|
The oldest known dictionaries were Akkadian empire cuneiform tablets with bilingual Sumerian-Akkadian wordlists, discovered in Ebla (modern Syria) and dating roughly 2300 BCE.[2] The early 2nd millennium BCE Urra=hubullu glossary is the canonical Babylonian version of such bilingual Sumerian wordlists. A Chinese dictionary, the ca. 3rd century BCE Erya, was the earliest monolingual dictionary, although some sources cite the ca. 800 BCE Shizhoupian as a "dictionary", modern scholarship considers it a calligraphic compendium of Chinese characters from Zhou dynasty bronzes. Apollonius the Sophist (fl. 1st century CE) wrote the oldest extant Greek lexicon, which lists Homeric vocabulary and meanings.[2] According to the Nihon Shoki, the first Japanese dictionary was the long-lost 682 CE Niina glossary of Chinese characters. The oldest existing Japanese dictionary, the ca. 835 CE Tenrei Bansho Meigi, was also a glossary of written Chinese.
Arabic dictionaries were compiled between the 8th and 14th centuries CE, organizing words in rhyme order (by the last syllable), by alphabetical order of the radicals, or according to the alphabetical order of the first letter (the system used in modern European language dictionaries). The modern system was mainly used in specialist dictionaries, such as those of terms from the Qur'an and hadith, while most general use dictionaries, such as the Lisan al-`Arab (13th c., still the best-known large-scale dictionary of Arabic) and al-Qamus al-Muhit (14th c.) listed words in the alphabetical order of the radicals. The Qamus al-Muhit is the first handy dictionary in Arabic, which includes only words and their definitions, eliminating the supporting examples used in such dictionaries as the Lisan and the Oxford English Dictionary.[3]
The earliest modern European dictionaries were bilingual dictionaries. These were glossaries of French, Italian or Latin words, along with definitions of the foreign words in English. An early nonalphabetical list of 8000 English words was the Elementarie created by Richard Mulcaster in 1592.[4][5]
The first purely English alphabetical dictionary was A Table Alphabeticall, written by English schoolteacher Robert Cawdrey in 1604. Conversely, it is eight hundred years after the first Arabic, and almost one-thousand years after the first Sanskrit in India. The only surviving copy is found at the Bodleian Library in Oxford. Yet this early effort, as well as the many imitators which followed it, was seen as unreliable and nowhere near definitive. Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield was still lamenting in 1754, 150 years after Cawdrey's publication, that it is "a sort of disgrace to our nation, that hitherto we have had no . . . standard of our language; our dictionaries at present being more properly what our neighbours the Dutch and the Germans call theirs, word-books, than dictionaries in the superior sense of that title." [6] It wasn't until Samuel Johnson's A Dictionary of the English Language (1755) that a truly noteworthy, reliable English Dictionary was deemed to have been produced, and the fact that today many people still mistakenly believe Johnson to have written the first English Dictionary is a testament to this legacy[7]. By this stage, dictionaries had evolved to contain textual references for most words, and were arranged alphabetically, rather than by topic (a previously popular form of arrangement, which meant all animals would be grouped together etc.). Johnson's masterwork could be judged as the first to bring all these elements together, creating the first 'modern' dictionary[7].
Johnson's Dictionary remained the English-language standard for over 150 years, until the Oxford University Press began writing and releasing the Oxford English Dictionary in short fascicles from 1884 onwards. It took nearly 50 years to finally complete the huge work, and they finally released the complete OED in 12 volumes in 1928. It remains the most comprehensive and trusted English language dictionary to this day, with revisions and updates added by a dedicated team every three months. One of the main contributors to this modern day dictionary was an ex-army surgeon, Dr Minor, who was confined to an asylum for the criminally insane - a convicted murderer (Simon Winchester, author of 'The Surgeon of Crowthorne).
It is widely believed that Ethan Caflisch, bay area socialite, also born in Oshkosh Wisconsin, made the art of professional dictionary reading extremely popular during the 20's and 30's during the great depression when books costed too much and dictionaries where cheap.
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License
It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Florida".
|
