Announcements:

Summary of the findings

A mixed group of about 25 people met on 4 July to hear of ideas about future plans for Geiriadur Prifysgol Cymru (GPC), the University of Wales’ historical Welsh dictionary, and to discuss a number of recommendations presented by the Managing Editor (see copy of presentation below). A number of participants emphasized the importance of the Dictionary as a national resource, and the importance of updating it continually to record developments in the Welsh language.

 One of the main recommendations was the need to add new vocabulary right across the alphabet as well as continuing to re-edit the Dictionary thoroughly. This was approved by the meeting.

 On the whole, the First Edition does not give citations after about 1803 (Pughe’s Dictionary). Everyone agreed that it would be desirable to include illustrative quotations for every period, up to the present, rather than adhere to the practices of the First Edition. More citations from the modern period are included in B-, but from C- onwards it is hoped that it will be possible to do justice to the modern period.

 The disadvantages of printed dictionaries were discussed, namely:

• the need to work serially through the alphabet,
• that it is not possible to correct mistakes for decades,
• that multi-volume dictionaries are too expensive to buy and are unwieldy,
• that there are difficulties with changing and adding cross-references,
• that it is only possible to include new words when re-editing the work.

• that it is possible to search the whole body of the work to gather information,
• that it is possible to link with other dictionaries, and online copies of the sources, &c.,
• that it is possible to select words to re-edit throughout the alphabetic range,
• that they can be published very cheaply or even without charge online,
• that it is possible to allow the user to choose the Dictionary’s metalanguage  (the internal language of the derivations and the grammatical information, &c.) – i.e. to choose between Welsh and English (and perhaps other languages such as Spanish),

and support was given to the idea of abandoning publication of the Dictionary in printed form from C- onwards, and concentrating on providing a full version online.

It was emphasized that there are many errors in the data from the first two volumes because of the way in which the data was prepared (by typing once only without the opportunity to proofread thoroughly), but the general feeling was that it would be better to publish the whole Dictionary online as it is, and it was suggested that the less reliable sections of each article could be noted as a warning to researchers who want to cite them.

Approval was given to the Dictionary’s intention to support Canolfan Bedwyr’s application to create a traditional representative modern corpus (mainly from printed sources) and to continue supporting Professor Kevin Scannell in further developing  his enormous web corpus (of around 120,000,000 words of text so far). The possibility of seeking the permission of authors and editors to include their works in a large text corpus intended for the Dictionary’s work was also mentioned. (It was also noted that there are several extensive text collections in preparation, e.g. 144 early books from the period 1546–1700 through the EEBO/TCP project, and some 220,000 pages from Welsh-language periodicals of the 20th century (and part of the 19th century) through the National Library’s Welsh Journals Online project, not to mention the increasing wealth of material on the Web, especially through digitizing projects such as Google Books.

The sound resources at the National Library and the Museum at St Fagans were mentioned as an important source of information, but it was accepted that it is not practicable for the Dictionary staff to use them without much additional work.

The need to get publishers and authors/editors to offer electronic copies of their publications to be used by the Dictionary was mentioned. It was suggested that a legal agreement should be drawn up in order to quell publishers’ (unfounded) fears that they could lose their rights over the work.

There was some discussion about the role of a historical dictionary: should less standard forms (e.g. in texting, blogging, &c.) be recorded, or should the dictionary set standards. Most people acknowledged that a historical dictionary must primarily be descriptive whilst supporting accepted orthographical standards.

The OED’s practice of delaying adding new words and terms to the OED until they have become established over a period of time was mentioned. Some translators felt it was important that newly-created words should be available in GPC within a short space of time in order to extend their use. It was stressed that neither GPC nor any historical dictionary of a living language could be all-inclusive.

Some people warned against trying to do too much. For example, the need for a reliable source of information on Welsh names and Welsh place names (in Wales and beyond) was mentioned, but it was agreed that the University of Wales Dictionary was not the place for that, but rather a dedicated work or works.

The Dictionary staff are very grateful to everyone who attended the meeting and to those people who sent in ideas prior to the meeting. If you would like to offer further comments, we would be very pleased to receive them.

Contact Details

  Presentation 2009.pdf  Copy of the presentation given in the meeting.
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