By Robert Oliphant
Columnist EdNews.org

If the Supreme Court follows the election returns, as the saying goes, then sociologists probably follow the casualty lists. Which is to say that Robert Putnam's current fears regarding ethnic diversity make more sense matched up against today's tribal struggles in Iraq, Afghanistan, Sudan, and Ceylon than would have been so in 1995, when "Bowling Alone" was first published as an article in the Journal of Democracy

Ethnic diversity, cultural pluralism, bilingualism, even "ancient affections" (Woodrow Wilson's term) — back in 1995 these separatist ideologies made bright and cheerful sense to many of us, including Mr. Putnam, whose Preface to the book version of Bowling Alone (2000) includes a respectful tribute to the Sons of Italy. In 2007, though, the term Balkanization (can it be translated as "Iraq-ization") has overtones far more dark, far more frightening.

As linguists, our professional take on ethnic diversity has always been somewhat ambivalent. Following Franz Boas, we've traditionally respected linguistic and cultural diversity. Yet as historically conscious Americans we know quite well how fragile nations (e.g., our own Civil War) and national languages (Spanish-Catalan) are. Hence our interest in what might be called "preservational" linguistics in the form of national policies to standardize communicative effectiveness — airport signage and hyphenation (via the U.S. Government Printing Office) are two instances that come to mind.

Paralleling Putnam's newly acquired awareness of the potential dangers of ethnic diversity, and thanks to the splendid work that's being done on word frequency lists, it's not surprising that some linguists are beginning to call for a new unabridged "preservational" dictionary of American English. Given the precedent set by William Torrey Harris, who edited the first Merriam Webster unabridged dictionary while simultaneously serving as U.S. Commissioner of Education, it would be quite proper to seek federal support for such a project.

As somewhat of a contrarian, I believe such a project, though worthy, is overambitious. Practically considered, I shall argue, American linguists could come pretty close to achieving the same unifying if they created a "user's manual" to make the dictionaries we have, large and small, work better with respect to four areas of current concern, namely international American English pronunciation, high-tech Latinate English, high stakes vocabulary testing, and Alzheimer's prevention.

International American English pronunciation. . . . Professors of English are not shy when it comes to celebrating the worldwide status of their subject, since over 3 billion of us now live in countries where English is explicitly designated as an official language or alternate language according to Time Almanac 2007. Just as important, for students at home and abroad, is the increasing insistence worldwide (especially in Asia) upon standard American English pronunciation, thanks largely to its crystal clear range of front vowels (flat A, etc.) and its consistent stress patterns.

This international development will require our user's manual to give special attention to the pronunciation of what might be called "worldwide standard" American English. Unfortunately, with the exception of the Scholastic Children's Dictionary, our printed-form dictionaries all use special "keyboard unfriendly" characters for representing individual sounds, along with offering alternate dialect-based pronunciation. Many of them have also cut back on the number of example-words used to illustrate the characters in what is still confusingly called a "phonetic" alphabet that goes back to Henry Sweet (a friend of G.B. Shaw's and the model for the irascible Henry Higgins in Pygmalion.

Our user's manual can compensate for these weaknesses by offering more pronunciation examples, including consonantal clusters as in stick /stik ( > "ihk-stay" in Pig Latin). Even more helpful would be a full treatment of sound-spelling correspondence along the lines set forth back in 1948 by Leonard Bloomfield: Dan, Nan, Fan, Can, etc. moving on up to encompass phonemic rhymes like moo, true, cue, new, few, and do, etc. By way of tribute to Bloomfield's genius (he was a prime mover in the WWII language-learning program), it's worth noting that Dan and Nan are still fanning one another in countless elementary school reading textbooks, e.g., the Open Court series..

The propriety of a "standard" approach to pronunciation is supported by the current dictionary policies of our university libraries. Anyone who checks the catalogs of major university libraries (UCLA, UC Berkeley, U of Chicago, etc.) will find, as might be expected, that the Merriam Webster Unabridged (1961) occupies pride of place with six or more copies shelved in various locations. Surprisingly enough, though, multiple copies of the long out of print Merriam Webster Unabridged of 1934 also remain on the shelves (e.g., 6 at UCLA), as opposed to only one or two for the relatively recent Random House Unabridged (2nd ed., 1997), which was edited by Stuart Flexner, a linguist more interested in social and geographical dialects than in an international standard vocabulary..

As far as pronunciation goes, it's worth noting here that Merriam Webster 1934 emphasizes "platform speech" pronunciation and offers a robust collection of spelling-sound examples to help users look up a "word they can't spell" (Thomas Pyles, The Origins and Growth of the English Language includes many of these). In a "speaker's planet" of offshore cell-phoning, our user's manual would be just as popular in Singapore as in St. Louis, in Bangkok as in Bangor, in Mumbai as in Minneapolis.

High Tech Latinate English. . . . Despite its attractive pronunciation system, American English vocabulary is for learners worldwide an equal-opportunity nightmare, uniquely so. This is to say that any fifth grader who makes a random check of a "college"-size dictionary will discover that 80% of its headwords came into the language after 1066 from Latinate and Graeco-Latinate sources, and must therefore be learned by rote rather than by structural recognition, e.g., vocabulary as opposed to worldwide. They also have more letters, e.g., pterodactyl, and are more difficult to spell. Hence the use of Latinate headwords for difficult spelling bee questions like, "Please spell the word whose pronunciation can be represented as /muy'euh kahr"dee euhm/, which is listed as a noun, and whose dictionary definition in Random House Unabridged is "the muscular substance of the heart.

"

A worldwide technology needs precise one-definition multi-letter terms like myocardium, as opposed to "ordinary" multi-definition mini-letter words like heart (43 numbered definitions and 5 letters). Just as important, its dictionaries need to label these technical terms, including technical definitions for ordinary words like crisis, e.g. "4. [definition 4] Med.[medicine] a. the point in the course of a serious disease at which a decisive change occurs, leading either to recovery or to death." It's also important that these technical terms be identified with consistent field labels, especially for electronic dictionaries that can be used to produce headword lists for students in specific fields like medicine, anatomy, chemistry, and even linguistics.
Our user's manual should take the study-list challenge very seriously. Right now, apart from Steadman's Medical Dictionary, glossaries of technical terms tend to omit memorization clues like pronunciation, etymologies, parts of speech, cross references, combining elements, and roots — all conventional dictionary features which encourage high-speed connectedness learning, as opposed to slow-as-death rote repetition.
Despite the potential benefits of dictionary-based study lists, some dictionaries, e.g., Webster's New World Collegiate, omit field labels in their entries, even though they list a large number of fields and abbreviations in their preliminary materials. Others, e.g., Random House Unabridged, meticulously identify fields and sub fields, including Veterinary Medicine (Vet. Med.) in their entries, but omit any listing of them (there are over 100) in their preliminary materials. Hence the need of a user's manual to compensate for these crippling lacunae.

High stakes vocabulary testing. . . . An unambiguous standard for measuring vocabulary achievement — this will be a major challenge for our user's manual. Right now high stakes vocabulary-emphasis tests like the SAT and the MCAT (Medical College Admissions Test) have far greater career relevance than course grades, recommendations, and even diplomas, with the result that companies like Pearson and Thomson Prometric now offer hundreds of tests like these in proctored settings all over the planet. Yet we still can't make achievement comparisons with the same degree of elegance that we use at our local gym when we count our treadmill calories (time and effort-level variables) and link their impact to other measures like weight loss, cholesterol level, stress test results, etc.

By way of meeting our standard-of-measurement challenge, we can start with George Kingley Zipf's assertion that familiar, frequently used words are shorter (fewer letters) and more ambiguous (more definitions listed), e.g., run (over 100 definitions) as opposed to myocardium (only one definition). Via these two variables we can rate and rank the presumptive frequency of use of any list of headwords, even the contents (over 300,000 of an unabridged dictionary). Going further, we can also rate and rank the presumptive difficulty of any spelling bee-style question if we include the definition number in our formula, along with the number of memory clues in the entry itself (etymologies, roots, etc.).

As stated here, this proposed standard for measuring vocabulary achievement is only a proposal, nothing more. But it certainly opens up the issue for discussion, especially in connection with credit for estimated study time. With an estimate of nine study-minutes overall for each item on a Scripps National Spelling Bee study list (800 high difficulty memory targets), the time estimate of 7200 minutes (120 hours) would certainly meet traditional Carnegie unit credit requirements well enough to justify three units of credit and a C-grade for an average grade (70%) on a 100-item test based upon such a list.

Time. talent, tasks, tests, and transfer — the productivity of these five basic elements of educational accountancy will be greatly improved by an authoritative dictionary-based worldwide standard for testing and ranking English-vocabulary achievement — especially as set forth in a low-cost user's manual.

Alzheimer's prevention. . . . It's hard to say exactly what role our user's manual will play in preventing Alzheimer's disease. But homeopathically considered, the prospect of going blank on words when we're older, including our early fifties, very properly urges more attention to developing and maintaining vocabulary fluency, ideally in connection with the high speed searching resources of our electronic dictionaries. Dictionaries in the mind, not just on the shelf — that's a proper goal for all of us, isn't it?

TO CONCLUDE . . . .Electronic dictionaries (not just CD ROMs), unabridged, college-size dictionaries, desk dictionaries, school-size dictionaries, special purpose dictionaries, even foreign language dictionaries — together these comprise what can fairly be called the American dictionary system. Individually, as noted here, they may have their limitations. As a functioning system, however, they work surprisingly well, enough so that a respectable user's manual may help them work even better.

This does not rule out our more ambitious goal of a new unabridged dictionary for American English, ideally one with plenty of input from the academic community. But pending completion of such a work, a user's guide certainly represents a first step worth supporting by American linguists and others concerned with the role of standard American English as a national resource and as a worldwide unifying element for our planet as a whole.

As described in the Boston Globe (8/5/2007) by Michael Jonas, Robert Putnam's ethnic diversity research could fairly be called new-century survivalist scholarship, as opposed to the meliorist flavor of his 1995 celebration of ethnic diversity and bonding. Back in what Henry Luce called the "American Century," we welcomed not only different strokes for different folks, but different foreign policies too, e.g., the Sons of Italy support for Mussolini in the thirties and the continuing support of many Irish-Americans for the IRA. As we move into 2008, however, our emerging concern with global warming, global population growth, and global diseases argues strongly for more of a global perspective, especially since American English is already over halfway there as a global language.

Overall, I believe Robert Putnam's current research represents a major step forward for American intellectuals, especially as a step beyond the "smelly little orthodoxies," as Orwell called them, of both the left and the right. As proposed here, a new user's manual for American dictionaries may not seem very ambitious. But as I tried to indicate, it represents a practical that's well worth taking seriously in times like these. . . . productively so, I hope.


Published August 8, 2007