Xenophobe corrupted dictionary
Robert Burchfield, an eminent former editor of the Oxford English Dictionary
covertly deleted thousands of words because of their foreign origins. Worse still, he cast the blame on previous editors, according to claims in a book published this
week.
Robert Burchfield's efforts to rewrite the dictionary
have been uncovered by Sarah Ogilvie, a linguist, lexicographer and former
editor on the OED.
And -- shock, horror! -- he was a Kiwi. Born in Whanganui, New Zealand, of humble beginnings, Burchfield won a Rhodes scholarship to Magdalen College, Oxford, where he was mentored by no one less than JRR Tolkein.
He died with a slew of death threats in his mailbox. Who can wish for a more interesting life than that?
If you don't believe me, read his obituary.
Ogilvie worked for 11 years to research and write Words
of the World, published by Cambridge University Press, which challenges the
widely held belief that editors of the OED between 1884 and 1933 were
Anglocentric Oxford dons obsessed with preserving the Queen's English, and that
it was not until Robert Burchfield's four supplements, produced between 1972
and 1986, that the dictionary was opened up to the wider world.
"I observed a pattern, that actually it was the
earlier editors who were dealing with words in a really enlightened way. They
certainly weren't these Anglocentric, judging kind of editors they were very
sensitive to cultural differences and they seemed to be putting in a lot of
foreign words and a lot of words from different varieties of English, which
must have been amazing for that day when colonial varieties of English were
just emerging," said Ogilvie.
She undertook a detailed analysis of Burchfield's
supplement, comparing it with the 1933 supplement by Charles Onions and William
Craigie. She found that, far from opening up the OED to foreign linguistic
influences, Burchfield had deleted 17% of the "loanwords" and world
English words that had been included by Onions, who included 45% more foreign
words than Burchfield.
Examples of Burchfield's deleted words include balisaur,
an Indian badger-like animal; the American English wake-up, a golden-winged
woodpecker; boviander, the name in British Guyana for a person of mixed race
living on the river banks; and danchi, a Bengali shrub. The OED is now
re-evaluating words expunged by Burchfield, who died in 2004, aged 81.
"This is really shocking. If a word gets into the
OED, it never leaves. If it becomes obsolete, we put a dagger beside it, but it
never leaves," Ogilvie said.
In tracing the discrepancy back to its origins, she found
that the dictionary's first editor, James Murray, in the 19th century, was
harshly criticised for including contributions by correspondents from as far
away as Ceylon, Mexico, and New Zealand. One reviewer wrote: "There is no
surer or more fatal sign of the decay of a language than in the interpolation
of barbarous terms and foreign words."
But Murray pressed on, as, later, did Onions, helped by
readers from around the world.
As well as Americanisms and other regional variations in
English, there were also those which entered English globally, such as typhoon,
okra, abattoir, svelte and bamboo, or those restricted to a particular region,
for example pak pai in Hong Kong, which is a car used illegally as a taxi.
The first version of the OED, released in 1884, contained
words from all round the world, from aard-vark and aard-wolf to acacia. Murray
also included the rodent, the agouti; the South American howling monkey, the
alouatte; and the Philippine textile, abaca.
"If a word was used in an English context, it
qualified as an English word.
After all, from the OED's beginnings, it was considered
to be a dictionary of the English language, not merely a dictionary written by
and for the people of England," said Ogilvie. Murray actually put out a
public appeal for English speakers around the world to send him quotations
including exotic varieties of English.The myth that the dictionary's early
editors were Anglocentric originates, believes Ogilvie, with Burchfield
himself.
