![]() Designed chiefly as a school dictionary for educa- tional purposes, this edition of Chambers, in spite of its title, devoted relatively little space to etymological information, but etymology nevertheless played an important role in relation to meaning, definitions and entry structure which is examined in the first part of the chapter before the other descriptive and peda- gogical considerations are dealt with. This edition is given special attention because it serves as a point of departure for the discus- sion of subsequent editions. In Chapter 5, a detailed analysis of the design of the first edition of Cham- bers is presented within the framework expounded in Chapter 1. ![]() Kaminski observes that recent Chambers lexicogra- phers had a more professional linguistic background, being better qualified for compiling dictionaries than the early editors, whose academic training was unrelated to lexicography. For the editions of 20, Ian Brookes was the editor and for those of 20, Vivian Marr. Catherine Schwarz was managing editor for the editions of 19 and, together with Robert Allen, was a consultant editor for the 1998 edition. These sources represent the overlapping of two traditions, the earlier one of philosophical etymologising, and the new one of the historical- comparative philology.Ĭhapter 4 provides a biographical account of the editors involved in the compilation of the different editions of the Chambers Dictionary: James Donald was responsible for the first two editions of 18, Thomas Davidson was the editor of the next two editions, the last edition of the nineteenth cen- tury in 1898 and the first edition of the twentieth century in 1901, William Geddie edited the 19 editions, Agnes Macdonald, also two editions, those of 19, while Betty Kirkpatrick edited the edition published in 1983. ![]() Since the 1993 edition, the Chambers Dictionary has been published by Chambers Harrap.īy describing the socio-historical factors which stimulated the growth of educational publishing in Victorian Britain, Kaminski deals with the origin of the dictionary in Chapter 3, also discussing the sources of the dictionary by referring to the intellectual ideas, which might have influenced the structure of the original edition. Robert died in 1871, a year before the publication of the second edi- tion of the Chambers Dictionary, and William in 1883, after which Robert Cham- bers (1832-1888), William's nephew, became the head of the firm. The framework of the analysis has been based partly on Hausmann and Wiegand (1989) and their followers, for example Fr^czek (1999), in which one of the recurring themes is the major principle of the theory of lexicographical functions, according to which dictionaries are considered as objects of use meant for a specific group of users (Tarp 2008 Wiegand 1987).Ĭhapter 2 presents an outline of the biographies of the Scottish brothers William and Robert Chambers, the founders of the W & R Chambers publish- ing house. ![]() He discusses each of these points in the context of the original edition in Chap- ter 5, and of the subsequent editions in Chapters 6-15. This comparative approach gives scholars and students insights into the procedures followed by the Chambers compilers, the aims they wished to achieve and the problems they encountered during the consecutive revisions of the dictionary.Īfter explaining his way of numbering the editions and his method of sampling to ensure a consistent comparison of the editions, Kaminski expounds in Chapter 1 the methodological and theoretical foundations of his analysis of the structure of the successive editions of the dictionaries: the arrangement of entries, the selection of morphological forms, the choice and growth of vocabu- lary, defining meaning, the order and discrimination of senses, etymology, syntagmatic and paradigmatic information, pronunciation and outside matter. This study by Kaminski traces the development of the Chambers Dictionary through its suc- cessive editions: the three editions which appeared during the last thirty years of the nineteenth century, the first dating from 1867, the nine editions which were published during the twentieth century, the first in 1901, and the second about fifty years later in 1952, and the four editions originating from the first eleven years of the twenty-first century. Price: euro84.Īs there have been few attempts at a systematic study of the history of popular general dictionaries, this book on the Chambers Dictionary, whose tradition goes back to the nineteenth century is especially worthy of cognisance.
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