Is That a Fish in Your Ear?

What is a dictionary for? The utility of a bilingual glossary is obvious. But what is the purpose of a monolingual one? A GPD seems to imply that speakers of the language do not know it very well, as if English, to take the first real example, were to some degree foreign to speakers of English themselves. Why else would they need a dictionary to translate the words of the language for them? The conceptualization of anything as grand and comprehensive as the Dictionnaire de l’Académie involves treating the written form of a spoken language as a thing that can be learned and studied not by foreigners but by native speakers of that language. It’s a peculiar idea. By definition, what a monolingual dictionary codifies is precisely the ability to speak that users of the dictionary possess.

The second presupposition of general-purpose dictionaries is that a list of all the word forms of a language is possible. We have become so accustomed to GPDs that it takes a moment to realize just what an extraordinary proposition that is. We may grant that dictionaries are always a little bit out-of-date, that even the best among them always miss something we would have liked to see there—but we should stop to take such thoughts a step further. To try to capture “all the words of a language” is as futile as trying to capture all the drops of water in a flowing river. If you managed to do it, it wouldn’t be a flowing river anymore. It would be a fish tank.

Once Latin had ceased to be a spoken language, it became possible to list all the word forms occurring in Latin manuscripts. That was done many times over, just as Roman scholars had compiled lexicons of words in Homer’s Greek, and Buddhist monks had listed all the words in sacred Sanskrit texts.[49] The monolingual dictionary of modern times treats French, or English, or German as if it were Latin—and that was the point. It raises the vernacular to the level of the language of the scholars. It proves that speaking English requires and also shows as much cultivation as using Latin. The monolingual dictionary was in the first place a two-pronged weapon for the improvement and the assertion of the common man.

“Improvement” and “assertion” may seem to go hand in hand, but those locked hands are really engaged in an arm-wrestling match. The first alphabetical lists of words in vernacular languages were extensions of traditional language-teaching tools: Robert Estienne’s Les Mots francois selon l’ordre des lettres ainsi que les fault escrire; tournez en latin, pour les enfans, first published in 1544, helped French-speaking children learn the rudiments of their language of culture, namely Latin, but incidentally gave them a tool for writing the vernacular correctly. (Spelling in French was quite variable in the sixteenth century. As Estienne was a printer, he had a stake in the standardization of the written language.) Over the following century, as both English and French absorbed more words from each other and from classical languages, alphabetical listings of technical, philosophical, and foreign words became quite popular. In 1604, a Coventry schoolmaster, Robert Cawdrey, brought out a work whose lengthy title explains the social and cultural basis for dictionary making ever since: A Table Alphabeticall of hard usual English wordes, with the interpretation thereof by plaine English words, gathered for the benefit & help of Ladies, gentlewomen, or any other unskilful person. Whereby they more easilie and better understand many hard English wordes, which they shall heare or read in the Scriptures, Sermons, or elsewhere, and also be made able to do the same aptly themselves.