You Could Look It Up (40 page)

CHAPTER
16

MONUMENTS OF ERUDITION

The Great National Dictionaries

The French Academy’s
Dictionnaire
and Johnson’s
Dictionary
represent different approaches to the idea of a national language: one protected from foreign impurities, based on the “best” literary language, and enforced from on high; the other recognizing the impossibility of ever fixing the language, and concerned only with recording the language as accurately as possible. Dictionaries often reflect the cultures that produce them: since the rise of the modern nation-state in the seventeenth century, lexicographers have worked to reinforce, or even to build, a national consciousness.

Modern maps suggest that everyone in the area labeled
SPAIN
speaks Spanish; across the border to the west they speak Portuguese; across the border to the north they speak French. But maps can lie. Before the eighteenth century it was hard to tell how many languages were spoken in Spain or Portugal or France, and where the speakers of one left off and the next began. Dictionaries were partly responsible for consolidating national linguistic consciousness. The Della Cruscan
Vocabolario
, for instance, played a role not merely in recording but in creating the Italian language: it established a standard form of Italian, based on Tuscan, that would displace the dozens of local dialects spoken around the Italian peninsula. When Peter the Great wanted to consolidate a vast and growing Russia, he ordered his Academy of Sciences to regularize the Russian language with an academic dictionary. The
six-volume dictionary published between 1789 and 1794 established vernacular Russian rather than Church Slavonic as the standard.
1
The Czech National Revival in part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the late eighteenth century led to the publication of a pile of reference books, of which Josef Dobrovský’s grammar in 1809 and Josef Jungmann’s
Ausfürliches und vollständiges deutsch–böhmisches synonymisch-phraseologisches Wörterbuch
of 1834–39—five volumes and 4,700 pages—were the most important.
2

The connection between nation and dictionary may be clearest in Poland. By the end of the eighteenth century, the Commonwealth of Poland had come to an end and the country was partitioned among Russia, Austria, and Prussia, prompting Tadeusz Kościuszko to lead an uprising in 1794. It was defeated, but patriotic Poles held on to their sense of themselves as a nation. One passionate advocate for Poland’s cultural identity was Samuel Bogumi
ł
Linde, part of the team that composed one of the first written national constitutions, Poland’s so-called “Government Act” of 1788. Linde’s constitution had a short life—the government it established was disbanded after just a year and a half—but his other contribution was more lasting: the
S
ł
ownik j
zyka polskiego
, or
Dictionary of the Polish Language
, published in Warsaw in six volumes between 1807 and 1814. The first substantial dictionary of Polish, it defined sixty thousand words and provided a focus for linguistic, and therefore national, identity. The nineteenth-century French philosopher Constantin François de Chassebœuf, comte de Volney, knew what he was talking about when he said “Le premier livre d’une nation est le Dictionnaire de sa langue”—a nation’s first book is a dictionary of its language.
3

Samuel Johnson had national ambitions in his
Dictionary
: “I have devoted this book, the labour of years, to the honour of my country, that we may no longer yield the palm of philology to the nations of the continent.”
4
Johnson stood for England. Not all English speakers, though, were English, and not all the English-speaking nationalists shared Johnson’s sense of the nation.

On the other side of the Atlantic one critic had serious complaints about the work everyone else seemed to admire. Noah Webster was born
in West Hartford, Connecticut, in 1758, three years after Johnson’s work was published. Webster, whose interest in the language was lifelong, found much to like about the
Dictionary
: Johnson’s “great intellectual powers,” his emphasis on morality, the definitions that let his abolitionist sympathies shine through (both Johnson and Webster despised American slavery). But Webster was an American patriot—at age nineteen he tried to fight in a battle in the American War of Independence in 1777 (though he arrived on the battlefield too late to be useful). Johnson, on the other hand, was notorious for his disparagement of the American rebels, whom he called “a race of convicts,” adding that they “ought to be thankful for anything we allow them short of hanging.” He was willing, he said, “to love all mankind,
except an American
.”
5

As the loyal American Webster became increasingly interested in the conjunction of language and nation, he came to scorn the English lexicographer whom he viewed not as a precursor but as an enemy. Before the Treaty of Paris officially ended the American Revolution, Webster wrote, “America must be as independent in
literature
as she is in
politics
, as famous for
arts
as for
arms
.”
6
Johnson’s
Dictionary
, he asserted, was “extremely imperfect and full of error,” and “Not a single page of Johnson’s
Dictionary
is correct.”
7
He therefore decided to produce his own distinctively American dictionary, and he began by publishing a series of books on the English language in America—which he preferred to call “the American language”—in order to “promote the honour and prosperity of the confederated republics of America and cheerfully throws his mite into the common treasure of patriotic exertion.”
8
His spellers, grammars, and readers, beginning with the
Grammatical Institute of the English Language
in 1783, were some of the bestselling books in America for more than a century, selling, by one estimate, a hundred million copies. He wrote essays and pamphlets advocating for spelling reform,
9
eager to widen the gap between British and American English: we owe to Webster most of the spellings marked “chiefly American” in modern dictionaries, in pairs like
colour/color
,
centre/center
,
programme/ program
, and so on.

In 1806 he published
A Compendious Dictionary
. It was written, he said, “for my fellow citizens,” and he had only scorn for those of his
countrymen “whose veneration for trans-atlantic authors leads them to hold American writers in unmerited contempt.”
10
This was to be an American document through and through. But, though serviceable, it accomplished only a tiny fraction of what Webster hoped. Merely 408 small pages, with no etymologies or quotations, its definitions are skimpy, usually just a handful of synonyms:

Admit, v. to allow, suffer, grant, let in, receive

Different, a. unlike, distinct, contrary, various

Law, n. a rule, order, judicial process, justice

Moose,
n.
an American quadruped of the cervine genus very large

Take, v. took, pret. taken, pa. to receive, seize, trap, suppose, hire, please

Much of the work was not even original—many entries were lifted whole from John Entick’s
New Spelling Dictionary of the English Language
, published in 1764.

Webster knew the limitations of his work, and he turned his attention to a much grander dictionary and worked on it for two decades. A contemporary account showed him at work, using a custom-built

large circular table … about two feet wide, built in the form of a hollow circle. Dictionaries and grammars of all obtainable languages were laid in successive order upon its surface. Webster would take the word under investigation, and standing at the right end of the lexicographer’s table, look it up in the first dictionary which lay at that end… . He took each word through the twenty or thirty dictionaries, making notes of his discoveries, and passing around his table many times in the course of a day’s labor.
11

An American Dictionary of the English Language
appeared in 1828, when Webster was seventy. In two stout quartos, it was in most respects the best dictionary of English on the market on either side of the Atlantic. Not all the work was original: though Webster often disparaged Johnson he also leaned on him, adopting many of his definitions verbatim and using others as the basis for his own. But lexicographers today are almost universally agreed that while Webster took much from Johnson, he also surpassed him in the clarity and precision of his definitions. Johnson was a very good definer, but Webster was a great one. He announced that “the great and substantial merit” of a dictionary consists of “the accuracy and comprehensiveness of its definitions,” and he delivered.

How far Webster came is clear in a comparison of an entry in the
Compendious Dictionary
with the
American Dictionary
. This is how Webster handled the word
language
in 1806:

Language, n. all human speech, a tongue, a style

Part of speech and three imprecise synonyms, nothing more. The entry for the same word in the dictionary of 1828 has grown exponentially, and with the length comes greater precision:

LAN´GUAGE,
noun
[Latin lingua, the tongue, and speech.]

1.  Human speech; the expression of ideas by words or significant articulate sounds, for the communication of thoughts.
Language
consists in the oral utterance of sounds, which usage has made the representatives of ideas. When two or more persons customarily annex the same sounds to the same ideas, the expression of these sounds by one person communicates his ideas to another. This is the primary sense of
language
the use of which is to communicate the thoughts of one person to another through the organs of hearing. Articulate sounds are represented by letters, marks or characters which form words. Hence
language
consists also in

2.  Words duly arranged in sentences, written, printed or engraved, and exhibited to the eye.

3.  The speech or expression of ideas peculiar to a particular nation. Men had originally one and the same
language
but the tribes or families of men, since their dispersion, have distinct languages.