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The English Dialect Dictionary

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The English Dialect Dictionary ( EDD ) is the most comprehensive dictionary of English dialects ever published, compiled by the Yorkshire dialectologist Joseph Wright (1855–1930), with strong support by a team and his wife Elizabeth Mary Wright (1863–1958). The time of dialect use covered is, by and large, the Late Modern English period (1700–1903), but given Wright's historical interest, many entries contain information on etymological precursors of dialect words in centuries as far back as Old English and Middle English . Wright had hundreds of informants ("correspondents") and borrowed from thousands of written sources, mainly glossaries published by the English Dialect Society in the later 19th century, but also many literary texts written in dialect. In contrast to most of his sources, Wright pursued a scholarly linguistic method, providing full evidence of his sources and antedating modes of grammatical analysis of the 20th century. The contents of the EDD' s nearly 80.000 entries (including the Supplement) were generally ignored during the 20th century but were made accessible by the interface of EDD Online , the achievement of an Innsbruck University research project first published in 2012 and repeatedly revised since (version 4.0 in March 2023).

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98-498: Compulsory school education was not introduced in Great Britain until as late as 1870, so for Joseph Wright, born into a poor family in 1850, no school was available until he was 14 or 15. In his childhood, he had to work as a donkey-boy in a quarry and as a factory worker in a Bradford weaving mill. Yet he taught himself to read and write all by himself, started self-education on a large scale, attended night-schools, and soon had

196-609: A reference library and, in general, documents may not be removed from the reading rooms. In 2000, a number of libraries within the University of Oxford were brought together for administrative purposes under the aegis of what was initially known as Oxford University Library Services (OULS), and since 2010 as the Bodleian Libraries , of which the Bodleian Library is the largest component. All colleges of

294-731: A sermo Theotiscus ('Germanic language'), the language of the Gothic translation of the Bible, and that they used such a liturgy. Many writers of the medieval texts that mention the Goths used the word Goths to mean any Germanic people in eastern Europe (such as the Varangians ), many of whom certainly did not use the Gothic language as known from the Gothic Bible. Some writers even referred to Slavic -speaking people as "Goths". However, it

392-441: A stress accent rather than the pitch accent of Proto-Indo-European . This is indicated by the shortening of long vowels [eː] and [oː] and the loss of short vowels [a] and [i] in unstressed final syllables. Just as in other Germanic languages, the free moving Proto-Indo-European accent was replaced with one fixed on the first syllable of simple words. Accents do not shift when words are inflected. In most compound words,

490-494: A "disservice" by criticising Ellis's methods used in collecting data, but then using almost identical methods in English Dialect Grammar and taking on much of Ellis's data for his own work. Both Peter Anderson and Graham Shorrocks have argued that Wright distorted Ellis's data by using a less precise phonetic notation and using vague geographical areas rather than the precise locations given by Ellis. Overall,

588-400: A "workshop", he was compelled partially to finance the project himself. Henry Frowde, publisher to the University of Oxford and no longer employee of Oxford University Press at the time, served as publisher. The six volumes appeared one at a time over eight years from 1898 to 1905, announced as "being the complete vocabulary of all dialect words still in use, or known to have been in use during

686-534: A church language when the Visigoths converted from Arianism to Nicene Christianity in 589). The language survived as a domestic language in the Iberian Peninsula (modern-day Spain and Portugal) as late as the eighth century. Gothic-seeming terms are found in manuscripts subsequent to this date, but these may or may not belong to the same language. A language known as Crimean Gothic survived in

784-681: A fear that Oxford would be bombed, and a volunteer fire brigade was trained and ready, but Oxford escaped the First World War without being bombed. By the 1920s, the Library needed further expansion space, and in 1937 building work began on the New Bodleian building, opposite the Clarendon Building on the northeast corner of Broad Street . The New Bodleian was designed by architect Sir Giles Gilbert Scott . Construction

882-509: A few documents in Gothic have survived – not enough for a complete reconstruction of the language. Most Gothic-language sources are translations or glosses of other languages (namely, Greek ), so foreign linguistic elements most certainly influenced the texts. These are the primary sources: Reports of the discovery of other parts of Ulfilas's Bible have not been substantiated. Heinrich May in 1968 claimed to have found in England twelve leaves of

980-428: A former perfect); three grammatical moods : indicative , subjunctive (from an old optative form) and imperative as well as three kinds of nominal forms: a present infinitive , a present participle , and a past passive . Not all tenses and persons are represented in all moods and voices, as some conjugations use auxiliary forms . Finally, there are forms called 'preterite-present': the old Indo-European perfect

1078-556: A good command of Latin, German and other languages and stages of languages, including Gothic and Middle English . After staying at German universities (Heidelberg, Leipzig) for over six years, he worked his way up in various teaching jobs, as a Deputy Professor and as secretary of the English Dialect Society , finally to be elected to a full Professorship of Comparative Philology at the University of Oxford . This

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1176-443: A historical description of the development of sounds in dialect; and 'Accidence', which gave details on grammar and especially on morphology. Unlike Alexander John Ellis 's monumental work on Early English Pronunciation , Volume V , Wright’s Grammar is very condensed. Its descriptive part comprises merely 82 pages, followed, however, by more than a hundred pages of an index, which relates words to dialect areas. The six chapters of

1274-416: A large number of parameters (e.g. compounds or variants) and filters (e.g. of areas and time). The details of the enormous potential of EDD Online and the repercussions for a new concept of English dialectology are described in a monograph by Manfred Markus published in 2021. Gothic language Gothic is an extinct East Germanic language that was spoken by the Goths . It is known primarily from

1372-681: A palimpsest containing parts of the Gospel of Matthew . Only fragments of the Gothic translation of the Bible have been preserved. The translation was apparently done in the Balkans region by people in close contact with Greek Christian culture. The Gothic Bible apparently was used by the Visigoths in Occitania until the loss of Visigothic Occitania at the start of the 6th century, in Visigothic Iberia until about 700, and perhaps for

1470-538: A popular location for filmmakers, representing either Oxford University or other locations. It can be seen in the opening scene of The Golden Compass (2007), Brideshead Revisited (1981 TV serial), Another Country (1984), The Madness of King George III (1994), and the first two, as well as the fourth, Harry Potter films, in which the Divinity School doubles as the Hogwarts hospital wing and

1568-456: A time in Italy, the Balkans, and Ukraine until at least the mid-9th century. During the extermination of Arianism , Trinitarian Christians probably overwrote many texts in Gothic as palimpsests, or alternatively collected and burned Gothic documents. Apart from biblical texts, the only substantial Gothic document that still exists – and the only lengthy text known to have been composed originally in

1666-519: Is the verb "to be" , which is athematic in Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, and many other Indo-European languages. Gothic verbs are, like nouns and adjectives, divided into strong verbs and weak verbs. Weak verbs are characterised by preterites formed by appending the suffixes -da or -ta , parallel to past participles formed with -þ / -t . Strong verbs form preterites by ablaut (the alternating of vowels in their root forms) or by reduplication (prefixing

1764-420: Is an allophone of the others, all found only in complementary distribution with them. Nasals in Gothic, like most other languages, are pronounced at the same point of articulation as the consonant that follows them ( assimilation ). Therefore, clusters like [md] and [nb] are not possible. Accentuation in Gothic can be reconstructed through phonetic comparison, Grimm's law , and Verner's law . Gothic used

1862-473: Is clear from Ulfilas's translation that – despite some puzzles – the Gothic language belongs with the Germanic language-group, not with Slavic. Generally, the term "Gothic language" refers to the language of Ulfilas , but the attestations themselves date largely from the 6th century, long after Ulfilas had died. A few Gothic runic inscriptions were found across Europe, but due to early Christianization of

1960-591: Is clearly identifiable evidence from other branches that the Gothic form is a secondary development. Gothic fails to display a number of innovations shared by all Germanic languages attested later: The language also preserved many features that were mostly lost in other early Germanic languages: Most conspicuously, Gothic shows no sign of morphological umlaut. Gothic fotus , pl. fotjus , can be contrasted with English foot  : feet , German Fuß  : Füße , Old Norse fótr  : fœtr , Danish fod  : fødder . These forms contain

2058-492: Is fairly free as is typical of other inflected languages. The natural word order of Gothic is assumed to have been like that of the other old Germanic languages; however, nearly all extant Gothic texts are translations of Greek originals and have been heavily influenced by Greek syntax. Sometimes what can be expressed in one word in the original Greek will require a verb and a complement in the Gothic translation; for example, διωχθήσονται ( diōchthēsontai , "they will be persecuted")

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2156-634: Is hard to separate the two) derived by the processes described in Grimm's law and Verner's law and characteristic of Germanic languages . Gothic is unusual among Germanic languages in having a /z/ phoneme, which has not become /r/ through rhotacization. Furthermore, the doubling of written consonants between vowels suggests that Gothic made distinctions between long and short, or geminated consonants: atta [atːa] "dad", kunnan [kunːan] "to know" (Dutch kennen , German kennen "to know", Icelandic kunna ). Gothic has three nasal consonants, one of which

2254-469: Is less significant in Gothic because of its conservative nature: the so-called "weak" declensions (those ending in n ) are, in fact, no weaker in Gothic (in terms of having fewer endings) than the "strong" declensions (those ending in a vowel), and the "strong" declensions do not form a coherent class that can be clearly distinguished from the "weak" declensions. Although descriptive adjectives in Gothic (as well as superlatives ending in -ist and -ost ) and

2352-555: Is noted and known for a diligent Student, and in all his conversation to be trusty, active, and discreet, a graduate also and a Linguist, not encumbered with marriage, nor with a benefice of Cure", although James was able to persuade Bodley to let him get married and to become Rector of St Aldate's Church , Oxford. James said of the Bodleian's collections, "The like Librarie is no where to be found." In all, 25 have served as Bodley's Librarian; their levels of diligence have varied over

2450-411: Is rendered: Likewise Gothic translations of Greek noun phrases may feature a verb and a complement. In both cases, the verb follows the complement, giving weight to the theory that basic word order in Gothic is object–verb. This aligns with what is known of other early Germanic languages. However, this pattern is reversed in imperatives and negations: And in a wh -question the verb directly follows

2548-616: Is the earliest Germanic language that is attested in any sizable texts, but it lacks any modern descendants. The oldest documents in Gothic date back to the fourth century. The language was in decline by the mid-sixth century, partly because of the military defeat of the Goths at the hands of the Franks , the elimination of the Goths in Italy, and geographic isolation (in Spain, the Gothic language lost its last and probably already declining function as

2646-647: Is the preservation of the dual number , referring to two people or things; the plural was used only for quantities greater than two. Thus, "the two of us" and "we" for numbers greater than two were expressed as wit and weis respectively. While proto-Indo-European used the dual for all grammatical categories that took a number (as did Classical Greek and Sanskrit ), most Old Germanic languages are unusual in that they preserved it only for pronouns. Gothic preserves an older system with dual marking on both pronouns and verbs (but not nouns or adjectives). The simple demonstrative pronoun sa (neuter: þata , feminine: so , from

2744-529: Is used for transliterating Gothic words into the Latin script . The system mirrors the conventions of the native alphabet, such as writing long /iː/ as ei . The Goths used their equivalents of e and o alone only for long higher vowels, using the digraphs ai and au (much as in French ) for the corresponding short or lower vowels. There are two variant spelling systems: a "raw" one that directly transliterates

2842-556: The Codex Argenteus , a 6th-century copy of a 4th-century Bible translation, and is the only East Germanic language with a sizeable text corpus . All others, including Burgundian and Vandalic , are known, if at all, only from proper names that survived in historical accounts, and from loanwords in other, mainly Romance , languages. As a Germanic language, Gothic is a part of the Indo-European language family. It

2940-563: The Dictionary is a standard work in the historical study of dialect. Wright marked annotations and corrections in a cut-up and rebound copy of the first edition; this copy is among Wright's papers in the Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford. The sixth volume includes the English Dialect Grammar , which was also published separately. This includes 16,000 dialectal forms across two main sections: 'Phonology', which gives

3038-481: The Gladstone Link . In 1914, the total number of books in the library's collections exceeded 1 million. By 1915, only one quarter of the revised catalogue had been completed, a task made more difficult by library staff going into the war effort , either serving in the armed forces or volunteering to serve in the hospitals. In July 1915, the most valuable books had been moved into a secret location due to

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3136-563: The Grammar proper are: I. Phonetic Alphabet; II. The Vowels of Accented Syllables; III. The French Element; IV. Vowels of Unaccented Syllables; V. The Consonants; and VI. Accidence. In his Introduction Wright explicitly mentions that in the classification of the dialects he has "in a great measure followed the one given by Dr. Ellis". As regards phonetic details, Wright also borrowed material from Ellis, for which he has been criticized by some linguists. Peter Anderson claimed that Wright did Ellis

3234-590: The Grammar , while obliged to many previous scholars, in the wake of the creation of the EDD , introduced much new material G.L. Brook referred to the Grammar as "a less satisfactory work than the English Dialect Dictionary". The English Dialect Dictionary Online ( EDD Online ), a database and software initiated by Manfred Markus at the University of Innsbruck , provided a computerised version of Wright’s English Dialect Dictionary . The work on

3332-743: The Radcliffe Camera . In 1861, the library's medical and scientific collections were transferred to the Radcliffe Science Library , which had been built farther north next to the University Museum . The Clarendon Building was designed by Nicholas Hawksmoor and built between 1711 and 1715, originally to house the printing presses of the Oxford University Press . It was vacated by the Press in

3430-498: The past participle may take both definite and indefinite forms, some adjectival words are restricted to one variant. Some pronouns take only definite forms: for example, sama (English "same"), adjectives like unƕeila ("constantly", from the root ƕeila , "time"; compare to the English "while"), comparative adjective and present participles . Others, such as áins ("some"), take only the indefinite forms. The table below displays

3528-635: The wh- at the beginning of many English interrogative, which, as in Gothic, are pronounced with [ʍ] in some dialects. The same etymology is present in the interrogatives of many other Indo-European languages: w- [v] in German, hv- in Danish , the Latin qu- (which persists in modern Romance languages ), the Greek τ- or π-, the Slavic and Indic k- as well as many others. The bulk of Gothic verbs follow

3626-534: The 170-page Supplement , given their non-integrated position in the six-volume work, are bound to be overlooked. With the help of the Innsbruck interface, users can focus on different linguistic aspects of the Dictionary ’s text beyond the mere headwords, in order to retrieve formally or semantically specific information based on the whole EDD . Similar to the online version of the OED ( OED 3), EDD Online allows for

3724-525: The Bodleian Library, in its current incarnation, has a continuous history dating back to 1602, its roots date back even further. The first purpose-built library known to have existed in Oxford was founded in the 14th century under the will of Thomas Cobham , Bishop of Worcester (d. 1327). This small collection of chained books was situated above the north side of the University Church of St Mary

3822-565: The Bodleian brand. The building was nominated for the 2016 Sterling Prize . In November 2015, its collections topped 12 million items with the acquisition of Shelley's " Poetical Essay on the Existing State of Things ". Thought lost from shortly after its publication in 1811 until a copy was rediscovered in a private collection in 2006, the Bodleian has digitised the 20-page pamphlet for online access. The controversial poem and accompanying essay are believed to have contributed to

3920-416: The Bodleian's collection. Anyone who wanted to use the Bodleian had to buy a copy of the 1620 library catalogue at a cost of 2 shillings and 8 pence. By the time of Bodley's death in 1613, his planned further expansion to the library was just starting. The Schools Quadrangle (sometimes referred to as the "Old Schools Quadrangle", or the "Old Library") was built between 1613 and 1619 by adding three wings to

4018-589: The Gothic language – is the Skeireins , a few pages of commentary on the Gospel of John . Very few medieval secondary sources make reference to the Gothic language after about 800. In De incrementis ecclesiae Christianae (840–842), Walafrid Strabo , a Frankish monk who lived in Swabia , writes of a group of monks who reported that even then certain peoples in Scythia ( Dobruja ), especially around Tomis , spoke

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4116-577: The Goths, the Runic writing was quickly replaced by the newly invented Gothic alphabet. Ulfilas's Gothic, as well as that of the Skeireins and various other manuscripts, was written using an alphabet that was most likely invented by Ulfilas himself for his translation. Some scholars (such as Braune) claim that it was derived from the Greek alphabet only while others maintain that there are some Gothic letters of Runic or Latin origin. A standardized system

4214-530: The Greek of that period is well documented, it is possible to reconstruct much of Gothic pronunciation from translated texts. In addition, the way in which non-Greek names are transcribed in the Greek Bible and in Ulfilas's Bible is very informative. In general, Gothic consonants are devoiced at the ends of words. Gothic is rich in fricative consonants (although many of them may have been approximants ; it

4312-480: The Indo-European root *so , *seh 2 , *tod ; cognate to the Greek article ὁ, ἡ, τό and the Latin is tud ) can be used as an article, allowing constructions of the type definite article + weak adjective + noun . The interrogative pronouns begin with ƕ- , which derives from the proto-Indo-European consonant *kʷ that was present at the beginning of all interrogatives in proto-Indo-European, cognate with

4410-593: The Proscholium and Arts End. Its tower forms the main entrance to the library, and is known as the Tower of the Five Orders . The Tower is so named because it is ornamented, in ascending order, with the columns of each of the five orders of classical architecture : Tuscan , Doric , Ionic , Corinthian and Composite . The three wings of the quadrangle have three floors: rooms on the ground and upper floors of

4508-538: The Selden End. The novel also features one of the library's Ashmole manuscripts (Ashmole 782) as a central element of the book. Medieval historian Dominic Selwood set part of his 2013 crypto-thriller The Sword of Moses in Duke Humfrey's library , and the novel hinges on the library's copy of a magical medieval Hebrew manuscript known as " The Sword of Moses ". The Library's architecture has made it

4606-468: The Strasbourg company Treuttel & Würtz . A large collection of medieval Italian manuscripts was bought from Matteo Luigi Canonici in 1817. In 1829, the library bought the collection of Rabbi David Oppenheim , adding to its Hebrew collection. By the late 19th century, further growth of the library demanded more expansion space. In 1860, the library was allowed to take over the adjacent building,

4704-548: The Supplement. The entries are of different length, ranging from cross-references to analyses of dialectal forms and meanings expanding over several pages. The true value of the Dictionary lies in the wealth of information contained within the entries. The data provided refers to usage labels of the headwords, pronunciation, spelling and phonetic variants, definitions, quotations from thousands of sources, types of word formation (such as compounds and phraseologisms ), as well as

4802-520: The University of Oxford have their own libraries, which in a number of cases were established well before the foundation of the Bodleian, and all of which remain entirely independent of the Bodleian. They do, however, participate in SOLO (Search Oxford Libraries Online), the Bodleian Libraries' online union catalogue , except for University College , which has an independent catalogue. Much of

4900-559: The Virgin on the High Street. This collection continued to grow steadily, but when Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester (brother of Henry V of England ) donated a great collection of manuscripts between 1435 and 1437, the space was deemed insufficient and a larger building was required. A suitable room was finally built above the Divinity School , and completed in 1488. This room continues to be known as Duke Humfrey's Library . After 1488,

4998-451: The areas of usage within the UK and worldwide. Moreover, the Dictionary is very scrupulous in adding information on historical precursors of dialect words, including both etymology and morphology. An impression of the form and size of the Dictionary is given by the following online versions of the six volumes: Due to the scale of the work and the period in which the information was gathered,

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5096-400: The characteristic change /u/ > /iː/ (English), /uː/ > /yː/ (German), /oː/ > /øː/ (ON and Danish) due to i-umlaut; the Gothic form shows no such change. Bodleian Library The Bodleian Library ( / ˈ b ɒ d l i ən , b ɒ d ˈ l iː ən / ) is the main research library of the University of Oxford . Founded in 1602 by Sir Thomas Bodley , it is one of

5194-494: The company to put a copy of every book registered with them in the library. The Bodleian collection grew so fast that the building was expanded between 1610 and 1612 (known as the Arts End), and again in 1634–1637. When John Selden died in 1654, he left the Bodleian his large collection of books and manuscripts. The later addition to Duke Humfrey's Library continues to be known as the "Selden End". By 1620, 16,000 items were in

5292-410: The correspondence between spelling and sound for consonants: It is possible to determine more or less exactly how the Gothic of Ulfilas was pronounced, primarily through comparative phonetic reconstruction. Furthermore, because Ulfilas tried to follow the original Greek text as much as possible in his translation, it is known that he used the same writing conventions as those of contemporary Greek. Since

5390-979: The declaration is as follows: I hereby undertake not to remove from the Library, nor to mark, deface, or injure in any way, any volume, document or other object belonging to it or in its custody; not to bring into the Library, or kindle therein, any fire or flame, and not to smoke in the Library; and I promise to obey all rules of the Library. This is a translation of the traditional Latin oath (the original version of which did not forbid tobacco smoking, though libraries were then unheated because fires were so hazardous): Do fidem me nullum librum vel instrumentum aliamve quam rem ad bibliothecam pertinentem, vel ibi custodiae causa depositam, aut e bibliotheca sublaturum esse, aut foedaturum deformaturum aliove quo modo laesurum; item neque ignem nec flammam in bibliothecam inlaturum vel in ea accensurum, neque fumo nicotiano aliove quovis ibi usurum; item promitto me omnes leges ad bibliothecam Bodleianam attinentes semper observaturum esse. Whilst

5488-466: The declension of the Gothic adjective blind (English: "blind"), compared with the an -stem noun guma "man, human" and the a -stem noun dags "day": This table is, of course, not exhaustive. (There are secondary inflexions of various sorts not described here.) An exhaustive table of only the types of endings that Gothic took is presented below. Gothic adjectives follow noun declensions closely; they take same types of inflection. Gothic inherited

5586-416: The definite determiners (such as the definite article sa / þata / sō ) while indefinite adjectives are used in other circumstances., Indefinite adjectives generally use a combination of a -stem and ō -stem endings, and definite adjectives use a combination of an -stem and ōn -stem endings. The concept of "strong" and "weak" declensions that is prevalent in the grammar of many other Germanic languages

5684-424: The early 19th century, and used by the university for administrative purposes. In 1975, it was handed over to the Bodleian Library, and now provides office and meeting space for senior members of staff. In 1907, the head librarian, Nicholson, had begun a project to revise the catalogue of printed books. In 1909, the prime minister of Nepal, Chandra Shum Shere , donated a large collection of Sanskrit literature to

5782-480: The end of a word, to their voiced form; another such example is wileid-u "do you ( pl. ) want" from wileiþ "you ( pl. ) want". If the first word has a preverb attached, the clitic actually splits the preverb from the verb: ga-u-láubjats "do you both believe...?" from galáubjats "you both believe". Another such clitic is -uh "and", appearing as -h after a vowel: ga-h-mēlida "and he wrote" from gamēlida "he wrote", urreis nim-uh "arise and take!" from

5880-582: The establishment of the British Museum in 1753, the Bodleian was effectively the national library of England. By then the Bodleian, Cambridge University Library and the Royal Library were the most extensive book collections in England and Wales. The astronomer Thomas Hornsby observed the transit of Venus from the Tower of the Five Orders in 1769. The library was significantly supplied by

5978-443: The full set of Indo-European pronouns: personal pronouns (including reflexive pronouns for each of the three grammatical persons ), possessive pronouns , both simple and compound demonstratives , relative pronouns , interrogatives and indefinite pronouns . Each follows a particular pattern of inflection (partially mirroring the noun declension), much like other Indo-European languages. One particularly noteworthy characteristic

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6076-561: The imperative form nim "take". After iþ or any indefinite besides sums "some" and anþar "another", - uh cannot be placed; in the latter category, this is only because indefinite determiner phrases cannot move to the front of a clause. Unlike, for example, Latin - que , - uh can only join two or more main clauses. In all other cases, the word jah "and" is used, which can also join main clauses. More than one such clitics can occur in one word: diz-uh-þan-sat ijōs "and then he seized them ( fem. )" from dissat "he seized" (notice again

6174-563: The last two hundred years and founded on the publications of the English Dialect Society and on a large amount of material never before printed". The content was issued progressively as 28 parts intended for binding into the six volumes with publication dates of 1898, 1900, 1902, 1903, 1904 and 1905. Vol. 6 includes the list of both printed and unprinted sources arranged by counties. The EDD comprises almost 80.000 entries of dialect words, about 10.000 of which were added by

6272-486: The library a copy of The Advancement of Learning and described the Bodleian as "an Ark to save learning from deluge". At this time, there were few books written in English held in the library, partially because academic work was not done in English. Thomas James suggested that Bodley should ask the Stationers' Company to provide a copy of all books printed to the Bodleian and in 1610 Bodley made an agreement with

6370-470: The library in March 1598. Duke Humfrey's Library was refitted, and Bodley donated some of his own books to furnish it. The library was formally re-opened on 8 November 1602 under the name "Bodleian Library" (officially Bodley's Library). There were around 2000 books in the library at this time, with an ornate Benefactor's Register displayed prominently, to encourage donations. Early benefactors were motivated by

6468-422: The library's archives were digitized and put online for public access in 2015. The Bodleian Library occupies a group of five buildings near Broad Street : the 15th-century Duke Humfrey's Library , the 17th-century Schools Quadrangle, the 18th-century Clarendon Building and Radcliffe Camera , and the 20th- and 21st-century Weston Library . Since the 19th century, underground stores have been constructed, while

6566-714: The library. In 1911, the Copyright Act (now superseded by the Legal Deposit Libraries Act 2003 ) continued the Stationers' agreement by making the Bodleian one of the six (at that time) libraries covering legal deposit in the United Kingdom where a copy of each published book must be deposited. Between 1909 and 1912, an underground bookstack was constructed beneath the Radcliffe Camera and Radcliffe Square , known since 2011 as

6664-415: The location of the stress depends on the type of compound: For example, with comparable words from modern Germanic languages: Gothic preserves many archaic Indo-European features that are not always present in modern Germanic languages, in particular the rich Indo-European declension system. Gothic had nominative , accusative , genitive and dative cases , as well as vestiges of a vocative case that

6762-525: The lower Danube area and in isolated mountain regions in Crimea as late as the second half of the 18th century. Lacking certain sound changes characteristic of Gothic, however, Crimean Gothic cannot be a lineal descendant of the language attested in the Codex Argenteus. The existence of such early attested texts makes Gothic a language of considerable interest in comparative linguistics . Only

6860-466: The most fragile items in the library's collection, and these are substituted for the originals whenever possible. The library publishes digital images of objects in its collection through its Digital Bodleian service. The head of the Bodleian Library is known as "Bodley's Librarian". The first librarian, Thomas James , was selected by Bodley in 1599, and the university confirmed James in his post in 1602. Bodley wanted his librarian to be "some one that

6958-806: The oldest libraries in Europe . With over 13 million printed items, it is the second-largest library in Britain after the British Library . Under the Legal Deposit Libraries Act 2003 , it is one of six legal deposit libraries for works published in the United Kingdom, and under Irish law it is entitled to request a copy of each book published in the Republic of Ireland. Known to Oxford scholars as "Bodley" or "the Bod", it operates principally as

7056-487: The original Gothic script and a "normalized" one that adds diacritics ( macrons and acute accents ) to certain vowels to clarify the pronunciation or, in certain cases, to indicate the Proto-Germanic origin of the vowel in question. The latter system is usually used in the academic literature. The following table shows the correspondence between spelling and sound for vowels: Notes: The following table shows

7154-733: The poet being sent down from Oxford University . The library operates a strict policy on copying of material. Until fairly recently, personal photocopying of library material was not permitted, as there was concern that copying and excessive handling would result in damage. However, individuals may now copy most material produced after 1900, and a staff-mediated service is provided for certain types of material dated between 1801 and 1900. Handheld scanners and digital cameras are also permitted for use on most post-1900 publications and digital cameras may also be used, with permission, with older material. The Library will supply digital scans of most pre-1801 material. Microform copies have been made of many of

7252-413: The pre-conceived size. No well-established professor would be burdened by the foreseeably immense amount of drudgery work involved in such a project. However, Professor Walter William Skeat , founder and president of the English Dialect Society, had created a fund in 1886 (of which nearly half was his own money) for the initial collecting and arranging of the material for the dictionary. Arthur Balfour , at

7350-439: The principal off-site storage area is located at South Marston on the edge of Swindon . Before being granted access to the library, new readers are required to agree to a formal declaration. This declaration was traditionally an oral oath, but is now usually made by signing a letter to a similar effect. Ceremonies in which readers recite the declaration are still performed for those who wish to take them; these occur primarily at

7448-475: The project has been going on since 2006. The third version is presently (summer 2023) available. The fourth version was released in March 2023: EDD Online 4.0 . While various scanned copies of the work from libraries are currently available through the Internet Archive , these disallow queries beyond the alphabetically arranged entry-headwords and beyond full-text searches, and Wright’s corrigenda and

7546-433: The quadrangle (excluding Duke Humfrey's Library , above the Divinity School ) were originally used as lecture space and an art gallery. The lecture rooms are still indicated by the inscriptions over the doors (see illustration). As the library's collections expanded, these rooms were gradually taken over, the university lectures and examinations were moved into the newly created University Schools building. The art collection

7644-404: The question word: Gothic has two clitic particles placed in the second position in a sentence, in accordance with Wackernagel's Law . One such clitic particle is - u , indicating a yes–no question or an indirect question, like Latin - ne : The prepositional phrase without the clitic - u appears as af þus silbin : the clitic causes the reversion of originally voiced fricatives, unvoiced at

7742-503: The recent memory of the Reformation to donate books in the hopes that they would be kept safe. Bodley's collecting interests were varied; according to the library's historian Ian Philip, as early as June 1603 he was attempting to source manuscripts from Turkey, and it was during "the same year that the first Chinese book was acquired", despite no-one at Oxford being able to understand them at that time. In 1605, Francis Bacon gave

7840-419: The root with the first consonant in the root plus aí ) but without adding a suffix in either case. This parallels the Greek and Sanskrit perfects . The dichotomy is still present in modern Germanic languages: Verbal conjugation in Gothic have two grammatical voices : the active and the medial; three numbers: singular, dual (except in the third person) and plural; two tenses: present and preterite (derived from

7938-451: The start of the university's Michaelmas term . External readers (those not attached to the university) are still required to recite the declaration orally prior to admission. The Bodleian Admissions Office has amassed a large collection of translations of the declaration – covering over one hundred different languages as of spring 2017 – allowing those who are not native English speakers to recite it in their first language. The English text of

8036-638: The time First Lord of the Treasury, made a grant from the Royal Bounty Fund which helped to complete the work. After years of nerve-racking hesitation and consultation, Wright finally decided for himself as editor to publish the dictionary by subscription at his own risk. This intention required an enormous amount of activity to promote the planned dictionary and gaining distinguished persons and scholars as subscribers. While he found further sponsors, e.g. Clarendon Press , which provided him rooms for

8134-458: The type of Indo-European conjugation called ' thematic ' because they insert a vowel derived from the reconstructed proto-Indo-European phonemes *e or *o between roots and inflexional suffixes. The pattern is also present in Greek and Latin: The other conjugation, called ' athematic ', in which suffixes are added directly to roots, exists only in unproductive vestigial forms in Gothic, just like in Greek and Latin. The most important such instance

8232-486: The underground bookstack, reached at night by sliding down the "Mendip cleft", a chute concealed in Radcliffe Square . Since J. R. R. Tolkien had studied philology at Oxford and eventually became a professor, many of Tolkien's manuscripts are now at the library. Historian and novelist Deborah Harkness , set much of the early part of her 2011 novel, A Discovery of Witches , in the Bodleian, particularly

8330-445: The university stopped spending money on the library's upkeep and acquisitions, and manuscripts began to go unreturned to the library. The library went through a period of decline in the late 16th century: the library's furniture was sold, and only three of the original books belonging to Duke Humphrey remained in the collection. During the reign of Edward VI , there was a purge of "superstitious" (Catholic-related) manuscripts. It

8428-520: The voicing of diz- ), ga-u-ƕa-sēƕi "whether he saw anything" from gasēƕi "he saw". For the most part, Gothic is known to be significantly closer to Proto-Germanic than any other Germanic language except for that of the (scantily attested) Ancient Nordic runic inscriptions, which has made it invaluable in the reconstruction of Proto-Germanic . In fact, Gothic tends to serve as the primary foundation for reconstructing Proto-Germanic . The reconstructed Proto-Germanic conflicts with Gothic only when there

8526-408: The years immediately preceding the appearance of the first part of the dictionary (1898), Joseph Wright was widely regarded with scepticism concerning both the academic value of the project and its financial coverage. While vast dialect material was made available by the English Dialect Society , no publisher including Oxford University Press would take the pecuniary responsibility for a dictionary of

8624-534: The years. Thomas Lockey (1660–1665) was regarded as not fit for the post, John Hudson (1701–1719) has been described as "negligent if not incapable", and John Price (1768–1813) was accused by a contemporary scholar of "a regular and constant neglect of his duty". Sarah Thomas , who served from 2007 to 2013, was the first woman to hold the position, and the second Librarian (after her predecessor, Reginald Carr ) also to be Director of Oxford University Library Services (now Bodleian Libraries). Thomas, an American,

8722-675: Was a former fellow of Merton College , who had recently married a wealthy widow, and the son of John Bodley (d. 15 Oct. 1591) a Protestant merchant who chose foreign exile rather than staying in England under the Roman Catholic government of Queen Mary , and was thereby involved in Rowland Hill's publication of the Geneva Bible . Six of the Oxford University dons were tasked with helping Bodley in refitting

8820-482: Was also the first foreign librarian to run the Bodleian. Her successor from January 2014 is Richard Ovenden , who was Deputy Librarian under Thomas. The Bodleian is one of the libraries consulted by Christine Greenaway (one of Bodley's librarians) in Colin Dexter 's Inspector Morse novel The Wench is Dead (1989). The denouement of Michael Innes 's Operation Pax (1951) is set in an imaginary version of

8918-582: Was completed in 1940. The building was of an innovative ziggurat design, with 60% of the bookstack below ground level. A tunnel under Broad Street connects the Old and New Bodleian buildings, and contains a pedestrian walkway, a mechanical book conveyor and a pneumatic Lamson tube system which was used for book orders until an electronic automated stack request system was introduced in 2002. The Lamson tube system continued to be used by readers requesting manuscripts to be delivered to Duke Humfrey's Library until it

9016-512: Was designed by WilkinsonEyre and the MEP design was undertaken by engineering consultancy Hurley Palmer Flatt . It reopened to readers as the Weston Library on 21 March 2015. In March 2010, the group of libraries known collectively as "Oxford University Library Services" was renamed " The Bodleian Libraries ", thus allowing those Oxford members outside the Bodleian to acquire the gloss of

9114-486: Was in 1900, when he was just publishing the different parts of his English Dialect Dictionary . The details of Wright's boyhood and of the romance of his remarkable career ("from donkey-boy to professor"), as well as the difficulties he encountered in publishing the English Dialect Dictionary , were presented in a biography written after his death in 1930 by his widow Elizabeth Mary Wright. During

9212-539: Was not until 1598 that the library began to thrive once more, when Thomas Bodley wrote to the Vice Chancellor of the university offering to support the development of the library: "where there hath bin hertofore a publike library in Oxford: which you know is apparent by the rome it self remayning, and by your statute records I will take the charge and cost upon me, to reduce it again to his former use." Bodley

9310-526: Was reinterpreted as present tense. The Gothic word wáit , from the proto-Indo-European *woid-h 2 e ("to see" in the perfect), corresponds exactly to its Sanskrit cognate véda and in Greek to ϝοἶδα. Both etymologically should mean "I have seen" (in the perfect sense) but mean "I know" (in the preterite-present meaning). Latin follows the same rule with nōuī ("I have learned" and "I know"). The preterite-present verbs include áigan ("to possess") and kunnan ("to know") among others. The word order of Gothic

9408-538: Was sometimes identical to the nominative and sometimes to the accusative. The three genders of Indo-European were all present. Nouns and adjectives were inflected according to one of two grammatical numbers : the singular and the plural. Nouns can be divided into numerous declensions according to the form of the stem: a , ō , i , u , an , ōn , ein , r , etc. Adjectives have two variants, indefinite and definite (sometimes indeterminate and determinate ), with definite adjectives normally used in combination with

9506-523: Was transferred to the Ashmolean . One of the schools was used to host exhibitions of the library's treasures, now moved to the renovated Weston Library, whilst the others are used as offices and meeting rooms for the library administrators, a readers' common room, and a small gift shop. The agreement with the Stationers' Company meant that the growth of stock was constant and there were also a number of large bequests and acquisitions for other reasons. Until

9604-530: Was turned off in July 2009. In 2010, it was announced that the conveyor, which had been transporting books under Broad Street since the 1940s, would be shut down and dismantled on 20 August 2010. The New Bodleian closed on 29 July 2011 prior to rebuilding. The New Bodleian building was rebuilt behind its original façade to provide improved storage facilities for rare and fragile material, as well as better facilities for readers and visitors. The new building concept

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