雅思经典例题及题解Johnson27sDictionary上课讲义.pdfVIP

精品文档 Johnsons Dictionary For the century before Johnsons Dictionary was published in 1775. there had been concern about the state of the English language.There was no standard way of speaking or writing and no agreement as to the best way of bringing some order to the chaos of English spelling. Dr Johnson provided the solution. There had, of course, been dictionaries in the past, the first of these being a little book of some 120 pages, compiled by a certain Robert Cawdray. published in 1604 under the title A Table Alphabetical! of hard usuall English wordes. Like the various dictionaries that came after it during the seventeenth century, Cawdrays tended to concentrate on scholarly words; one function of the dictionary was to enable its student to convey an impression of fine learning. Beyond the practical need to make order out of chaos, the rise of dictionaries is associated with the rise of the English middle class, who were anxious to define and circumscribe the various worlds to conquer - lexical as well as social and commercial. It is highly appropriate that Dr Samuel Johnson, the very model of an eighteenth-century literary man. as famous in his own time as in ours, should have published his Dictionary at the very beginning of the heyday of the middle class. Johnson was a poet and critic who raised common sense to the heights of genius. His approach to the problems that had worried writers throughout the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries was intensely practical. Up until his time, the task of producing a dictionary on such a large scale had seemed impossible without the establishment of an academy to make decisions about right and wrong usage Johnson decided he did not need an academy to settle arguments about language; he would write a dictionary himself; and he would do it single-handed. Johnson signed the contract fo