A Concise Dictionary of Early English [antikvár]

PrefaceThe study of Early English, and its recorded monuments which comprise Middle English and Early Modern English writings of different genres in particular, has started its Renaissance, which felicitously does not revive the discredited rule of thumb methods of stereotyped traditionalism but in applying modern methods and procedures of investigation raises it to a higher level.University and college lecturers and students of the macrosystem of English, which comprises its British, American, Canadian, Australian, New Zealand national varieties, and other variations, e.g., Hiberno-English, Caribbean English, etc., make efforts to be given more room to textology, and primarily to historical studies of language and literary devices of Middle English and Early Modern English writings.However, a great obstacle on the road of disclosing the peculiarities of the language of Early English writings, including the fine works by G. Chaucer and the immortal oeuvre by W. Shakespeare, and finding out the "cost"' of their literary devices (icons, symbols, registers, etc.) and thus in giving an objective and dispassionate evaluation of them is the absence of a Concise Dictionary of Early English. This gap is to be filled by the present book which is linked with a thousand threads to our recently published textbook "From Middle English to the Macrosystem of Modern English"^ and is based mainly on the lexical units to be found in the writings included in different Middle English and Early Modern English Anthologies and Readers. It relies heavily on: R. Ascham's Toxophilus 1545; J. Baret's An Alvearie or triple dictionarie, 1573; J. Florio's A Worlde of Wördes, 1611; A. Cotgrave's A dictionarie of French and English Tongues, 1611; H. Coleridge's A Dictionary of the First, or Oldest Words in the English Language, London 1611; Th. Blount's Glossographia, 1656; E. Phillips' The New World of English Words (4th ed.), 1678; J. Bullokar's An English expositor . (5th ed.), 1674; J. Kersey's Dictionarium Anglo-Britannicum, 1708; N. Bailey's Universal Etymological English Dictionary (1721); S. Johnson's A Dictionary of the English Language, London 1755 (reprint 1983); W. Toone's A Glossary and Etymological Dictionary, London 1834; A. Schmidt's Shakespeare-Lexicon, 4th ed. revised by G. Sarrain, Berlin 1923; O. F. Emerson's Middle English Reader: Glossary, London 1929; C. T. Onion's A Shakespeare Glossary, Oxford 1941; E. Partridge's Shakespeare's Bawdy, New York 1947; H. Kurath, S. M. Kuhn and J. Reidy's Middle English Dictionary, Ann Arbor (Mich.) 1954 ff.; Davis, N.' On the philological essence of the "cost" of icons, symbols, registers and other literary devices see details in: S. Rot, J. D. Salinger's Oeuvre in the Light of Decoding Stylistics and Information-Theory, "Studies in English and American", vol. 4. (ed. by T. Frank), Budapest 1978.^ See: S. Rot, From Middle English to the Macrosystem of Modern English, Budapest 1992, 524 pp.