The Whole World in a Book: Dictionaries in the Nineteenth Century ed. by Sarah Ogilvie and Gabriella Safran (review)
- The Whole World in a Book: Dictionaries in the Nineteenth Century ed. by Sarah Ogilvie and Gabriella Safran
This collection of twenty-six chapters originated in a two-day workshop titled "Nineteenth-Century Lexicography Conference: Between Science and Fiction," which the editors hosted at Stanford University in April 2018. The twenty-eight contributors, leading scholars of linguistic and lexicographical history, often refer to the relevance of each other's work. Such attentive cross-referencing, combined with the broadly chronological sequencing of the chapters and a brief but helpful editorial introduction, gives the book a continuity that is unusual in such collections.
The book is bracketed by a retrospective chapter by John Considine, which efficiently identifies a set of precedents and unresolved questions that faced lexicographers at the end of the eighteenth century, and a final, prospective chapter by Jorge Bidarra and Tania Aparecida Martins, which looks toward a new lexicography for sign language in Brazil to resolve questions that date back to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The intervening chapters assess the motives, circumstances, and accomplishments of dictionary-makers in the nineteenth century as they worked to describe the lexis of a broad range of Western and Asian modern languages. A leitmotif in the book is linguistic evolution, which the authors invoke some two dozen times, not always with reference to James A. H. Murray's Romanes Lecture The Evolution of English Lexicography (1900). [End Page 149]
NATION
One of the questions framed in the call for papers was, "What role, if any, did nationalistic enterprises play in the planning and execution of these texts?" (Ogilvie and Safran 2016). Many of these chapters highlight that role. "Christian Nationalism in Noah Webster's Lexicography" is the title of Edward Finegan's contribution, which characterizes the nationalism signaled by the first epithet in the title of Webster's major work, An American Dictionary of the English Language (1828). Volker Harm's chapter on the Deutsches Wörterbuch, begun by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm early in the nineteenth century though not completed until 1961, makes clear that "the Grimms explicitly identified language and nation"—characterized as "the folk"—decades before the consolidation of the German nation-state (78). Harm points out that Anne Dykstra's chapter, "Joost Halbertsma and the Lexicon Frisicum," registers similar pressures in Dutch and Frisian lexicography, attenuated in the latter case by Halbertsma's resort to a Latin meta-language for his dictionary (94, 97). "The First Scottish 'National' Dictionary: John Jamieson's Etymological Dictionary of the Scottish Language (1808/1825)," by Susan Rennie, and "French Lexicography in Québec: The Works and Ideas of Oscar Dunn," by Wim Remysen and Nadine Vincent, are also germane: Walter Scott understood Jamieson's project to be "an important national task" (114), and Dunn advocated for "a French nation in America" (145). In all three of these latter cases—Frisian, Scots, Québécois—the independent status of the language as a language rather than a dialect is disputable (thanks in part to the uncertainty of the general distinction between language and dialect), even as the independence of the polities involved—Frisia, Scotland, Québec—has been less than assured. And even where independence had been secured, as in the United States, Webster's American Dictionary described not the American language but a dialect of the English language. The taxonomic question of where to draw the line, and at what level, inflects nineteenth-century lexicography in this respect and in others that will be noted below.
Other chapters that engage the relation of language and nation include "Lord of the Words: Vladimir Dahl's Explanatory Dictionary of the Living Great-Russian Language as a National Epic" by Ilya Vinitsky, "Lexicography of the Entrenched Empire: Banihûn's and Pu-gong's Manchu-Chinese Literary Ocean (1821)" by Mårtin Söderblom Saarela, [End Page 150] "Steingass's Comprehensive Persian–English Dictionary and the Rise and Fall of Persian as a Transregional...
