雅思练习总结（六）

雅思练习总结（六）

本文章是雅思练习总结（六），总结了文章《Johnson’s Dictionary》，内容包括原文精翻，文章脉络总结，单词扩展学习3个部分

1 文章原文及翻译

Johnson’s Dictionary

翻译：约翰逊词典的起源

For the century before Johnson’s Dictionary was published in 1775, there had been concern about the state of the English language. There was no standard way of speaking or writing and no agreement as to the best way of bringing some order to the chaos of English spelling. Dr Johnson provided the solution.

翻译：在约翰逊词典于 1775 年出版前的一个世纪里，人们对英语当时的状况可谓忧心忡忡。当时没有说话或书写的标准方式，人们也没有就如何最好地整理混乱的英语拼写达成一致意见。而此时，约翰逊博士为上述问题提供了解决方案。

There had, of course, been dictionaries in the past, the first of these being a little book of some 120 pages, compiled by a certain Robert Cawdray, published in 1604 under the title A Table Alphabeticall ‘of hard usuall English wordes’. Like the various dictionaries that came after it during the seventeenth century, Cawdray’s tended to concentrate on ‘scholarly’ words; one function of the dictionary was to enable its student to convey an impression of fine learning.

翻译：当然，在约翰逊词典之前，也曾有过其他的英语字典的。历史上可考的第一本英语词典名为《常用英语难词字母表》，于 1604 年出版。它由某个叫做 Robert Cawdray 的人编纂，是一本大约 120 页的小书。与 17 世纪之后出现的各种字典一样，考德雷的字典倾向于集中收录偏学院派的词汇；其目的是为了提高学习者的素质，给人以一种受过良好教育的形象。

Beyond the practical need to make order out of chaos, the rise of dictionaries is associated with the rise of the English middle class, who were anxious to define and circumscribe the various worlds to conquer- lexical as well as social and commercial. It is highly appropriate that Dr Samuel Johnson, the very model of an eighteenth-century literary man, as famous in his own time as in ours, should have published his Dictionary at the very beginning of the heyday of the middle class.

翻译：除了从英语的混乱状态中理出头绪的实际需要之外，词典的兴起还与英国中产阶级的崛起有关，他们急于定义和界定有待征服的各个领域 —— 词汇学、社会学和商学。享誉古今的塞缪尔·约翰逊博士是十八世纪文学家的典范，理应由他出本一本词典，为中产阶级的鼎盛时期拉开序幕。

Johnson was a poet and critic who raised common sense to the heights of genius. His approach to the problems that had worried writers throughout the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries was intensely practical. Up until his time, the task of producing a dictionary on such a large scale had seemed impossible without the establishment of an academy to make decisions about right and wrong usage. Johnson decided he did not need an academy to settle arguments about language; he would write a dictionary himself; and he would do it single-handed. Johnson signed the contract for the Dictionary with the bookseller Robert Dosley at a breakfast held at the Golden Anchor Inn near Holborn Bar on 18 June 1764. He was to be paid ￡1,575 in instalments, and from this he took money to rent 17 Gough Square, in which he set up his ‘dictionary workshop’.

翻译：约翰逊是一位诗人和评论家，尤善见微知著。他解决困扰整个十七世纪末和十八世纪初作家的问题的方法非常实用。在他所处的时代，编写一本涵盖方方面面的词典，需要一个权威的学派来给词典中的正确范例来背书。约翰逊却凭借一腔孤勇，决定在没有学派的支持下，独自完成一部词典巨著。在 1764 年 6 月 18 日，霍尔本酒吧旁的金锚旅馆，约翰逊与图书出版商罗伯特·多斯利，在一顿早餐的功夫就签订了这份词典合同。约翰逊用合同中分期支付的 1,575 英镑，租下了高夫广场 17 号，并在那里建立了约翰逊“词典工作室”。

James Boswell, his biographer, described the garret where Johnson worked as ‘fitted up like a counting house’ with a long desk running down the middle at which the copying clerks would work standing up. Johnson himself was stationed on a rickety chair at an ‘old crazy deal table’ surrounded by a chaos of borrowed books. He was also helped by six assistants, two of whom died whilst the Dictionary was still in preparation.

翻译：约翰逊的传记作者詹姆斯·博斯韦尔 (James Boswell) 曾这样描述他工作的阁楼: 中间有一张长桌子，抄写员们站在桌子边缘。约翰逊本人则坐在一张摇摇晃晃的椅子上，在他手边是一堆乱七八糟的借来的书还有一张旧得出奇的桌子。在6名助手的帮助下，这本词典的编篡仍耗时持久，其中的两名助手在甚至都没能活到词典问世的那一刻。

The work was immense; filling about eighty large notebooks (and without a library to hand), Johnson wrote the definitions of over 40,000 words, and illustrated their many meanings with some 114,000 quotations drawn from English writing on every subject, from the Elizabethans to his own time. He did not expect to achieve complete originality. Working to a deadline, he had to draw on the best of all previous dictionaries, and to make his work one of heroic synthesis. In fact, it was very much more. Unlike his predecessors, Johnson treated English very practically, as a living language, with many different shades of meaning. He adopted his definitions on the principle of English common law-according to precedent. After its publication, his Dictionary was not seriously rivalled for over a century.

翻译：词典的编篡工作量巨大，约翰逊为超过 40,000 个单词写下了定义，这背后是八十大本笔记本（且没有图书馆的支持）。此外，约翰逊还从伊丽莎白时代到他自己那个时代的各个主题的英语著作中摘录的大约 114,000 条引文来说明它们的多种含义。约翰逊并不期望这本词典能达到完全的原创性。在截止日期之前，他必须从以前的词典中去芜存菁，以使他的工作成为一部综合性的巨制。而事实上，约翰逊的工作远不止于此。与他的前辈不同，约翰逊非常务实地将英语当作一种词汇含义变化多样的活的语言。他根据英语基本法的原则和先例，制定了自己的定义。这部词典问世后的一个世纪，都没有再出现过能与之匹敌的对手。

After many vicissitudes the Dictionary was finally published on 15 April 1775. It was instantly recognised as a landmark throughout Europe. ‘This very noble work,’ wrote the leading Italian lexicographer, ‘will be a perpetual monument of Fame to the Author, an Honour to his own Country in particular, and a general Benefit to the republic of Letters throughout Europe.’ The fact that Johnson had taken on the Academies of Europe and matched them (everyone knew that forty French academics had taken forty years to produce the first French national dictionary) was cause for much English celebration.

翻译：历经 11 年的辛苦耕耘，这部词典终于在 1775 年 4 月 15 日出版，它立时被整个欧洲视为里程碑。意大利的著名词典编纂家写道：“这部高贵的作品是约翰逊的永久丰碑，也是为国争国，更是整个欧洲文学共和体的福祉。”约翰逊挑战欧洲学院并与他们并驾齐驱（众所周知，四十位法国学者花了四十年时间才编纂出第一部法国国家词典）。这一事实让英国人欢欣鼓舞。

Johnson had worked for nine years, ‘with little assistance of the learned, and without any patronage of the great; not in the soft obscurities of retirement, or under the shelter of academic bowers, but amidst inconvenience and distraction, in sickness and in sorrow’. For all its faults and eccentricities his two-volume work is a masterpiece and a landmark in his own words, ‘setting the orthography, displaying the analogy, regulating the structures, and ascertaining the significations of English words’. It is the cornerstone of Standard English, an achievement which, in James Boswell’s words, ‘conferred stability on the language of his country’.

翻译：在约翰逊工作的九年中，“仅得到了少部分学者的帮助，更是没有获得任何大人物的赞助。此外，他在编篡字典时既没有在舒适的退休生活中也不是在象牙塔里专心整理，而是在各种不便和干扰中，在疾病和悲伤的折磨中完成的”。尽管这部两卷本的作品有种种缺点和弊病，但用他自己的话来说，它仍然是一部杰作和一座里程碑，它“确立了正字法，展示了类比，规范了结构，并确定了英语单词的含义”。它是标准英语的基石，用詹姆斯·博斯韦尔的话来说，这一成就“将稳定带给了整个英语”。

The Dictionary, together with his other writing, made Johnson famous and so well esteemed that his friends were able to prevail upon King George Ⅲ to offer him a pension. From then on, he was to become the Johnson of folklore.

翻译：这本词典和他的其他作品使约翰逊声名鹊起，并广受尊敬，他的朋友们甚至说服了乔治三世国王给他一笔养老金。从那时起，他就成了民间传说中的那个约翰逊。

2 文章结构分析

这篇文章的脉络总结如下

1. 第一段是引子，通过 18 世纪的人们对于英语发展混乱状态的担忧，引出了本文的主角：约翰逊以及他编篡的词典

2. 第二段是对英文词典的渊源说明，其实在约翰逊词典之前，已经有了很多英文词典，第一本英语词典早在 1604 年就出现了

3. 第三段是约翰逊词典出现的历史原因，1是正在欧洲崛起的中产阶级急需接管各个领域的话语权，包括文字、社会、经济；2是约翰逊在 18 世纪文化人中的卓然地位

4. 第四段和第五段是约翰逊词典的编篡过程记叙，包括词典的实用性定位、独自编篡词典的勇气、在早餐途中签订合同的佚事、站着工作的忙碌工作环境和拖垮2位助手的历史长久

5. 第六段是对约翰逊词典的特点总结：工作量浩大、集百家之长、将英语视为一门活的语言、在质量上前无古人，后无来者

6. 第七段，第八段和第九段，是对约翰逊词典编篡的后记，第七段记叙了欧洲语言界对该字典的褒扬：整个欧洲语言共同体的福祉、第八段记叙了该词典编篡过程的不易，并给出了总结：将稳定带给了整个英语、第九段是又一段佚事，约翰逊因为自己的词典，不仅从国王那里获得了养老金饭碗，还成为了民间传颂的“那个约翰逊”

文章整体结构如下