' ABOUT DICTIONARIES.
WHAT is a dictionary ? The question is not one which it is easy to answer off-band. But we may safely say that a dictionary is a book of reference; it is not intended to be read straight through ; it falls under the category of what Charles Lamb used to call " biblia abiblia." And yet we have known one ardent scholar who made a point of reading so many pages of Liddell-and-Scott every day. Nor did he complain, like the man who tried the same experiment on Dr. Johnson's dictionary, that he found it disconnected. Another attribute which seems essential to a dictionary, at least in modern days, is that it should contain words arranged in alphabetical order. Thus we speak of the "Dictionary of National Biography," because in that great work the Browns takes precedence of the Smiths, owing to the accident of prim-literature. Any encyclopaedia is a dictionary in .a wide use of the term. But in a more special and restricted sense a dictionary is a list of all the words in a language, or of as many of them as may be thought convenient. In this stricter meaning of the term we 'may divide dictionaries into uniling,ual, bilingual, and multilingual. The first is an aid to the speakers of a given language ; the others are intended to facilitate communication between the speakers of different languages. But why do the speakers of a given language want a dictionary at all? For obvious reasons. They may be at a loss how to spell some word; or, knowing how to spell, they may not know how to pronounce it; or, knowing both these things, they may not know what the word means. Hence the three great functions of a dictionary of this sort are, as laid down by Dr. Nuttall, orthography, orthoepy, and definition. In other words, a good dictionary must enable you to spell and pronounce correctly any word in your own language, and also to understand its meaning.
If phonetic spelling were to be introduced among all the countries of Europe, it would be the English and French languages of which the appearance would be the most trans- formed in consequence, and the French even more than the English. We pronounce our syllables in the most arbitrary fashion; but then how many letters there are, both vowels and consonants, which the French do not pronounce at all! Once, when reading a Spanish novel, the present writer Came acrods a word which puzzled him,—namely, edecan. The Spanish dictionary did not recognise it; it was therefore clearly a foreigner. But whence ? A little reflection, with the friendly aid of the context, showed it to be the French aide-de- camp,—phonetically exact indeed, but quantum. Mutatus at illo !
Place-names are peculiarly liable to differ in the appearance they present to the eye and to the ear. There is a village in North Devon which the sign-posts call Wolfardisworthy, but which we have heard pronounced " Woolserthy." Very likely, however, if you went there and pronounced it so, you would be reproved for the contraction. This was what happened to us at Cirencester. Passing through that town, and having occasion to go into a shop, we were solemnly corrected by fair lips over the counter for calling it " (locator." Local dignity stood out for the full dimensions of the name. On the other hand, when wandering in Norfolk, and drawing nigh to a place which was marked on the map " Happisburgh," we found ourselves quite unintelligible to the local mind because we did not pronounce it " Hazebro."
Spanish and Italian would suffer very little from the applica- tion to them of phonetic spelling. Let a person who is begin- ning one of those languages get his teacher to dictate to him some passage which he does not know. He will find that though he may join or disjoin the words wrongly, he is not likely to make mistakes in the spelling, provided, of course, that he knows the value of the letters to begin with.
Even in English the difference between sight and sound is confined to a small minority of words, though some people seem to be of the same opinion as a young Hanoverian lady of our acquaintance (this was some time ago, when there was a Hanover), who naively remarked:—" You English do pro- nounce so strangely. There is your great author; you spell him D—i—c—k—e—n—s, and you pronounce him ' Boz.' " The one-language dictionary may either be for practical purposes, like Nuttalfs, or etymological, like Skeat's, or historical, like the great secular work by Drs. Murray and Bradley. Nuttall indeed gives derivations too, but they are not a strong point, and such slips as deriving " malacology " from the Greek " malachos," and " zythum," the last word in the dictionary, from the Greek " zithos," neither of which words exists in Greek, meet the eye even on a casual glance at the volume. It is fair to add, however, that Natoli, or rather the Rev. James Wood, seems to have gone to the best authorities for his derivations. Under "apricot" we notice that while the derivation from the Latin "prae " and " coque" is rightly given, the interesting item of information which is to be found in Skeet is withheld, that the "a" represents the Arabic article "al." We must protest in passing against the abuse of the word "root," which leads to saying, for instance, that the Latin" pretium" is the root of our English "precious." One has to dig a good deal lower down than that before one gets to a root. "Precious" is derived from " pretium," but " pretium" itself is far from the fountain-head. Bating this matter of derivations, however, Nuttall very well fulfils its professed end,—namely, to be "a dictionary of English words that will be found adequate to all ordinary needs." Such a dictionary eschews a word because it is dead, whereas the historical dictionary cherishes it all the more on that account. Hence the practical dictionary may be complete at a given epoch, whereas the historical dictionary never can be so until the language as a whole is dead. The latter is following the course of a stream which is still flowing. When we talk of a dictionary being complete, it must be remembered that no dictionary ever professes to give all the words in a language. For every inflexion is a separate word, and a dictionary always selects some one form as typical of all the others which differ from it only in inflexion, leaving it to the grammar to supply the rest.
What Nuttall is to the present age, that Walker was to an age gone by. Walker, who was first an actor, then a school- master, and finally a teacher of elocution, in which capacity be was invited by the Heads of Houses to lecture in Oxford, did a really great service towards settling the pronunciation of the English language, not only by his "Pronouncing Dic- tionary," but also by several works on grammar and rhetoric.
He pointed out the law of "retrocession of accent" in English, in accordance with which he predicted that the word " revenue " would follow the analogy of "avenue" and "retinue." We can ourselves remember gentlemen of a past generation being careful to lay stress on the penultimate syllable in " revenue " ; but they were swimming against the tide. Johnson allowed only " revenue " ; Walker allowed both " revenue " and " revenue "; Nuttall allows only "revenue." Among Walker's works was a rhyming dictionary, in which the English language was arranged according to its terminations. We wonder that such a" Gradns ad Parnassam" Las not been more cherished than it seems to have been by poets. Who ever bean of it now P The title-page of the "Pronouncing Dictionary" presents one rather whimsical feature. There is mention made on it of
"rules to be observed by the natives of Scotland, Ireland, and London, for avoiding their respective peculiarities." Now if, like most great Englishmen, Walker had been either a Scotchman or an Irishman, we could bettar understand this. "Depend upon it, Sir," said Dr. Tamen, " the finest view a Scotchman ever saw was the road that led him to London." He did not say "to England." Then as for Ireland. We have ourselves known an absentee landlord residing in Oxford to be addressed by tenants in the West of Ireland as at "Oxford University, London." Owing to the sagacity of the Post Office officials, such letters usually came straight to their destination, but one came marked: "Not known at the Oxford Music Hall." It served as a useful moral lesson to our friend, as showing how feeble after all is the blast of Fame's trumpet. "Not known at the Oxford Music Hull"! If, we say, Walker had been either a Scotchman or an Irishman, the substitution of London for England would have been more intelligible. But he was born at Colney Hatch. We disown all insinuations. Or, again, if Walker had been a native of the Levant, the dis- appearance of the country down the throat of the Metropolis would have been quite natural. We must be allowed to illustrate this. The late Philip Pusey, only son of the cele- brated Dr. Pusey, though unfortunately both deaf and a cripple, was of a very enterprising character. Once he made a journey to the Near East, and visited, among other places, the monastery on Mount Athos. Another Oxford man was there about a year later, and was asked by the monks whether he knew Philip of London. As be was aware that Philip Posey had been there before him, he was able to reply that he did. This story had always seemed to us to be merely well invented, until it was verified by personal experience. We were sitting one day in a coffee-house at Constantinople conversing with a dragoman. He told us how he had once been put in charge of a little man by the Consul Bouverie, by whom he was exhorted to "guard him as the apple of his eye." To his horror one day, when the little man was riding in front of him, he saw him fall from his horse. He rode up, expecting to find that accident had com- pleted the ruin which Nature had begun : but what was his joy to find the plucky little man laughing! "And what was his name ? " said we. "Philip," was the only reply. "Ana where did he come from?" "From London."
But to return to Walker, whom we have all this time been stupidly misunderstanding. He did not undertake on his title-page to give a logical division of the inhabitants of Great Britain. Why should he P But there were three classes of people to whom be was chiefly in the habit of giving lessons in elocution, and whose peculiarities he had therefore closely studied. These were Scotchmen, Irishmen, and Londoners. For their benefit he had drawn up rules. Doubtless be would have done so also for Welshmen or Somersetsbire men, if they had come to him in sufficient numbers. The more glaring errors which he notes on the part of Londoners are these :—(l) Making two syllables out of words like "posts," "fists," 8te.; (2) the confusion of "v" and " w "; (3) the sinking of the aspirate in words like " while " ; (4) the dropping and inserting of initial "h." He gives a catalogue of the words in which initial "h" is seen but not sounded. These are,—heir, heiress, herb, herbage, honest, honesty, honestly, honour, honourable, honourably, hospital, hostler, hour, hourly, humble, humbles, humbly, humour, humorist, humorous, humorously, humorsome—twenty- two in all. Of these hospital has fully recovered the "h," while the propriety of dropping it in herb and herbage was questioned in Walker's own time. Thanks also in great measure to Dickens and his Uriah Heep, the " has been restored also to humble and its congeners. We think it may yet reassert itself in humour and its derivatives, which would make one half of the whole number.
Previous page
