7. History of lexicology.

7.1. Early studies in India, China, the Islamic World, and Europe

   Can lexicology be traced back to its earliest sources? Like all systematic study of the formal patterns of language, lexicology depends on language being written down. Oral cultures are capable of developing highly elaborated forms of speech and rhetoric, but only after writing evolves does attention come to be focused on grammar and vocabulary. This typically began as a way of keeping alive ancient texts whose meanings were beginning to be lost as the language continued to change. In India, between 2^nd and 3^rd centuries BC, the first glossaries appeared whose primary function was to make the difficult and opaque words in the Vedas (which by that time were already a thousand years old) known to a wider public. With time these glossaries evolved into something that was close to what we now know as dictionaries. In the 7^th century AD, the scholar Amera Sinha put together a Sanskrit dictionary, the Amera Kosha. Over ten centuries later it was still in use. It was translated into English by Colebrooke and published in 1808. It is known to have been a source that Roget drew on for ideas for his celebrated Thesaurus. In later centuries came more dictionaries, the best known of which were the Abhidhana Kintamani and the Desinamamala, dictionaries of Sanskrit and Prakrit respectively, compiled by Hamacandra. These date from the 12^th century. By this time Indian scholarship in grammar and phonology had made significant advances and dictionary-making was part of the systematic description of language.

   In China the earliest record of lexicological work is a thesaurus, the Er Ya ‘Treasury of Fine Words’. Compiled in the 3^rd century BC, it is a list of approximately 3,500 words that were found in ancient texts. The words were arranged under 19 headings: the first three sections contained words of a general nature – nouns, verbs and figurative expressions; the remaining 16 were grouped thematically under the headings Kin, Buildings, Implements, Music, Sky (i.e. calendar and climate), Land, Hills, Mountains, Water, Plants, Trees, Insects and Reptiles, Fishes, Birds, Wild Animals and Domestic Animals. Each word was glossed, defined or otherwise explained. The study of vocabulary in China developed in three major directions: (1) recording dialect words, as in the Fang Yan, by Yang Xiong (1^st century AD); (2) tracing the origins of written characters, as in Shuo Wen Jie Zi, by Xu Shen, in the 1^st century AD; and (3) describing the sounds and words and classifying them according to rhyme, notably in the Qie Yun (AD 600) and Tang Yun (AD 750). By the time of Ming and Qing dynasties, large-scale dictionaries and encyclopedias were being compiled. Especially stand out the Yongle Encyclopedia (1403-1409) in 10,000 volumes, few of which, however, have survived; and the Kangxi Dictionary (1716), which contained some 50,000 characters together with pronunciation and definition.

   As opposed to China, where little attention was paid to grammar (Chinese words are invariant, so the question of why words change in form simply did not arise), both Arabic and Hebrew traditions are rich in grammatical scholarship. The earliest Arab grammarian, al-Khalil ibn Ahmed is known to have begun work on an Arabic dictionary, applying a phonological principle to arranging words. But it was Persians who played the leading role in lexicography in the Islamic world. They put together two dictionaries, one of Farsi-dari (Persian literary language) in the 9^th-10^th centuries and the other of Farsi, Lughat-e Fars, in the 11^th century. The former has not survived, but the latter is extant. Persian scholars also had the lead in bilingual dictionaries. They are known to have produced Persian-Arabic (11^th century) and Persian-Turkish (from the 15^th century onwards) dictionaries.

   Topically arranged wordlists were also produced by Egyptians; they are known to have put together thesaurus-like lists of words from as early as 1750 BC. None of them has survived, however. Like in India, Greek lexicographers put together glossaries of less-known, sophisticated and archaic vocabulary found in ancient texts – Homeric texts. Apollonius, an Alexandrian grammarian of the 1^st century BC, compiled a Homeric lexicon, but both this and the later glossaries by Hesychius are now lost. The most prominent lexicographical work of the Byzantine period was the Suda, a tenth-century etymological and explanatory dictionary of around 30,000 entries from literary works in Ancient, Hellenistic and Byzantine Greek and Latin. It is noteworthy that lexicographical research of that time accompanied the spread of education and the promotion of emerging literary languages. Starting from 1450 bilingual dictionaries were being produced for use in schools, initially for learning Latin (Latin-German, Latin-English, etc.), but soon afterwards also for the newly-emerged languages of Europe. But as the fledgling national languages of Europe were taking hold, some countries felt that some sort of regulation was needed to keep the grammar and lexicon of their languages intact and immune to foreign influences and modernization. Many European countries believed that the best way to look after a language was to place it in the care of an academy.  As a result, national academies sprang up all around Europe with the sole purpose of establishing norms for the definition and usage of words. The first such body, the Accademia della Crusca, was set up in Italy in 1582 with the object of purifying the Italian language. Precisely to this end, it produced Vocabulario degli Academici della Crusca in 1612. Before long, France followed suit with its Académie française, which set the pattern for many subsequent bodies. The French academy, in its turn, put out the Dictionnaire de l’Académie française in 1694 (the lexicographer Furetiére was expelled from the Academy because he published his own dictionary, the Universal Dictionary Containing All French Words, in 1690 before the official one had appeared). Several other academies were founded in the 18^th and 19^th centuries. The Spanish Academy was founded in 1713 by Philip IV, and within 200 years corresponding bodies had been set up in most South American Spanish countries. The Swedish Academy was founded in 1786; the Hungarian in 1830. There are three Arabic Academies, in Syria, Iraque, and Egypt. The Hebrew Language Academy was set up more recently, in 1953. The dictionary of the Spanish Academy was produced in 1726-39, and that of the Russian Academy in 1789-17994. By the 19^th century the great publishing houses were bringing out extended series of lexicological works: notably in France (Littré, Dictionnaire de la Langue française, in 1863-78; and Larousse, Grand Dictionnaire Universel du XIXe siécle, an encyclopedic dictionary in 15 volumes, 1865-76) and in Germany (Meyer’s Great Encyclopedic Lexicon in 46 plus 6 supplementary volumes, 1840-55). Each of these major works was followed by a large number of ‘spin-off’ publications of various kinds [Halliday, Yallop, 2007 : ].