Реферат на тему The history of dictionary making.

Содержание:

Introduction 3
The history of English and Russian dictionaries 4
Modern electronic dictionaries 8
Conclusion 11
List of references 12

Введение:

Introduction
The relevance of research. No speaker of Russian or English knows all the words. The common reader turns to a dictionary for information about the spelling, pronunciation, meaning and proper use of words. He wants to know what is current and respectable. At the same time, it looks like dictionaries are always were here. People seldom think about origin on the dictionaries. But there is a long history of dictionary making. Today we face a very interesting period. Today, most people in Russia, the United States, and Europe use various kinds of gadgets. Dictionaries fit into this information model, they, however, are often inconvenient for consumers, do not meet their needs and do not clearly reflect a particular segment of the language.
The aim of the study is to describe the history of dictionary making.
Tasks of the study:
1. To analyze the history of English and Russian dictionaries.
2. To characterize Modern electronic dictionaries.
The following research methods were determined: analysis of literature on the topic of research; synthesis; generalization; continuous sampling method; opiate method.

Заключение:

The beginnings of dictionary history are concerned with Latin, the international language of medieval European civilization. The next stage was a kind of very early Latin-English dictionaries. Later the rapid development of international trade led to a demand for foreign-language dictionaries, that’s why Cooper’s Thesaurus (1565) appeared. In Britain, the most famous dictionaries were made by John Kersey, Nathaniel Bailey, Samuel Johnson. Noah Webster is the most famous of all American dictionary-makers. The Webster’s dictionaries were the first to help separate British English and American English. 
An urgent task of modern computer lexicography is the development of optimal-to-use, complete, universal electronic dictionaries. It is the electronic lexicographic form that will allow in the near future combining the results of research aimed at creating a variety of types of dictionaries. 

Фрагмент текста работы:

The history of English dictionaries
The beginnings of dictionary history in Europe are concerned with the international language of medieval European civilization: Latin. A lot of people across the Europe used Latin as a language of law and science, but no one knew all of the words. 
So, the first dictionaries were lists of relatively difficult Latin terms, usually accompanied by glosses in easier or more familiar Latin. Very early in the Anglo-Saxon period, however, we find glosses containing native English equivalents for the hard Latin terms and it may be the Leiden and Erfurt Glosses that represent the earliest written English we have. 
Such glosses, whether Latin-Latin or Latin-English, continued to be compiled during the entire Anglo-Saxon and most of the Middle-English period. There wasn’t any dictionary that was more interesting that other. The next stage of development attained in England was the collection of the isolated glosses into what is called a “glossary”, a kind of early Latin-English dictionary. As it chances, our first example of the glossary, written in East Anglia around 1400, has never been printed.
The first great classical dictionary, Cooper’s Thesaurus, had appeared in 1565. It was the first dictionary that looked more or less like our modern dictionaries. It should be noted, that none of the various books of the 16th century actually used the title dictionary. They were called by the various kinds of names [1, р. 678]. 
The first English book to use the name “dictionary”, The English Dictionary (1623), was subtitled “An Interpreter of Hard Words”. 
The Dictionary of Hard Words was the real predecessor of the modern dictionary. It was developed to provide explanations of unknown words to the readers.
In the 17th century, as printing was well established, the first real English dictionary appeared. John Kersey was the first to attempt a universal dictionary of the English language. Kersey is credited with producing several fine dictionaries between 1702 and 1718, all explaining the common words and aimed at the ordinary reader. 
His innovations were noted and borrowed by Nathaniel Bailey, who compiled a dictionary of 950 pages and about 40, 000 entries. Bailey’s dictionary, An Universal Etymological English Dictionary (1721), was followed later by one of the most successful of all early dictionaries. This was A Dictionary of Modern English Language written by Dr. Samuel Johnson. 
First published in 1755, Johnson’s work is one of the most famous and important English dictionaries in history. The dictionary took nine years to be compiled and lists 40,000 words, each defined in detail and illustrated with quotations covering every branch of learning.