact of serving a master’ as contrasted with
‘The work or duty of a servant; the action of serving a master’,
which is a purely linguistic distinction. This approach to the ordering of
entries has been found to exhibit more clearly those aspects of language and
society that are uniquely Scottish. It is worth pointing out that this is a
change in point of view that in no way inhibits comparison with English.
Indeed, since these parameters are clearer, it may well act to facilitate it.
We are doing no more than redressing an imbalance deriving from a more strongly
centralist, imperialist view of language than is now plausible.
Further
examples of entries where the arrangement of senses must differ widely from that
in OED in order to reveal adequately the modalities of Scots usage are as
follows. In the entry
Set
v.
the first major sense grouping is ‘to cause to sit, to seat, passing into,
to cause to take place, to appoint, to arrange’. (The equivalent senses
in OED are arranged in two sections: I, ‘to cause to sit’ and V,
‘to appoint, arrange, ...establish’.) This arrangement in DOST
allows the development of the commonest sense in Scots, ‘to let or lease
out (property)’ (located in section V, sense 57 in OED) to be placed close
to the beginning of the entry, as is appropriate for a major sense, and relates
it to the other senses concerned with institutional and legal affairs: ‘to
cause a deliberative or judicial body to sit’, ‘to arrange,
organise’ and ‘to appoint’ in relation to various public
affairs. These senses concerned with the organisation of society develop in a
satisfying way from the core concept of sitting or being seated to arrange such
matters, and contrast cleanly with the other major elements of the word in Scots
which are concerned with relationships of direction (descent) and location
(placing in a position, physically or mentally). This arrangement allows the
structure of society to be revealed, once again, as a core concern. In the
entry
Tik(k)at
n.
the main usage in Scots relates to formal notification of the business of a
court, its earliest example is 1515, making this the earliest example of the
word in either English or Scots. The first sense in OED’s entry
Ticket
n. is ‘a short written document’, dating from 1528, the earliest
English example, and the only one before the last decade of the
16th
century. DOST’s sense 2 is the equivalent of OED’s sense 1. The
relationship to official business runs throughout the Scots material reinforcing
the factor of dating in choosing it as the first sense in the entry. In
Wat(t)ir
n.,
too, the senses have been ordered according to the predominant usages in Scots
giving much more prominence to the word as a geographical term, and especially
as the term for a river. These senses make up a major section of four main
senses with a number of sub-senses in contrast to OED’s single sense.
Indeed, from
S
onwards, this approach informs every entry. This approach is both new and yet a
process whose origins can be discerned at the very beginning of
DOST:
This
slow process of severing ourselves from dependence on OED goes back in many ways
to the very beginnings, and to Sir William Craigie’s original
determination to compile a separate dictionary of
Scots,[15]
and it is the fuller, one might say, the logical, outcome, of treating every
instance and word as an example of a language (the Scots language) that has
aspects in common with its larger neighbour, English, but must be treated, in
the first instance at least, as separate and unique in order to maximise our
knowledge and understanding not only of the language as such but, equally
importantly, of its social
function.[16]
As
remarked at the outset of this chapter, this perception of the
Dictionary’s having an encyclopaedic function has been acknowledged right
from the beginning of
DOST.[17]
However Dareau foregrounded the view that the job of historical lexicography is
to provide the most useful tool possible for all those likely to be users of the
Dictionary. This philosophical emphasis was the more easily put into practice
in the 1980s inasmuch as modern publishing technology has removed the premium on
short quotations:
By
a different emphasis in the way we now analyse the material, as well as by the
use of longer, more self-explanatory quotations, we are developing the notion
that a dictionary and an encyclopaedia need not be mutually exclusive and that a
research tool such as DOST can be more than a record of the language without
losing that necessary aspect of its
function.[18]
This
period also saw a reduction in the discrimination between the language of the
16th
and
17th
centuries. Entries were no longer omitted merely because they made their first
appearance in Scots after 1600. Though the spelling may be anglicised, much of
the usage of the
17th
century is still characteristically Scots, though it is very difficult to be
aware of this if the preferred structural pattern for an entry is the one used
for the OED entry. It required the change in editing policy outlined above to
bring out the unique Scottishness of many
17th
century examples which appeared to be very similar to ordinary English usage,
and hence were liable to be omitted. On the other hand such examples of form or
usage as are influenced by, or borrowings from, the English of the
17th
century, are of interest in their own right for these very reasons. Much has
been lost to Scottish lexicography by the prescriptive attitude that saw the
17th
century as of limited interest. It is to be regretted, also, that a similar
attitude has allowed DOST and SND to follow such different paths. The editors
of SND took an even more radical view of what was Scots and what was not,
focussing their efforts towards those Scottish examples of vocabulary,
phraseology and orthographic or phonological forms which were easily identified
as markedly different from English. SND also had a different task to perform in
recording the characteristics of the modern dialects. However this inevitably
meant that certain sorts of
18th
century prose, for instance, private letters, which were seemingly little
different from English, were neglected. It is only by a full scale analysis of
this sort of language, treating it without preconceptions as to its
Scottishness, or otherwise, that we can discover its value to our understanding
of Scots. Fortunately, these losses may to an extent be set right in the future
by the projected electronic Dictionary of the Scots Language, which will
encompass both traditions. It will undoubtedly be possible at some future time
to incorporate ongoing work on the language of the
17th
and
18th
centuries into this database.
The
1980s also saw the final rejection of the concept of separate entries dependent
upon spelling variation interpreted as suggestive of a separate etymological
source, so-called ‘phonemic’ variants. Dr Hans Meier, himself an
assistant editor on DOST’s staff in the 1950s, had commented
on
this
characteristic in a review of DOST in
1962:[19]
One
disconcerting problem is the separate entry of spelling variants whenever these
are numerous and/or can be interpreted to represent phonematic differences, i.e.
separable morphemes. Since the order is strictly alphabetical, one may have to
go to many different places for ‘the same word’.
By
the 1980s it was generally agreed among the editorial staff that the policy
should go. Not only was it time-consuming to edit in this fashion but such
entries are difficult to consult. Above all, such divisions were liable to
obscure other semantic variation, wherein much that is characteristic of Scots
is to be found. The policy that all spelling forms that could be designated
simply as variants would be included in one entry was implemented fully from
1987 onwards. In the printed dictionary the change comes at
Ref-,
where, for example,
Ref(e
v.1
includes all the spelling forms
refe,
reve,
rive,
raiff
and
rave
(cf.
Lef(e
v.1
which is designated as a variant of
Lev(e
v.1)
whereas Rid
adj.
along with its variant spelling
redde
is distinguished from
Red(e
adj.
as a late variant with vowel shortening. Examples of variants now included in
single entries are
Sall
and
Schall
(s.v.
Sal(l
aux.
v.),
Speke
and
Speche
(s.v.
Spech(e
n.),
Ta
and
Tak
(s.v.
Ta(k
v.),
To
and
Till
(s.v.
To
prep.),
Tresaurar
and
Thresaurar
(s.v.
Tresaurar
n.)
and
Waw,
Wall
and
Waiff
(s.v.
Waw
n.2)
all of which fall into the category of simple variants with no semantic
questions involved. The etymologies of these entries are arranged according to
the method explained below. They contain, of course, all relevant comparative
material. This method produces entries where all relevant information for each
semantically defined unit is found at a single site. As a safeguard for those
users particularly interested in orthographic or phonological issues, spellings
which would by the previous policy have been in separate entries are located in
separate paragraphs (signalled by
(a),
(b),
etc.) wherever these differences occur throughout the combined entry, so that
what was of value in the separate entries is not lost. By this means we hope to
put into the hands of users a work directed, as a first priority, towards their
needs, whatever aspect of the language or culture is their interest. For
instance, all of the equivalent Scots material that is to be found in the OED
entries
Sire
and Sir
is included in the single entry
Sir(e
n.,
encompassing all of the forms
sire,
sir
and
schir.
This allows the user to see how the
meaning of the word developed.
Valé
n.,
too, does not accord with the modern English pattern of word division. Although
the differences in meaning in Scots are similar to the sense pattern in English,
viz., ‘valley’ and ‘vale’, and we can be sure
valay
belongs to the word defined as ‘valley’ and
vaill
to ‘vale’, because
valé
and
vale
are formally indistinguishable in the record of Older Scots, we cannot know to
which meaning the examples spelled
vale
should be assigned. For this reason, in
DOST, there is a single entry
Valé,
Valay,
Vail(l,
n.,
a valley or vale. The intricacies of its formal history are explored in this
entry in a way that would not have been possible if the option of two entries
had been chosen. An example of a division made on the balance of semantic and
etymological grounds is to be found in the entries
Secretar(e
n.,
and
Secretary
n.
The former means ‘a person functioning as a secretary’ and the
latter, ‘the royal secretariat or the office of Secretary’. They
are clearly ultimately of the same origin etymologically, from L.
sēcrētus,
secret. However, the distinction in sense, deriving from med. L.
secretarius
a confidential adviser and med. L.
secretaria
a secretariat, has led, in this case, to a preference for two entries rather
than one. Both, however, contain variant forms in
–y(e
and
–ie.
In making such choices the semantic evidence is taken to be clinching whereas
the etymological evidence is merely suggestive and the orthographic evidence
open to interpretation.
During
the 1980s also, a rather different approach to the etymology section of an entry
was developed. Much of the careful ordering of the evidence as explained above
was discontinued. It became editorial policy simply to list all the cognate and
comparative forms from related languages considered useful or relevant to an
understanding of the anterior relationships and derivation
of
the word under consideration without
coming down in favour of any particular derivational route. The information has
been provided in greater and lesser degrees of detail according to the
circumstances.
Tartan(e
n.,
for instance, is a case where as much detail as was available is supplied
because it is a word that is both of disputed etymology and of great cultural
significance.
We see our task as to give the user all
the evidence necessary to make a judgment or, if that is not possible, to point
the direction for further research. On the other hand, the minimum information
supplied may be [?], indicating that, at the time of editing, nothing was known
about the history of the word. The examples cited from Middle English onwards
are ordered chronologically. The usual listing follows the pattern: ME, e.m.E,
(or
17th-20th
c. Eng.), OE, ON, (or OF, L., MDu., MLG, etc.). The question of exactly how
individual etyma are to be sourced is much too difficult for the brief space
allowed in
a
dictionary entry, but the comparative
material is of use, and this has been given in a straightforward, non-judgmental
fashion.
Phase
IV 1994-2001
The
general thrust of the changes discussed in Phase III towards simplification met
the needs of the project after the 1994
Review.
[20] The task facing the staff of DOST
in 1994 was to complete the editing and proof reading of a quarter of the
Dictionary
(
T-
Z)
as well as the pre-keying tidying up and proof reading of the
S material
(
Schot-Syze), amounting to one and a
half volumes, already edited when the Review took place. The issue facing the
editorial team was how to devise a set of procedures to meet this deadline. The
Review had suggested the use of computer technology in the editing as well as in
post-editing processes where, undoubtedly, it would facilitate the speedy
production of press-ready copy. However, experience on MED and the Dictionary
of American Regional English (DARE), both of which had faced similar problems,
proved this was not the solution, as outlined in correspondence with the DOST
team at this time:
The
main problem for us [sc. on MED] was
that none of the data was on computer (unlike the
Dictionary of Old English, which has
all of its data on computer) and the task of putting all of our texts on
computer was mind-boggling, especially since we were (and are) just about at the
end of our work. I would think the same is true of your data.
The
other problem was that the experiment that was done in the 1960s by my colleague
John Reidy (and reported by Jay Robinson and Dick Bailey in
Computers and Old English Concordances,
1970) suggested that it would be slower to edit by computer than in the
traditional way.
[21]and
As
to DARE, though every editor has a personal computer on his/her desk which does
all kinds of useful operations, we are still editing from quotation
slips.
[22]Clearly
those involved in dictionaries on the same scale as DOST found that working
on-screen was difficult, even starting from a point where the slip collection
was held in electronic form. When the materials were available only on paper, a
first step of keying the collection in its entirety had to be undertaken. For
DOST, editing in the traditional way, and then keying only the slips that would
actually be published was the only feasible course of action. Equally, the DOST
experience in 1981 had been that radical solutions which would compromise the
quality of the product were unacceptable. What was left was to apply the
stringent test of ‘is this really necessary?’ and ‘is there a
simpler equally satisfactory way of doing this?’ to each and every process
in the editing of every word. Some attempts were useful, and some less so. For
instance, the general simplification of sub-sense divisions was enormously
useful. Divisions were restricted to the obvious ones, allowing speedy sorting
of sub-senses with a minimum of soul searching over the rights and wrongs of a
particular case. This was applied especially to the minor grammatical or
semantic divisions displayed under the sub-section labels (1), (2), etc. The
effect of this was to reduce editing time by simplifying choices. Consider, for
instance,
Restor(e
v. 1. The quotations section is
divided into six sub-sections. (1) separates things; (2) persons; (3)
non-material things; (4) examples with the construction
to something; (5) with the construction
restore
bak; (6) absolute
(absol.) examples, i.e., those having
no dependent construction. To achieve this result, editing time would be taken
deciding what sorts of divisions to make. Then decisions would have to be made
as to whether particular quotations belonged in one division or another, for
instance, whether the quotation The naturale
heit consumys the humedite naturale & radicale that is restorit be mete,
drink and nurising; should be assigned to (1) a thing or to (3) a
non-material thing. Furthermore, though one of the rules of editing limited the
number of quotations per paragraph, there was no limitation on the number of
paragraphs. Having 6 divisions, in theory permitted one to deploy 72
quotations, not allowing for separate spelling paragraphs which would also be
required. Furthermore, the distinctions made were frequently not of any
specific importance to Scots. So the principle became that divisions be reduced
to a minimum. In the case of
Restor(e
v. this would have reduced the
divisions (1), (2), (3) and (4) to one paragraph with only the constructions
evidenced in (5) and (6) treated separately. This could reduce the number of
quotations in the entry to 20 instead of 36, making a saving of the cost of
keying, proof-reading and printing 16 quotations. This reduction in copy would
benefit the whole process. We found it was indeed possible to save time and
effort in this way without any real loss to the coverage of the Dictionary. We
found that the level of separation had led to over-exemplification in many
cases. Exceptions were always permitted as this in itself could help difficult,
time-consuming decisions to be avoided. The outcome of this way of working is
to reflect the nature of the material in the way it is edited rather than impose
on it a preconceived pattern such as that to be found in OED. In fact, although
many more stringent rules of working were introduced at this time, they simply
confirmed a style of editing that was happening in many of its essentials long
before 1994. By taking the line of least resistance, so to speak, we were
driven to achieve an outcome that we came to see as desirable, in many ways, in
its own right, rather than a less than ideal solution imposed on us by
circumstances.
On
the other hand, one procedure tested had only partial success. In the process
of editing, about half of the slips for any word become copy and the other half
are rejected. According to the previous method of editing all the material is
processed, what is not required for publication only being rejected after the
editing is completed. Indeed, the reject is kept in the same format as the
copy. A system was now tried by which a ‘first reject’ was made
straight away leaving less material to edit thereafter and saving a good deal of
time. This was only partially successful. There were a number of
straightforward words, such as
Tran(e
n. where this technique could be used
to good effect, but most words were too complex to risk eliminating a lot of
material so early in the process. However, the general injunction to reject
repetitive material as early in the process as possible was found to be
effective.
Some
previously used procedures had to be dropped. Formerly editors each revised
his/her own copy six months after first editing. This method of revising had
been found to be very effective provided that the six-month gap was adhered to.
After 1994 schedules became too tight to allow for a six- month gap, so this was
abandoned and replaced by immediate review by another editor. As one means of
counteracting the very definite loss of the second bite at the cherry that an
editor had before 1994, it was made a principle that every difficulty was
resolved if at all
possible
at the first editing. This gave the reviewing editor a possible
solution to consider, which at least allowed him/her to focus on whether the
proposed solution was feasible or not. It is all too easy to shuffle through
the evidence for a particularly difficult example or examples, never coming up
with any sort of entry, and at the end of the day that is what every editor must
achieve – an entry of some sort. Even an entry which turns out to be
wrong
is better than no entry at all. For at least it means that the
evidence, misconstrued though it may be, is put in the public domain for other,
perhaps better informed, scholars to encounter and correct. Of course some
difficulties could not be resolved first time round, but it set a tone that
helped things along rather than acting as a brake on action.
Management
of the material from raw slips to copy ready for publication was tightened up so
that at any time it was possible to ascertain precisely the rate of progress of
the editing and how this related to the progress of the project as a whole.
This, too, kept things moving, as the failure to reach a target was always very
evident.
From
the beginning of T, it was seen to be no
longer possible to allocate time or staff resources to the sending on process.
Although some slips were still tied up in the editing-to-publication process,
all of those rejected as not required for publication could have been sent on,
as had happened in the past, had the resources been available to permit this.
However, the great efforts in the early 1980s under Stevenson meant that all of
the backlog of slips awaiting this procedure had been cleared up to
Se. Nonetheless the slips tied up in
the copy since Se have not taken part in
this exercise. For this period it has been the responsibility of editors to
spot unusual or interesting examples that they thought might be needed, on an
ad hoc basis. This was not ideal, but,
as all lexicographers know, the amount of material available is cumulative, and
dictionaries tend to expand towards completion. Further, given the imminence of
an electronic DOST which will allow searches throughout the whole of the
Dictionary for any word, it is to be hoped that the loss sustained by the
abandonment of this process will not prove too great in the long term.
Conclusion
The
sorts of changes outlined above are an inevitable part of a project as long in
the making as DOST. Scotland has changed enormously since 1919 when Sir William
Craigie first set out his plan for a series of ‘period’ dictionaries
of English to complement OED, one of which was this dictionary of medieval and
early modern Scots. That the perceptions of the Editors of DOST should reflect
such changes and that these changing views of what Scotland is and has been and
how her language has related to her society over the centuries should be
reflected in the editing of this dictionary is inevitable. The project changed
from the work of a single scholar, Sir William Craigie, into an enterprise
supported and funded by most of Scotland’s Universities and a good number
of Charitable Foundations, as well, latterly, as the Scottish Office and the
Arts Council for Scotland. As the twentieth century progressed many academic
enterprises progressed from modest beginnings through a period of expansion of
aims and hopes, driven by scholarly ambition and a feeling that the perfect
outcome might be achieved. At the end of the century much of this expansion
began to be seen as economically unsustainable. Limits had to be drawn. DOST
is no different in this respect. We have on the one hand restrictions seen to
be inevitable in the current economic climate and on the other the feeling of
something very important coming to fruition in a way that reflects the nature of
Scotland at the beginning of the twenty-first century. This is a Scotland that
is more self-aware, more self-confident and less willing to judge itself by the
imperial yardstick that seemed natural in the second decade of the twentieth
century when it all began. We believe we have completed this dictionary by
acknowledging two parameters. Firstly that the time limit imposed upon us was
real; the task had to be completed in the time allowed. Secondly that the human
resources in the staff available were larger and more experienced than at any
previous time in the history of the Dictionary and were able to meet the
challenge offered.
M.
G. Dareau