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CHAPTER XII

THE DICTIONARY; STUDY OF THE VOCABULARY

Ir will, perhaps, be most convenient to begin with that aspect of the dictionary which makes it the reverse of the grammar. From this point of view we have already defined a dictionary as a collection of the isolated phenomena of a language-those which cannot easily and conveniently be brought under general rules. It follows from this that the main function of a dictionary is to give the meanings of separate words. Some dictionaries confine themselves strictly to this function. But a dictionary which does not sacrifice everything to giving as large a vocabulary as possible in the shortest space ought to give a good deal more than this.

Idioms fall entirely within the province of the dictionary, because the meaning of each idiom is an isolated fact which cannot be inferred from the meaning of the words of which the idiom is made up: a dictionary which explains the meaning of do without explaining that of how do you do? is useless as a guide to the meanings of words.

A thoroughly useful dictionary ought, besides, to give information on various grammatical details, which, though they fall under general rules of grammar, are too numerous or too arbitrary and complicated to be treated of in detail in any but a full reference-grammar: such a dictionary ought to give full information about those grammatical constructions which characterize individual words, and cannot be deduced with certainty and ease from a simple grammatical rule. Thus it ought to give full information about the prepositions by which verbs are connected with the words they govern (think of, think about, think over, part from, part with). Such a dictionary ought further to give the anomalous and irregular forms, especially those which are of only occasional occurrence, so

that the learner cannot reasonably be expected to be perfectly familiar with them.

A full dictionary of this kind is obviously suited for reference only. All grammars-even the most detailed referencegrammars-can be read through with profit; but few would think of reading through an ordinary dictionary. It need scarcely be said that M. Gouin, who tried every conceivable method of learning German-that is, all except a rationally progressive one on a phonetic basis-tried this also. He took a dictionary of three hundred pages, and not only read, but learnt by heart ten pages a day, so that in a month he knew the whole dictionary by heart. Such, at least, is his statement. The result was what might have been expected: he could not understand a word of German, and in a month he forgot all he had learnt.

Ease of reference involves alphabetic order, as in the index to a grammar. In fact, an ordinary alphabetic dictionary is, in some respects, simply an expanded index to a referencegrammar.

We will now consider the principles on which such dictionaries ought to be constructed.

Scope

As convenience of reference requires that a dictionary should be as little bulky as is consistent with efficiency, it is advisable that its scope should be distinctly defined and strictly limited. A dictionary of English for practical use by foreigners, or a French or German dictionary for practical use by English speakers, is, in the nature of things, mainly a dictionary of the present stage of these languages: its foundation is the modern colloquial and literary language, which involves, of course, the inclusion of a certain number of archaic words used in the higher literature, together with a certain amount of slang and vulgarisms and those dialectal words which have found their way into general literature and conversation.

Such a dictionary as the New English Dictionary, which attempts to include the whole English vocabulary from 1200 to the present day, is not, even from a purely scientific and theoretical point of view, a dictionary, but a series of dictionaries digested under one alphabet. Such dictionaries have no practical interest. This applies with still greater force to

comparative dictionaries, such as Fick's Indogermanisches wörterbuch.

Most of our larger English dictionaries are also compromises between an expanded dictionary and an abridged cyclopedia. The fundamental distinction between a dictionary and a cyclopedia is, that the dictionary has to explain words, the cyclopedia has to explain things. The main function of the dictionary is to identify each word with its meaning or meanings, and give the details of its linguistic use as far as they do not fall entirely and exclusively under the province of grammar. This is clearly shown in the use we make of dictionaries of foreign languages. If we are ignorant of the meaning of the French word fleur, we look it up in our French-English dictionary, where we find the English translation 'flower,' without any further comment, it being assumed that we know what a flower is. We feel that the translation is a surer guide to the meaning than the most elaborate definition. In an English dictionary for English people the same method of translation is followed as far as possible: commence and purchase are defined by being translated into the simpler 'begin' and 'buy,' and we fall back on definition only when absolutely obliged to do so. Some of the more naïve among the older dictionaries openly give up the attempt to define by such evasions as telling us that dog is 'the name of a well-known animal.' Even Walker's celebrated definition of a flea as 'a small insect of remarkable agility' would be of little use to any one who did not know already what a flea was.

But it may happen that in reading French we come across the name of some flower that is not found out of France, or, at any rate, not in England, so that when we look up the word in the French dictionary, the only explanation we find is 'name of a flower' with, perhaps, the botanical name, which probably conveys no meaning to our minds; we have not, therefore, learnt anything from the dictionary beyond what we could probably have gathered from the context without any further help. Nevertheless, the dictionary has done everything in its power to identify the word with the thing expressed by it; it is our want of knowledge of the thing itself which prevents us from profiting by the dictionary's identification. If we look up the botanical name in a cyclopedia, we can acquire a more or less definite idea of the thing itself—the flower.

There can be no question of the usefulness and convenience of the brief explanations of the ideas and objects expressed by rare words which our larger dictionaries give: these explanations afford the reader enough information to enable him to form an idea of the real nature of the thing represented by the unfamiliar word without obliging him to wade through a sea of detail.

But it is a question whether it would not be better to publish such information in a separate book than to mix it up with the legitimate material of a dictionary-namely, the identification of familiar ideas with the words which express them. An educated Frenchman just beginning English is ignorant of the meaning of the commonest verbs and adjectives in English, but he will not require to be told what oxygen is, or how lithography is carried on. It is not meant that these words should be excluded from a practical dictionary; on the contrary, they are examples-especially the latter-of a numerous class of words which form a debateable ground between necessary, everyday words and purely special and technical words.

A further reason for separating the special or encyclopediac from the general or lexical words lies in the different treatment they require. While the former demand, or, at least, allow, a more or less elaborate and lengthy description of the thing they denote, accompanied, perhaps, with pictures or diagrams, they are generally barren from the linguistic point of view, for they offer neither varied shades of meaning nor irregularities of form, nor do they enter into idiomatic combinations or special grammatical constructions. With the lexical words the relations are reversed: the greater the number of irregularities of form a word offers, and the more complex and varied its meanings and idiomatic combinations and special constructions are, the more indispensable for expressing ideas, and the more independent of encyclopediac treatment it is sure to be.

We arrive, then, at the result that for purposes of practical study of modern languages we require dictionaries which are strictly limited to the modern language, and exclude all encyclopediac elements-that is, all words of which it is conceivable that an educated native might say that he had never seen them in literature or that he did not know what they meant. Such a dictionary would, of course, include debateable words, unless it were intended for very elementary purposes, in which

case it might exclude even such words as abacus, habeas corpus, iambic, nabob, oxygen.

But it would be very difficult to lay down any general principles by which we could exclude all encyclopediac words without hesitation, and the ordinary compromise has its practical advantages.

Pronouncing Dictionaries

Most dictionaries of modern languages are at the same time pronouncing dictionaries, the pronunciation being indicated either by the addition of stress-marks and other diacritics, or by a complete phonetic transliteration of each word, the last method being the only practical one with such languages as English and French. Separate pronouncing dictionaries are the most convenient for reference. It might be worth while to shorten them by the omission of all words in frequent use, which no one could help knowing who had learnt the language in a phonetic transcription, but it would be difficult to draw the line. A complete pronouncing dictionary ought to include proper names.

The usual arrangement in a pronouncing dictionary is to give the words in their nomic spelling and add the phonetic transcription. Michaelis and Passy's Dictionnaire phonétique de la langue Française is an interesting example of the reverse order, which is more scientific, but less convenient for reference.

We have hitherto assumed that the dictionary covers the whole field of the language it deals with. A dictionary which deals only with the words occurring in certain definite texts is called a glossary. Of such nature are the glossaries to primers and readers. Glossaries admit of the same variety of arrangement and scale of size and fullness as complete dictionaries. Such glossaries as those to Grein's edition of the Old English poetry and to Windisch's Altirische texte are on the scale of a large scientific dictionary.

The field of a dictionary may also be diminished negatively -by excluding certain classes of books. This can only be done in dead languages like Latin, where we have excellent school dictionaries such as Smith's, restricted to the vocabulary of the books read by schoolboys, which are numerous enough to give the complete elementary vocabulary of the language.

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