Formulating Models of Author Dictionaries in Vietnam

Abstract

An author’s dictionary, also called Author’s Language Dictionary, is a type of reference work that provides information about the author’s vocabulary, based on the corpus of a famous work or the collected works of a renowned author. In Vietnam, this type of dictionary has rarely been compiled and is not widely known. Since the pioneering work of scholar Đào Duy Anh - Dictionary of The Tale of Kiều (1974), only two other dictionaries have been published: Dictionary of The Tale of Lục Vân Tiên (1987) by Nguyễn Quảng Tuân, Nguyễn Khắc Thuần and Nguyễn Trãi’s Quốc âm Dictionary (2014) by Trần Trọng Dương.
This article presents analyses of these three dictionaries from the perspective of lexicography. The analysis highlights the fundamental aspects of compiling dictionaries of this type, the actual structure of such dictionaries in Vietnam, and offers some observations as well as proposes a structural model and development orientation for author’s dictionaries in Vietnam.