You Could Look It Up (45 page)

Both works discussed in this chapter have had significant afterlives. The first edition of Liddell and Scott appeared in 1843; today, in its ninth edition (1925–40), it remains the authoritative work in the field. Its three versions—the abridged edition, the intermediate edition without citations, and the unabridged edition—are known affectionately as the “Little Liddell,” the “Middle Liddell,” and the “Great Scott.”

But much has happened over the decades: new texts and unknown words have turned up in manuscripts and inscriptions, and new research
has revealed word origins unsuspected by earlier generations. A new definitive take on Greek is needed, and it is coming in the form of the
Diccionario Griego–Español
(
DGE
) being developed at the Instituto de Lenguas y Culturas del Mediterráneo y Oriente Próximo at Madrid’s Centro de Ciencias Humanas y Sociales. When complete, the
DGE
will be three times the length of Liddell and Scott, with an even broader scope, taking in some of the earliest Greek writings from Mycenae as well as the Christian Church Fathers. It will also be more open to encyclopedic information by including personal names and place names. Volume 1 appeared in 1980, covering the alphabet from
a
to
alla
, and volume 7 (
ekpelleuo
–
exauos
) arrived in 2009.

Pauly-Wissowa, too, has been both abridged and revisited. Between 1964 and 1975 a
Kleine Pauly
(small
Pauly
) appeared in five volumes, mostly an abridgment of the
Real-Encyklopädie
but with updates to some of the older entries. But the more significant work is the
Neue Pauly
(new
Pauly
), eighteen volumes published between 1996 and 2003, with twelve supplementary volumes between 2004 and 2012. While this work was inspired by Pauly-Wissowa and written in the same tradition, the scholarship was original and reflected the latest thinking in the study of antiquity. The new version appeared in two independent alphabetical sections, one covering “Antiquity” and the other the “Classical Tradition.” An English version,
Brill’s New Pauly
, was published in twenty-eight volumes between 2002 and 2014.

CHAPTER
17 ½

LOST PROJECTS

What Might Have Been

Many ancient books have disappeared. Seven plays each by Aeschylus and Sophocles have survived, and eighteen or nineteen by Euripides. But Aeschylus is believed to have written between seventy and ninety plays; Sophocles wrote more than a hundred, and Euripides had ninety-five to his credit. The others are lost, presumably forever. The same fate has befallen many early reference books. Verrius Flaccus wrote
On the Meaning of Words
early in the first century
C.E.
; only a later summary survives. Cato the Censor's encyclopedia, compiled around
158
B.C.E.
, is gone leaving hardly a trace, as is Marcus Terentius Varro's
Disciplines
. Only the medical parts of A. Cornelius Celsus's encyclopedia survive. The first known Chinese encyclopedia,
Huang Ian
, written around the year
220
C.E.
, has vanished.

The survival rate is better in the medieval world, though many reference books celebrated in their time have never been seen today. The
Hortus deliciarum
(
Garden of Delights
) was composed in the twelfth century by Herrad of Landsberg, the abbess of Hohenburg. The original manuscript was beautifully illustrated in color, and the book survived intact for seven centuries. But when the Prussians besieged Strasbourg in August 1870 during the Franco-Prussian War, fire destroyed both the city's Museum of Fine Arts and its Municipal Library, where the
Hortus
had been kept. We know of its contents only from earlier lithographic reproductions, but the glorious colors of the original are lost.
1
Fire also did in what would have been a magnificent Czech lexicon. Jan Ámos Komenský, or Comenius, an important Moravian humanist and educator, began work on his
Linguae Bohemicae thesaurus
in 1612, while he was still a student, and spent forty years on it.
But it was burned to ashes during the Habsburg occupation of the town of Leszno during the Swedish-Polish War in 1656.

Water has been equally damaging. Louis de Jaucourt worked for almost twenty years on a six-volume folio medical dictionary. In 1750, nearing the finish line, he was negotiating with a Dutch publisher to bring the book out. He had the manuscript carefully packed in a box and sent on a ship from Rouen to Amsterdam—but the ship sank to the bottom of the sea somewhere off the Dutch coast, taking the only copy of his work with it. Recognizing that it was too late to start again from scratch, he turned to the editors of
L'Encyclopédie
and offered his services there.
2

Probably the most painful loss the world of reference books has ever suffered is the
Yonglè dàdian
, also called the
Yongle Encyclopedia
. This king-sized work was ordered by the Emperor Cheng Zu and carried out at the Wen Yuan Pavilion in the imperial library. When the encyclopedia was completed in 1407 it occupied 22,937 scrolls in 11,095 books. In the sixteenth century, prudence dictated that a copy be made, so in 1567 a team set to work transcribing it—by which time something like 10 percent of the original work had gone missing. That original has now disappeared entirely, and no one knows what happened to it. Even the backup copy has suffered serious indignities. In the nineteenth century, the English and French visited China as part of their imperial projects and thought it reasonable to take pieces of the encyclopedia home as souvenirs. A fire wiped out eight hundred volumes. By 1875, less than half of the original work survived; by 1894, just 7 percent; and today, less than 4 percent.
3

But every so often we get lucky, and a long-lost work turns up. James Boswell, famous as Samuel Johnson's biographer, worked in the 1760s on a Scottish dictionary. “The Scottish language is being lost every day,” he lamented in his diary, “and in a short time will become quite unintelligible… . To me, who have the true patriotic soul of an old Scotsman, that would seem a pity. It is for that reason that I have undertaken to make a dictionary of our tongue.”
4
But no such dictionary had ever been published, and even the discovery of tens of thousands of pages of Boswell's manuscripts in the 1920s produced nothing lexicographical. Critics assumed Boswell never made much progress on his dictionary,
or, if he did, it had been destroyed, but it was hiding in plain sight all along, on the shelves of one of the world's great libraries. Some unknown owner in the late eighteenth or nineteenth century bound the unpublished manuscript with John Jamieson's
Etymological Dictionary of the Scottish Language
—a published Scottish dictionary sharing a binding with an unpublished Scottish dictionary—and when Oxford University's Bodleian Library bought the volume, they cataloged it only under Jamieson's name, convinced the manuscript was his. Boswell's work sat undetected until in 2010 lexicographer Susan Rennie, pursuing research on Jamieson in Oxford, discovered the handwritten material and began to suspect it was not Jamieson's. After consulting Boswell experts, she was able to confirm that the long-neglected manuscript was the work begun in the 1760s.

CHAPTER
18

WORDS TELLING THEIR OWN STORIES

The Historical Dictionaries

The Grimms showed the lexicographical world what a dictionary could be: a monumental work of scholarship, surveying the whole of a language’s literary inheritance and providing a historical account of its development. But the
Deutsches Wörterbuch
, though
34
,
000
pages and the work of a century and a half, is neither the largest nor the slowest of the great dictionaries.

The
Woordenboek der Nederlandsche taal
, the historical dictionary of the Dutch language, is called the longest dictionary in the world. The
Deutsches Wörterbuch
was its most important inspiration, but whereas the Grimms were seeking to establish a national identity, Dutch lexicographers were self-consciously dealing with an international language. Dutch is spoken in both the Netherlands and the Flemish parts of Belgium, two countries that had once been part of a United Kingdom of the Netherlands. With the Belgian Revolution of the 1830s, though, what had been the Southern Netherlands became a new nation-state, Belgium. The
Woordenboek
is often identified with an “integrationist” movement, an attempt to create an international version of the language. Both nations provided financial support for the project.

People had been lamenting the lack of a reliable Dutch dictionary since the early eighteenth century, and the moaning grew louder in the
nineteenth.
1
The plan to publish a dictionary arose at the first Nederlandsch Congres, an annual gathering of Dutch-speaking linguists that alternated its meetings between the Netherlands and Belgium. The meeting that began on August 26, 1849, was hosted by the University of Ghent in Belgium, where Gerth van Wijk of the Netherlands urged a dictionary “for our common tongue.” It would eventually become the
Woordenboek der Nederlandsche taal
, or
WNT
. After a year’s preparation, the 1850 congress—this time in Amsterdam—made it official: Matthias de Vries was to be the editor.

As a young man, de Vries was fascinated by all things Dutch, especially the literature of the Middle Ages. He had studied classics at Leiden University, earning a Ph.D. in 1843, and became a private tutor in classical studies at Leiden. In 1846 he took another position, as a teacher at the city’s grammar school, but he was determined to bring the study of Dutch to the level of scientific inquiry that had been achieved in the classical languages. In 1849 he published
De Nederlandsche taalkunde, beschouwd in hare vroegere geschiedenis, tegenwoordigen toestand
en eischen voor de toekomst
(Dutch philology: past, present, and future), and was appointed professor of Dutch language and literature at Groningen University, but a few years later he returned to Leiden, where he remained for nearly forty years, until his retirement in 1891.

One of de Vries’s contemporaries wrote that “Language is the soul of the nation, it is the very nation itself,” and de Vries was so impressed with that formulation that he made it the motto for the entire dictionary.
2
He valued the historical study of a living language, for in a living language he could discern the true spirit of a nation. But there was something special about Dutch. De Vries believed that the Romance languages were now “benumbed” in the people’s minds, but that the Germanic languages were still vigorous, still vital. De Vries’s most important predecessor as both lexicographer and Leiden-based philologist, Matthijs Siegenbeek, believed that the point of studying the Dutch language was to achieve eloquence. Not so de Vries, who thought it was to achieve a scientific understanding of the language, including the old, the hackneyed, the awkward, “just as to the botanist the most insignificant weed is as important as the most splendid flower.”
3
By paying attention to the language in all its registers, he hoped to extract the laws that guided its development—and that could be achieved only through a solid grounding in linguistics. In this de Vries was channeling the spirit of August Schleicher, a German linguist who had made similar calls for a scientific approach to language.