by Jack Lynch
In one area, though, Webster is unambiguously inferior to his rivals, and that was etymology. Johnson’s etymologies are sometimes inaccurate, but they were at least based on a reasonable method. Webster’s were lousy because his theory of etymology was fundamentally unsound.13
Webster, writing in the early nineteenth century, was still looking backward, to seventeenth-century theories of the ways in which languages were related to one another. Early etymologists invented family trees for the world’s languages that can be described only as wacky. The most superficial similarities between words were enough to suggest connections between languages. Webster bought into many of these theories and drew impossible connections between languages that had nothing in common. Webster had every reason to know better, because when he was a young man the biblical notion of the confusion of tongues at the Tower of Babel was dissolving from fact into myth. Sir William Jones, an English polymath, first made the argument that most of the languages of Europe and South Asia were related to one another. Everyone knew the Romance languages were descended from Latin. Other connections, though, were mysterious. Was English related to Greek? Did Latin and Swedish have anything in common, or Welsh and Russian? Did German or Portuguese share anything with Persian or Hindi? No one had a good answer before Jones lectured before the Asiatic Society in 1786 and compared Sanskrit to both Latin and Greek. He discovered similarities “so strong indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists.” He went even further: “There is a similar reason, though not quite so forcible, for supposing that both the Gothick and the Celtick, though blended with a very different idiom, had the same origin with Sanscrit; and the old Persian might be added to the same family, if this were the place for discussing any question concerning the antiquities of Persia.”14
Jones laid the foundations for the study of what is now known as Indo-European, a language family that includes most of the languages of Europe and many of the Indian Subcontinent: English, Latin, French, Spanish, Italian, German, Dutch, Swedish, Norwegian, Greek, Russian, Polish, Czech, Persian, Hindi, Urdu, and dozens of others are all more or less distant cousins. Not all languages belong to this family: Swahili, for instance, has no known connections to English or Spanish or Greek, and no one has discovered any connections between Nahuatl and Dutch. But more than four hundred languages—some dead like Latin, some living like Polish; some major like French, some obscure like Chhattisgarhi—are all descended from the same original language, now known as Proto-Indo-European.
The most exciting etymological advances came from Germany, the center of international comparative and historical philology in the early nineteenth century. No nation-state with that name existed then; Germany was more an idea than a political reality. The Holy Roman Empire, centered mostly on the territory occupied by modern Germany, had been falling apart for generations, producing what became known as Kleinstaaterei, a proliferation of fragmented states. Historians cannot even agree on how many statelets there were: something on the order of three hundred, but no list has elicited consensus. German speakers wanted to know: What did it mean to be German? What defines a nation if it is not coterminous with a government? For many theorists in early nineteenth-century Germany, it was above all a culture, and the most important part of a culture was a shared language. Germans were not the people who lived in Germany, or even those who lived under German laws; they were the people who spoke German.
The Brothers Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm, are best known today for their collection of folktales, including Cinderella, Snow White, and the Frog Prince. The Grimms’ most important contribution to scholarship, though, was a dictionary, still the most authoritative dictionary of the German language nearly two centuries after it was begun. And though Hansel and Gretel may seem distant from innovations in comparative lexicography, both the dictionary and the folktales grow out of the same nationalist consciousness.
Jacob Ludwig Carl Grimm, born in 1785, was a child prodigy—he “could read books fluently,” people said, “before others were beyond their alphabet”15—and his brother, Wilhelm Carl Grimm, born a year later, was nearly as brilliant. The family moved to Cassel in 1798; although the children started in the local school’s lower levels, Jacob soon reached the top of his class, and Wilhelm was close behind. Jacob entered the University of Marburg in 1802, studying law on his father’s advice, with Wilhelm once again in tow. Both found the lectures dull, but they came under the spell of a young lecturer named Friedrich Karl von Savigny. Wilhelm would later say that he owed all his achievements to Savigny.
When the royal library of Westphalia needed a librarian, Jacob’s name was suggested. It was an easy enough job, requiring little effort, so Jacob took advantage of both his free time and the great library to begin his scholarly work in earnest. In 1811, both brothers issued their first learned publications: Jacob’s Über den alt-deutschen Meistergesang (On the Old German Mastersingers) and Wilhelm’s Altdänische Heldenlieder, Balladen und Märchen (Old Danish Heroic Songs, Ballads, and Tales). Together they published a collection of ancient German fragments, Die zwei ältesten deutschen Gedichte des achten Jahrhunderts (The Two Oldest German Poems of the Eighth Century). The German alt ‘old’ appears in all three titles, and with reason: each was concerned with finding the ancient roots of German literary and cultural identity. The answer to the question of Germanness, they believed, was to be found in the deep past. The books were also concerned not with individual geniuses, but with an expression of das Volk—the people as a whole.
TITLE: Deutsches Wörterbuch
COMPILER: Jacob Grimm (1785–1863) and Wilhelm Grimm (1786–1859)
ORGANIZATION: Alphabetical, a to Zypressenzweig
PUBLISHED: 1852–1961; supplement 1971
VOLUMES: 32 + 1 vol. supplement
PAGES: 33,872 (34,824 including the supplement)
ENTRIES: 330,000
TOTAL WORDS: 42 million
SIZE: 10¾″ × 6¾″ (27.5 × 17 cm)
AREA: 17,000 ft2 (1,600 m2), 17,400 ft2 (1,630 m2) with the supplement
WEIGHT: 185 lb. (84 kg)
Das Volk was at the heart of the Grimms’ most famous work. In 1812, the first three volumes of Kinder- und Hausmärchen (Children’s and Household Tales) appeared. This foundational work in the study of folklore was one of the first great collections of popular stories. Having collected the tales, they moved on to the language of the folk. In 1819, Jacob published the first part of his four-volume Deutsche Grammatik (German Grammar), which has been described as “the first lengthy historical study of the Germanic languages” and which “laid the foundations of Germanistik, the study of Germanic philology.”16 Its publication marked an epoch, not merely for Jacob Grimm, not merely for German, but for the scientific study of language itself. As one contemporary remarked, “it for the first time demonstrated to the learned world what a language is. Its method was a complete revolution in the science of grammar,—the substitution of a natural and comparative process, in lieu of the former a priori rules.”17
Eventually the brothers returned to Cassel, at which point Jacob Grimm wrote to Jules Michelet, spelling out the brothers’ plan to write “a complete dictionary of the German language,” one modeled not on the Dictionnaire de l’Académie françoise, with its prescriptivism and its invented quotations, but on the Vocabolario of the Accademia della Crusca, with its illustrative quotations drawn from the best writers. “Our object,” wrote Jacob to another friend, “was first of all to open a complete archive of the language, as it actually exists and has existed during the time in question, let the practical use that shall be made of it be what it may.”18 The hard work began in 1838, and they likened their labors to splitting wood. They read hundreds of books, corresponded with Europe’s leading philologists, and lined up volunteers to collect quotations. They particularly encouraged their contributors to pay attention to idioms and proverbs, and even invited them
to report obscene words.19
Their work would bear the title Deutsches Wörterbuch (German Dictionary), and even that seemingly direct choice of title was a statement of nationalist consciousness. Most early reference books that listed words and meanings borrowed a name from the classical languages: Latin glossarium, dictionarium, or vocabularius, Greek lexikon or thesaurus. In late eighteenth-century Germany, though, a homegrown equivalent had begun to catch on: no longer a Latin dictionarium or a Greek lexikon, a German language reference book would be a Wörterbuch ‘word book’. That is what Johann Christoph Adelung chose for his Grammatisch-kritisches Wörterbuch der Hochdeutschen Mundart (1774–86), the first great German dictionary, and what the Grimms chose for theirs decades later. It was a sign that German speakers were asserting their own identity, finding words rooted in the Germanic rather than the classical languages.
The most distinctive thing about the Grimms’ Wörterbuch is the definitions—or, rather, the lack of them. Lexicographers like Johnson and Webster were determined to tease out all the subtle shades of meaning in every word. Not so the Grimms. Their plan was to give not proper definitions but simple translations of German words into Latin; when there was no Latin equivalent, as with modern scientific and technological developments, the Grimms used French or Dutch. Other lexicographers might spend pages explicating a word like kaufen ‘buy’, trying to pin down exactly which kinds of exchanges constituted a purchase. The Grimms simply gave the Latin words mercari and emere—no more. Jacob even ridiculed other lexicographers who wasted time on long definitions of words like table when they could simply give the Latin word for it.20 (In practice, the Grimms’ plan to define in Latin or French was not carried through, at least not systematically, and Latin became less and less common as the work went on. Most of the definitions are in German, though there are some Latin equivalents.)
A dictionary without definitions sounds like a very short work, but the Wörterbuch was anything but. It was based on extensive folkloric scholarship, but not fieldwork in the modern sense. The Grimms spent their time digging deep into linguistic history to trace the origins of every word in the German language, and they offered cognates in other Germanic and Indo-European languages in a vigorous workout of the methods of comparative historical linguistics. This attention to linguistic history and etymology was a Germanic tradition, appearing prominently in earlier works such as the Swedish Glossarium suiogothicum (1769). The Grimms turned to the quotations that showed the words in use in real German authors, ranging from Martin Luther and Hans Sachs in the early sixteenth century to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in the early nineteenth. (Most of their attention went to the earlier writers, since they regarded the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as periods of linguistic decay in Germany.)21
Their account of the verb besetzen ‘occupy’, to take an example, opened with an extensive etymological note, comparing German besetzen to Gothic bisatjan, Old High German pisezan, Modern Dutch bezetten, Anglo-Saxon besettan, English beset, Swabian besätta, and Danish besätte, and then offered an explanation: “land, stadt, burg, haus mit leuten besetzen, occupare,” that is, “besetzen a country, city, castle, a house with people, occupare.” The German illustrated of the kinds of objects the verb might take, but was not an explanation of what the verb means—the Latin verb occupare is as close as they came to a definition. Having got the origin and meaning out of the way, they turned their attention to the word’s use in German literature, starting with a quotation from Martin Luther’s translation of the Bible, then a trawl through medieval German poetry, a quotation from the sixteenth-century military writer Leonhard Fronsperger, right up to their near-contemporaries, Goethe, Jean Paul, and Friedrich Schiller. The entry runs to nearly a thousand words.
Their dictionary shows on every page their fascination with the cultural hallmarks of Germanness, and they were determined that their book would be a “shrine”—in German, Heiligtum—“to language, to preserve its entire wealth, to hold access to it open for all.”22 Though it may have been open for all, it was hardly accessible to most; its erudition would have scared off all but the most learned readers, and its bulk would have put it beyond the means of most of the peasants they admired. Still, the Wörterbuch was to be a work of what was called Germanistik, a wide-ranging “German studies” that includes language, literature, history, culture, and folklore. The Deutsches Wörterbuch contributed to a sense of German national identity at a time when there was no nation to speak of, and even if the folk could make little sense of it, it made much of the folk.
The Grimms planned a dictionary of six or seven volumes, which would take perhaps ten years to complete. Of course they missed their target—by so much that both Grimms had been in their graves for nearly a century before their life’s work was complete. The first installment appeared in 1852, when Jacob was sixty-seven and Wilhelm sixty-six, and the first complete volume was published two years later. Wilhelm worked on the Wörterbuch up to D but died in 1859, a victim of anthrax, before the second complete volume had appeared. His brother soldiered on until he died 1863, when he was working on the word Frucht ‘fruit’. At that point the work was taken up by the Preußische Akademie der Wissenschaften (Prussian Academy of Sciences), and Göttingen became a center of German philology. The Grimms’ successors had a comparable sense of the national mission of the book. Rudolf Hildebrand, who was instrumental in keeping the project going after the Grimms’ death, gave a public lecture at the University of Leipzig in 1869, claiming that the dictionary served two purposes—“a scholarly one and a national one.” For him the dictionary was a “treasure trove of German-language spirit,” and he insisted that “language is [a] national treasure … in whose fate, flourishing, or disappearance the people [can] see its own fate as a people.”23
After the division of Germany into East and West in 1945, work continued on both sides of the Iron Curtain, with centers in East Berlin and Göttingen. Cooperation was not always as smooth as it might have been. The Communist government of East Germany regarded lexicography as suspiciously bürgerlich—bourgeois—and the staff was sometimes reassigned to other tasks. Still the work continued, and the dictionary was completed on January 10, 1961—a century and a quarter after the work began. Much had happened in that time. The book was begun when there was no such country as Germany; the work lasted through the Franco-Prussian War and both World Wars, ending when Germany was not one nation-state but two. So even before the dictionary was complete, a team was put to work on bringing the older material up to date. In 1971 a supplement appeared, and the whole work, including the supplement, was now thirty-three volumes, a total of 34,824 pages.
Webster and the Grimms were both engaged in lexicographical nation building, but they ended up taking very different approaches. Webster inspired a nation by dividing a linguistic community; the Grimms did so by uniting linguistic communities. For Webster, the problem was that the English-speaking world—what some have since called “the Anglosphere”—was too big and undifferentiated. The Brothers Grimm, on the other hand, lived in a world where no German nation-state existed, just many speakers of the German language spread out among many political organizations. For them, creating a German dictionary was a step toward creating a coherent German people.
CHAPTER 16 ½
COUNTING EDITIONS
One measure of the importance of a work of reference is the number of editions it goes through. The Encyclopædia Britannica, for example, is not just one work; there are actually fifteen different sets bearing that title, from Encyclopædia Britannica; or, A Dictionary of Arts and Sciences, Compiled upon a New Plan, published in three volumes from 1768 to 1771, through the New Encyclopædia Britannica, fifteenth edition, published in thirty-two volumes in 2010. Altogether, 274 volumes stretch over a quarter of a millennium, all part of this larger thing called the Encyclopædia Britannica. This does not include the hundreds of spinoffs: student editions, fact books, yearbooks, CD-ROM editions, and online versions. The Harvard
University Libraries have 255 separate works with Encyclopædia Britannica in the title, the British Library has 386, and the Library of Congress 451.
Such is the story of all the great reference books. The Grand Larousse gastronomique is now in its sixth edition, the Dictionnaire de l’Académie française in its ninth, Black’s Law Dictionary in its tenth, Webster’s Collegiate in its eleventh, Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations in its seventeenth, Emily Post’s Etiquette in its eighteenth, the Duden German dictionaries in their twenty-fifth, and Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack in its 152nd. For a reference work to be superseded is a badge of honor, meaning that the work did its job. The only works that never change are the dead ones.
But numbers like ninth, eleventh, and twenty-fifth can be misleading. Some works go through so many versions, so poorly coordinated and labeled, that it can be difficult to count them. Even a task that should be simple—tallying the number of editions of Johnson’s Dictionary—can induce headaches. Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language is famous for its appearance in 1755, but pirated editions, abridgments (both authorized and unauthorized), miniature versions, international issues, unlabeled reprints, and so on, were often advertised with meaningless edition numbers. According to the best count so far, there have been at least 52 separate editions of the full Dictionary, 13 adaptations of it, 141 abridgments, and 315 miniature versions. Thus at least 521 different books can in some sense be called “Johnson’s Dictionary,” and that does not count the modern facsimiles and electronic editions. And previously unrecognized editions still turn up from time to time. Because every one of these involved a separate setting of type, no two editions are exactly the same, though no one has yet had the energy to go through all of them to figure out which edition borrowed from which, or where they differ from one another.
