The evolution of English lexicography by James Augustus Henry Murray
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James Augustus Henry Murray >> The evolution of English lexicography
THE ROMANES LECTURE
1900
The Evolution of English Lexicography
BY JAMES A.H. MURRAY
M.A., LL.D., D.C.L., PH.D.
DELIVERED IN THE SHELDONIAN THEATRE, OXFORD, JUNE 22, 1900
THE EVOLUTION OF ENGLISH LEXICOGRAPHY
When the 'Act to facilitate the provision of Allotments for the
Labouring Classes' was before the House of Commons in 1887, a
well-known member for a northern constituency asked the Minister who
had charge of the measure for a definition of the term _allotment_,
which occurred so often in the Bill. The Minister somewhat brusquely
told his interrogator to 'look in the Dictionary,' at which there was,
according to the newspapers, 'a laugh.' The member warmly protested
that, being called upon to consider a measure dealing with things
therein called 'Allotments', a term not known to English Law, nor
explained in the Bill itself, he had a right to ask for a definition.
But the only answer he received was 'Johnson's Dictionary! Johnson's
Dictionary!' at which, according to the newspapers, the House gave
'another laugh,' and the interrogator subsided. The real humour of the
situation, which was unfortunately lost upon the House of Commons,
was, that as agricultural allotments had not been thought of in the
days of Dr. Johnson, no explanation of the term in this use is to be
found in Johnson's Dictionary; as, however, this happened to be
unknown, alike to the questioner and to the House, the former missed a
chance of 'scoring' brilliantly, and the House the chance of a third
laugh, this time at the expense of the Minister. But the replies of
the latter are typical of the notions of a large number of persons,
who habitually speak of 'the Dictionary,' just as they do of 'the
Bible,' or 'the Prayer-book,' or 'the Psalms'; and who, if pressed as
to the authorship of these works, would certainly say that 'the
Psalms' were composed by David, and 'the Dictionary' by Dr. Johnson.
I have met persons of intelligence who supposed that if Dr. Johnson
was not the sole author of 'the Dictionary'--a notion which, in view
of the 'pushfulness' wherewith, in recent times, Dictionaries,
American and other, have been pressed upon public notice, is now not
so easily tenable--he was, at least, the 'original author,' from whose
capacious brain that work first emanated. Whereas, in truth, Dr.
Johnson had been preceded by scores of workers, each of whom had added
his stone or stones to the lexicographic cairn, which had already
risen to goodly proportions when Johnson made to it his own splendid
contribution.
For, the English Dictionary, like the English Constitution, is the
creation of no one man, and of no one age; it is a growth that has
slowly developed itself adown the ages. Its beginnings lie far back in
times almost prehistoric. And these beginnings themselves, although
the English Dictionary of to-day is lineally developed from them, were
neither Dictionaries, nor even English. As to their language, they
were in the first place and principally Latin: as to their substance,
they consisted, in large part at least, of _glosses_. They were Latin,
because at the time to which we refer, the seventh and eighth
centuries of our era, Latin was in Western Europe the only language of
books, the learning of Latin the portal to all learning. And they were
_glosses_ in this wise: the possessor of a Latin book, or the member
of a religious community which were the fortunate possessors of
half-a-dozen books, in his ordinary reading of this literature, here
and there came across a difficult word which lay outside the familiar
Latin vocabulary. When he had ascertained the meaning of this, he
often, as a help to his own memory, and a friendly service to those
who might handle the book after him, wrote the meaning over the word
in the original text, in a smaller hand, sometimes in easier Latin,
sometimes, if he knew no Latin equivalent, in a word of his own
vernacular. Such an explanatory word written over a word of the text
is a _gloss_. Nearly all the Latin MSS. of religious or practical
treatises, that have come down to us from the Middle Ages, contain
examples of such glosses, sometimes few, sometimes many. It may
naturally be supposed that this glossing of MSS. began in Celtic and
Teutonic, rather than in Romanic lands. In the latter, the old Latin
was not yet so dead, nor the vulgar idioms that were growing out of
it, as yet so distinct from it, as to render the glossing of the one
by the other needful. The relation of Latin to, say, the Romanic of
Provence, was like that of literary English to Lancashire or Somerset
dialect; no one thinks of glossing a literary English book by
Somersetshire word-forms; for, if he can read at all, it is the
literary English that he does read. So if the monk of Burgundy or
Provence could read at all, it was the Book-Latin that he could and
did read. But, to the Teuton or the Celt, Latin was an entirely
foreign tongue, the meaning of whose words he could not guess by any
likeness to his own; by him Latin had been acquired by slow and
painful labour, and to him the gloss was an important aid. To the
modern philologist, Teutonic or Celtic, these glosses are very
precious; they have preserved for us a large number of Old English,
Old Irish, Old German words that occur nowhere else, and which, but
for the work of the old glossators, would have been lost for ever. No
inconsiderable portion of the oldest English vocabulary has been
recovered entirely from these interlinear glosses; and we may
anticipate important additions to that vocabulary when Professor
Napier gives us the volume in which he has been gathering up all the
unpublished glosses that yet remain in MSS.
In process of time it occurred to some industrious reader that it
would be a useful exercise of his industry, to collect out of all the
manuscripts to which he had access, all the glosses that they
contained, and combine them in a list. In this compact form they could
be learned by heart, thus extending the vocabulary at his command, and
making him independent of the interlinear glosses, and they could also
be used in the school-teaching of pupils and neophytes, so as sensibly
to enlarge their stock of Latin words and phrases. A collection of
glosses, thus copied out and thrown together into a single list,
constituted a _Glossarium_ or _Glossary_; it was the remote precursor
of the seventeenth-century 'Table Alphabetical,' or 'Expositor of Hard
Words.'
Such was one of the fountain-heads of English lexicography; the other
is to be found in the fact that in those distant days, as in our own,
the learning of Latin was the acquisition of a foreign tongue which
involved the learning of a grammar and of a vocabulary. Both grammar
and vocables were probably in the main communicated by oral teaching,
by the living voice of the master, and were handed down by oral
tradition from generation to generation. The stock of vocables was
acquired by committing to memory classified lists of words; lists of
names of parts of the body, lists of the names of domestic animals, of
wild beasts, of fishes, of trees, of heavenly bodies, of geographical
features, of names of relationship and kindred, of ranks and orders of
men, of names of trades, of tools, of arms, of articles of clothing,
of church furniture, of diseases, of virtues and vices, and so on.
Such lists of vocables, with their meaning in the vulgar tongue, were
also at times committed to paper or parchment leaves, and a collection
of these constituted a _Vocabularium_ or _Vocabulary_.
In their practical use the Vocabulary and the Glossary fulfilled
similar offices; and so they were often combined; the possessor of a
Vocabulary enlarged it by the addition of a Glossary, which he or some
one before him had copied out and collected from the glossed
manuscripts of his bibliotheca. He extended it by copying into it
vocabularies and glossaries borrowed from other scholars; he lent his
own collection to be similarly copied by others. Several such
collections exist formed far back in Old English times, the composite
character of which, partly glossary, partly vocabulary, reveals itself
upon even a cursory examination.
As these manuscript lists came to be copied and re-copied, it was seen
that their usefulness would be increased by putting the words and
phrases into alphabetical order, whereby a particular word could be
more readily found than by looking for it in a promiscuous list of
some hundreds or thousands of words. The first step was to bring
together all the words having the same first letter. The copyist
instead of transcribing the glossary right on as it stood, extracted
first all the words beginning with A; then he went through it again
picking out all the words beginning with B; then a third time for
those with C, and so on with D, E, and the rest, till he had
transcribed the whole, and his copy was no longer in the fortuitous
disorder of the original, but in what we call _first-letter_ order.
A still later scribe making a copy of this vocabulary, or possibly
combining two or three lists already in first-letter order, carried
the alphabetical arrangement one stage further; instead of
transcribing the A-words as they stood, he went through them, picking
out first those that began with Aa-, then those in Ab-, then those in
Ac-, and so on, to Az. Then he did the same with the B-words, picking
out first all in Ba-, then Be-, Bi-, Bl-, Bo-, Br-, Bu-, By-; and so
exhausting the B-words. Thus, at length, in this second recension, the
Vocabulary stood, not yet completely alphabetical, but alphabetized as
far as the second letter of each word.
All these stages can actually be seen in four of the most ancient
glossaries of English origin that have come down to us, known
respectively, from the libraries to which they now belong, as the
Leiden, the Epinal, the Erfurt, and the Corpus (the last at Corpus
Christi College, Cambridge). The Leiden Glossary represents the
earliest stage of such a work, being really, in the main, a collection
of smaller glossaries, or rather sets of glosses, each set entered
under the name of the treatise from which it was extracted, the words
in each being left in the order in which they happened to come in the
treatise or work, without any further arrangement, alphabetical or
other. It appears also to incorporate in a final section some small
earlier vocabularies or lists of names of animals and other classes of
things. In order to discover whether any particular word occurs in
this glossary, the whole work from beginning to end must be looked
through. The first advance upon this is seen in the Epinal Glossary,
which uses part at least of the materials of the Leiden, incorporating
with them many others. This glossary has advanced to _first-letter_
order: all the A-words come together, followed by all the B-words, and
so on to Z, but there is no further arrangement under the individual
letters[1]. There are nearly fourteen columns of words beginning with
A, containing each about forty entries; the whole of these 550 entries
must be looked through to see if a given word occurs in this glossary.
The third stage is represented by the Corpus Glossary, which contains
the materials of its predecessors, and a great deal more, and in which
the alphabetical arrangement has been carried as far as the second
letter of each word: thus the first ninety-five words explained begin
with Ab-, and the next seventy-eight with Ac-, and so on, but the
alphabetization goes no further[2]; the glossary is in _second-letter_
order. In at least one glossary of the tenth century, contained in a
MS. of the British Museum (Harl. 3376), the alphabetical arrangement
has been carried as far as the third letter, beyond which point it
does not appear to have advanced.
The MS. of the Corpus Glossary dates to the early part of the eighth
century; the Epinal and Erfurt--although the MS. copies that have come
down to us are not older, or not so old--must from their nature go
back as glossaries to a still earlier date, and the Leiden to an
earlier still; so that we carry back these beginnings of lexicography
in England to a time somewhere between 600 and 700 A.D., and probably
to an age not long posterior to the introduction of Christianity in
the south of England at the end of the sixth century. Many more
vocabularies were compiled between these early dates and the eleventh
century; and it is noteworthy that those ancient glossaries and
vocabularies not only became fuller and more orderly as time advanced,
but they also became more _English_. For, as I have already mentioned,
the primary purpose of the glosses was to explain difficult _Latin_
words; this was done at first, whenever possible, by easier Latin
words; apparently, only when none such were known, was the explanation
given in the vernacular, in Old English. In the Epinal Glossary the
English words are thus relatively few. In the first page they number
thirty out of 117, and in some pages they do not amount to half that
number. In the Corpus Glossary they have become proportionally more
numerous; and in the glossaries that follow, the Latin explanations
are more and more eliminated and replaced by English ones, until the
vocabularies of the tenth and eleventh centuries, whether arranged
alphabetically or under classified headings, are truly Latin-English:
every Latin word given is explained by an English one; and we see
clearly that a new aim had gradually evolved itself; the object was no
longer to explain difficult Latin words, but to give the English
equivalents of as many words as possible, and thus practically to
provide a Latin Dictionary for the use of Englishmen[3].
Learning and literature, science and art, had attained to fair
proportions in England, and in the Old English tongue, when their
progress was arrested by the Norman Conquest. The Norman Conquest
brought to England law and organization, and welded the country into a
political unity; but it overthrew Old English learning and literary
culture. In literary culture the Normans were about as far behind the
people whom they conquered as the Romans were when they made
themselves masters of Greece; and it was not till some two generations
after the Conquest, that learning and literature regained in England
somewhat of the position which they had occupied two centuries
earlier. And this new literary culture was naturally confined to the
French dialect of the conquerors, which had become the language of
court and castle, of church and law, of chivalry and the chase; while
the rich and cultured tongue of Alfred and AElfric was left for
generations without literary employment, during which time it lost
nearly all its poetical, philosophical, scientific, and artistic
vocabulary, retaining only the words of common life and everyday
use[4]. And for more than 300 years after the Conquest English
lexicography stood still. Between 1066 and 1400, Wright-Wuelcker shows
only two meagre vocabularies, occupying some twenty-four columns of
his volume. One of these, of the twelfth century, is only an echo of
the earlier literary age, a copy of a pre-Conquest glossary, which
some scribe who could still read the classical tongue of the old West
Saxon Court, transliterated into the corrupted forms of his own
generation. The other is a short vocabulary of the Latin and
vernacular names of plants, a species of class-vocabulary of which
there exist several of rather early date.
But when we reach the end of the fourteenth century, English is once
more in the ascendant. Robert of Gloucester, Robert Mannyng of Brunne,
Dan Michel of Canterbury, and Richard Rolle of Hampole, William
Langland and John Wyclif, John Gower and Geoffrey Chaucer, and many
other authors of less known or entirely unknown name, have written in
the tongue of the people; English has been sanctioned for use in the
courts of law; and, as John of Trevisa tells us, has, since the
'furste moreyn' or Great Pestilence of 1349 (which Mrs. Markham has
taught nineteenth-century historians to call the 'Black Death'), been
introduced into the grammar schools in the translation of Latin
exercises, which boys formerly rendered into French. And under these
new conditions lexicographical activity at once bursts forth with
vigour. Six important vocabularies of the fifteenth century are
printed by Wright-Wuelcker, most of them arranged, like the Old English
one of AElfric, under subject-headings; but one large one, extending to
2,500 words, entirely alphabetical. About the middle of the century,
also, was compiled the famous _Medulla Grammatices_[5], designated,
with some propriety, 'the first Latin-English Dictionary,' the
popularity of which is shown by the many manuscript copies that still
survive; while it formed the basis of the _Ortus (i.e. Hortus)
Vocabulorum_ or first printed Latin-English Dictionary, which issued
from the press of Wynkyn de Worde in 1500, and in many subsequent
editions down to 1533, as well as in an edition by Pynson in 1509.
But all the glossaries and vocabularies as yet mentioned were
Latin-English; their primary object was not English, but the
elucidation of Latin. A momentous advance was made about 1440, when
Brother Galfridus Grammaticus--Geoffrey the Grammarian--a Dominican
friar of Lynn Episcopi in Norfolk, produced the English-Latin
vocabulary, to which he gave the name of _Promptuarium_ or
_Promptorium Parvulorum_, the Children's Store-room or Repository.
The _Promptorium_, the name of which has now become a household word
to students of the history of English, is a vocabulary containing some
10,000 words--substantives, adjectives, and verbs--with their Latin
equivalents, which, as edited by Mr. Albert Way for the Camden Society
in 1865, makes a goodly volume. Many manuscript copies of it were made
and circulated, of which six or seven are known to be still in
existence, and after the introduction of printing it passed through
many editions in the presses of Pynson, Wynkyn de Worde, and Julian
Notary.
Later in the same century, the year 1483 saw the compilation of a
similar, but quite independent work, which its author named the
_Catholicon Anglicum_, that is, the English Catholicon or Universal
treatise, after the name of the celebrated Latin dictionary of the
Middle Ages, the _Catholicon_ or _Summa_ of Johannes de Balbis, or
John of Genoa, made in 1286. The English _Catholicon_ was in itself a
work almost equally valuable with the _Promptorium_; but it appears
never to have attained to the currency of the _Promptorium_, which
appeared as a printed book in 1499, while the _Catholicon_ remained in
two MSS. till printed for the Early English Text Society in 1881.
The Renascence of Ancient Learning had now reached England, and during
the sixteenth century there were compiled and published many important
Latin-English and English-Latin vocabularies and dictionaries. Among
these special mention must be made of the Dictionary of Sir Thomas
Elyot, Knight, the first work, so far as I know, which took to itself
in English what was destined to be the famous name of DICTIONARY, in
mediaeval Latin, _Dictionarius liber_, or _Dictionarium_, literally a
repertory of _dictiones_, a word originally meaning 'sayings,' but
already by the later Latin grammarians used in the sense of _verba_ or
_vocabula_ 'words.' The early vocabularies and dictionaries had many
names, often quaint and striking; thus one of _c_1420 is entitled the
_Nominale_, or Name-book; mention has already been made of the
_Medulla Grammatices_, or Marrow of Grammar, the _Ortus Vocabulorum_,
or Garden of Words, the _Promptorium Parvulorum_, and the _Catholicon
Anglicum_; later we find the _Manipulus Vocabulorum_, or Handful of
Vocables, the _Alvearie_ or Beehive, the _Abecedarium_, the
_Bibliotheca_, or Library, the _Thesaurus_, or Treasury of Words--what
Old English times would have called the _Word-hord_, the _World of
Words_, the _Table Alphabetical_, the _English Expositor_, the _Ductor
in Linguas_, or Guide to the Tongues, the _Glossographia_, the _New
World of Words_, the _Etymologicum_, the _Gazophylacium_; and it would
have been impossible to predict in the year 1538, when Sir Thomas
Elyot published his 'Dictionary,' that this name would supplant all
the others, and even take the place of the older and better-descended
word _Vocabulary_; much less that _Dictionary_ should become so much a
name to conjure with, as to be applied to works which are not
word-books at all, but reference-books on all manner of subjects, as
Chronology, Geography, Music, Commerce, Manufactures, Chemistry, or
National Biography, arranged in Alphabetical or 'Dictionary order.'
The very phrase, 'Dictionary order,' would in the first half of the
sixteenth century have been unmeaning, for all dictionaries were not
yet alphabetical. There is indeed no other connexion between a
dictionary and alphabetical order, than that of a balance of
convenience. Experience has shown that though an alphabetical order
makes the matter of a dictionary very disjointed, scattering the
terminology of a particular art, science, or subject, all over the
book, and even when related words come together, often putting the
unimportant derivative in front of the important primitive word, it is
yet that by which a word or heading can be found, with least trouble
and exercise of thought. But this experience has been only gradually
acquired; even now the native dictionaries of some Oriental languages
are often not in alphabetical order; in such a language as Chinese,
indeed, there is no alphabetical order in which to place the words,
and they follow each other in the dictionary in a purely arbitrary and
conventional fashion. In English, as we have seen, many of the
vocabularies from the eleventh to the fifteenth century, were arranged
under class-headings according to subject; and, although Sir Thomas
Elyot's Dictionary was actually in alphabetical order, that of J.
Withals, published in 1554, under the title 'A short dictionarie for
young beginners,' and with the colophon 'Thus endeth this Dictionary
very useful for Children, compiled by J. Withals,' reverts to the
older arrangement of subject-classes, as Names of things in the AEther
or skie, the xii Signes, the vii Planets, Tymes, Seasons, Other times
in the yere, the daies of the weeke, the Ayre, the viii windes, the
iiii partes of the worlde, Byrdes, Bees, Flies, and other, the Water,
the Sea, Fishes, a Shippe with other Water vessels, the earth,
Mettales, Serpents, woorms and creepinge beastes, Foure-footed
beastes, &c.[6]
It is unnecessary in this lecture to recount even the names of the
Latin-English and English-Latin dictionaries of the sixteenth century.
It need only be mentioned that there were six successive and
successively enlarged editions of Sir Thomas Elyot; that the last
three of these were edited by Thomas Cooper, 'Schole-Maister of
Maudlens in Oxford' (the son of an Oxford tradesman, and educated as a
chorister in Magdalen College School, who rose to be Dean of Christ
Church and Vice-Chancellor of the University, and to hold successively
the episcopal sees of Lincoln and Winchester), and that Cooper, in
1565, published his great _Thesaurus Linguae Romanae et Britannicae_,
'opera et industria Thomae Cooperi Magdalenensis,' founded upon the
great French work of Robert Stephens (Estienne), the learned French
scholar and printer. Of this work Martin Marprelate says in his
_Epistle_ (Arber, p. 42), 'His Lordship of Winchester is a great
Clarke, for he hath translated his Dictionarie, called Cooper's
Dictionarie, verbatim out of Robert Stephanus his _Thesaurus_, and
ill-favoured too, they say!' This was, however, the criticism of an
adversary; Cooper had added to Stephens's work many accessions from
his editions of Sir Thomas Elyot, and other sources; his _Thesaurus_
was the basis of later Latin-English dictionaries, and traces of it
may still be discovered in the Latin-English dictionaries of to-day.
Of printed English-Latin works, after the _Promptorium_, one of the
earliest was the _Vulgaria_ of William Herman, Headmaster and Provost
of Eton, printed by Pynson in 1519. This is a _Dictionarium_ or _liber
dictionarius_ in the older sense, for it consists of short _dictiones_
or sayings, maxims, and remarks, arranged under subject-headings, such
as _De Pietate_, _De Impietate_, _De corporis dotibus_, _De
Valetudinis cura_, _De Hortensibus_, _De Bellicis_, and finally a
heading _Promiscua_. It may therefore be conceived that it is not easy
to find any particular _dictio_. Horman was originally a Cambridge
man; but, according to Wood, he was elected a Fellow of New College,
Oxford, in 1477, the very year in which Caxton printed his first book
in England, and in this connexion it is interesting to find among the
illustrative sentences in the _Vulgaria_, this reference to the new
art (sign. Oij): 'The prynters haue founde a crafte to make bokes by
brasen letters sette in ordre by a frame,' which is thus latinized:
'Chalcographi artem excogitauerunt imprimendi libros qua literae formis
aereis excudunt.' Of later English-Latin dictionaries two deserve
passing mention: the _Abecedarium_ of Richard Huloet or Howlet, a
native of Wisbech, which appeared in the reign of Edward VI, in 1552,
and the Alvearie of John Baret, Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge,
published under Elizabeth in 1573. The Abecedarium, although it gives
the Latin equivalents, may be looked upon to some extent as an English
dictionary, for many of the words have an English explanation, as well
as a Latin rendering; thus _Almesse_, or gift of dryncke, meate, or
money, distributed to the poore, _sporta_, _sportula_; _Amyable_,
pleasante, or hauing a good grace, _amabilis_; _Anabaptistes_, a sorte
of heretyques of late tyme in Germanye about the yere of our Lorde God
1524.... _Anabaptistae_.