Background information
Webster, Noah (Oct. 16, 1748 - May 28, 1843) American lexicographer and philologist, born West Hartford, Conn. A Yale graduate. His Elementary Spelling Book (the first part of the Grammatical Institute of the English Language and the American Dictionary of the English Language established the nobility and vitality of the American Language. He holds that the spelling and grammar of a language must be based on actual usage rather than artificial principles. And thus laid a foundation for the 20th century lexicography. The Elementary Spelling Book, first published in the late years of the 18th cent., standardized American spelling and by 1850, when the whole population was under 23 million, was sold at 1 million copies annually. The American Dictionary of the English Language, his greatest work, was published in 1828. Of the 70,000 words, 12,000 had not appeared in any other dictionaries before. Within one year, all the 2,500 copies issued in American and the 3,000 copies in Britain were sold out. In 1840, the second edition was a failure and he had to sell the copy right to Merriam Publishing Company which thereafter became the Merriam-Webster Incorporation. Webster's other contributions include efforts in the passage of a national copyright law, in the founding of the Amherst College etc.
Dictionary: a published list, in alphabetical order, of the words of a language, explaining and defining them, or in the case of a bilingual dictionary, translating them into another language. In the 20th cent., American dictionary makers began to adopt criteria of use rather than of etymological purity.
Dictionaries were produced in China, Greece, Islam, and other complex early cultures.
The first modern examples of lexicography are thought to be Nathan Bailey's Universal Etymological English Dictionary (1721) and his larger Dictionarium Britannicum (1730), which served Samuel Johnson, who was considered as England's first complete man of letters, in preparing his Dictionary of the English Language (1755), the first comprehensive English lexicography.
The next great lexicographer was Noah Webster. His American Dictionary of the English Language has been skilfully revised and abridged over the years, thereby retaining its popularity. A six-volume American encyclopaedic dictionary, The Century Dictionary, was completed in 1891.
American Dictionary of the English Language ---1828
second edition, 1840, failure, copyright sold to Merriam,
first Merriam-Webster unabridged Diction 1847
1847 third edition, 2752 pages, 470,000 entries)
British lexicographers from the 19th cent. on, began to collect and organize examples of usage. In 1857, the Philological Society began collecting dated examples of usage, culminating in the publication (1928) of the monumental, unrivalled lexicon known as the New English Dictionary, the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) or Murray's Dictionary. Two major shorter editions exist: The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Current English and the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary. Other advances in lexicography are reflected in the frequently revised collegiate or desk dictionaries, such as the Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary.
Encyclopedia, lexicon, thesaurus.
Linguistics: the systematic or scientific study of language.
General linguistics covers a wide range of topics and its boundaries are difficult to define.
Phonetics（音韵学）is a general, descriptive and classificatory. It studies speech sounds as they are.
Phonology （音位学）is concerned with the sound system of language. It studies the functioning of the speech sounds.
Morphology （词法学）refers to the study of the internal structure of words, and the rules by which words are formed.
Syntax（句法学） is the study of how sentences are structured, or in other words, it tries to state what words can be combined with others to form sentences and in what order.
Semantics （语义学）is generally considered to be the study of meaning in languages.
Etymology（词源学）， the study of the origin and history of words and their meanings.
Rapidly developing branches of linguistics are: psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, computational linguistics, applied linguistics, etc.
If linguistics is studied historically, it is called diachronic linguistics (历时语言学)while there is also synchronic (共时语言学) linguistics if looked at at one particular point time.
Classification of languages: Languages can be classified genealogically or typologically. Thus we have the Sino-Tibetan, the Indo-European, etc. families and the radical language (词根语), such as ancient Han language, Vietnamese etc; flexional language (曲/屈折语), such as English and so on.
Germanic: a branch of the Indo-European language family containing English, German, Dutch, Afrikaans, Flemish, Friesian, the Scandinavian languages, and Gothic.
Bloomfield, Leonard, 1887-1949, American linguistics, b. Chicago. His masterpiece, Language (1933), a standard text, is a clear statement of principles: that language study must always be centred in the spoken language, that the definitions used in grammar should be based on the forms of the language etc.
Language is always changing, thus we have different terms with temporal brands, expressions like: the black 5 categories （黑五类）, alien class elements（阶级异已分子）, 防修反修，etc.
Colloquial: In Wuhan, there are some peculiar terms, especially those denoting money: malaokuo / datuanjie, yizhangqian, yijo, yifen, dianmamu.