James Muray (lexicograph) – Wikipedia, free encyclopedia
James Augustus Henry Murray (February 7, 1837 – July 26, 1915) was a Scottish lexicographer and philologist. It was the main editor of the Oxford English Dictionary from 1879 to his death.
Biographical Synthesis [ To edit ]
Sir James Murray was born in the town of Denholm near Hawick on the Scottish border. Eldest son of a town tailor, Thomas Murray. Early boy with a voracious appetite for learning, he left school at fourteen because his parents were not in economic conditions to pay for studies. At seventeen, he also received a teacher at the Hawick Grammar School.
In 1861 Murray met Maggie Scott, a music teacher with whom he contracted nuptials the following year. Two years later they had a daughter, Anna, who died at an early age because of tuberculosis. His wife also infected, and by the suggestion of the doctors they moved to London to escape the Scots. Once there, Murray was used in administrative work with the Chartered Bank of India, while continued in his free time dedicated to his varied academic interests. Maggie died the following year, and Murray married two years later with Ada Agnes Ruthven.
At this time Murray was mainly interested in language and etymology. A letter of presentation that wrote to Thomas Watts, a bibliographic curator of the British Museum gives an idea of the depth and amplitude of his linguistic erudition: he argues about his “intimate relationship” with the Italian, French, Catalan, Spanish and Latin languages, and -In “lesser extent” – Portuguese, you are going, Provencal and several dialects. In addition, he affirms that the Dutch, German and Danish are “tolerately”. He mentions his studies of Anglo -Saxon and Gothic and knows a little Celtic languages and is “occupying” of the Slavic languages, having obtained useful knowledge of Russian. He has enough knowledge of Hebrew and Syriac to read and understand the Old Testament and the Peshitta, and to a lesser extent he knows Aramaic, Arabic, Coptic and Phoenician. In spite of everything, he did not obtain the requested employment.
In 1869 Murray was a member of the Council of the Philological Society of which he will become president, and by 1873 he had left his work in the bank to teach in the Mill Hill School From london. That same year he published The Dialect of the Southern Counties of Scotland (The Dialect of Southern Conditions of Scotland), a work that increased its fame in the philological circles.
Murray had eleven children with Ada, all with the last name Ruthven For an agreement with his father -in -law, George Ruthven: Major Harold James Ruthven Murray became an important chess historian, and another son, Wilfrid George Ruthven Murray, wrote a biography of his father.
Murray the age [ To edit ]
On April 26, 1878 Murray was invited to Oxford to meet with the Delegates of the Oxford University Press, to propose to be a editor of a new dictionary of the English language that replaced the Johnson dictionary and included all the existing words in English speech in Everyone, with their varied meanings. It was a monumental project, which required someone with Murray’s knowledge and determination.
On March 1, 1879, the agreement was formalized for Murray to edit a new English dictionary. The idea was to take ten years of work to complete about 7000 pages, in four volumes. In fact, when the final results were published in 1928, the work covered twenty volumes, with 414,825 definitions and 1,827,306 citations used to illustrate the meanings of words.
In work preparation, Murray built a galvanized iron shed in the Mill Hill School funds, which he baptized “Scriptorium” , to house their small team of attendees as well as the flow of documents required to refer appointments that will explain the terms to be defined, the basis of their work. He also wrote the English public reader to read books and make passages by documenting uses of the words that then sent them to expand the documentary basis of their work. When the first parts of the dictionary were completed, Murray left his teaching task and devoted himself fully to lexicography.
In the summer of 1884 Murray and his family moved to a larger house on Banbury Street, north of Oxford, where he built a second scriptorium In the garden, greater than the first, with more storage space for the always growing number of papers sent to Murray and his team. Any letter with the address “Mr.murray, Oxford”, found the way to his house, and such was the volume of correspondence received, that the British mail placed a special mailbox on the sidewalk of his house.
Murray continued to work in his dictionary, without the broken age or health decreasing his enthusiasm. He died of pleurisy on July 26, 1915, and was buried in Oxford.
Biographies [ To edit ]
His granddaughter K. M. Elisabeth Murray wrote a biography entitled Caught in the Web of Words: James Murray and the Oxford English Dictionary (Yale University Press, 1977, ISBN 0-300-08919-8). Recently Simon Winchester published The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary (OUP, 2003, ISBN 0-19-860702-4).
Murray is “the teacher” mentioned in Winchester’s book The Surgeon of Crowthorne , although he never worked as a professor at the University of Oxford. The doctor. William Chester Minor , a volunteer who worked in the dictionary was “El Loco.”
The movie The Professor and the Madman [Spanish: Between reason and madness ] (2019), based on the 1998 book The Surgeon of Crowthorne From Simon Winchester, he tells part of J. Murray’s biography in his relationship with William Chester Minor, also a collaborator of the dictionary.
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