Susan Rennie

Jamieson's Dictionary of Scots: the story of the first historical dictionary of the Scots language

John Jamieson’s Etymological Dictionary of the Scottish Language (1808) was the first complete dictionary of Scots and is a landmark in the development of historical lexicography. This book is the first full‐scale study of Jamieson’s work on both the Dictionary and the later Supplement of 1825. Using Jamieson’s correspondence and surviving manuscript sources, it traces the evolution of the Dictionary project, from Jamieson’s early linguistic fieldwork to the production and promotion of the Dictionary over twenty years later. It discusses Jamieson’s editorial methods and examines in detail the content of the Dictionary, highlighting Jamieson’s pioneering of the historical method, as well as his innovative use of contemporary and popular sources. It also reveals how Jamieson continually revised and updated his text, aided by a growing number of contributors and specialist consultants – among them Sir Walter Scott – and describes how his work was supplemented by later editors, ensuring that the Dictionary dominated Scots lexicography for over a century, providing inspiration to generations of creative writers, as well as source material for the major historical dictionaries of English and Scots that were to follow.

The Electronic Scottish National Dictionary (eSND): work in progress

The Scottish National Dictionary (SND) is the standard historical dictionary of modern Scots, covering the period from 1700 to the present. This paper describes the current project to digitize the SND to produce the eSND, which will eventually be output on the Internet. It includes a brief description of the SND itself, outlining its history, content, and structure, and describes how the eSND will differ from the printed text. The various stages of the eSND project are discussed, using examples from the work in progress: (1) the data capture, which is being achieved through scanning and optical character recognition (OCR) of the printed text; (2) the conversion of the OCR data to full Extensible Markup Language mark-up, including details of the actual mark-up scheme (which is based on the Text Encoding Initiative guidelines), and how this has been adapted to suit the SND text; (3) the integration of the original Supplement and new material; (4) the development of search tools and a Web interface. Details are also given of the new proposal to combine the eSND with an electronic version of the Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue (eDOST), sharing the same mark-up scheme, search software, and interface, to produce a comprehensive electronic resource covering Scots from the early medieval period to the present day.

The lexicography of Scots

The chapter begins with a summary account of the Scots language and its vocabulary, before continuing with a history of lexicographical activity in Scots. Lexicons of Scots have been published since the end of the sixteenth century. In the eighteenth century, Scots lexicography developed its essentially descriptive nature, to gloss editions of medieval texts and new works by vernacular poets, as well as to record and preserve a language that was increasingly being eroded. The nineteenth century saw the publication of John Jamieson’s Etymological Dictionary, now recognized as a key work in the development of lexicography on historical principles. This legacy was continued by the compilation, throughout the twentieth century, of the two major historical dictionaries of Scots, the Scottish National Dictionary (SND) and the Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue (DOST). The present century has seen a number of digital initiatives in Scots lexicography: the digitization of SND and DOST to form the composite Dictionary of the Scots Language/Dictionar o the Scots Leid (DSL) and the creation of electronic corpora of both Older and Modern Scots. New projects, such as a proposed Historical Thesaurus of Scots, continue to build on and contribute to the tradition. Smaller dictionaries of Scots, including school dictionaries, are in demand to support new initiatives in teaching Scots in schools, and Scots lexicography is an important part of the debate about any future standardization of the Scots language.