Ўзбекистон республикаси олий ва ўрта махсус таълим вазирлиги ўзбекистон давлат жаҳон тиллари университети инглиз тили назарий аспектлари №1

Task 4: Read and discuss the extract about Noah Webster, a famous American lexicographer:

Noah Webster (1758–1843), a Connecticut farmer’s boy, graduated at Yale in 1778, and after studying law and teaching at school in several Connecticut towns, compiled in the years following several books about the language and its use. …His first dictionary, the Compendious Dictionary of 1806, at once takes independent Yankee ground. In fact, Webster had taught himself some Anglo-Saxon, and, however imperfectly acquainted with it, had acquired a true and sensible feeling for historical method and for the weight of analogy in deciding points where usage is doubtful. In these respects his Dictionary anticipates the methods of the larger American Dictionary of the English Language of 1828, in the preparation of which he spent the next twenty years.

Webster much enlarged Johnson’s vocabulary, admitting a large number of technical terms which Johnson considered outside the classic pale. In this respect Webster’s broad personal experience as farmer, lawyer, teacher, editor, and pamphleteer served him well. He was open-minded and meant his book to be serviceable to the common man. In spelling, though his fondness for analogy tended toward a logical schematism, he yet guarded his reforms in most cases by consulting usage, logic not logick, meter not metre, honor not honour, symbolize not symbolise. Webster’s definitions are admittedly his forte. They are untinged with personal bias; they are proportioned in space to the importance of the word and the number of its meanings; and they are so phrased that generally they can be substituted for the word itself. Quotations it was Webster’s policy to employ only “to illustrate those definitions that are not entirely evident in sense” without them.
Though in England Webster’s Dictionary has not superseded Johnson’s, it soon became the standard in the United States. ( http://www.bartleby.com/228/0233.html/abridged )