You Could Look It Up (42 page)

A dictionary without definitions sounds like a very short work, but the
Wörterbuch
was anything but. It was based on extensive folkloric scholarship, but not fieldwork in the modern sense. The Grimms spent their time digging deep into linguistic history to trace the origins of every word in the German language, and they offered cognates in other Germanic and Indo-European languages in a vigorous workout of the methods of comparative historical linguistics. This attention to linguistic history and etymology was a Germanic tradition, appearing prominently in earlier works such as the Swedish
Glossarium suiogothicum
(1769). The Grimms turned to the quotations that showed the words in use in real German authors, ranging from Martin Luther and Hans Sachs in the early sixteenth century to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in the early nineteenth. (Most of their attention went to the earlier writers, since they regarded the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as periods of linguistic decay in Germany.)
21

Their account of the verb
besetzen
‘occupy’, to take an example, opened with an extensive etymological note, comparing German
besetzen
to Gothic
bisatjan
, Old High German
pisezan
, Modern Dutch
bezetten
, Anglo-Saxon
besettan
, English
beset
, Swabian
besätta
, and Danish
besätte
, and then offered an explanation: “land, stadt, burg, haus mit leuten besetzen,
occupare
,” that is, “
besetzen
a country, city, castle, a house with people,
occupare
.” The German illustrated of the kinds of objects the verb might take, but was not an explanation of what the verb means—the Latin verb
occupare
is as close as they came to a definition. Having got the origin and meaning out of the way, they turned their attention to the word’s use in German literature, starting with a quotation from Martin Luther’s translation of the Bible, then a trawl through medieval German poetry, a quotation from the sixteenth-century military writer
Leonhard Fronsperger, right up to their near-contemporaries, Goethe, Jean Paul, and Friedrich Schiller. The entry runs to nearly a thousand words.

Their dictionary shows on every page their fascination with the cultural hallmarks of Germanness, and they were determined that their book would be a “shrine”—in German,
Heiligtum
—“to language, to preserve its entire wealth, to hold access to it open for all.”
22
Though it may have been open for all, it was hardly accessible to most; its erudition would have scared off all but the most learned readers, and its bulk would have put it beyond the means of most of the peasants they admired. Still, the
Wörterbuch
was to be a work of what was called
Germanistik
, a wide-ranging “German studies” that includes language, literature, history, culture, and folklore. The
Deutsches Wörterbuch
contributed to a sense of German national identity at a time when there was no nation to speak of, and even if the folk could make little sense of it, it made much of the folk.

The Grimms planned a dictionary of six or seven volumes, which would take perhaps ten years to complete. Of course they missed their target—by so much that both Grimms had been in their graves for nearly a century before their life’s work was complete. The first installment appeared in 1852, when Jacob was sixty-seven and Wilhelm sixty-six, and the first complete volume was published two years later. Wilhelm worked on the
Wörterbuch
up to
D
but died in 1859, a victim of anthrax, before the second complete volume had appeared. His brother soldiered on until he died 1863, when he was working on the word
Frucht
‘fruit’. At that point the work was taken up by the Preußische Akademie der Wissenschaften (Prussian Academy of Sciences), and Göttingen became a center of German philology. The Grimms’ successors had a comparable sense of the national mission of the book. Rudolf Hildebrand, who was instrumental in keeping the project going after the Grimms’ death, gave a public lecture at the University of Leipzig in 1869, claiming that the dictionary served two purposes—“a scholarly one and a national one.” For him the dictionary was a “treasure trove of German-language spirit,” and he insisted that “language is [a] national treasure … in whose fate, flourishing, or disappearance the people [can] see its own fate as a people.”
23

After the division of Germany into East and West in 1945, work continued on both sides of the Iron Curtain, with centers in East Berlin and Göttingen. Cooperation was not always as smooth as it might have been. The Communist government of East Germany regarded lexicography as suspiciously
bürgerlich
—bourgeois—and the staff was sometimes reassigned to other tasks. Still the work continued, and the dictionary was completed on January 10, 1961—a century and a quarter after the work began. Much had happened in that time. The book was begun when there was no such country as Germany; the work lasted through the Franco-Prussian War and both World Wars, ending when Germany was not one nation-state but two. So even before the dictionary was complete, a team was put to work on bringing the older material up to date. In 1971 a supplement appeared, and the whole work, including the supplement, was now thirty-three volumes, a total of 34,824 pages.

Webster and the Grimms were both engaged in lexicographical nation building, but they ended up taking very different approaches. Webster inspired a nation by dividing a linguistic community; the Grimms did so by uniting linguistic communities. For Webster, the problem was that the English-speaking world—what some have since called “the Anglosphere”—was too big and undifferentiated. The Brothers Grimm, on the other hand, lived in a world where no German nation-state existed, just many speakers of the German language spread out among many political organizations. For them, creating a German dictionary was a step toward creating a coherent German people.

CHAPTER
16 ½

COUNTING EDITIONS

One measure of the importance of a work of reference is the number of editions it goes through. The
Encyclopædia Britannica
, for example, is not just one work; there are actually fifteen different sets bearing that title, from
Encyclopædia Britannica; or, A Dictionary of Arts and Sciences, Compiled upon a New Plan
, published in three volumes from
1768
to
1771
, through the
New Encyclopædia Britannica
, fifteenth edition, published in thirty-two volumes in
2010
. Altogether,
274
volumes stretch over a quarter of a millennium, all part of this larger thing called the
Encyclopædia Britannica
. This does not include the hundreds of spinoffs: student editions, fact books, yearbooks, CD-ROM editions, and online versions. The Harvard University Libraries have
255
separate works with
Encyclopædia Britannica
in the title, the British Library has
386
, and the Library of Congress
451
.

Such is the story of all the great reference books. The
Grand Larousse gastronomique
is now in its sixth edition, the
Dictionnaire de l'Académie française
in its ninth,
Black's Law Dictionary
in its tenth,
Webster's Collegiate
in its eleventh,
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations
in its seventeenth,
Emily Post's Etiquette
in its eighteenth, the
Duden
German dictionaries in their twenty-fifth, and
Wisden Cricketers' Almanack
in its 152nd. For a reference work to be superseded is a badge of honor, meaning that the work did its job. The only works that never change are the dead ones.

But numbers like ninth, eleventh, and twenty-fifth can be misleading. Some works go through so many versions, so poorly coordinated and labeled, that it can be difficult to count them. Even a task that should be simple—tallying the number of editions of Johnson's
Dictionary
—can induce headaches. Samuel Johnson's
Dictionary of the English Language
is famous for its appearance in 1755, but pirated editions, abridgments (both authorized and unauthorized), miniature versions, international issues, unlabeled reprints, and so on, were often advertised with meaningless edition numbers. According to the best count so far, there have been at least 52 separate editions of the full
Dictionary
, 13 adaptations of it, 141 abridgments, and 315 miniature versions. Thus at least 521 different books can in some sense be called “Johnson's
Dictionary
,” and that does not count the modern facsimiles and electronic editions. And previously unrecognized editions still turn up from time to time. Because every one of these involved a separate setting of type, no two editions are exactly the same, though no one has yet had the energy to go through all of them to figure out which edition borrowed from which, or where they differ from one another.

Nineteenth- and twentieth-century publishing depended on a new technology, the stereotype or electrotype plate, that allowed publishers to reprint a book without resetting the whole thing in type. Mini-editions could be issued, each slightly different from those that came before, but only modest changes were possible in each, and nothing that altered the pagination. In this system, new edition numbers were reserved for major top-to-bottom revisions. There are many printings of
Webster's Third New International Dictionary
, for instance, with the later ones correcting the errors of the early ones, and sometimes new entries squeezed in when space could be found. The
World Book Encyclopedia
actually had a practice of issuing stickers and telling subscribers to paste them over the old pages to bring information up to date.
1

The confusion is only becoming worse. In the electronic age, “editions” become close to meaningless. Software sometimes bears an edition number (Windows 8.1), or uses the year of its release as part of a trademark (Office 2010). But it feels meaningless to assign an edition number to, say, Wikipedia. Many guides to citation recommend giving the date of access, but even a date may not be enough. A Wikipedia entry may say one thing at 11:07 in the morning, and something very different at 11:08, and then be tweaked a dozen more times before noon.

CHAPTER
17

GRECIAN GLORY, ROMAN GRANDEUR

Victorian Eyes on the Ancient World

Dictionaries of the ancient languages are among the earliest reference books we know—though the languages were not ancient when the first dictionaries were compiled. Even the ancient Greeks needed help with ancient Greek. By the late fourth century
B.C.E.
, Greeks were already having trouble with Homer’s language from four centuries earlier. Scholars compiled dictionaries and grammars, most notably at the great Library of Alexandria and the Mouseion—the home of the Muses, the origin of our word
museum
.
1

Bizarre stories circulate about Philetas of Cos, a late fourth-century-
B.C.E.
lexicographer. “He was remarkable,” wrote Sir John Sandys, “for the delicacy of his frame; it is even stated that he was compelled to wear leaden soles to prevent his being blown away by the wind.”
2
His
Ataktoi glossai
(
Miscellaneous Glosses
) collected difficult words from Homer and other early writers and earned Philetas both a statue in his native town of Cos—a rare honor for a lexicographer—and a ribbing in the works of the comic playwright Strato.

Latin posed the same problems as Greek.
3
Even in the Middle Ages, when scholars and clerics were still speaking Latin, the language had evolved to the point that many words in ancient literature were no longer understood. Despite rearguard efforts to keep Latin alive, by the seventeenth century only a tiny population spoke any Latin, and the
written language was kept on scholarly life support. Greek was in even worse shape, at least in the West. For as long as Greece was part of the Byzantine, and then the Ottoman, Empire, the West had little contact with Greek as a living language; few Greek texts were in libraries, and no Greek grammars or dictionaries.

In 1478 Giovanni Crastoni published the first printed Greek–Latin dictionary, opening the works of Aristotle and Plato to scholars across Europe. The most important Greek lexicon of the age of print, though, was the
Thesaurus linguae graecae
that Henri Estienne—in Latin, Henricus Stephanus—published in four volumes in 1572. Estienne came from a learned family: his father, Robert, a distinguished Parisian printer, was the first to divide the Christian Bible into verses in his Greek New Testament in 1551. When Robert died in 1559, Henri took over the family printing business, specializing in classical texts, especially in Greek. He devoted himself to a project his father had begun, a dictionary of the ancient Greek language, translating the still-little-known Greek into the international language of scholarship, Latin.