Page 179 - Encyclopedia Of World History

dictionaries and encyclopedias 529

When I feel inclined to read poetry, I take down my dictionary. The poetry of words is quite as
beautiful as the poetry of sentences. The author may arrange the gems effectively, but their shape
and lustre have been given by the attrition of ages. • Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. (1809–1894)

1573). However, the beginning of the modern Japanese used alphabetical order (Collison 1964). Another later
dictionary is traced to the Rakuy¯oshu¯, published by the landmark was Ambrosius Calepino’s Dictionarium ex
Jesuits in 1598 (Bailey 1960). opitmis quibusquam... (1502), which came out in nu-
Beside the Jesuit influence on Japanese dictionaries, merous editions into the early 1700s. Initially the Dic-
there is an undeniable legacy of Western influence on tionarium was in Latin, but later expanded to a number
non-Western dictionary making. Dictionaries of many of other languages including Hebrew, German, French,
African and Asian and Pacific languages are relatively Greek, Italian, and English (Green 1996).
recent and bear the imprint of Western contact. Many of
the first to study these languages and write dictionaries English Dictionaries
were missionaries and social workers. While making a The first purely English dictionary was Robert Caw-
significant contribution in being the first to record these drey’s Table Alphabeticall in 1604. Consisting of only
languages, often their work was didactic and moralizing. 2,560 entries, mostly plagiarized from other sources,
In addition early missionaries like Alexandre de Rhodes Cawdrey concentrated on so-called hard words. This
compiled dictionaries using Romanized scripts, further “hard word” tradition held sway through the seventeenth
portraying the native language through Western eyes.The century. Attempting to record all English words was left
same holds true for African languages with the later, more to the remarkable Oxford English Dictionary nearly three
formal efforts of organizations like the International centuries later.
Institute of African Languages and Cultures, founded in Dozens of other dictionaries were published after
London (1926), and the Instituto de Estudios Africanos, Cawdrey, but it was Samuel Johnson who authored the
founded in Madrid (1939). And today, modern Arabic first great English dictionary. In a sense Johnson’s work
lexicographers, inspired by E.W. Lane’s Madd al- Qa¯mu¯s, was in response to the great continental dictionaries like
Arabic-English Lexicon (1863–1893), follow Western those of Italy, the Accademia della Crusa’s Vocabolario
methods and principles. (1612), and France, the Dictionnaire de l’Académie
Française (1694). Johnson’s Dictionary of the English
Greeks and Romans Language (1755) answered the need for an authoritative
After the first century, Greeks and Romans continued English language dictionary and “the growing desire to
building a tradition of lexicography. The famous Greek create...a national language” (Green 1996, 226). But
philologist Aristophanes of Byzantium assembled the first instead of being a national project undertaken by an
Greek dictionary entitled Lexeis (200 BCE) based on pre- academy of scholars, the work was left to Johnson and
vious glossai and wordlists.The prolific Marcus Terentius six assistants. In all Johnson defined some 40,000
Varro contributed the De Lingua Latin (43 BCE) that was headwords, using approximately 118,000 quotations to
more a grammar, but with a number of etymologies. support and differentiate meanings.
Other writers like Verrius Flaccus (c. 10 BCE) and his De National impulses also inspired the work of Noah
Signigicatu Verborum, Julius Pollux (180–238 CE) and his Webster. He realized that American English was distinct
Onomasticon, and Photius (860–935 CE) and his Lexi- from the language spoken in England, and his American
con, also made their mark on early lexicography. Their Dictionary of the English Language (1828) reflected this
work, and similar efforts, culminated in the great tenth- fact. His dictionary also had a lasting impact on the
century lexicon the Suda or Suidas. Actually a combina- spelling of American English. But Webster’s work may
tion dictionary and encyclopedia, the Suda contained have faded from view had not George and Charles Mer-
about thirty thousand entries on language, literature, and riam purchased the rights from his family.The Merriams
history. More importantly, it integrated all of this mate- improved the quality of the dictionary and published
rial, alphabetically. Up to this point, most works had not revisions and abridgements on a regular schedule. The