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Mårten Söderblom Saarela
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It is perhaps fitting that an introduction to the part on lexicography should discuss words and their definitions. “Dictionary” and its synonyms and near-synonyms (“lexicon,” “thesaurus”), indeed the word “lexicography” itself, refer to genres of books and the practice of writing such books. They might be straightforward enough for writing their recent history in the West (before the changes brought about by new information technology), but they cannot easily serve to single out a specific body of sources or a certain scholarly practice in earlier periods of European history, let alone in historical societies elsewhere in the world.

The introduction to this part will survey the world history of lexicography—a field that is only now coming into being. It will show that lexicography was common in early cultures as a philological, exegetical tool or as language pedagogy for learning a first or a second language. Thus mono- and bilingual lexicography is very old, even as old as writing. In addition, I will suggest that multilingual lexicography, wordlists including three or more languages, started to become more common in the second millennium CE. The rise of multilingual lexicography as a translational, perhaps global, phenomenon is a topic for further research.

In what follows, I will go through the basic concepts of lexicography and its development from mono- and bilingual wordlists in antiquity to multilingual dictionaries in the early modern period. I will end with a mention of some of the multilingual books we have from East Asia.

1 What Is Lexicography?

Investigations of the vocabulary of the practice and products of lexicography in Western Europe in the medieval and early modern periods, whence stem our current ways of talking about these things, have shown that dictionaries as we know them today were long in the making. The early middle ages had glossaries, which were lists of words drawn from a particular text, not the language as a whole. Most of them were in Latin, but they could be Greek-Latin or Latin-vernacular.

The large compendia that included a lot of lexical material were not really dictionaries. These works include Isidore of Seville’s (ca. 560–636) Etymologiae, which was early and influential (see Chapter 2.7). One book in the Etymologiae “is indeed about words, and is alphabetically arranged,” but it is as if “Isidore did not see a difference between discussing words … and discussing things.”1 But these works also include the much later Elementarium doctrinae rudimentum (ca. 1041) by Papias. “On the whole, Papias’s work looks like a real dictionary,” writes Olga Weijers, but “the whole text is a mixture of very different articles” of different arrangement, some “consisting in lengthy explanations of an encyclopedic character.”2 John Considine, who has studied the history of the relevant concepts, concludes that “[w]hen we refer to medieval dictionaries, or to medieval lexicography, we are using convenient anachronisms.”3 The European concept of the dictionary, expressed through the Latin words dictionarium and lexicon, dates to the early sixteenth century, with the category of lexicography emerging only in the eighteenth.4 Naturally, extra-European cultures have different conceptual frameworks with their own histories. When talking about lexicography historically and across cultures, the most sensible thing to do is what Considine did when he compiled a world history of lexicography: define “lexicography” as “the making of lists of words and their interpretations,” with dictionary thus being a “wordlist.”5

2 Monolingualism in Early Lexicography

With “lexicography” generously defined as the practice of listing words and “dictionary” defined as a wordlist—or lexical list—the history of lexicography is as old as writing itself. Already in the third millennium BCE, Mesopotamian scribes compiled such lists. They could be loosely arranged either according to the spelling of the words in cuneiform or their pronunciation (that is, their graphic form), or by subject matter (that is, their semantic content), or a combination of the two. Thus we have lists of—among other things—domestic and wild animals, trees and wooden objects, plants, metal objects, professions, and mathematical and economic terms.6 Such lexical lists “are the earliest scholarly genre in ancient Mesopotamia, and thus they may claim to be the earliest scholarly genre in the history of humanity.”7 Lexicography, then, has been integral to scholarship since remote antiquity. Ever since, its boundaries have been porous.

In the Mesopotamian wordlists arranged by subject matter, as in many later lists and books written in other places and languages, words are not separated from their meanings. It is not a coincidence that we have lists of fish, birds, or plants. Inventories of the words for the objects of the world were also inventories of the world itself. Thus lexicography from the very beginning was closely linked to encyclopedism and the collection and systematization of knowledge.

Such was arguably the case to an even greater extent in the early cultures with logographic or morphophonetic writing, such as ancient Egypt and China. Individual hieroglyphs and Chinese characters encoded meaning. “So, the natural approach for early Egyptians studying language was classification and encyclopedism: a description of the world they lived in, mirrored also in the hieroglyphic signs.”8

The ancient Chinese used wordlists as educational and exegetical tools. Xu Shen, the author of Shuowen jiezi (Explain the graphs to unravel the written words), “the first dictionary of Chinese characters” dated to ca. 100 CE,9 broke with the earlier tradition of glossing classical texts, but not by making a dictionary in the modern sense. Xu’s “interest was with the writing system of the language,”10 which he subdivided into semantic categories that reflect a greater cosmological vision. His book is thus not a reference work, or even necessarily a book for learning the meaning of words.

The Egyptian, Chinese, and earliest Mesopotamian wordlists are generally monolingual. Multilingualism is not absent from early lexicography, however. Curiously, it is in China—a cultural area for which scholars “lament the absence of any record of anyone speaking anything other than Chinese”11—that we find the wordlist Fangyan, which “collected synonyms taken from different dialects and languages, gathered by court messengers who had been sent to various regions of China.”12 This text contains multilingual material, but marked (non-standard) vocables are associated with places rather than languages (“In Wu, they say …”). It is thus very different from the multilingual imperial dictionaries of the early modern period.

In traditions with alphabetic scripts or a strong element of orality, early lexicography is more clearly related to attempts to bridge the growing distance between the language of the canon and that of its readers than with the order of the cosmos as a whole. In India, “the need to prepare a list of obsolete words used in the Vedic texts … must have arisen from the fact that the language of the hymns differed from that of the next generations, and the cultural context of many words became obscure.”13 Similarly, the earliest Greek lexicographical papyri list words from the older Homeric and epic literature, which was studied among the philologists at Alexandria.14 That is not to say that the study of classical texts was irrelevant for the development of lexicography in early Egypt and China. Erya, one of the oldest Chinese wordlists, is a text of this nature, for example.

3 Bilingual Lexicography

Several of the world’s ancient cultures thus engaged in lexicography in order to handle the growing disconnect between the language or vocabulary of a single individual—even an educated one—and those of a lengthening written tradition. Over time, as new languages passed into the realm of writing and other languages fell out of active, spoken use, some bilingual lexicographical traditions emerged. The Mesopotamian tradition, for one, became bilingual as Sumerian ceased to be an everyday spoken language; lists that used to give only the pronunciation of Sumerian logograms now also presented their translation into Akkadian.15 Early Latin lexicography was related to glossography, as in Greece, but Latin-Greek dictionaries were also written, and they probably influenced later comprehensive dictionaries that were written in Greek only.16

Bilingualism is, quite naturally, seen in many of the lexicographical traditions that developed within—or in close relationship to—societies that predominantly used another written language. Thus, we have Hebrew-Arabic dictionaries, Sanskrit-Tibetan dictionaries, Tangut-Chinese dictionaries, and glossaries or wordlists of Latin and the emerging vernaculars in the European middle ages.

4 From Bilingualism to Multilingualism in Lexicography

Unlike multilingualism, plurilingualism involving two languages (that is, bilingualism) was, then, common already in the lexicography of the ancient world. Naturally, the relative rarity of multilingual dictionaries from this period is not due to societies being somehow more linguistically homogenous. Goods and people moved over great distances in the ancient world, and it stands to reason that commercial and political centers were linguistically diverse. Indeed, alloglottography is attested in some early cultures (notably, but probably not exclusively, in early Japan), in that texts written in one language could actually be read in another.17 In such cases, a superficially monolingual text actually belongs to a bi- or multilingual context. Furthermore, as in the Byzantine Suda introduced later in this part, a multilingual reality is clearly discernable within the monolingual dictionary entries. Finally, certain kinds of texts, such as imperial inscriptions, which were not philological in character and not restricted by the high cost of writing material, were multilingual already in antiquity.

Moreover, if we remain in the realm of lexicography, certain tendencies prevailing at the time tended to marginalize the multilingual wordlists that might actually have existed. For example, within the monolingual Greek tradition, lexicographers “never acknowledge the existence” even of bilingual dictionaries.18 If that was the case for wordlists including two languages, it holds true for multilingual lists as well. The multilingual wordlist presented later in this part is a case in point; it is an excavated papyrus, not a part of the transmitted tradition.

The existence of the multilingual wordlist papyrus suggests that the impression that multilingual lexicography only really gained momentum after ca. 1000 CE might to some extent be the result of selection bias. I find it hard to believe, however, that an adjustment for these factors would completely overturn the narrative that I am presenting here, the point of which is to suggest that multilingual lexicographies—involving three or more languages—were relatively rare in the ancient world and only became common in the long second millennium CE. I will elaborate.

The philological character of much early lexicography was often not conducive to multilingual scholarship. Yet over time, dictionaries that included several languages were compiled and read in several parts of the world. Curiously, if we remain on the scale of the longue durée, it might perhaps be argued that these multilingual collections appeared in greater numbers in the same historical period: the so-called “vernacular millennium,”19 whose beginnings we, for the sake of convenience, might date to around 1000 CE. If this hypothesis, which I will entertain in this introduction, turns out to be true, then the rise of multilingual lexicography can be linked to the relativization—if not marginalization—of cosmopolitan written traditions that was proceeding at different speeds in this period as societies changed. Furthermore, paper became more accessible, making it economically and technically feasible to write a greater variety of books.20 Crucially, writing was adopted to a greater extent on the peripheries of old civilizations. With more languages, and more words, being committed to writing, information flowed more easily across the old world. Some lexicographers ascended to a new vantage point and endeavored to gather, on one page, as many languages as possible.

5 Multilingual Lexicographies in the Second Millennium CE

These factors were all in evidence in the second millennium CE. With several of the Indo-European and Turkic languages of Central Asia committed to writing as part of state-building and religious (Buddhist, Manichean, Islamic) projects, dictionaries of new languages or language varieties appeared. The earliest wordlist of Persian, Lughat-i furs from ca. 1066, is monolingual and best grouped with the philological dictionaries of the first millennium (it was meant to serve the reading and writing of poetry). But the first dictionary of Turkic, Dīwān Luġāt at-Turk from ca. 1077, translates words from several Turkic dialects into Arabic. With time, multilingual Arabic-Persian-Turkish wordlists were compiled in Central Asia, where several written languages were now in contact.21 In the fourteenth century, in Yemen, where the trade route from the Indian ocean to the Mediterranean passed, the king sponsored the compilation of multilingual glossaries that covered Arabic, Persian, Turkic, Greek, Armenian, and Mongolian.22

In India, the Mughal invasion ushered in numerous Sanskrit-Persian wordlists, but this bilingual tradition quickly expanded. According to Audrey Truschke,

particularly beginning in the seventeenth century, multilingual dictionaries proliferated that include languages such as Marathi and Gujarati paired with Persian and Arabic. At this time, certain Sanskrit lexicons also began to show a heavy density of vernacular terms. The relationship between Sanskrit–Persian lexicons and texts that incorporate other tongues remains to be worked out, but early modern intellectuals more broadly tried to make sense of their world through words and language.23

Written multilingualism was making its way into dictionaries, but as Truschke remarks, the phenomenon has rarely been the focus of dedicated historical study. John Considine has tried to pin down what drove the development of new multilingual lexicographies in Europe from about the fifteenth century onward, that is, at a point in time somewhere in between the emergence of multilingual dictionaries in Central and South Asia, judging by the scholarship cited above. Before the fifteenth century, Considine writes, bilingual lexicography in Europe had been motivated by the practical study of languages. But from the second half of the fifteenth century, a new tradition of lexicography emerged that “was driven not by the need to learn a useful or prestigious language but by curiosity.”24 This curious lexicography did not just incorporate languages already written, but brought new ones into the fold of writing. Therefore, the new languages brought into the world of print by European lexicographers of the era cannot, as in the case in some other parts of the world in the “vernacular millennium,” be explained by their availability in writing—quite the contrary. However, the fact that many of the resulting wordlists were multilingual to some extent depended precisely on this fact, as was the case elsewhere in Eurasia. Tri- or quadrilingual wordlists often contained the new language, Latin, and one or two recently codified national vernaculars.25 The latter’s firm establishment in print (if not recent commitment to writing) thus contributed to the multilingualism of lexicography in the new age of curiosity.

After the major European vernaculars, including Russian, had been standardized and codified in monolingual dictionaries under government auspices, Catherine II of Russia herself took up the “curious hobby” of translating wordlists. They became “the backbone for a comparative dictionary claiming to represent all the languages in the world”: Vocabularia comparativa linguarum totius orbis from 1787–1791.26 This dictionary was obviously a product of empire. As such, it was not unique. In the Qing empire of the Manchus, the court sponsored multilingual dictionary projects at exactly the same time.

The imperial multilingual dictionaries produced in Beijing in the late eighteenth century are inseparable from the Inner Asian imperial project of the Manchus. Yet, just as Catherine II’s multilingual dictionary in part stemmed from a curiosity for which the reality of empire alone cannot account, when placed in its broader historical context, the Manchu polyglots appear as part of a historical trend.

The Manchu invasion of China in the mid-seventeenth century brought East Asia closer to the new written multilingualism that was a contributing factor in the emergence of multilingual dictionaries elsewhere in Eurasia as well. The first period of Inner Asian vernacularization in the early second millennium CE did not result in any multilingual lexicography, as far as we are able to tell from the texts still extant; we only know of mono- or bilingual dictionaries from said period. Not so after the Manchu conquest.

In the second half of the eighteenth century, bilingual Manchu-Chinese and Manchu-Mongolian dictionaries were complemented by court-sponsored multilingual dictionaries containing all of these three languages together. In some books, Tibetan was added, and in the imperially sponsored pentaglot of the 1790s, Uighur was added to these four languages. The simultaneity of this book, that is, the Manchu Qianlong emperor’s Yuzhi wuti Qingwen jian, and Catherine II’s collection is suggestive. It also makes the Manchu book look provincial. The Qianlong emperor liked to praise the Manchu language over all the other languages of the world, but his dictionary contained only five of them, all of which were important to the Qing imperial formation. Nevertheless, Yuzhi wuti Qingwen jian was part of a broader trend in East Asia at this time, which was further represented at the Qing court through books that have thus far remained much less known than the pentaglot.

Qianlong’s project was more closely related to the general written multilingualism of Eurasia than the pentaglot alone might suggest. It was not the only multilingual dictionary compiled in the region. In Chosŏn Korea, the trilingual Chinese-Korean-Manchu Tongmun yuhae was compiled on the basis of Qing sources in 1748. Some decades later, in 1778, Pang’ŏn yusŏk was finished but never printed. It contained Chinese (with Mandarin pronunciation glosses), Korean, Manchu, Mongolian, Japanese, and Chinese dialect terms.27 The trend toward multilingual lexicography encompassed East Asia as a whole.

Furthermore, although Qianlong’s five-language dictionary certainly looks intimately tied to the Qing imperial formation in its coverage, there was a greater interest in the lexicography of foreign languages at the Manchu court. In 1755, when the work on multilingual compilations was underway at the Qianlong court, the Jesuit missionary Antoine Gaubil wrote from Beijing:

Pekini Imperator voluit habere plurima vocabula sinica, russicé, latiné, italicé, lusitanicé, germanicé et gallicé versa cum sonis earum linguarum exprimentibus sonos sinenses; non parvus fuit labor, et opinor sine ullâ verâ utilitate, sed magnates Sinenses credidere maximo honori fore suo Imperatori Sinicam linguam sic verti in Sinis in tam diversarum Gentium linguas.28

The Emperor in Peking wanted to have a great number of Chinese words translated into Russian, Latin, Italian, Portuguese, German, and French, with the Chinese sounds expressed in the sounds of these languages [transcribed into the alphabet of these languages?]. This was not a small task, and, I think, one without any real usefulness, but the high Chinese officials thought it a great honor to their Emperor to have the Chinese language thus translated in China into the languages of such diverse Peoples.

Gaubil’s letter appears to refer to the voluminous manuscript dictionaries of various foreign languages produced at the Manchu court in the middle of the eighteenth century. These books await further study.

Elsewhere in East Asia, the integration of the languages of the Qing empire with those of Europe likewise advanced. In the early 1820s, scholars in Japan compiled a manuscript dictionary that contained Chinese, Manchu, Dutch, and occasionally English and Russian.29 Thus, by the end of the early modern period, multilingual lexicography covering a great number of languages from different parts of Eurasia was practiced from Europe to Japan.

6 Conclusion

The lexicographical texts translated and introduced in this part offer glimpses of lexicographical practice from very different times and places. They include a section of a lexicon from Mesopotamia (3.2), a multilingual wordlist from Egypt (3.3), the prefaces to two Byzantine dictionaries (3.4), an encyclopedic dictionary from Byzantium (3.5), and a bilingual Manchu dictionary from Qing China (3.6). The texts evidence several of the functions often filled by lexicography, including as a scholarly, exegetical tool, and as a support for language learning. The texts are plurilingual—and at times multilingual—in their inclusion of both different languages and of earlier stages of the same language. The historical study of lexicography has made great advances in recent years, but while it has answered many questions, it has given rise to many more, which remain to be explored in both philological detail and synthesizing overviews.

1

Considine, “Concept of Lexicography,” 32.

2

Weijers, “Lexicography in the Middle Ages,” 141.

3

Considine, “Concept of Lexicography,” 34.

4

Ibid., 36–38.

5

Considine, “Introduction,” 3.

6

Cavigneaux, “Lexikalische Listen,” 612–616.

7

Veldhuis, “Ancient Mesopotamia,” 11.

8

Feder, “Ancient and Coptic Egypt,” 38.

9

Bottéro, “Ancient China,” 59.

10

Harbsmeier and Bottéro, “Shuowen Jiezi Dictionary,” 251.

11

Boltz, “Multilingualism and Lingua Franca,” 401.

12

Bottéro, “Ancient China,” 57.

13

Deokar and Chevillard, “Ancient India,” 69.

14

Ferri, “Greco-Roman World,” 86.

15

Cavigneaux, “Lexikalische Listen,” 616.

16

Ferri, “Greco-Roman World,” 102.

17

Rubio, “Writing in Another Tongue,” 33–70.

18

Ferri, “Greco-Roman World,” 93.

19

Pollock, “India in the Vernacular Millennium,” 41–74.

20

This insight is from Considine, Small Dictionaries and Curiosity, 19.

21

Stachowski, “Turkic Languages and Persian,” 223–232.

22

Golden, The King’s Dictionary.

23

Truschke, “Defining the Other,” 662.

24

Considine, Small Dictionaries and Curiosity, 29.

25

Considine, Academy Dictionaries.

26

Kim, “Foreign Interests,” 20–21.

27

Söderblom Saarela, “Mandarin over Manchu,” 378–382.

28

Antoine Gaubil to Thomas Birch, May 8, 1755, Beijing, in Gaubil, Correspondence de Pékin, 813.

29

Söderblom Saarela, “Mandarin over Manchu,” 396–397.

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