Granaries of Language

The struggle of literature is in fact a struggle to escape from the confines of language; it stretches out from the utmost limits of what can be said; what stirs literature is the call and attraction of what is not in the dictionary.” So wrote Italo Calvino in The Uses of Literature (1980), and he was right. Literature is what happens after words find their rightful place on the page. But the quote fails to acknowledge that dictionaries are narratives, too. They may lack an obvious plotline and may even seem disjointed—these lists of words alphabetically organized and defined. Yet each definition contains a story about what a word means and how it came to be. That our understanding of love, bad, patriotism, and home is in constant flux is reflected in how their dictionary definitions change over time. The act of defining all the words in any language represents a massive and methodical undertaking: to explain not only the vocabulary of a people at a specific time and place, but their Weltanschauung as well. Hence, any edition of a dictionary is a cultural snapshot. Ephemeral, limited, and practical in its functions, it is just like the telephone book used to be, as much a glimpse of those who produce it as it is of those who use it.

The pitch I’m making isn’t new. Although the voraciousness of the postmodern imagination, which looks at any artifact as a metaphor, has transformed dictionaries from reference tools to symbols of wisdom and even sources of literary motifs, our predecessors were there already. The Victorians, for instance, read the New English Dictionary of Historical Principles like a journal, maybe not as a work of imaginative literature, but not as a mere repository of language, either. Similarly, the existence of paratexts (that is, the material surrounding the body of a text) in dictionaries dating back to the 16th century suggests that intertextual reading was taking place, though admittedly on a limited scale. Modernists such as T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, and others spoke of dictionary reading and, in Auden’s case, of words themselves as poems.

Plus, dictionaries are often characters in literature, which is again proof of the nearsightedness of Calvino’s declaration. They show up in memoirs, novels, stories, poems, plays, and other genres, at times serving as the very scaffolding that makes stories come alive. In Norton Juster’s The Phantom Tollbooth, for example, Dictionopolis is the protagonist’s ultimate destination, a place where people sell letters and words via The Word Market. Dictionaries play another function: they are nation-building machines. All nations coalesce around a language (or—in the case of countries such as Switzerland, Belgium, Canada, and India—languages), and dictionaries serve as the mechanism to catalog those tongues. Indeed, dictionaries are gravitational forces that shape both literature and culture in general. Put the other way around, a national literature needs dictionaries for its existence to be consolidated and tested. The 17th-century dictionaries of Robert Cawdrey, Henry Cockeram, and Thomas Blount, as well as the glossaries found at the ends of Renaissance books, exude a national—and even nationalist—ethos. One can’t have dialect dictionaries until there’s a unifying identity against which to pose the dialects. Slang works somewhat the same way, with slang dictionaries counterpoised to the national standard. Wherever a people come together as a nation, a dictionary is required to validate their intentions. Without a dictionary, a nation lacks its soul.

God, as Maimonides argued, is the sole possessor of all knowledge. Every word—past, present, and future—is within the Almighty. We humans, however, are all trapped in our own narrow linguistic universe. Multilingualism is a way to escape that trap, but even the most expert of polyglots is limited. I’m familiar with the lexicographic enterprises of almost a dozen traditions; Czech, Hungarian, Tamil, Swahili, and Urdu, to list just a few important examples, are beyond my scope. The purview that follows is inevitably narrow.

Arabic philosophers and philologists in the Middle Ages, such as Ibn Sina and Ibn Rushd, were interested in the study of alphabets. Al-Khalil ibn Ahmad al-Farahidi composed his Kitab al-‘Ayn, believed to be the first Arabic lexicon and arguably one of the first in any language, in the eighth century. Meanwhile, the first lexicographic reference in Hebrew, Saadia Gaon’s Agron, dates to the
10th century. (It also includes Arabic word translations.)