You Could Look It Up: The Reference Shelf From Ancient Babylon to Wikipedia

by Jack Lynch

  EXPLAINING THE HEAVEN

  Round-hollow and very blue, this is Heaven. In springtime, Heaven is blue; in summertime, bright; in autumn, clear; in wintertime, Heaven is wide up. These are the four seasons.

  In springtime, there is a greening sun-warmth; in summer, a reddish enlightening; in autumn a blank storing; and in winter a dark blossom. If all these expressions are harmonious, [the year] is called “jade candle.” The spring gives birth; the autumn grows the adult; in autumn the harvest is completed; and in winter there is a peaceful tranquillity. If the harmony of the four seasons is thorough and correct, [the year] is called “illustrious wind.” If the sweet rain comes down to the right time, the many things are at their best, it is called “sweet spring.” This means luck.

  As we might expect for an early work in any genre, Erya has its weaknesses. The definitions are short, and they often do little to explain the meanings of the words. The organization of words into thematic clusters is an interesting effort to make sense of the universe, but later eras have found it counterintuitive and hard to consult. But it was groundbreaking in its day, and it remains illuminating even long after it was superseded by other dictionaries. Moderns find Erya a valuable source for identifying the animals and plants, for instance, that appear in older Chinese literature. Even more important, it reveals how early Chinese writers organized their understanding of the social world, the natural world, and the divine world.

  The original Erya led to a wide array of editions and annotations. The earliest is the Hsiao erya, or Abbreviated Approaching Elegance. There was also a Kuang-ya, or Expanded Elegance. In the third century C.E. came Guangya, or Extension of Erya, by Zhang Yi, with 2,345 entries. Early in the fourth century, Go Pu wrote Erya zhu, or Annotations on Erya, and around the year 1000, Xing Bing turned out Erya shu, Explanations of Annotations on Erya. As late as 1775, Chinese scholars were working on new versions of and annotations on the Erya, including Hao Yixing’s Erya zhengyi, or Meaning Verification of Erya, and Wang Niansun’s Guangya Shuzheng, or Annotations and Textual Criticism of Guangya.9

  The Erya also prompted imitations, new dictionaries that attempted the task of defining words from scratch rather than extending the original work. Probably in the early third century C.E., Liu Xi wrote his Shiming, or Explanation of Names, a collection of 1,502 definitions in eight volumes and twenty-seven chapters. As Xue Shiqui explains, “its special feature is its use of phonetic explanations. It explains the meanings of words in terms of other characters of the same or similar sound, and makes assumptions about etymology based on the sound of a character”—or, as some have described it, semantics based on puns, or connections between the sounds of words. “At times,” Xue goes on, “this method is misleading and far-fetched, but it did motivate scholars to analyze the meaning of a word from the viewpoint of the spoken language.”10

  In the year 837, Erya was named one of the Thirteen Confucian Classics, joining the Book of Changes (or I Ching), the Classic of Poetry (or Shijing), and the Analects of Confucius. As the Sinologist Endymion Wilkinson wrote, “This greatly enhanced the influence of the Erya on the interpretation of the classics, and no doubt also on the development of the language itself since generations of scholars memorized it.”11

  Several centuries after the greatest early dictionary of China came the greatest early dictionary of India, the Amarakosha—probably compiled around the fourth century C.E., though some favor a later date. It had to be before the early ninth century, since other writers were referring to it by that period.12 As with the Erya, little is known of the author, Amarasimha, but tradition says he was named one of the Navaratnas or “nine gems,” the most extraordinary people in the court of king Chandragupta II.

  The Amarakosha, also known as the Nâmalingânusâsana, is the “Immortal Treasure” that organizes the entire Sanskrit vocabulary into a logical order. It has remained an important work in the ancient literature of India ever since. It is not the earliest Sanskrit dictionary—that honor belongs to the Nighantu, a collection of words drawn from the Vedas. We have the names of other Sanskrit lexicographers, including Katya, Brihaspati, Vyadi, Bhaguri, Amara, Mankala, Sahasanka (Vikramaditya), Mahesa, and Jina. These early lexicons tend to fall into two categories, the dictionaries of synonyms and the dictionaries of homonyms. The synonymous dictionaries, organized topically, give clusters of words that stand for related ideas. The homonymous lexicons collect multiple meanings for a single written form, and they are usually organized not thematically but by letter, sometimes the first but often the last letter of a word.13

  TITLE: Amarakosha or Nâmalingânusâsana

  COMPILER: Amarasimha? (fl. c. 375 B.C.E.)

  ORGANIZATION: Topical

  PUBLISHED: c. third century B.C.E.

  ENTRIES: 10,000

  TOTAL WORDS: 15,000

  Amarasimha himself acknowledged that the Amarakosha resulted from his work of codifying, adapting, and abridging the works of those who came before him. The organization, though, seems to be original with him. The whole work is in poetry rather than prose, around fifteen hundred lines. It is organized into three khandas or books—Svargadikhanda, treating the gods and the heavens; Bhuvagardikhanda, on earthly things like animals and towns; and Samanyadikhanda, treating common words, especially on grammar—each of which is further divided into vargas, or sections.

  It is not an easy book to use, as this entry makes clear:

  Blood. Flesh used in sacrifice. Heart. Marrow, fat. Diaphragm. The tendon forming the nape of the neck. Any tubular organ of the body, as an artery, vein, intestine, etc. Kidneys. Brain. Any bodily excretion. Entrail. Spleen. Tendon, muscle. Liver. Saliva. Concretion on the eyes. Excretion of the nose. Wax of the ear. Urine. Feces, dung. Glene. Bone. Skeleton. Spine, backbone. Skull. Rib.

  Where the entries end and the interpretations begin is far from obvious, and the book is useful only for nouns. But in combining the two common methods of organizing a dictionary, the homonyms and the synonyms, and in surveying the best literature in the Sanskrit language, Amarasimha developed a reference tool that served not only his own age but every succeeding generation that has worked through the literary tradition of the Subcontinent. As late as 1808, an English author could refer to “The celebrated Amara Kosha, or Vocabulary of Sanskrit by Amara Sinha,” praising it as “by the unanimous suffrage of the learned, the best guide to the acceptations of nouns in Sanskrit.”14 Its influence extended even further, for another nineteenth-century reader influenced by the Amarakosha was Peter Mark Roget. The grouping of words in thematic clusters inspired his approach to classifying synonyms in the famous Thesaurus of 1852.

  Erya and Amarakosha were entirely independent works—there is no evidence of one influencing the other—but they are remarkably similar. Both are concerned with only a selection of the entire vocabulary of their respective languages; both are concerned with making sense of the great literary classics of their traditions; both are organized thematically, giving us a glimpse of how their authors classified the world’s knowledge. Both also inspired long traditions. Erya is only the first in a long line of premodern Chinese dictionaries, culminating perhaps in Peiwen yunfu, put together by a team with support of the emperor in 1711, which contains 700,000 words—more than any other Chinese dictionary, even those created today—arranged by rhyme by their last character. Though there are no definitions, words and phrases are shown in use, providing a contextual clue to their meanings.15 And the Amarakosha led to the Anekarthasamuchchaya of Shashvata, the Trikandashesha of Purushottamadeva, the Haravali of Purushottama, and others—not merely useful tools in making sense of older literature, but important works of literature in their own right.16

  The West has its own major premodern dictionaries. For centuries, no Greek lexicographer rivaled the great Suidas, who lived in the late tenth century: everyone who worked with ancient Greek texts found his dictionary essential. The only problem is that Suidas never existed. The book known as “the dictionary of Suidas
” was not actually a book by an author named Suidas, but a dictionary called Suda, a late Latin word for “fortress.” Only in the twentieth century was its origin sorted out, but for a millennium this book, the high point of Byzantine scholarship, has been indispensable for students of Greek literature. It contains thirty thousand articles—some lexical, some encyclopedic, some somewhere in between—on language, literature, and history. The information is strangely miscellaneous. Some entries on important topics are short; some entries on trivial topics are long. The entire entry for Aaron, the brother of Moses and the first high priest of the Israelites, reads, “Aaron, a proper name.” (“A proper name” is a favorite non-entry entry: “Abdiou [i.e. Obadiah], a proper name,” “Abeiron, a proper name,” “Aberothaeus, a proper name,” “Abim, a proper name” …) The Suda remains valuable for its extensive quotations of Greek writers whose works have been lost—sometimes our only evidence about a Greek writer’s style is the quotations in the Suda.

  Advertisements for modern dictionaries always boast about all the new words that have been included since the previous edition, as if the sole virtue of a dictionary is its up-to-the-minute treatment of words like locavore and hashtag. But dictionaries can be valuable precisely for being old, for giving us a glance at the way a language was organized, and a world was understood, centuries or even millennia ago.

  CHAPTER 2 ½

  A FRACTION OF THE TOTAL

  Counting Reference Books

  “Touts les gens de Lettres sont d’accord,” lexicographer Antoine Furetière wrote in 1684, “qu’il n’y sçauroit avoir trop de Dictionnaires”—“Men of letters agree that you can’t have too many dictionaries.”1 But is there such a thing as too many?

  Even in antiquity, reference books were supposed to fix the problems of information fatigue, serving as life preservers in a sea of information. In the end, though, they may just contribute to the flood. It didn’t take long for even the reference books to start overwhelming their readers. The cultural commentator Ilan Stavans reports on his own explorations in the card catalog: “Today there are dictionaries of Aramaic, ballet, gerontology, hip-hop, knighthood, Napoleon’s wars, proteins, Russian slang, and TV.”2

  What, then, is the total? Counting reference books is like counting the stars in the sky—something, incidentally, that reference books help us do. No one knows the answer, but the number is immense. Major research libraries devote large rooms to reference books, where they may number in the tens of thousands. Even that is a tiny fraction of the total. The Library of Congress Online Catalog, when asked to display all its holdings with the word dictionary in the title, comes back with an error message: “Your search retrieved more records than can be displayed. Only the first 10,000 will be shown.” The same thing happens in a search for encyclopedia.

  But we can get an idea of the magnitude of the task by searching a few major library catalogs. The General Catalogue of the British Library, one of the world’s great collections, lists 38,904 titles that contain the word dictionary;3 the Catalogue Général of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France contains 42,162 works with dictionnaire in their titles; the Deutsche National Bibliothek in Leipzig features 41,892 titles with the word Wörterbuch; the Rossiiskaia Gosudarstvennaia Biblioteka in Moscow has 16,124 titles with словарь (slovar’); Spain’s Biblioteca Nacional de España has 12,563 titles with diccionario; the Italian Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze has 7,760 titles with the word dizionario. The figures are similar for encyclopaedia (18,482 in the British Library), encyclopédie (24,273 titles in the Bibliothèque Nationale), and Enzyklopädie (8,549 in the Deutsche National Bibliothek).

  In WorldCat, the combined electronic catalogs of 71,000 libraries from 112 countries, a search for dictionary comes up with 311,602 books, 35,756 separately cataloged articles, 15,051 Internet resources, 2,637 computer programs, 1,859 periodicals, 824 sound recordings, 659 visual materials, 239 maps, 238 musical scores, 154 archival records, and 19 “updated resources,” for a total of 369,071 titles and editions. Throw in the words for dictionary in the other major European languages, and the total swells to 727,930. Another 259,724 records for encyclopedia in the major European languages brings the total number of dictionaries and encyclopedias to nearly a million. If it were possible to broaden the search further—covering every library; including Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic, Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, Russian, and other languages whose speakers number in the hundreds of millions; and searching not only for dictionaries and encyclopedias, but also atlases, thesauruses, legal references, and so on—the number would be much higher.

  So the answer is certainly in the millions, and a little time browsing library catalogs reveals just how various these books are. The Library of Congress, for instance, holds fifty-two dictionaries of metallurgy, as well as an Encyclopedia of R.F.D. Cancels (281 pages on the postmarks used on Rural Free Deliveries), an Encyclopedia of Knots and Fancy Rope Work, and a Dictionary of Jewish Surnames from the Kingdom of Poland. In the Bibliothèque Nationale de France is Le Dictionnaire du rire: 4 000 histoires drôles (The dictionary of the joke: 4,000 funny stories). German railway dictionaries number in the dozens. Robert O. Campbell’s Barriers: An Encyclopedia of United States Barbed Fence Patents covers both the history of wire fencing and the patents on different varieties of barbed wire in 460 pages.

  Pick any area of human endeavor—for that matter, pick almost any noun—and there will be at least one reference book about it. Cocker spaniel aficionados will want to get their hands on John F. Gordon’s Spaniel Owner’s Encyclopaedia (1967), while those who love tools can consult Mark Duginske’s Tools: A Complete Illustrated Encyclopedia (2001). Even sewage treatment is covered in Clinton Bogert’s Glossary: Water and Sewage Control Engineering (1950), Fritz Meinck’s Dictionary of Water and Sewage Engineering (1963), W. Bischofsberger’s Lexikon der Abwassertechnik (1974), the Swedish Tekniska Nomenklaturcentralen’s Avfallsordlista: Nordiska termer med motsvarighteter på engelska, franska och tyska samt defioniter på svenska och engelska (1977), Hu Mingcao’s Ying Han shui ran kopng zhi ci hui (1986), Shan Peihua’s Shui wu ran ming ci ci dian (1987), Günay Kocasoy’s Kati atik termileri açiklamali sözlügü (in Turkish, English, German, and French, 1994), Carmen Campbell’s Vocabulaire de la production d’eau potable et du traitement des eaux usées (French and English, 1997), Krzysztof Czekierda’s Slownik gospodarki wodnosciekowej (English and Polish, 2011), and dozens of others.

  CHAPTER 3

  The HISTORY OF NATURE

  Science in Antiquity

  Theophrastus

  Historia plantarum

  350–287 B.C.E.

  Pliny

  Historia naturalis

  c. 77–79 C.E.

  Our word science comes from Latin scientia, which is in turn derived from the verb scio ‘I know’. When it first showed up in the modern languages, it had the same broad range of meaning as Latin scientia, knowledge of any sort. As late as the nineteenth century, the word covered not only geology and astronomy but also poetry and history. No word corresponded perfectly to our modern sense of science. When people in the Renaissance wanted to refer to biology, chemistry, and physics, they used terms like “natural philosophy” and “natural history.”

  But lexical history is not the same as conceptual history, and long before there was a word for what we call science, people were energetically collecting information about the natural world—animal, vegetable, mineral, and beyond. Eventually it was necessary to collect new discoveries in a manageable compass. “Scientific” reference books have been with us for more than two millennia, and they have only grown in importance in our technological age. This chapter has at its heart two ancient works of natural history, one Greek, one Roman.

  We know more about Theophrastus than we do about most ancient Greek authors. He was born around 371 B.C.E. in Eresos, Lesbos. As a young man he headed to Athens, which was then at the height of its intellectual powers and the center of the philosophical world.
Theophrastus missed his chance to meet Socrates, who swallowed the hemlock in 399 B.C.E., but he did study at the Academy, where Plato was one of his teachers and Aristotle a friend and mentor.

  Theophrastus went on to write widely. He was probably the author of an influential book on character types (the braggart, the flatterer, the ironist), another on metaphysics, and yet another on geology. One book, lost now and known only through a later paraphrase, explained the senses. His most important reference work, written in Greek as Περ φυτν στορα (Peri phytôn historia), is better known by its Latin title, Historia plantarum (The History of Plants), though A Treatise on Plants captures the spirit better. It earned him the title “the father of botany.” Greeks had written about plants before him, including his friend Aristotle. But in the words of one botanical historian, “no one before him had recorded a philosophic thought or suggestion about the plant world separately considered.”1 Robert Sharples goes further: “he so far surpassed his predecessors that the history of the subject in the west can be said effectively to begin with him.”2

  Like Aristotle, Theophrastus begins with first principles, including a philosophical attempt to distinguish the vegetable, animal, and mineral kingdoms. What seems like an easy problem quickly becomes entangled in philosophical complexity: it is easier to define plants in terms of what they are not than what they are. Many seeming plants differ enough from the familiar ones to leave us unsure what to do with them—things like fungi, lichens, and algae. Theophrastus lumped them all in with the plants—not the way modern taxonomy proceeds, but defensible in his day.