Paradigm, Number 10 (April, 1993)

 This paper outlines how in the seventeenth century the expansion of printing in the area of English language and its teaching included the publication of dictionaries and school-texts. The work of the writers of dictionaries was frequently complementary to that of the compilers of school-books. Among those authors who essayed both forms in the 1670s and 1680s were Elisha Coles (1640?-1680) and Guy Miège (1644-1718?).

In the case of Coles, the texts which are most relevant to the present purposes are his spelling-book The Compleat English Schoolmaster (1674), and his popular An English Dictionary (1676). In his 26,000-word dictionary he made a point of advertising that, among his etymologized ‘hard words’, were vocabularies from arts, sciences and crafts, and canting terms. He also included a great number of ‘old’ words, following the lexicographical practice initiated by John Bullokar’s An English Expositor (1616). Coles’s combined interest in ‘old’ words and in a less refined but specialized vocabulary like cant may have contributed to his decision to mark regional words in his dictionary. In including such lexis in a general dictionary, Coles was consciously entering into a then-contemporary linguistic debate. The issue of whether dialect words were to be considered part of current English usage had exercised language-reformers, educational theorists, grammarians, and fellow-schoolmasters since the previous century. Some writers objected to dialect words, on phonological or orthographical grounds. Others recognized the existence of regionally-based variants. Others again criticized some regional pronunciations while also listing examples of dialect words. There were also those who censured orthographical inaccuracies arising from dialectal accent, and yet conceded that the use of regional lexis in private correspondence was permissible.

There was some interest in dialect words in other seventeenth century dictionaries (as I shall be demonstrating in a forthcoming book), but the most extended and serious study was made by John Ray in his A Collection of English Words, Not Generally Used (1674), devoted exclusively to regional lexis, with suggested etymological and geographical provenance. Ray may be said to have isolated local words from standard English in his dictionary, but in no sense did he intend to exclude them from scholarly consideration -- hence his insertion of etymological discussion. He also can be seen to be providing a resource of immediate practical use for the reader, in a period of increasing mobility, when dialectal differences could present difficulties in understanding. Coles arguably, two years later, in his listing of dialect words in his general English dictionary imitated Ray’s combined historico-linguistic/ regional bias, but on a more limited scale. On occasion, Coles gives both a condensed etymology and a geographical location for a word, on the lines of Ray’s collection. Frequently, however, he provides either etymological or regional source material.

Coles’s tolerance in his dictionary of the presence of dialect words in the English language is reflected, to a lesser degree, in his spelling-book The Compleat English Schoolmaster (1674), published two years earlier. This measured attitude to regional lexis was shared by some compilers of school-texts from about the mid-1660s to the mid-1680s, none of whom expressly advocated the retention of local words in the language, although including in their spelling-lists a few examples of what Ray considered dialect words.

Elisha Coles’s own school-text has in its spelling-lists two words of regional origin (according to Ray), dilling and yate, both of which he himself in his An English Dictionary and several other seventeenth-century lexicographers enter unmarked in their monolingual English dictionaries. In his bilingual A Dictionary English-Latin, and Latin-English (1677), however, Coles restricts these lemmas to the English-Latin section, a fact which may suggest his awareness of their changing status.

But the same cannot be said of rathe-ripe, which also occurs in one of Coles’s spelling-lists in his 1674 school-text. Not only does Ray that same year consider the word dialectal, but Coles himself two years afterwards marks it as such in his English dictionary. Rath-fruit appears only in the English-Latin part of Coles’s 1677 bilingual dictionary, again a possible indication of a growing unfamiliarity. There is, however, a measure of support for the current usage of rathe in some other contemporary monolingual, bilingual, and etymological lexicons, if not in his own two dictionaries. Clearly, then, although Coles’s criteria for the standard or non-standard nature of certain words are not consistent in his school-text and his dictionaries, it must be averred that he was reluctant to exclude some words of probable dialect origin from both his pedagogical and his lexicographical practice.

Another seventeenth-century compiler of a dictionary and a textbook, Swiss-born Guy Miège, held similarly ambivalent views about the place or status of certain words of an arguably regional nature. Of his extensive publications the most relevant for the present purpose are his textbook The English Grammar (1688), and A New Dictionary French and English (1677, 1679), which appeared enlarged as The Great French Dictionary (1688), itself published in abridged form as The Short French Dictionary (1691). The English Grammar attests to Miège’s interest in regional speech; he extols the richness of his adopted language, and its dialects in particular, and notes without censure certain Northern phonological variants. Perhaps this non-proscriptive attitude to the presence of localized speech and lexis leads him to cite among his ‘Monosyllables’ two words of possible dialectal nature, dern and flawn. Miège as lexicographer does not include dern in his 1677 and 1679 dictionaries, and marks it as, arguably, ‘provincial’ in his Great French Dictionary of 1688, the same year as his grammar. Flawn he inserts in both parts of his dictionary in 1677 and 1679, but he deems an explanatory phrase necessary. By 1688 the explanation has lengthened, and flawn is restricted to the English-French half -- an indication of growing unfamiliarity. Both items have a chequered lexicographical history elsewhere: while Ray enters dern as a northernism in 1674, it is considered elsewhere current usage. Flawn Ray only includes as a northernism in the second edition of his Collection of English Words in 1691, although it is deemed ‘old’ by some lexicographers, and current by others, from 1671 to 1696.

One might argue that Miège, with English as his second language, would be less familiar with non-standard varieties. The evidence of his informed comments on English regional pronunciation in his 1688 Grammar would challenge this, along with his marking -- or explicating -- possible dialectisms in his dictionaries. Also, the two dialect words (according to Ray) which appear in his Grammar feature in other school-texts of the period.

If Miège’s inclusion of dialect words in his textbook and his dictionaries was not dictated by ignorance of their non-standard nature, Coles’s similar practice was equally not determined by his own regional background. Coles was born in Wolverhampton, but the words he selects for his school-book come, according to Ray, from northern and southern England.

In summation it can be said that Coles and Miège in their pedagogical and lexicographical practice shared an inconsistency of approach with relation to the inclusion and marking (if debatably dialect words. Both published their school-books at about the same time as their dictionaries, and yet both chose to include in their textbooks words which others, and even on occasion they themselves as lexicographers, considered ,of regional or at least changing status

[Given at the Colloquium, University College London. Complete version to be published in McMenamin, J. et al eds., Papers in Honour of Frederick Brengelman (Fresno, CA: California State University at Fresno, 1993)]

 

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