Preface to the second edition
"Jean Nicot's Thresor de la langue françoyse of 1606 is the key
to the development of French lexicography. The sum of four editions of
Robert Estienne's Dictionaire françois-latin, which traces the
path leading from the Latin dictionary to the assertion of French as the
main subject of a French-Latin dictionary, the Thresor assumes,
through the contributions of Nicot, the nature of a monolingual French
dictionary. It thereby opens the way to the dictionaries of Richelet,
Furetière and the Académie Francaise, and of more recent
lexicographers such as Littré and Dubois. It is no exaggeration to
say that the dictionary article, at least as far as French lexicography is
concerned, was created by Nicot. Almost every type of information and every
technique of description subsequently used in French dictionaries are
already to be found in the pages of the Thresor." (T.R. Wooldridge, Les Débuts de la lexicographie française, first edition, 1977)
In the present work the Thresor and the four editions of the Dictionaire françois-latin are examined from three fundamental points of view. In the first place, through a comparative study of the prefatory statements made by the lexicographer, printer or bookseller, the author attempts to determine precisely the filiation of the different editions and printings and of the intentions of each (ch. 1: From the Latin dictionary to the French dictionary). Secondly, the content and, especially, the
structure of the dictionary text are analyzed, this time from the point of view of the (modern) user: what can he or she expect to encounter in each edition of the dictionary, and to what extent does the real nature of each edition coincide with its intended character (ch. 2: The consultable dictionary)? As a corollary to the second part, in which the examination of the dictionary text centres essentially on its consultability, a study is made of the
non-systemic text, that is to say of the numerous items of information and lexical usage
which, in a closed text, would appear in the nomenclature, but which, in fact, are only encountered by chance (ch. 3: Reading discoveries). The last part proposes a synthesis of the consultable dictionary and the dictionary-corpus, the former accessible via the printed nomenclature, the second made accessible by the computerized text (ch. 4: The text as dictionary and corpus).
Since the publication in 1977 of the first edition of this book, the Thresor de la langue françoyse has been computerized (in the 1980s: cf. Wooldridge 1985) and since then put on-line by the ARTFL Project of the University of Chicago (in 1994). Thus the second edition has been able to take advantage of the full access to the text afforded by the electronic version of the Thresor (particularly in its WordCruncher database form), as well as of various studies made possible by the computerized dictionary (see, for example, Wooldridge 1989 and Wooldridge 1990).
The findings of the first edition remain valid; the author has simply replaced samples with exhaustive lists at different points of the text (or else the reader will choose to make this type of enquiry in the on-line Thresor database). Two parts of the book have been particularly affected by this new approach: in section 2.2.4.3, the sampling of named sources has been dropped in favour of a link to the on-line version of an exhaustive study of the sources of the Thresor (Wooldridge 1989); the obsolete "specimen of reading discoveries" (Wooldridge 1977: 3.2-3.2.4) has been replaced, on the one hand by the existence of the on-line Thresor, and on the other by a new chapter 4 on "the text as dictionary and corpus". The calculations based on samplings of the size of the nomenclature (number of headwords) and the text (number of text words) have been corrected by the absolute counts provided by the computerized dictionary (cf. 2.3 and 3.5.1).
TRW, Toronto, September 1997
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