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.
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