Orð og tunga - 01.06.2005, Page 52

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Orð og tunga
3 Plans for forthcoming revision of Iðunn 1989
I will now turn this issue around, and instead of concentrating on
what was wrong with especially the bifunctionality of Iðunn 1989 I
will look at what plans there might be for improving it.
Let us assume for the moment that there is only room on the mar-
ket for one professional Icelandic-English bifunctional dictionary.
When Sverrir Hólmarsson and I were planning a revision of Iðunn
1989, a few years ago, shortly before he died, our intuitive sense was
that a doubling, i.e. an increase to approx. 50,000 entries, was possible
without exploding the concept of the dictionary, which should con-
tinue to be bifunctional, but this of course has still to be tested. Look-
ing at it in these terms, what sort of vocabulary would we have been
aiming to include in a forthcoming expansion of Iðunn 19891
3.1 Planning - general terms
There is a need to cover the developments that have occurred in Ice-
landic over the last approximately fifteen years; there are both genu-
ine nýyrði ('neologisms'), which are limited in number, and a relatively
large number of morphologically adapted words of foreign origin that
occur at least in specialised texts, in newspapers and magazines and
in daily speech. There are also considerable shifts in the phraseology
of everyday speech to be accommodated. There is, above all, a general
need to expand the size of the vocabulary. Three areas will be concen-
trated on here.
3.1.1 Compounds for the production of English by Icelanders
On this point the policy in Iðunn 1989 was, as expressed in Keneva
Kunz (1988-1989:173), a tendency to exclude a compound where both
parts of it were easily understood in combination, but to include it
where a new sense was formed that did not correspond to the sum of
the two parts (her example was fortölur which is translated 'persua-
sion'); in addition to this, sometimes in Iðunn 1989 there were spe-
cial entries for the first element in compound words, thus, for ex-
ample, "sam- in compounds" is given the explanation 'fellow, collect-
ive', yet these equivalents would only be aids to comprehension, they