September 2003 newsletter

One of the most intriguing figures involved in the preparation of the First Edition of the OED was James Platt (1861-1910), an unassuming man with a quite remarkable gift for learning languages, who once said (from experience) that in his opinion, the greatest difficulty lay in mastering the first twelve languages thoroughly. Any one who could speak twelve languages fluently would have little difficulty in mastering a hundred.

With this flair, and an encyclopaedic knowledge of the dictionaries of non-European and other exotic languages, he was able to supply single-handedly most of the material for the etymology of words from these languages. In the absence of a modern-day James Platt, today's OED draws on the expertise of a whole network of specialists in languages from Algonquian to Vietnamese, whose work is described in the article by Sarah Ogilvie and Joanna Tulloch.

James Platt died in 1910, when talkies and commercial radio broadcasts were still unknown, let alone television (although the word television dates from 1907). Thus Nick Shearing's entertaining account of some of the ways in which these media now transmit the spoken word, and of how the OED records their vocabulary, would have been, as it were, Greek to him.

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