The history of the dictionary

Dictionaries are extremely popular tools. This has not always been the case, however: monolingual dictionaries did not exist in the West until about the sixteenth century (Matoré 1968). Different sorts of ‘proto-lexicographical’ document existed in Antiquity and the Middle Ages, such as the glossaries or word lists used to keep a record of words which had fallen out of use in everyday language, but which continued to be used in specialized speech genres like poetry. In China, Japan and India, similar documents are also known from an early date: the earliest Chinese proto-lexicographical work, for instance, the Erya (a title which means ‘approaching what is elegant and correct usage’), which is not a dictionary in the modern sense but simply a collection of semantic glosses on classical Chinese texts, probably dates from the third century BC (Malmqvist 1994: 5–6). More surprising, perhaps, than the historical recency of the mod ern dictionary, is the fact that the monolingual dictionary is a later invention than the bilingual one: the direct precursor of the modern monolingual dictionary is the bilingual Latin-vernacular dictionary or ‘lexicon’ which became popular in Europe between the end of the fourteenth and the end of the fifteenth centuries (Auroux 1994: 119). As noted by Auroux (1994), the novelty of the modern monolingual dictionary lay in the fact that it was intended not for people who wanted to acquire a language which they did not yet command, as had been the case for the earlier bilingual dictionaries, but for people who wanted guidance in the use of a language which they already spoke. So completely has the monolingual dictionary eclipsed the bilingual one as the lexicographical standard that, as pointed out by Rey (1990: 19), we now largely think of definitions as exclusively monolingual: whereas a bilingual dictionary contains equivalents or translations, only a monolingual one contains definitions.

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مواضيع ذات صلة

Word-based and meaning-based approaches to definition

Meaning and use

Meanings as brain states

Meanings as concepts/mental representations

Breaking the circle

Object language and metalanguage

Levels of meaning

Compositionality

Sense/reference/denotation/connotation

Meaning in French

What is semantics?

Change in meaning with no change in category