You Could Look It Up (5 page)

Enter the reference book, an attempt to cure the disease of overmuch study and to alleviate the misery of scholars. The atlas promises to take the world's maps and put them in a handy form; the encyclopedia promises to take an entire library and deliver only the parts you need and only when you need them. The degree to which they succeed will be one of the recurring themes of this book.

CHAPTER
2

IN THE BEGINNING WAS THE WORD

The First Dictionaries

No one knows what the first dictionary was or when it was compiled, but we can reasonably assume that dictionary-like works appeared not long after the dawn of writing. The dictionary as we know it—a book containing an alphabetical list of words with etymologies, pronunciations, and a series of definitions, all in one language—was long in coming, and some of the earliest dictionaries seem unfamiliar to us. But dictionaries come in many varieties. Some of the earliest and most rudimentary are simply lists of words—lists with no definitions, etymologies, or notes of any sort—but still useful, because they might list all the words in some particular category.

The story begins in the ancient Middle East. He was called
Šarru-kinu
—the true king—though sources in other languages usually represent
Šarru-kinu
as
Sargon
. This is not the Sargon mentioned in the Bible—“In the year that Tartan came unto Ashdod, (when Sargon the king of Assyria sent him)”—but another king who lived more than fifteen hundred years earlier and came to prominence by conquering Sumer and establishing the Akkadian Empire.

Sumerian seems to have died out, more or less, as a spoken language around 1800
B.C.E.
, though that history is notoriously murky. Still, it did not disappear completely, and it remained the language of religious rituals and works of literature for another fifteen hundred years. This left the Akkadians in a difficult position. The Sumerian civilization had reached heights to which the Akkadians aspired, and they wanted to
emulate the erudition of their predecessors. But that meant mastering their language, and the Sumerian language was a challenge. Written Akkadian borrowed the cuneiform characters of the Sumerians, but a shared writing system is not the same as a shared language. Akkadian scribes were obliged to learn to read and write Sumerian, but Sumerian struck Akkadian speakers as thoroughly alien.

The Akkadian language—sometimes called Assyro-Babylonian—is a Semitic language, part of the large family of languages including modern Arabic, Hebrew, Aramaic, Amharic, and Ge‘ez. Sumerian, on the other hand, is not part of the Semitic family, and scholars to this day are unsure where it fits in the family tree of human languages. (Some propose that it is a “language isolate” with no known relatives.) It goes back at least to 3350
B.C.E.
, making it one of the earliest languages for which we have any evidence. The differences between Sumerian and Akkadian were more than a matter of vocabulary. Sumerian verb forms depended on roots along with prefixes and suffixes; Akkadian, like other Semitic languages, changed its verb forms by altering the vowels inside the words. Akkadian even had a different sound system from Sumerian. It was this difference that needed to be bridged. And so some of the earliest known word lists were born.

The first surviving glossary goes by the clumsy name of
Urra=hubullu
, compiled sometime in the second millennium
B.C.E.
(The title is sometimes presented, even more clumsily but more precisely, as
UR
5
-
RA
=
hubullu
or
HAR
-ra=
hubullu
.) The work gets its name from the first line, which gives an equivalent for “debt; interest-bearing loan; interest”:
urra
in Sumerian means the same as
hubullu
in Akkadian.
1
It is a collection of twenty-four stone tablets containing a total of around 9,700 word pairs in Sumerian and Akkadian. Cuneiform writing had no alphabetical order, so the entries are arranged thematically: the first two tablets are devoted to legal and administrative matters, the rest to the material world. Trees and things made of wood appear in tablets 3 through 7, for instance; pottery is discussed on tablet 10; tablet 13 contains the names of domesticated animals; tablet 14 contains the names of 410 animals, including 120 insects; tablet 15 catalogs parts of the body; and so on.

The compilers of
Urra=hubullu
, concerned only with making life easier for scribes, had no grand thoughts of describing their universe. They were bureaucrats, not philosophers or poets. And yet they inadvertently left a picture of the universe as they understood it. As one writer puts it, “the work comprises a comprehensive survey of the animate and inanimate world, geography, and stars, as well as artificially produced objects, victuals, and many other things.”
2
The most important version survives in the Louvre in Paris, though other copies, including students’ copies (glossaries were often assigned as scribal exercises for students), can be found in other museums. The text was apparently used by students—and, if the clues provided by the text are to be believed, by beginning students.
3

Lexicography became more sophisticated in ancient Greece. Even our word
lexicography
is Greek, from
lexikos
‘of words’ and
graphia
‘writing’. The Greeks were fascinated by language, both their own and language in general. In the fourth century
B.C.E.
, Philitas of Cos—an Alexandrian Greek scholar and poet, famous in his day as an early type of the absent-minded professor—pulled together the
Átaktoi glôssai
, or “Miscellaneous Glosses,” and a few centuries later, Apollonius the Sophist compiled the
Lexeis Homerikai
, the first comprehensive dictionary of words found in Homer. Aristophanes of Byzantium, the librarian at Alexandria starting around 195
B.C.E.
, created a major lexicon, and the fifth-century-
C.E.
lexicon by Hesychius is valuable for containing the only surviving evidence of some Greek words.
4

Some of the most interesting early dictionaries, though, are not from Babylon or Greece but from China. A work called
Shizhou
existed as early as the ninth century
B.C.E.
, but it does not survive, and little is known of it beyond the title. The
Erya
or
Erh-ya
, though, written in China probably in the third century
B.C.E.
, is the oldest surviving dictionary of the Chinese language, containing glosses on just over 4,300 words drawn from early Chinese literature. The title means something like “approaching what is correct, proper, refined,” and it is sometimes called
Approaching Elegance
, sometimes
The Ready Guide
. Heming Yong and Jing Peng describe its “remarkable position in the history of philological and linguistic studies in China”:

It is the first work of exegetic studies conducted on a systematic basis and the first thesaurus dictionary of an encyclopedic nature. It aims to explain the meaning of ancient words and a great variety of object names and serves as the starting point from which other classic works can be justifiably interpreted. That partly explains why [
Erya
] has always been placed into the category of ancient Chinese classics rather than ancient Chinese dictionaries.
5

Its background is murky; the identity of the writer or writers is unknown, as is even the century in which he, she, or they worked. (Tradition says the author was the Duke of Zhou, but so many things are attributed to this semilegendary figure, including the
I Ching
and the earliest Chinese classical music, that we should be skeptical of all such attributions.) Most experts agree, though, that it was written by a Confucian scholar sometime between the eighth and second centuries
B.C.E.
6

The
Erya
set out to explain the words in old Chinese literature—old even when the dictionary was compiled. The Qin Dynasty, which began in 221
B.C.E.
, was the first of the imperial dynasties in China. But the literature of the long Zhou Dynasty (1046 to 256
B.C.E.
), from before the unification of China, was of particular interest. In the Confucian bureaucracy, the way to climb through the ranks of both the government and the larger society was to pass examinations on classic works of literature. Aspiring civil servants knew that their promotion depended on access to good dictionaries. Dictionaries were classified among the
hsiao-hsüeh
‘minor learning’ rather than
ta-hsüeh
‘major learning’, and major learning, as they understood it, had moral implications. But even the minor learning, which covered more or less the same territory as the modern word “linguistics,” remained an essential step on the way to the better life. And so the
Erya
became an important work, sitting on the boundary between high culture and official culture.

The Chinese language lacks an alphabet, and the logographical system does not have any obvious equivalent to alphabetical order. For a long time Chinese dictionaries have been ordered according to either the “radicals” (basic strokes) of the Chinese characters or the tones and final sounds of the spoken words. Around 100
C.E.
, for instance,
Xu Shen composed his
Shuowen jiezi
, a collection of 10,516 characters organized under 540 headers, one for each “radical” or basis to a written word. It deserves to be called the first systematic dictionary of Chinese, and its classification of words by radical would be used in Chinese dictionaries for a millennium and a half. But when the
Erya
was compiled, those systems had not yet been developed, so the anonymous creator of the
Erya
organized the work by subject. This places the work in a middle ground between dictionary, thesaurus, and encyclopedia: it gave not only definitions but clusters of thematically related words, and therefore gestures out to the larger world.

The book came in two parts: the first, chapters 1–3, focuses on common words, especially verbs and particles; the second, chapters 4–19, on specialized terms, mostly nouns. The nouns were divided into sixteen sections, grouped by topic: kinship, implements, architecture, geography, and so on.
7
The approach to defining was distinctive. “In the first section,” one critic observes, “entries are defined by combining words of the same or similar meaning and then explaining them in terms of a word more commonly used at that time. If one of the words had an additional meaning, there would be an additional explanation.”
8
A typical entry shows the associative logic that structures the whole work:

EXPLAINING THE HEAVEN

Round-hollow and very blue, this is Heaven. In springtime, Heaven is blue; in summertime, bright; in autumn, clear; in wintertime, Heaven is wide up. These are the four seasons.

In springtime, there is a greening sun-warmth; in summer, a reddish enlightening; in autumn a blank storing; and in winter a
dark blossom. If all these expressions are harmonious, [the year] is called “jade candle.” The spring gives birth; the autumn grows the adult; in autumn the harvest is completed; and in winter there is a peaceful tranquillity. If the harmony of the four seasons is thorough and correct, [the year] is called “illustrious wind.” If the sweet rain comes down to the right time, the many things are at their best, it is called “sweet spring.” This means luck.