Education, Careers & Professional News
Assam Scholar points at errors in Oxford dictionary
He dared to do it and actually received an acknowledgement. A teacher of English in an Assam college thought the pronounciations given in the Oxford Dictionary weren’t proper, so he wrote back to the publishers.
Paulose V D found some entries in the Concise Oxford Dictionary (9th edition) to have discrepancies with regard to the accent mark. And in response to his comment, the UK-based managers of Oxford University Press (OUP), the publishers of the dictionary, promised ‘‘the pronunciations for the class of words under consideration will be dealt with correctly in the future.’’
Paulose, a teacher of English in N C Collage, Badarpur, and a doctorate in English language, while bringing to OUP’s notice some dictionary entries including the words ‘‘lyre,’’ ‘‘mire’’, ‘‘sire’’, ‘‘wire’’, ‘‘dire’’, ‘‘fire’’, ‘‘gyre’’, ‘‘hire’’ and ‘‘tyre’’, said the accent mark used for them had certain discrepancies.
‘‘It’s accepted practice that the monosyllabic words are not accent marked. Going by convention, the above entries imply that the words ‘‘lyre’’, ‘‘mire’’, ‘‘sire’’ and ‘‘wire’’ are monosyllabic while others in the list (‘‘dire,’’ ‘‘fire’’, ‘‘gyre’’, ‘‘hire’’ and ‘‘tyre’’) are disyllabic words, as these are accent marked in the dictionary. However, I don’t think there is a difference between the first set of words and the second set of words with regard to the number of syllables,’’ Paulose said in his letter to the publishers.
He went on to add, ‘‘The number of syllables a word has is determined by the number of vowel phonemes, or in some rare cases, by syllabic consonants. In the list of nine words under consideration, the number of vowel phonemes is the same, and hence, all these words must belong to the same category. I treat these words disyllabic as all of them have two vowel phonemes, the first a diphthong and the second a pure vowel.’’
The English teacher, who has to his credit a number of poems and articles published in various prestigious journals in India and abroad, said both the words ‘‘mire’’ and ‘‘dire’’ (one each from each set) have the same syllabic structure except for the onset consonants, which don’t affect the number of syllables. These two words, along with the remaining seven, have the same syllabic structure. Hence, it was better and more acceptable to treat all these words as disyllabic.
Angus Stevenson, project manager, English Dictionaries and Thesauruses of Oxford University Press, UK, in his response appreciated the point Paulose raised. ‘‘You are right to say that the pronunciations of the words you mention should be treated in a consistent manner, and that they should be treated as disyllabic words. We will make sure that the pronunciations for this class of words are dealt with correctly in future editions of the Concise Oxford English Dictionary and other dictionaries,’’ he wrote to Paulose.