Wednesday, March 8, 2017

The languages I tried to learn and the languages I’ll never learn

The languages I tried to learn and the languages I’ll never learn

Part 3.

A digression on encyclopedias

From the earliest years I liked to read encyclopedias. The first one was the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, 2nd edition. The day a new volume arrived I spent hours to look through the newcomer from the first to the last page. It is difficult to understand what a role was played by this encyclopedia in the life of a child with an inquisitive mind in the society where there was a shortage of everything, including books. It would not be an exaggeration to say that I acquired a secondary education thanks to this inexhaustible well of knowledge. Some people say that this encyclopedia has an infamous mark of the so called cult of personality. This is true only to some extent. Sure, many articles about persons demonstrate such derogatory epithets as ‘reactionary’ and so on. However, a reader may omit them mentally without damage to the facts.
When I had joined the Foreign Languages Library, reading foreign encyclopedias became a kind of mania with me. It was the Encyclopaedia Britannica [a1] that attracted my attention most often.
Recently I downloaded a lot of volumes of the EB published at various times. What especially struck me is the remarkable lack of the articles Language and Linguistics in editions from the first to the 11th one.
The EB has a lot of lengthy articles on some subjects, looking like whole discourses. These articles could be used as textbooks of a kind. The newer editions are closer to what specialists regard as a specimen encyclopedia, which they think should contain many short articles without going into details. The Soviet encyclopedias and wikipedia  are closer to this sort of reference books. However, I prefer the earlier editions of the EB.
To be continued.


 [a1]I use the British spelling only in a case like that to show the original name of the book in question. Usually I adhere to the American mode of writing.