Cryptic avatars: the ornamental illustrations of rare initial letters in French dictionaries
Abstract
This paper examines the ornamental illustration of rare initial-letters in some 19th and 20th century French dictionaries and attempts to show how these illustrations offer a few predictable — and somewhat exotic — items on the one hand, and on the other reveal a great many diversionary tactics meant to dissimulate the difficulty ofillustrating words that start with these letters. These tactics include 1) grouping of rare letters into a single head-piece; 2) graphic stratagems such as drawing "big" or adding irrelevant items; 3) breaching a thematic programme of illustrations for lack ofitems whose name starts with the necessary letter; 4) stratagems more related to the lexicon itself, such as addition of labels, illustrations based on variant or even fanciful spellings.
Session
Poster Session
Keywords
BibTex
@InProceedings{ELX02-083, author = {Thora van Male}, title = {Cryptic avatars: the ornamental illustrations of rare initial letters in French dictionaries}, pages = {741-746}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the 10th EURALEX International Congress}, year = {2002}, month = {aug}, date = {13-17}, address = {København, Denmark}, editor = {Anna Braasch and Claus Povlsen}, publisher = {Center for Sprogteknologi}, isbn = {87-90708-09-1}, }
