The Study of Language in England, 1780-1860

"It helps to understand where this idea about, ‘What kind of dictionary do we need — or is still needed?’ came from. This is a really good introduction to the intellectual climate, what people thought about language, and how they thought about it academically. I confess that the earlier part of the book is very dense and about the philosophy of language. But it traces the development of particular ideas about language and in the last couple of chapters it talks about the foundation of the London Philological Society, which was the society that set the dictionary going, and some of the people involved in that society. You asked me to select five books. If I could have chosen chapters, there is a more recent book, the Oxford Handbook of Lexicograph y , which has a chapter in it by John Considine on the development of the idea of the historical dictionary. I think that would be a better introduction to where the OED came from. It is straight to the point because Aarsleff’s book is about the history of the study of language generally, whereas John Considine’s chapter talks about the development of the historical principle, the idea that the way to write a dictionary entry is to work out all of the different meanings that a word has had and illustrate them using examples following the actual evidence of a word from its birth to its death. The development of that principle started in Germany, with German scholars. First of all, a German scholar working on a dictionary of Greek wanted to apply the principle to his Greek dictionary. Then the same historical principle was applied by the Brothers Grimm who, as well as collecting fairy tales, also started the German equivalent to the OED. German was the first of the European languages to be treated in this way. The Deutsches Wörterbuch was started by the Brothers Grimm, but it took an awful lot longer than the OED to finish. But it was from these ideas that the OED developed — and also an important Dictionary of Scots by John Jamieson, which used quotations in much the same way as the OED does. All of these together fed into the idea of the OED, and I would say John Considine’s chapter tells that story very well. And there’s an awful lot else in the Oxford Handbook of Lexicography which is worth reading as well. This is something that Hans Aarsleff talks about. It’s partly the idea of the language as the embodiment of the ‘spirit of a nation.’ People became interested in the idea of studying where this idea of ‘German-ness’ comes from and I think people had the same idea about English. It was both an interest in the idea and also patriotism. You could make it a great national project and certainly the OED, or the New English Dictionary, as it was originally called, was promoted by its supporters as a great, national, patriotic work. Ah, but then they become English. It’s a real mongrel language. English has drawn on so many strands of so many different languages."