Proceedings talk:EK1

This is the discussion page for Erin McKean's pres at Wikimania 2006, Practical (and Annoying) Problems in Dictionary Compiling. Please join the discussion below!

In the absence of national standards organizations to dictate what is proper in a language, the task falls to lexicographers and publishers.

Please comment on descriptivism versus prescritivism; that is, whether a dictionary should describe the language as it is used versus advising on how it should be used. How many people must use the word "humongous" before it is considered a real word, for instance?

On a related note, how do you typcally decide what is included, and what's not? New words are invented constantly, and it only makes sense to include those that have continued, widespread relevance, but persistence and relevance are relative. --Dvortygirl 06:10, 2 August 2006 (UTC)

Two views of a dictionary

My experience with Wiktionary has show that there are two fundamental approaches to dictionary writing. In a historical view, like that of the OED, the word is shaped by its history, and the uses of the word over its lifetime are just as important as the derived definition. A person who uses a word uses its entire history with it. The word "gay" retains all the shades of meaning that led up to its most popular curent meaning.

In a utilitarian approach the definitions are paramount without regard to the history. The person who looks a word up in a dictionary wants assurance that he is using the word the "right" way. It reflects a vain belief that we can have perfect machine translation. To some extent that may be attainable in technical translations, but the effects of applying that to the world's great literature is laughable.

How can these diverse approaches be reconciled in a living online dictionary? Are these approaches so different that they can only survive in different projects. Eclecticology 06:28, 2 August 2006 (UTC)

Copyrights

There is a long tradition of lexicographers making extensive use of works that came before them. Noah Webster would complain when others would use his material, but he was no above using the work that had been done by Johnson who in turn was quite hap[y to draw from his predecessors.

To what extent are dictionaries copyrightable? To be sure the layout of the information and the selection of the words to include is copyrightable. But when we refer to the definitions and other information it is often difficult to separate the original descriptive definition from the meaning itself. This can trigger the "merger principle" in copyright law, and thereby make much of the information uncopyrightable. Can there be proprietary definitions? This has come up in the context of defining psychiatric disorders. In areas such as medicine precise definitions are important, and if a person is forced to define a disorder differently to avoid copyright infringement he may effectively be defining something copletely different. In medicine tragic results are easy to imagine.

To what extent do you see copyright law as applicable to dictionaries. Eclecticology 06:28, 2 August 2006 (UTC)