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

by Jack Lynch

  As soon as we establish those rules, though, reality intrudes. Law dictionaries, biographical dictionaries, gardening dictionaries—all are really encyclopedias. And some encyclopedic information tends to find its way into even the general-purpose dictionaries: the proper names Lothario or Einstein have come to serve as synonyms for lover and genius, and in that sense they need to be defined rather than discussed. Some dictionaries offer other encyclopedic information, such as the altitudes of mountains, lists of kings and presidents, characters in famous works of literature, populations of cities, and so on. (American dictionaries have been more welcoming of encyclopedic information than dictionaries hailing from Britain.)

  A dictionary explains that a barometer is a device for measuring atmospheric pressure, and an encyclopedia explains how a barometer is constructed, how it measures the atmosphere, and what the readings mean. But the two often run into each other. Most encyclopedias start out with a short dictionary definition, and many dictionaries will venture into encyclopedic information, whether they want to or not. Even Webster’s Eleventh Collegiate, a dictionary that avowedly has no room for encyclopedic information, defines barometer as “an instrument for determining the pressure of the atmosphere and hence for assisting in forecasting weather and for determining altitude”—but the uses to which the instrument is put are really part of an encyclopedic understanding, not a linguistic one.

  One of the great sources of frustration over the publication of Webster’s Third New International Dictionary in 1961 was its abandonment of nearly all the encyclopedic information; many reviewers were emphatically not pleased. The Second (1934) was loaded with encyclopedic information—lists of presidents and popes, characters in Dickens and Shakespeare, hundreds of figures from mythology, thousands of places, and thirteen thousand “noteworthy persons.” It aspired to be the only reference book an educated person needed on his or her shelves. Not so the Third: all that information was unceremoniously deleted. It was to be pure dictionary. Some critics were appalled: “Think if you can,” wrote one reviewer, “of a dictionary from which you cannot learn who Mark Twain was … or what were the names of the apostles.”1

  And yet even the resolutely lexical Webster’s Third manages to sneak encyclopedic information in, though not in the obvious places. The etymologies sometimes contain digressions, and even some of the definitions struggle to draw the line between lexical and encyclopedic material. The notorious Webster’s Third entry for hotel is practically an encyclopedia entry masquerading as a dictionary definition:

  hotel: a building of many rooms chiefly for overnight accommodation of transients and several floors served by elevators, usually with a large open street-level lobby containing easy chairs, with a variety of compartments for eating, drinking, dancing, exhibitions, and group meetings (as of salesmen or convention attendants), with shops having both inside and street-side entrances and offering for sale items (as clothes, gifts, candy, theater tickets, travel tickets) of particular interest to a traveler, or providing personal services (as hairdressing, shoe shining), and with telephone booths, writing tables and washrooms freely available.

  CHAPTER 14

  OF REDHEADS AND BABUS

  Dictionaries and Empire

  Inamura Sampaku

  Haruma-wage

  1796

  Henry Yule and

  Arthur C. Burnell

  Hobson-Jobson

  1886

  The earliest dictionaries in most traditions are not the monolingual volumes we most often use but bilingual works serving as a link between two linguistic communities. That makes sense: the need to communicate with others who do not understand you at all has often been more urgent than pinning down all the subtleties of a language. And some of those bilingual dictionaries played an essential role in a nation’s imperial ambitions. The Spanish in early America, for instance, had to deal with native languages. An anonymous and unpublished eighteenth-century Bocabularia en lengua Quiche y Castellana (K’iche’–Spanish Vocabulary) was aimed at helping Spanish conquistadors communicate with their new Mayan conquests. The Spanish side of the vocabulary reveals the missionary function: diablo (devil), disciplinado (disciplined), dicipulo (disciple), divinidad de Dios (divinity of God). The same is clear in another K’iche’–Spanish dictionary from 1745, with native equivalents for Spanish terms such as la santissima Trinidad (the most holy Trinity) as well as a section of phrases on “Preguntas dela Doctrina Christiana” (Questions on Christian Doctrine): “Donde esta Dios—Apacatzih Coui Dios?,” “Quien es Dios—Apachinal Dios?”1

  A Dutch–Japanese dictionary was written two hundred years ago to keep Japan sealed off from the rest of the world. Today, though, it can be a way of opening that world up and looking in. For generations, the bridge between Japan and the West was seven inches wide—the width of a book published in Edo.

  Japan has a long lexicographical history, though the earliest examples do not survive. A dictionary called Niina, or New Characters, was compiled in 682 C.E. and presented to the emperor—a list of Chinese characters with Japanese annotations. Around 835, Kukai’s Tenrei bansho meigi, or Myriad Things, featured about a thousand Chinese characters. Shoju edited the Shinsen Jikyo around the year 900, with more than twenty thousand characters in Chinese and Japanese; the Ruiju myogisho, from around 1100, contained more than thirty thousand. The Wamyo ruijusho, by Minamoto no Shitago, was compiled in 938 on a different plan: instead of arranging words by “radicals,” the basic strokes that make up the Chinese characters, it was arranged thematically, borrowing and adapting the categories of the ancient Chinese Erya (see chapter 2).

  The Nippo jisho, or Vocabulario da lingoa de Iapam, was a milestone in the early modern period: a Japanese–Portuguese dictionary that appeared in 1603 with the aim of helping Portuguese missionaries learn the language. It contained 32,293 Japanese words rendered in the Latin alphabet, with Portuguese explanations for each. The dictionary was the work of Jesuits, with Father João Rodrigues, a missionary, credited for the compilation. It was immensely useful in its day, and it is still valuable for providing evidence on the pronunciation of Japanese at the beginning of the seventeenth century.

  The Nippo jisho promised a new age of intercultural communication between East and West, but that was not to be. Europeans had been visiting Japan since 1543: first Portuguese traders, then Spanish, Dutch, and English vessels, trading in silk, cotton, and spices as well as spreading the Christian Gospel. But tensions began rising in the early seventeenth century. The Japanese authorities grew weary of the Christian missionaries and issued a series of decrees expelling them. The populace was divided over the actions of the shogunate. In 1637–38, forty thousand peasants, mostly Catholic converts, rose up against the shoguns in the Shimabara Rebellion, both for their anti-Christian policies and their high taxation. The Tokugawa shogunate would not tolerate the challenge to their authority, and they responded with more than a hundred thousand troops. The leader of the rebellion, Amakusa Shiro, a Catholic, was beheaded.

  The Sakoku Edict, which followed in 1639, effectively closed Japan off from the rest of the world. It prevented egress: the Japanese were not allowed to leave the country, and anyone who somehow managed to get out and tried to return faced the death penalty. And while no Japanese could get out, no Europeans could get in. Japanese forces maintained an effective blockade on their own country. When Portuguese warships tried to land at Nagasaki, a Japanese fleet of nearly a thousand ships drove them away. Any foreigners who did manage to get to Japan were detained, and their ships were searched for missionaries.

  The era is known as the Sakoku ‘closed country’ or ‘chained country’. The closure was not absolute; some trade with China and with Korea remained. The only significant Western contact, though, was with the Vereenidge Oostindische Compagnie, or Dutch East India Company, which set up a trading post at Dejima—a small artificial island in the bay of Nagasaki, created in 1634 when a canal was built to separate a peninsula from the mainland
. It was originally set aside for the Portuguese, but when they were expelled in 1639, the Dutch were moved from Hirado to Dejima. A heavily guarded bridge linked the island to the mainland, but the Dutch were not routinely permitted to cross to Nagasaki, nor most Japanese to cross to Dejima. For centuries, this Dutch enclave was the only tolerated European outpost in the country. All other Europeans, known as komojin ‘redheads’, were proscribed.

  The Dutch were allowed because Holland valued Japanese trade enough to make concessions other nations were not willing to make. They agreed not to evangelize, and even to refrain from holding their own religious ceremonies in their host country. They also declared enmity to Portugal and Spain, the two sharpest thorns in Japan’s side, partly on religious grounds (Dutch Protestants resented Iberian Catholics), but also because the Dutch were waging their own war for independence from the Spanish, who controlled the Netherlands until 1648.

  This was a time of rapid technological advance in the West. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Europeans described the circulation of the blood, worked out the laws of planetary motion and gravitation, developed the calculus, and invented the microscope, telescope, and barometer. The Dutch were on the cutting edge. Throughout this period the Netherlands was the most economically and technically advanced country in Europe. The Japanese followed these developments from afar, getting news about European advancements only through Dutch channels, and they wanted what the West had to offer.2 The Dutch brought scientific works, medical instruments, maps, and other tokens of Western modernity to Japan. This led to the development of the field of Rangaku ‘Dutch studies’ or ‘Dutch learning’, which became synonymous with “Western studies.”

  The Dutch were expected to conform to a strict set of rules for interacting with the Japanese. The chief of the trading post, the opperhofd, was regarded as the representative of a state owing allegiance to the Shogun. He would make presentations to the Shogun on annual trips to the capital, Edo (modern Tokyo), providing expensive and elaborate gifts. Only a very few Japanese had permission to interact with the Westerners. A small group of interpreters held their posts as hereditary translators, and they were trained from childhood under Dutch tutelage; a few samurai received permission to engage in Rangaku.

  The challenge was communication. Dutch and Japanese are from different language families, with no vocabulary in common and dissimilar syntax and morphology. There had been attempts to bridge the gap before. The Shogun Yoshimune authorized two Japanese scholars, Noro Genjo and Aoki Konyo, to study Dutch scientific and medical writing in 1740. Noro went on to publish Oranda honso wage (Japanese Explanations of Dutch Botany), but Aoki’s contribution was more relevant: a small Dutch–Japanese dictionary, published in 1745. A more ambitious one was begun by Nishi Zenzaburo (1718–68), one of the hereditary interpreters, who learned Dutch in Dejima starting in 1722. By 1754 he had been promoted to chief interpreter, and he accompanied the Dutch on their trips to Edo several times. Zenzaburo worked on a Dutch–Japanese dictionary, with Pierre Martin’s Dutch–French dictionary as his starting point, but he made little progress, getting only as far as the letter B. Shortly afterward, Maeno Ryotaku likewise started, and likewise left unfinished, a set of translations.

  A large-scale bilingual dictionary was a necessity,3 and one finally appeared before the end of the eighteenth century: the work known as the Haruma-wage, or sometimes the Edo Haruma. The dictionary itself is dull, difficult of access, and both untranslated and probably untranslatable in any useful sense—it is simply a list of Dutch words and their Japanese equivalents. Its existence, though, is one of the most illuminating bits of evidence about East-West interaction in the eighteenth century.

  Haruma is the Japanese rendering of the French name Halma: in 1708, François Halma, a French book dealer living in Utrecht, had published a Woordenboek der nederduitsche en fransche taalen (Dutch–French Dictionary). A copy of the second edition, 1729, eventually made its way to Japan, where Inamura Sampaku, a physician’s son, encountered it. While studying medicine in Nagasaki he was first introduced to Western medicine; while in Kyoto, he read Otsuki Gentaku’s Rangaku Kaitei (Introduction to Western Studies, 1788), and he felt his eyes had been opened. Starting in 1792, he studied with Gentaku, who gave him a copy of Halma’s dictionary. Sampaku explained his intention to create a definitive Dutch–Japanese dictionary to Gentaku, who advised him that someone else, Ishii Shosuke, was already at work on such a dictionary. Sampaku was delighted, and the two lexicographers began collaborating.

  The Haruma-wage was the work of thirteen years. Unimpressive as a dictionary, it has been called “a crude dictionary or rather a wordbook … giving for each headword only a few Japanese equivalents represented by Chinese characters.”4 While there are a few phrasal verbs, there are no parts of speech, and a sprinkling of synonyms takes the place of serious definitions. What demands our attention, however, is not the quality of the lexicography, but the vocabulary considered worthy of inclusion. Not surprisingly, many words related to trade were included: handel ‘trade’, handelaar ‘dealer’, vredehandel ‘peace trade’, and so on. The word god received a bold, centered heading, followed by a series of words related to religion: goddelijk ‘divine’, goddelijkheid ‘divinity’, godendom ‘godhead’, and so on. Words such as natie ‘nation’ and religie ‘religion’ aimed at bridging the distance between Western and Eastern notions of statehood and spirituality.

  TITLE: Haruma-wage, also known as Edo haruma

  COMPILER: Inamura Sampaku (1758–1811), following François Halma

  ORGANIZATION: Alphabetical by Dutch word, from abboek to zy

  PUBLISHED: Edo, 1796

  VOLUMES: 27

  PAGES: 4,500

  ENTRIES: 64,035

  TOTAL WORDS: 630,000

  SIZE: 10½″ × 7″ (27 × 18 cm)

  AREA: 2,350 ft2 (219 m2)

  The Haruma-wage’s influence was limited, because just thirty copies were produced—the Japanese definitions had to be added by hand, and mass production was impossible. An abridged version, the Yakken, followed in 1810, available in a hundred copies; it was printed in movable type and featured about twenty-seven thousand headwords. A new project, also based on Halma, was prepared in Nagasaki by the chief of the Dutch enclave, H. Doeff and was completed in 1833. The so-called Dufu Haruma or Nagasaki Haruma was more influential than its Edo predecessor, and more useful because it featured sentences showing the words in context.5 The book was finally published in 1855–58, and it was the last significant bilingual dictionary during the closed Sakoku era. In 1853 Commodore Matthew Perry’s warships forced Japan to open to Western trade, and the Meiji Restoration of 1868 broke down the last of the barriers.

  Haruma-wage linked two immense cultures, but the number of people who had any reason to care about this work at the time was tiny. A trivial number of Dutch traders were allowed into Japan, and a similarly trivial number of Japanese translators were permitted to interact with them. But another variety of imperial relation comes at the opposite end of the spectrum. From the middle of the eighteenth century to the middle of the twentieth, British traders and troops controlled the whole of South Asia (known as India before partition). Thousands of British civil servants came into direct contact with millions of Indians, and with the ripple effect, hundreds of millions of people on two continents were influenced by the Raj. And a dictionary played a major role in connecting the parties.

  Henry Yule was born in East Lothian, Scotland, in 1820. When his father, an orientalist who knew Persian and Arabic and worked for the East India Company, was stationed in Bengal, Henry followed. He got a close-up view of Anglo-Indian culture: his father’s boss, Sir David Ochterlony, had “gone native” to the extent of marrying thirteen Indian wives. Henry Yule entered the East India Company’s Military College in 1837, and two years later he was appointed to the Bengal Engineers. Between 1840 and 1862 he worked in Indian railways and irrigation canals; at forty-two he retired with the rank of colonel
and moved to Sicily. There he became interested in travel as a means of exploring other cultures. His publication of an English translation of Marco Polo’s Travels earned him a gold medal from the Royal Geographical Society, and he “so completely identified himself with his favourite traveller” that he would sign articles he wrote “MARCUS PAULUS VENETUS or M.P.V.”6

  After his retirement he resolved to create a glossary of Anglo-Indian terms. In or around 1872, while working in the India Office Library in London, Yule met a thirty-two-year-old senior Indian civil servant named Arthur Coke Burnell. Burnell began his career as a student of Arabic and had become proficient in Sanskrit, Tamil, Tibetan, Coptic, Kawi, Javanese, Portuguese, Dutch, and Italian. It turned out that Burnell was also working on an Anglo-Indian dictionary, so, rather than produce competing works, the two decided to combine their energies.

  They planned to cover “etymological, historical, and geographical” subjects, but they found it difficult to draw boundaries. Though their book, Hobson-Jobson, is in theory concerned only with the language, in reality it takes in many subjects related to the Raj. “Anglo-Indian” is a strange category: there is no such language as “Indian,” so it is inherently multicultural. Hobson-Jobson was concerned with the English language as spoken in what was then India. It includes words from Hindi, Tamil, and Urdu, Persian, Arabic, Malay, Marathi, Chinese, and even Portuguese.

  TITLE: Hobson-Jobson: A Glossary of Colloquial Anglo-Indian Words and Phrases, and of Kindred Terms, Etymological, Historical, Geographical and Discursive

  COMPILER: Henry Yule (1820–89) and Arthur Coke Burnell (1840–82)

  ORGANIZATION: Alphabetical, abada to zumbooruck

  PUBLISHED: London: J. Murray, 1886