Is That a Fish in Your Ear?

Sumerian bilingual dictionaries consist of roomfuls of clay tablets sorted into categories—occupations, kinship, law, wooden artifacts, reed artifacts, pottery, hides, copper, other metals, domestic and wild animals, parts of the body, stones, plants, birds and fish, textiles, place-names, and food and drink, each with its matching term in the unrelated language of Sumer’s Akkadian conquerors.[46] As they are organized by field, they correspond directly to today’s SPDs, or “special purpose” dictionaries—Business French, Russian for the Oil and Gas Industries, German Legal Terminology, and so forth. Some of them are multilingual (as are many of today’s SPDs) and give equivalents in Amoritic, Hurritic, Elamite, Ugaritic, and other languages spoken by civilizations with which the Akkadians were in commercial if not always peaceful contact.[47] From ancient Mesopotamia to the late Middle Ages in Western Europe, word lists with second-language equivalents went on serving the same purposes—to regularize translation practice and to train the next generation of translators. Characteristically, they mediate between the language of conquerors and the language of the conquered retained as a language of culture. What did not arise in the West at any time until after the invention of the printed book were general or all-purpose word lists giving definitions in the same language.

The Western monolingual dictionary—“the general purpose” dictionary, or GPD—is a late by-product of the ancient tradition of the translator’s companion, the bilingual word list, but its impact on the way we think about a language has been immense. The first real GPD was launched by the Académie Française in the seventeenth century (volume 1, A–L, appeared in 1694); the first to be finished from A to Z was Samuel Johnson’s dictionary of the English language, which came out in 1755.

These monuments mark the invention of French and of English as languages in a peculiar, modern sense. Once they had been launched, every other language had to have its own GPD—failing which, it would not be a real language. It wasn’t just rivalry that sparked the great race to produce national dictionaries for every “national language.” The need to compile self-glossing lists of all the words in a language also expressed a new idea of what kind of a thing a language was, an idea taken directly from what had happened in English and French.

The Chinese tradition is entirely different.[48] Its rich history of word lists is essentially linked to the tradition of writing commentaries on ancient texts, not at all with the business of translating foreign languages, in which traditional Chinese civilization seems to have had as little interest as did the Greeks. Early Chinese dictionaries were organized by semantic field and gave definitions roughly like this: If someone calls me an uncle, I call him a nephew (from the Erh Ya, third century B.C.E.). It was not easy to find a word in the Erh Ya, and many of the definitions given were too vague to be useful in the way we would now want a dictionary to be. It was a tool for cultivating knowledge of more ancient texts, so as to maintain refinement in speech and script. The second kind of glossary of classical Chinese arose in the first century C.E., and it listed characters organized by their basic written shapes, or “graphic radicals.” These works gave no clues as to how the words should be pronounced, and their purpose was mainly to assist the interpretation of ancient written texts. The third type of early Chinese lexicon was the rhyme dictionary—handbooks for people who needed to know what rhymes with what, because rhyming skills were tested in examinations for the imperial civil service. It was not until the seventeenth century that a device for classifying Chinese characters in a way that made them easily retrievable was devised by the scholar Mei Ying-tso, a few years before Jesuit missionaries produced the first Western-style bilingual dictionaries of Chinese (into Latin, then Portuguese, Spanish, and French). Traditional Chinese dictionaries, lexicons, and glossaries do not list “all the words of the language” in the way that Western dictionaries seek to do; they list written characters and they organize them by semantic field, or by written forms, or by sound. Their profound difference perhaps makes clearer the extent to which Western dictionary making is also a “regional” tradition arising from the particular nature of the script that we have.