LINGUIST List 12.922

Mon Apr 2 2001

Review: Langley & Levy, Old French-English dictionary

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  • Miguel Ayerbe Linares, review of Old French-English dictionary

    Message 1: review of Old French-English dictionary

     Date: Mon, 2 Apr 2001 18:41:09 +0200
    From: Miguel Ayerbe Linares <mayerbeedunet.es>
    Subject: review of Old French-English dictionary


    Hindley, Alan, Langley, F. W. and Levy, B.J. (2000). Old French-English Dictionary, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 621 pp., single volume, ISBN: 0-521-34564-2

    Reviewed by Miguel Ayerbe Linares, Departament of German Philology of the University of Seville (Spain)

    We have a dictionary before us for everyone who is working on Old French, not only philologists but also for students and historians. That is so because the expressions included in it are drawn from many sorts of old texts such as epic, romance, religion, moral, didactic, allegorical, lyrical, satirical, historical, political and legal ones. The dictionary itself is designed for anglophone users, and that is the reason for editing it in English.

    The dictionary includes the following sections:

    1) Acknowledgments (page vii)

    2) Introduction (pages ix-xi). This section is divided into: I) From database to dictionary (page ix): An historical introduction to the origins of the dictionary beginnig as an electronic database, Known as COFREL (Computerized Old French-English Lexicon) II) The dictionary entries (pages ix-x): Description how the 60.000 entries of the dictionary are organized and what kind of information they provide, such as grammatical function and definition. III) How to use the dictionary (pages x-xi): Some aspects to take in account when working with a dictionary about older stages of a language (whatever it may be) are explained here, like, for instance the lack of spelling rules, so that one can find the same expression written in different ways when working with older texts. IV) Conclusion (page xi): The introduction ends with some acknowledgments to preceeding Old French dictionaries such as Godefroy's (1880-1902), Tobler and Lommatzsch's (1925-), and with a hope that both anglophone readers and students of Old French would find this dictionary very useful.

    3) List of abbrevations (pages xii-xiii)

    4) Select bibliography (pages xiv-xv), divided into the following parts: (a) Multi-volume dictionaries (b) Single-volume dictionaries (c) Old French grammar and syntax (d) Histories of the French language (e) Antholofgies and Old French readers (f) Other

    Dictionary (pages 1-621)

    There are several things that speak in favour of this dictionary, and one of them is the fact that it has been edited in English language. First of all because English is a more used language by linguists than French, and then because by doing so many people are able to work on Old French literature, eventhough they do not know Modern French. This is very important because most Old French dictionaries are obviously edited in French language. There are also some exceptions like editions in German like Tobler, A./Lommatzsch, K. (1925) Altfranzoesisches Woerterbuch, still incomplete and multi-volume edition, or in English like Urwin, K. (1949), a short Old French Dictionary for Students, a single-volume edition but very limited for other purposes than for studying and reading Old French literature. From another point of view, there are users who are not concerned with Linguistics such as historians and jurists, and who are probably expected to know English as foreign language rather than French.

    Another positive aspect of this dictionary is that it is a single-volume edition of 621 pages with up to 60.000 entries. For this reason the user is not working with any 'Short' dictionary.

    In the introduction the authors give some practical informations about how to use the dictionary. There they point out that the written forms that we find in an old text (whatever the language may be) often correspond to heard expressions rather than to read ones. At this point it must be also said that at that time there were no spelling rules, and that explains why different variations of a same expression can be found on the same manuscript (sometimes in the same text too). That is one reason why this dictionary is clearly intended for general users, above all for non- linguist ones. Obviously linguists do not expect such information in a dictionary intended especially for them, or, in other words, editors would not probably provide such basic information when designing a tool of this kind for them.

    It must be also said that definitions are not always limited to the exact or general meaning of a concrete expression. The expressions are often placed in context with others words, being so considered to be colloquialisms, and that is of course very helpful for beginners in Old French texts. In other places, when the same expression presents different meanings because it can have more than one function in a sentence, such as substantive, adverb or adjective, the dictionary indicates each meaning depending on each function, by separating them in different entries, each one according to a concrete function, for instance 'avenant' (on page 59):

    avenant(1): present participle (prp) as adjective (a) 'pleasant, pleasing, graceful'

    avenant(2): (prp) as adverb (adv) 'fittingly, in seemly fashion'

    avenant(3): (prp) as substantive masculine (sm) 'advantage, convenience; proportional share of something'

    When an expression can be read in different ways depending on the text or manuscript, the dictionary includes them but it only provides the definition in one case, so that, if the user should be looking for alternative spellings of the same expression, the dictionary directs him to that, which has been definied in the dictionary. This way is of course very helpful but I do not think that it is the most practical one, because the different variations are separated from each other and then the user must be always turning over the pages to find the definition. From my point of view, a better way would be to place the different alternative spellings together and then the definition like other similar dictionaries or glossaries do, such as Braune/Ebbinghaus' Althochdeutsches Lesebuch (1994), for Old High German, or Greimas' Dictionaire de l'ancien fran�ais (1989). I think that this way would make the user's work considerably easier.

    With respect to the entries in the dictionary, there are two more points that I would like to point out: on one hand the dictionary does not give any etymological information nor where the expression comes from (for instance, from Latin, Franconian, etc). On the other hand, it does not provide any information about the date or the time in which the expression begins to be used. And this last kind of information would be very interesting for historians and for jurists as well.

    However, I do not consider this dictionary to be unadequate because of these last remarks. Including all this additional information would be of course too much for the purposes the authors intended it to. As pointed out above, the dictionary contains already 621 pages with up to 60.000 entries, so that additional information would probably not allow this single-volume edition, which would be quite more expensive as well.

    All in all, I find this dictionary very useful for anyone who is interested in Old French literature in some way, and I consider the fact of being edited in English very helpful since this general kind of users do not need to know or to have some competence in French language in order to use a tool like this. However I do not include philologists and those with very scientific purposes in this group because I think that the information provided in it is to a certain extent too basic for them.

    I would personally recommend this dictionary also to translators and editors of Old French literature. According to its structure I think that it is a very good working tool for them too.

    To conclude, I want to congratulate the editors for this dictionary. I think that its major strength is on one hand how it is designed, because it makes possible to be used by a broader range of people than only francophone users, and on the other hand the large list of entries included.

    The reviewer works at the Departament of German Philology of the University of Seville (Spain). He has studied German Philology in Seville, Cologne and Munich. His research interests include the historical development of Germanic languages and historical mutual influences between Romance and Germanic languages especially in their oldest stages.