You Could Look It Up (41 page)

4.  Style; manner of expression.
Others for
language
all their care express.

5.  The inarticulate sounds by which irrational animals express their feelings and wants. Each species of animals has peculiar sounds, which are uttered instinctively, and are understood by its own species, and its own species only.

6.  Any manner of expressing thoughts. Thus we speak of the
language
of the eye, a
language
very expressive and intelligible.

7.  A nation, as distinguished by their speech. Daniel 3:29.

What had been 9 words was now 240. Other pairings are even more extreme: the entry for
give
was 16 words in 1806, and 1,114 in 1828. In 1806 Webster covered
set
—noun and verb—in 43 words; in 1828 he took 2,490. The entry for
take
went from 13 words to 2,524. Joseph Friend calls his definitions “more accurate, more comprehensive, and not less
carefully divided and ordered than any previously done in English,”
12
and to this day, professional lexicographers admire his definitions and strive to equal them.

Sales of the first edition were modest—about twenty-five hundred copies. Still Webster carried on, mortgaging his house to raise the money for a second edition. He entered into an acrimonious dispute with one of his former assistants, Joseph Worcester, who published his own
Comprehensive Pronouncing and Explanatory English Dictionary
in 1830, prompting accusations of plagiarism from Webster and a battle—the “dictionary wars”—that dragged on for decades. Webster’s own second edition appeared in 1840, three years before he died at the age of eighty-four. His work had remarkable longevity, as the G. & C. Merriam Co. bought the intellectual property in Webster’s
American Dictionary
and began marketing a series of revised and expanded editions: a New Revised edition in 1847, a Royal Quarto Edition in 1864,
Webster’s International Dictionary
in 1890,
Webster’s New International Dictionary
in 1909, a second edition in 1934, and
Webster’s Third New International Dictionary
in 1961. The franchise remains the most prestigious in all American lexicography.

In one area, though, Webster is unambiguously inferior to his rivals, and that was etymology. Johnson’s etymologies are sometimes inaccurate, but they were at least based on a reasonable method. Webster’s were lousy because his theory of etymology was fundamentally unsound.
13

Webster, writing in the early nineteenth century, was still looking backward, to seventeenth-century theories of the ways in which languages were related to one another. Early etymologists invented family trees for the world’s languages that can be described only as wacky. The most superficial similarities between words were enough to suggest connections between languages. Webster bought into many of these theories and drew impossible connections between languages that had nothing in common. Webster had every reason to know better, because when he was a young man the biblical notion of the confusion of tongues at the Tower of Babel was dissolving from fact into myth. Sir William Jones, an English polymath, first made the argument that most
of the languages of Europe and South Asia were related to one another. Everyone knew the Romance languages were descended from Latin. Other connections, though, were mysterious. Was English related to Greek? Did Latin and Swedish have anything in common, or Welsh and Russian? Did German or Portuguese share anything with Persian or Hindi? No one had a good answer before Jones lectured before the Asiatic Society in 1786 and compared Sanskrit to both Latin and Greek. He discovered similarities “so strong indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists.” He went even further: “There is a similar reason, though not quite so forcible, for supposing that both the
Gothick
and the
Celtick
, though blended with a very different idiom, had the same origin with
Sanscrit
; and the old
Persian
might be added to the same family, if this were the place for discussing any question concerning the antiquities of
Persia
.”
14

Jones laid the foundations for the study of what is now known as Indo-European, a language family that includes most of the languages of Europe and many of the Indian Subcontinent: English, Latin, French, Spanish, Italian, German, Dutch, Swedish, Norwegian, Greek, Russian, Polish, Czech, Persian, Hindi, Urdu, and dozens of others are all more or less distant cousins. Not all languages belong to this family: Swahili, for instance, has no known connections to English or Spanish or Greek, and no one has discovered any connections between Nahuatl and Dutch. But more than four hundred languages—some dead like Latin, some living like Polish; some major like French, some obscure like Chhattisgarhi—are all descended from the same original language, now known as Proto-Indo-European.

The most exciting etymological advances came from Germany, the center of international comparative and historical philology in the early nineteenth century. No nation-state with that name existed then; Germany was more an idea than a political reality. The Holy Roman Empire, centered mostly on the territory occupied by modern Germany, had been falling apart for generations, producing what became known as
Kleinstaaterei
, a proliferation of fragmented states. Historians cannot even agree on how many statelets there were: something on the order of
three hundred, but no list has elicited consensus. German speakers wanted to know: What did it mean to be German? What defines a nation if it is not coterminous with a government? For many theorists in early nineteenth-century Germany, it was above all a culture, and the most important part of a culture was a shared language. Germans were not the people who lived in Germany, or even those who lived under German laws; they were the people who spoke German.

The Brothers Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm, are best known today for their collection of folktales, including
Cinderella
,
Snow White
, and the
Frog Prince
. The Grimms’ most important contribution to scholarship, though, was a dictionary, still the most authoritative dictionary of the German language nearly two centuries after it was begun. And though
Hansel and Gretel
may seem distant from innovations in comparative lexicography, both the dictionary and the folktales grow out of the same nationalist consciousness.

Jacob Ludwig Carl Grimm, born in 1785, was a child prodigy—he “could read books fluently,” people said, “before others were beyond their alphabet”
15
—and his brother, Wilhelm Carl Grimm, born a year later, was nearly as brilliant. The family moved to Cassel in 1798; although the children started in the local school’s lower levels, Jacob soon reached the top of his class, and Wilhelm was close behind. Jacob entered the University of Marburg in 1802, studying law on his father’s advice, with Wilhelm once again in tow. Both found the lectures dull, but they came under the spell of a young lecturer named Friedrich Karl von Savigny. Wilhelm would later say that he owed all his achievements to Savigny.

When the royal library of Westphalia needed a librarian, Jacob’s name was suggested. It was an easy enough job, requiring little effort, so Jacob took advantage of both his free time and the great library to begin his scholarly work in earnest. In 1811, both brothers issued their first learned publications: Jacob’s
Über den alt-deutschen Meistergesang
(
On the Old German Mastersingers
) and Wilhelm’s
Altdänische Heldenlieder, Balladen und Märchen
(
Old Danish Heroic Songs, Ballads, and Tales
). Together they published a collection of ancient German fragments,
Die zwei ältesten deutschen Gedichte des achten Jahrhunderts
(
The Two Oldest German Poems of the Eighth Century
). The German
alt
‘old’ appears in all
three titles, and with reason: each was concerned with finding the ancient roots of German literary and cultural identity. The answer to the question of Germanness, they believed, was to be found in the deep past. The books were also concerned not with individual geniuses, but with an expression of
das Volk
—the people as a whole.

Das Volk
was at the heart of the Grimms’ most famous work. In 1812, the first three volumes of
Kinder- und Hausmärchen
(
Children’s and Household Tales
) appeared. This foundational work in the study of folklore was one of the first great collections of popular stories. Having collected the tales, they moved on to the language of the folk. In 1819, Jacob published the first part of his four-volume
Deutsche Grammatik
(
German Grammar
), which has been described as “the first lengthy historical study of the Germanic languages” and which “laid the foundations of
Germanistik
, the study of Germanic philology.”
16
Its publication marked an epoch, not merely for Jacob Grimm, not merely for German, but for the scientific study of language itself. As one contemporary remarked, “it for the first time demonstrated to the learned world what a language is. Its method was a complete revolution in the science of grammar,—the substitution of a natural and comparative process, in lieu of the former
a priori
rules.”
17

Eventually the brothers returned to Cassel, at which point Jacob Grimm wrote to Jules Michelet, spelling out the brothers’ plan to write “a complete dictionary of the German language,” one modeled not on the
Dictionnaire de l’Académie françoise
, with its prescriptivism and its invented quotations, but on the
Vocabolario
of the Accademia della Crusca, with its illustrative quotations drawn from the best writers. “Our object,” wrote Jacob to another friend, “was first of all to open a complete archive of the language, as it actually exists and has existed during the time in question, let the practical use that shall be made of it be what it may.”
18
The hard work began in 1838, and they likened their labors to splitting wood. They read hundreds of books, corresponded with Europe’s leading philologists, and lined up volunteers to collect quotations. They particularly encouraged their contributors to pay attention to idioms and proverbs, and even invited them to report obscene words.
19

Their work would bear the title
Deutsches Wörterbuch
(
German Dictionary
), and even that seemingly direct choice of title was a statement of nationalist consciousness. Most early reference books that listed words and meanings borrowed a name from the classical languages: Latin
glossarium
,
dictionarium
, or
vocabularius
, Greek
lexikon
or
thesaurus
. In late eighteenth-century Germany, though, a homegrown equivalent had begun to catch on: no longer a Latin
dictionarium
or a Greek
lexikon
, a German language reference book would be a
Wörterbuch
‘word book’. That is what Johann Christoph Adelung chose for his
Grammatisch-kritisches Wörterbuch der Hochdeutschen Mundart
(1774–86), the first great German dictionary, and what the Grimms chose for theirs decades later. It was a sign that German speakers were asserting their own identity, finding words rooted in the Germanic rather than the classical languages.

The most distinctive thing about the Grimms’
Wörterbuch
is the definitions—or, rather, the lack of them. Lexicographers like Johnson and Webster were determined to tease out all the subtle shades of meaning in every word. Not so the Grimms. Their plan was to give not proper definitions but simple translations of German words into Latin; when there was no Latin equivalent, as with modern scientific and technological developments, the Grimms used French or Dutch. Other lexicographers might spend pages explicating a word like
kaufen
‘buy’,
trying to pin down exactly which kinds of exchanges constituted a purchase. The Grimms simply gave the Latin words
mercari
and
emere
—no more. Jacob even ridiculed other lexicographers who wasted time on long definitions of words like
table
when they could simply give the Latin word for it.
20
(In practice, the Grimms’ plan to define in Latin or French was not carried through, at least not systematically, and Latin became less and less common as the work went on. Most of the definitions are in German, though there are some Latin equivalents.)