Hugh Schofield of BBC News reports on French lexicography:
Forty years after they began the task – and nearly four hundred years after receiving their first commission – sages in Paris have finally produced a new edition of the definitive French dictionary. The full ninth edition of the Dictionnaire de l’Académie Française was formally presented to President Macron this afternoon in the plush surroundings of the 17th century Collège des Quatre-Nations on the left bank of the Seine. […]
“The effort is praiseworthy, but so excessively tardy that it is perfectly useless,” a collective of linguists wrote in the Liberation newspaper on Thursday. This ninth edition replaces the eighth, which was completed in 1935. Work started in 1986, and three previous sections – up to the letter R – have already been issued. Today the end section (last entry Zzz) has been added, meaning the work is complete.
In its press release, the Academy said the dictionary is a “mirror of an epoch running from the 1950s up to today,” and boasts 21,000 new entries compared to the 1935 version. But many of the “modern” words added in the 1980s or 90s are already out of date. And such is the pace of linguistic change, many words in current use today are too new to make it in. Thus common words like tiktokeur, vlog, smartphone and émoji – which are all in the latest commercial dictionaries – do not exist in the Académie book. Conversely its “new” words include such go-ahead concepts as soda, sauna, yuppie and supérette (mini-supermarket).
For the latest R-Z section, the writers have included the new thinking on the feminisation of jobs, including female alternatives (which did not exist before) for positions such as ambassadeur and professeur. However print versions of the earlier sections do not have the change, because for many years the Académie fought a rear-guard action against it. Likewise the third section of the new dictionary – including the letter M – defines marriage as a union between a man and a woman, which in France it no longer is. “How can anyone pretend that this collection can serve as a reference for anyone?” the collective asks, noting that online dictionaries are both bigger and faster-moving. […]
Among the “immortals” is the English poet and French expert Michael Edwards, who told Le Figaro newspaper how he tried to get the Academy to revive the long-forgotten word improfond (undeep). “French needs it, because as every English student of French knows, there is no word for ‘shallow’,” he said. Sadly, he failed.
Discussions – lengthy ones — are already under way for the commencement of edition 10.
I confess I’ve never been sure what, or who, the Academy’s dictionary is for, but it’s a grand thing to be sure. (Thanks, Trevor!)
I too know nothing about the actual dictionary, but it is characteristic of a journalist’s idea of what a truly comprehensive dictionary is, that he should make a great fuss over whether the dictionary contains words like “tiktokeur” and “vlog” rather than whether its treatment of (say) “faire” or “maison” is adequate.
Michael Edwards is represented (perhaps wrongly) as thinking that a dictionary ought to contain words that one would like to exist, even if they actually don’t. Who’d be a harmless drudge nowadays?
For a dictionary whose previous edition was published nearly ninety years ago, 21,000 new lexemes seems like an astonishingly small number. Even if that is actually only the number in the most recent fascicle, it sounds pretty low.
(Auto-incorrect of the day: “winery” for correctly spelled “ninety.” How very French.)
Bah! Let the Rosbifs neologise to patch their ever-defective speech, but French had achieved perfection by the eighteen century. Since then, neologisms are mere placeholders, until a real French expression can establish itself and render them obsolete.
Actually, I imagine that it might be a matter of how much specialised technical vocabulary is regarded as suitable for inclusion. Even very large English dictionaries seem to see no need to include some of the more recondite vocabulary of medicine, for example.
I must admit to having no real idea how many totally new lexemes you’d actually expect over a winery year period. (And English may very well be an atypical case.)
21,000 new lexemes seems like an astonishingly small number
How about 53,000 in total?
Seems kinda few:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dictionaries_by_number_of_words
I don’t think that these numbers mean a lot without a lot more information about just what is being counted, though.
Having no French, I was unaware of the “no word for ‘shallow'” point, but the internet tells me (reliably? I dunno …) that one can replicate English “shallow” with French “peu profond.” I suppose “improfond” would be “a word” while “peu profond” would be “two words,” but c’mon man does that really evidence a lexical gap?
This article by B W Andrzejewski on R C Abraham’s Somali-English dictionary, gives no numbers, but is interesting on the impossibility of estimating “how many words” there are in a language (and also on the extremely difficult circumstances under which Abraham carried out his work on this dictionary.)
https://arcadia.sba.uniroma3.it/bitstream/2307/2581/1/Reflections%20on%20R.C.%20Abraham%27s%20Somali-English%20Dictionary.pdf
Favourite bit is the envoi:
Preach it!
I know quite a few Kusaal words which appear in neither of the two fairly extensive dictionaries available, and encountered half a dozen more in the course of reading a single short newspaper article I rediscovered among my stuff a few months ago.