How to stay in the loop. A think-aloud study on dictionary use by excellent secondary-school students of Ancient Greek.

Dictionary use in secondary-school classics education in the Netherlands is problematic and an important cause of poor translations and text comprehension. Research on the topic is scarce and dictionary training plays a marginal role in the classics teaching practice. This explorative, qualitative think-aloud study examines which dictionary activities lead to success. We observed excellent secondary-school students while they were translating an Ancient Greek text. A feedback loop model, characterised as a slow process of constant verification, is used to analyse their dictionary behaviour. The findings show that successful dictionary activities depend on moving back and forth between text and dictionary, while the students reduce the cognitive load by activating schemata. Performing informed searches and using their fingers or the ribbon bookmark facilitate this process. In addition, closely monitoring the process with a critical mind, and linguistic reflection using appropriate metalanguage seem crucial.

Merging Professional and Collaborative Lexicography: The Case of Czech Neology

This paper aims to relate two linguistic phenomena: neology (along with sources for its study) and collaborative lexicography. A pair of case studies is presented concerning two thematically defined groups of recent Czech neologisms: those abusing the Czech ex-president V. Havel’s name and those reflecting the Covid-19 pandemic. An initial dataset was provided by the user-generated content web dictionary of non-standard Czech Čeština 2.0 and the Neomat neology database, fostered by professional linguists. The objective data from a monitor corpus of Czech is used in contrast with the initial dataset and thereby leads to some open questions, especially with regards to the extent to which amateur and professional, two branches of lexicography, can inspire and enrich each other.

Forging a New Path in English-French Lexicography: Guy Miège in Relation to Robert Sherwood

From 1632 to the late 1670s, the English-French lexicographic scene was monopolized by Robert Sherwood’s Dictionaire Anglois & François, which was annexed to Randle Cotgrave’s second edition of the Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues and reissued in all subsequent editions (1650, 1660, and 1673). Sherwood’s work would have been the source of choice for any lexicographer wanting to compile a new English-French dictionary. However, for Guy Miège, the author of A New Dictionary French and English, with another English and French published in 1677, Sherwood’s dictionary seems to have been a minor influence at best. What the relation between them sets forth is the significantly new range and originality of Miège’s work in comparison, as demonstrated in this study.