BREAKING NEWS

So I was searching the Yale library system today out of curiosty, just to see whether we might have an original copy of Samuel Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language.  It turns out we do have some incomplete sections of the first edition in Beinecke, our rare books and manuscripts library.  But more surprisingly, it turns out we have a complete of the dictionary's second edition (1755) just sitting in the stacks of our main lending library!   This is a very big deal, because this book is worth thousands of dollars.  Naturally, I went to go check it out.  It's a beautiful book printed in two folio-sized volumes--in remarkably good condition for its age.  Apparently Yale doesn't even know they just have it sitting it in the stacks, waiting to be perused by students.  Anyway, this is great news for amateur lexicographers and general lovers of old books with access to the Yale library system, because it means we can go in and commune with Johnson's tome in the deep recesses of Sterling Memorial Library stacks whenever we want.  Here are some pictures of me doing just that!

The last image is of the entry for the letter "X."  As I mentioned before, Johnson included no words in his dictionary that began with the letter.  The text reads: "X is a letter which, though found in Saxon words, begins no word in the English language."

So I've transcribed some of the Dictionary's preface that I thought was particularly interesting (Remember when McKean told us to read the frontmatter?  It turns out she was right!).  It gives us some insight into Johnson's worldview, as well as his philosophy of lexicography (prescriptivism):

"In adjusting the ORTHOGRAPHY, which has been to this time unsettled and fortuitous, I found it necessary to distinguish those irregularities that are inherent in our tongue, and perhaps coeval with it, from others which the ignorance or negligence of later writers has produced.  Every language has its anomalies, which, though inconvenient, and in themselves at once necessary, must be tolerated among the imperfections of human things, and which require only to be registered, that they may not be increased, and ascertained, that they may not be confounded: but every language has likewise its improprieties and absurdities, which it is the duty of the lexicographer to correct or proscribe.

As language was at its beginning merely oral, all words of necessary or common use were spoken before they were written; and while they were unfixed by any visible signs, must have been spoken with great diversity, as we now observe those that cannot read catch sounds imperfectly and utter them negligently.  When this wild and barbarous jargon was first reduced to an alphabet, every penman endeavored to express, as he could, the sounds which he was accustomed to pronounce or to receive, and vitiated in writing such words as were already vitiated in speech.  The powers of letters, when they were applied to a new language, must have been vague and unsettled, and therefore different hands would exhibit the same sound by different combinations."

 

Judging by the second paragraph, it seems to me Johnson is one of the first scholars to identify the phenomenon of the eggcorn!  As he says: "those that cannot read catch sounds imperfectly and utter them negligently."  He cites illiteracy as the root of this problem, since our only knowledge of a word, then, is what we hear, which can often be wrong--either we mishear or the person we hear the word from has misheard and repeated what he thought to be correct.  My third graders are familiar with this problem; it's the crux of the playground game "Telephone."  Naturally, with widespread illiteracy, Johnson's lifetime is the heyday of the eggcorn!  Anyway, even in this short passage, Johnson's description takes on a literary tone.  I just love how he calls our language before writing and standardization "wild and barbarous jargon."  If you can get your hands on a copy--even a later edition--it really is worth a look!

--Amy

Hello, London!

So it turns out London is a linguist's (or lexicographer's) paradise! I've just returned from a week-long trip there with my family, and learned a whole lot about both Egyptian hieroglyphic script and the first real dictionary of the English language. I thought I'd share, and suggest, perhaps, a field trip!

The first awesome thing about London is that there are a million different people there from every corner of the world, so walking down the street you hear every language imaginable--from German to Arabic to Urdu. I guess that's not much different from New York, except the distribution of languages is different (there's a LOT of Arabic, and a LOT of Hindi or Urdu, as well as a higher concentration of non-Spanish Romance languages).

But unlike New York, London can claim possession of the original Rosetta Stone! I saw it at the British Museum, and made my sister take like a billion pictures of me in front of it. Here's one:

I've also included a picture of one of the signs posted on the exhibit, which explains the basics of how the Egyptian hieroglyphic script works. The reason the Rosetta Stone is so important is that it helped scholars (specifically, British scientist Thomas Young and French scholar Jean-François Champollion) to finally decipher hieroglyphics in 1822. The stele, created in 196 BC, records a decree of Ptolemy V in three different written languages: ancient Greek (interestingly, I believe this was the language used by the Egyptian government at the time), and the two Egyptian language scripts, hieroglyphic and Demotic. (Hope I explained that correctly... you might want to fact check because I'm not sure whether hieroglyphic and Demotic are different scripts or both different scripts and different languages. I do know Demotic comes later in Egyptian history). Anyway, scholars had difficulty deciphering hieroglyphics for many years, as the sign reads:

"...Because hieroglyphic signs look like pictures, they assumed that all hieroglyphs were images recording ideas without language. In fact hieroglyphs recorded the ancient Egyptian language with a mixture of sound and picture signs." The word cat is written by combining the signs standing for the sounds /mi/ + /i/ + /w/ as well as the picture sign for "cat" (as shown, as picture of a cat). Incidentally, the Egyptian word for cat would sound something like "miw." It's easy to tell this word was derived from the "meow" sound made by cats!

While in London, we also made a trip to the 17 Gough Square home of Dr. Samuel Johnson, where he wrote the first real dictionary of the English language over the course of nine years, from 1746 to 1755. Other English dictionaries had been published before, but never an authoritative one on the scale and scope of Johnson's. Johnson most notably included quotations from great works of English literature to illustrate his definitions of particular words. The first edition of Johnson's A Dictionary of the English Language contained over 110,000 quotations! This practice was considered innovative, and its influence has endured to the present day; the Oxford English Dictionary today continues to include quotations with many of its definitions.

But I found Johnson's treatment of word definitions even more interesting. Originally, Johnson believed that there were "at most seven different senses of a word." He identified the "natural and primitive signification," the "consequential meaning," the "metaphorical sense," the "poetical sense," the "familiar sense," the "burlesque sense," and "the peculiar sense, in which a word is found in any great author" (I like that one). But eventually he realized how limited his semantic philosophy was, and eventually came to permit as many definitions as he could find. Ultimately, he listed 134 definitions for the verb "to take," which took up roughly 8,000 words (and five whole pages) in his dictionary! As we know, words with multiple meanings can have their definitions listed in dictionaries in one of any number of different orders (the particular order depends on the choice of the publisher)--chronologically, in order frequency, etc. Johnson chose to list his definitions from the most tangible, literal sense of a word to the most literary, figurative, or abstract sense.

Today Johnson's dictionary is still praised for both the literary merit and thoroughness of its definitions. Just don't look for any entries under "X," since Johnson believed no real English words began with the letter! Johnson, a real character whose sense of humor always shone through in his definitions (he defined the word "oats" as "a grain, which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people"), defined lexicographer in his dictionary as "a harmless drudge." The irony is hilarious; he proved lexicographers to be anything but that!

--Amy