The Cambridge World History of Lexicography is the first survey of all the dictionaries which humans have made, it says on the backcover, which is somewhat misleading, because this book is a history of lexicography, not of dictionaries. And it is a story, not a bibliography.
So, the Cambridge World History of Lexicography tells the story of the making of lists of words and their equivalents or interpretations, from the ancient civilizations of Mesopotamia, Egypt, China, India, and the Greco-Roman world, to the contemporary speech communities of every inhabited continent. Their makers included poets and soldiers, saints and courtiers, a scribe in an ancient Egyptian 'house of life' and a Vietnamese queen. Their physical forms include Tamil palm-leaf manuscripts and the dictionary apps which are supporting endangered Australian languages.
The Cambridge World History of Lexicography (972 pages), edited by John Considine (University of Alberta), provides insight into the "dictionaries" of hundreds of languages, into the imaginative worlds of those who used or observed them, and into a dazzling variety of the literate cultures of humankind.
A truly global story
John Considine, in the introduction: "This book is a history, not a bibliography; contributors were asked from the beginning to treat the bibliographical record selectively enough for their chapters to have a narrative rather than an enumerative quality. This book seeks to tell a story."
"A good way to read this book would be as a story, starting at the beginning and going on to the end. And the story it tells is a truly global one: English is the language in which this book is written, and the lexicography of the English language plays an important part in the book, but the language to which the most chapters are devoted is Chinese (indeed, the commonest surname in the biographical appendix is Lı 李, with representatives from the third century BC to the present day), and, to give another example, after Indo-European, the language family of which most members are mentioned (albeit only in one chapter) is Pama-Nyungan, to which many of the languages of Australia belong. The story which this book tells, is also a long one: the lexicography of the twenty-first and twentieth centuries is widely surveyed, but sustained individual attention is paid to each of the five traditions which began more than two thousand years ago," John Considine continues.
Lexicography?
For the purpose of this book, lexicology means "the making of lists of words and their equivalents or interpretations". Not all makers of such lists have thought of themselves as lexicographers: many people have done what we would call lexicography although they themselves had no word for lexicography.
"Another problem is that the distinction between the lexicographical and the encyclopedic is notoriously uncertain, and is, indeed, made differently in different learned traditions. A borderline instance is that of the distinction between dictionaries of synonyms, which bring words of related meaning together (they have been very important in some Indian traditions, and are treated here) and thesauruses of the sort which are primarily oriented towards mapping the relationships between concepts (Roget’s Thesaurus, for instance, is not treated here)."
"Yet another problem is that we may ask when a text – for instance, a poem about words, or a traveller’s account of unfamiliar things and their names in a local language – becomes sufficiently list-like to be counted as lexicographical. Here again, different learned traditions operate differently: the typical European dictionary is made up of entries in which the lemma, or headword, is an obligatory building-block of the text, but, for instance, a classical Tamil dictionary in verse may include statements of equivalence between words in which no one word seems to have headword status. However, ‘the making of lists of words and their interpretations’ gives this book a central subject. The word "dictionaries" might not have done so: many short lists of words are lexicographical, but can hardly be called dictionaries. So, this is a history of lexicography, not of dictionaries."
This book brings together contributions from Niek Veldhuis, Frank Feder, Françoise Bottéro, Lata Mahesh Deokar, Jean-Luc Chevillard, Rolando Ferri, Nathan Vedal, Ramzi Baalbaki, Aharon Maman, Mårten Söderblom Saarela, Marek Stachowski, Stefano Valente, John Considine, Henning Klöter, David Lurie, Heokseung Kwon, John D. Phan, Luciano Rocchi, Arthur Dudney, Walter Hakala, Lisa Mitchell, Jan Hoogland, Tsvi Sadan, Rick Derksen, Ulrike Haß, Charlotte Brewer, Michael Adams, Pascale Renders, Otto Zwartjes, Willem de Reuse, Toon Van Hal, Gonçalo Fernandes, William B. McGregor.
ISBN (hardback): 9781107178861
ISBN (eBook): 9781316836293
For more information please visit the Cambridge University Press website.