Sharper Tools

Discussing characteristics of nineteenth-century missionary women’s lives abroad, Russell demonstrates that the colonial, sociopolitical, and technological contexts involved in missionary work in Asia made dictionary-making a possible and appropriate employment for American women. Women involved in missionary work often enjoyed more opportunities for equality in education, allowing for language acquisition and scholarly pursuits that may not have been possible in their home country. These women gained linguistic proficiency through varied interactions—religious, educational, and otherwise—with members of their communities, and in many cases developed pragmatic lexicographical methods that tended to be less prescriptive and more inclusive and appreciative of native languages, in contrast to the colonializing discourse that characterized studies produced by male missionaries.

Lexicography of the Entrenched Empire

Lexicography in China under the rule of the Manchu Qing dynasty (1644–1911) was intimately tied up with empire. The Qing Empire was plurilingual; with the support of the Chinese elite, dominated by scholar-officials from the lower Yangtze region, the Manchu khans ruled as Confucian emperors, at the same time safeguarding a place for their own language in the polity. In this context, the bilingual elite undertook various lexicographical projects aspiring to greater integration of the empire’s main languages: Manchu and Chinese. Within this context, Mårten Söderblom Saarela addresses Banihûn’s and Pu-gong’s Qing-Han wenhai (Manchu–Chinese Literary Ocean), a reworking of an eighteenth-century poetic Chinese dictionary. He compares this bilingual project to an unfinished Chinese–French dictionary inspired by the same source. At a time of linguistic and social change in China, Banihûn and Pu-gong aspired to further integrate the empire’s two literary languages and thereby to provide a resource for lettered bannermen such as themselves and to maintain what they knew to be the fragile equilibrium of relations between these languages.

Lord of the Words

Vinitsky examines the cultural and historical elements of Vladimir Dahl’s Explanatory Dictionary of the Living Great Russian Language, the major and most famous of Russian dictionaries. Dahl’s religious passions and experimental approach to language led to an organizing principle based not on scientific lexicography, but on entries centred on the notion of the word family or ‘nest’. In discussing these features of Dahl’s work, Vinitsky presents the dictionary as an inventive production that was meant to reveal to the reader the communal spirit of Russia through the words of living Russian language. Vinitsky surveys Dahl’s literary and intellectual goals and the structure and pragmatics of his dictionary alongside the interconnected contexts of lexicographical trends in England, reform in Russia, the literary foundations for Dahl’s interest in family structures, and Dahl’s religious and spiritual background. Through his unique approach to language, Dahl worked to cast the Russian language itself as a kind of national epic.

Joost Halbertsma and the Lexicon Frisicum1

Joost Halbertsma’s Lexicon Frisicum, published by his son Tjalling in 1872, was the first dictionary to contain modern Frisian, spoken in the Dutch Province of Friesland. As such, it is considered the basis of modern Frisian lexicography. In his dictionary, Halbertsma focuses much attention on the cultural and linguistic history of the Frisians. At the same time, he was very concerned with the Netherlands as a free civil state, and he used ancient Frisian customs and habits to comment on the national and political situation of his time. Dykstra addresses criticism levelled at Halbertsma’s dictionary, such as that it lacked internal consistency and coherence, tends to digress, and uses Latin as meta-language, making it largely inaccessible to Halberstma’s contemporaries. Even with its shortcomings, Dykstra evaluates the ways in which Halbertsma’s Lexicon Frisicum provides insight into various aspects of nineteenth-century linguistics, lexicography, culture, and cultural nationalism.

The Lexical Object

Adams discusses the formulation of Richardson’s New Dictionary of the English Language, focusing especially on Richardson’s influences as he defined his methods and the organizing principles he applied to the construction of the dictionary. Following Horne Tooke, Richardson’s method viewed etymology as unifying different words with distinct meanings and grammatical functions. As such, he lumped derivationally-related words in single entries and eschewed historical principles favoured by other prominent lexicographers. This entry-level practice, Adams argues, had a number of drawbacks, despite Richardson’s supposedly scientific arrangement of English words and the underlying semantic principle his method was meant to support. Though Richardson’s methods were largely ignored by subsequent lexicographers, Adams argues, without Richardson’s intervention in the history of lexicography, there would have been no OED. With its primary focus on Richardson and consideration of other significant contributions to continental lexicography, Adams’ chapter engages the argument about what dictionaries should do—whether they’re about words or meanings or usage or culture, and if in some combination, in what proportion. He claims that although this is principally a nineteenth-century argument, it persists as a conceptual and practical problem for lexicography to the present day.

Dictionaries of Libras from the Nineteenth to the Twenty-First Century

Sign languages, structurally different from oral languages, are based on gestures and involve their own grammars and repertoires of lexical units (signals or signs), and they play an important role in establishing communication among deaf people around the world. This chapter primarily focuses on the development of dictionaries for Libras (an acronym for Língua Brasileira de Sinais, or ‘Brazilian Language of Signs’), the natural language of the Brazilian deaf community. It traces the influence of the first dictionary of the deaf in Brazil, Iconographia dos Signaes dos Surdos-Mudos (‘Iconography of Signs of Deaf-Mutes’), which was published in 1875 by the National Institute of Education of the Deaf (INES) and authored by Flausino José da Gama, a student at the Institute. In their demonstration of the influence and inspiration this dictionary gave to lexicographers who followed da Gama, Bidarra and Martins outline the historical trajectory of sign languages up to the present, considering different and parallel paths for sign languages in different countries, forms of stigmatization of sign language, and barriers to its use. Incorporating this historical and transnational analysis, Bidarra and Martins present both a broad discussion of the various models of sign language dictionaries that have been used around the world and an in-depth analysis of the development of Libras dictionaries in Brazil to the modern day.

Dialect Joke Books and Russian–Yiddish and English–Yiddish Dictionaries

Safran examines the nineteenth-century publishing history of Jewish dialect joke books and Yiddish dictionaries and the generic links between dictionaries and joke books in Russian–Yiddish and English–Yiddish cases. In the 1870s in the Russian Empire and in the 1890s in the United States, Jewish speech style (Jewish Russian and Jewish English) was enregistered; that is, the concepts of ‘Jews’ and ‘Jewish speech’ took on new meanings. This was reflected in both dictionaries and joke books that, at least in some cases, were intended to teach their readers to be humorous as well as knowledgeable. These texts demonstrate the tension between dialect humour that is derogatory and that which embraces its subject; beyond this dichotomy, Safran argues that the confluence of Yiddish lexicography and Jewish dialect humour in the Russian Empire and the United States also reflected the marketing of distinctive spoken language by publishers for general readers. As Safran shows, the commodification of dialect humour and low-status spoken languages was facilitated by a nineteenth-century publishing boom fostered by cheap machine-made paper, fast printing techniques, the rise of literacy, the decline of book prices, the increase in railroad journeying, and the concomitant demand for portable entertainment.

The Invention of the Modern Dictionary

Sokolowski details the revision process that shaped the development of Webster’s American Dictionary of the English Language (1828), the foundation of a nearly uninterrupted chain of dictionaries over almost two centuries. He discusses the role of collaboration, lexicographical scholarship, and the commercial considerations involved in the various updates to the dictionary, as well as the ‘War of the Dictionaries’, which forced Webster’s (under the purview of the Merriams) to evolve in order to conquer the market. The revisions following Webster’s death—and the innovations that accompanied them, which include many of the elements that distinguish today’s dictionaries from their pre-1864 forebears—have kept the name of Noah Webster associated with dictionaries to this day, while subverting the very notion of individual authorship for such a significant work of intellectual labour.

The Unfinished Business of Eighteenth-Century European Lexicography

This chapter reviews the development and publication of dictionaries in Europe in the eighteenth century, covering advances in continental lexicography that had significant influence on the dictionaries that evolved in the nineteenth century and beyond. Dictionaries of Germanic and Romance languages; Latin, Greek, and Hebrew; and other world languages all abounded at the time. The remarkable lexicographical activity of the eighteenth century is evidenced by the vigour, high quality, and proliferation of the more prominent and scholarly dictionaries of the period discussed. The developments which took place at this level had their effect at humbler levels too, Considine argues, as the makers of modest dictionaries abridged, or drew more or less explicitly from, the flagship dictionaries of national and classical languages. But all this activity still left a number of challenges to be addressed by nineteenth-century lexicographers. Considine divides these into three groups: questions of the structure and contents of the dictionary entry; questions of the scope of the dictionary wordlist; and larger questions about the sorts of information which dictionaries should offer. In covering these three types of challenges in the course of his chapter, Considine delves into crucial issues that affected the formation of the dictionary genre and that continue to be discussed in lexicography today.

Christian Nationalism in Noah Webster’s Lexicography

Finegan explores the expression of Noah Webster’s religious convictions and nationalistic beliefs as expressed in An American Dictionary of the English Language. He reviews Webster’s changing values over the course of his life, from idealistic enthusiasm surrounding the American Revolution to political disillusionment and intensified religious conviction later in his life. Becoming a born-again Christian in 1808, Webster adopted religious beliefs that shaped not only his personal life but also his etymologies, choice of illustrative quotations, and the very tone of his 1828 American Dictionary as a whole. While the definitions in the 1828 work are now most notably promoted in conservative religious contexts, Webster’s earlier and more secular Compendious Dictionary, first published in 1806, is consulted in a wider span of viewpoints in the United States today.