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Whys and Hows of Collecting for the Dictionary of Canadian English I: Scope and Source Material

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 July 2016

Charles J. Lovell
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Extract

Several serious problems face a Committee on the Historical Dictionary in planning for the proposed Dictionary of Canadian English. At present under study are means of publicizing the project, negotiating adequate financial sponsorship and securing a capable editorial staff, with headquarters handy to research centers and the publisher's offices. These cannot be taken up here, but will be reported upon at ensuing meetings of the Association.

The basic problem concerns acquisition of the dated citations which will serve as the framework of the proposed dictionary. It is an arduous task to collect and digest the huge volume of materials necessary to compilation of any comprehensive dictionary based upon historical principles. The Oxford English Dictionary, garnering 9,000,000 quotations through the unpaid labors of 2,000 members of the Philological Society, took forty-four years to publish; and the much less ambitious Dictionary of American English was eighteen years in the making.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Linguistics/Revue canadienne de linguistique , Volume 1 , Issue R2 , October 1955 , pp. 3 - 8
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Linguistic Association. 1955

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References

Notes

1 The OED Supplement defines a Canadlanism as “a Canadian idiom.” and Webster's New International Dictionary as “a linguistic expression distinctively Canadian.”

2 The following antedatings suggest the treasure trove awaiting Canadian lexical researchers, DA primary dates being parenthesized: mamelle (1819) 1744 Dobbs Account of the Countries Adjoining to Hudson's Bay; date: news dispatch (1845) 1824 prince Edward Island Register 3 Jan.; 1828 Loyalist (York) 7 June; Indian flour (1860) 1821 OliverView of Lower Canada; double beer (1867) 1620 Whitbourne Discourse and Discovery of New-found-land; emigrant agent (1868) 18S8 British Colonist (Victoria) 11 Dec.; deeded land (1872) 1820 Stuart Emigrant's Guide to Upper Canada; shaganappi (1873) 1865 Manitobao (Red River Settlement) 13 May; carry, v.: extend credit (1879) 1864 Witness (Montreal) 29 Aug.; tuladi (1884) 1846 Hatheway History of New Brunswick; firebreak (1885) 1841 Journal of the House of Assembly ef Newfoundland; bake(d)-apple (1889) 1775 Cartwright Labrador Journal; 1839 Tucker Five Months In Labrador; 1853 Transactions Literary & Historical Society of Quebec; 1875 North Star (St. John's) 31 July; tobogganer (1891) 1878 Canadian Gentleman's Journal 8 Mar.; whiskey-John (1895) 1795 Hearne Journey to the Northern Ocean; sourdough (1902) 1899Klondike Nugget (Dawson) 17 May; Chinese Laundry 1904; 1890 Moose Jaw Tunes 29 Aug.; Cadet of Temperance (1906) 1853 Canadian Watchman (Toronto) 8 Jan.; fire hall (1906) 1882 Brandon Mall 19 Dec.; 1903 Yukon Sun (Dawson) 31 Dec.; 1904 Eye Opener (Calgary) 19 Nov.; seed catalogue (1907) 1880 Saskatchewan Herald (Battleford) 29 Mar.; remittance man (1924) 1906 Eye Opener 8 Dec ; binder twine (1946) 1890 Moose Jaw Tunes 18 July.

Existence of these many antedatings demonstrates the folly of drawing too sweeping conclusions. from such meager evidence as was collected for the DA, though they by no means preclude an American, or even British, origin for some of the words.

3 The DA, with a single example of treaty Indian dated 1876. declares the term obsolete, but it is still common in Canada, as witness its occurrence in the North Star (Yellow-knife, N.W.T.) Feb., 1954. and the Manitoulin Expositor (Little Current. Ont.) 26 May, 1955. Similarly, the DA'a sole example of wood rights dates to 1788, but it is to be found in the Aug., 1954 Issue of the North Star.

4 The OED Supplement regards Prairie Provinces as synonymous with the prairie states of the American Midwest!

5 The 1954 printings of the “Webster” New World and American College dictionaries have not as yet noticed the accession of Newfoundland to the Maritime Provinces.

6 As a case in point, let us suppose we want to know the localities where aboiteau is commonly in use. Swan's Anglo-American Dictionary says “Canada.” implying currency throughout what is the largest country in the Western Hemisphere; the NID contents itself with “local,” which tells us nothing; Chambers's Twentieth Century says “Canadian French” and Odham's Dictionary, “French Canadian.’ from which we might well expect aboiteau to be commonest in Quebec; while the Century and New Standard dictionaries specify “N.B.,” which, unhappily, falls short of complete accuracy. The term has been prevalent in Nova Scotia for more than a century as evidenced by the following citations: 1825 Novascotlan (Halifax) 9 Mar.; 1830 Moorson Letters from Nova Scotia; 1876 Campbell History of Yarmouth County, Nova Scotia; 1955 Hants Journal (Windsor, N.S.) 13 Apr.; 1955 News & Sentinel (Amherst NS) 26 Apr.

7 The roots of prairie steppe are French and Russian.

8 Splake was coined by Ontario biologists to denote a hybrid of speckled and take trout.

9 Vaneouverlan was an early designation for a resident of Vancouver Island; modern usage for a citizen of the British Columbia city is Vancouverite.

10 An advocate of Confederation.

11 The qualification “apparent” is used advisedly, inasmuch as many words that are especially prevalent in the Maritimes. and do not have the ring of Canadian coinage, the nonetheless absent from the OED and Joseph Wright' English Dialect Dictionary.

Turr, used in Newfoundland for the raor-billed auk. and drake, a topographical ternm, are apt instances of terms which take the form of Old World dialect, but which do not seem to be recorded in British English.

12 In addition to linguistic Information covering what is new and distinctive in Canadian culture, we should probably include a few terms of British origin, that have a significant place in Canadian history. Certainly, our picture of the development of Canadian railways would be incomplete if we entered the general American usage of grade crossing, while excluding level crossing becauae it happens to be British, inasmuch as both terms have been ueed in Canada for fully a century. Moreover, how could we very well ignore the grand old Scottish—and Canadian—game of curling, by limiting ourselves, say. to ‘spleler, as the only “new” rock-and-broom term of trans-Atlantic origin?

There are perhaps a few other classes of Canadian words, such as those that have acquired different shades of meaning and thus carry different connotations; words retaining meanings now obsolete in England; and words of varying orthography, where so-called American spelling is preferred to British. (For Instance, harbour is now generally used in Newfoundland, whereas the ending in -or occurs repeatedly in legislative Journals of the 1840s).

13 We might, for instance, view the opportunities presented by the one broad field of geography. The physical features of a nation that spans a continent are of course unlike those of a small insular country, whence we have such topographical terms as alkali flat, bedlands, Barren Grounds, barrens, bluff, began, buffalo wallow, bedland, butte, canal, canyon, caribon beg, cotton, coulee, creek, divide, draw, drake, maker, foothill, gully, gumbo, height of land, hoodoo, intervale, knap, mamalle, maraia, muskeg, oak opening, pocalogaa, poplar bluff portage, prairie (which figures in several hundred combinations), rattle, Recklas, ratting land, sandhill, smult, slough, steady, tamarack swamp, tickle, while water. The diversity of Canadian weather is suggested by a wealth of terms, such as anchor ice, barber, black blizzard, blizzard, blizzardous, blizzardy, breakup, chinook wind, cloudburst, dry farming, duster, fredl, freezeup, frost hill, glitter, goose drewader, gallywasher, ice storm, Indian Summer, Manitoba wave, pathola, road ban, robin storm, semi-arid, silver thaw, sleb, smelt storm, mow shed, mow shower, squaw winter, twister. Then think of the vast riches awaiting discovery among other phases of geography, particularly flora and fauna, place names, Indian tribal names and borrowings from native cultures.