Daily Times

Do you know what bilingual dictionary is? When we hear the word dictionary we usually think of it as some bulky books, but what we fail to realise is that these books are a treasure of knowledge for the seekers. For many students and teachers, dictionary is a resource for checking the meaning and spelling of unfamiliar words. A bilingual dictionary entails the description of two cultures because it deals with the translation of entry words from the source language to the target language.

When a person wants to learn another language and wants to comprehend a target foreign language he/she will consult a bilingual dictionary and when a source language speaker wants to express his/her feelings in a foreign language, he/she will also consult dictionary. As Swanson (1983:193) puts it, a bilingual dictionary can be useful and desirable to several kinds of people: students, travelers and linguists.

Roman Emperor Claudius (10BCE-54) is known to have compiled an Etruscan-Latin dictionary, which is now lost. One significant bilingual dictionary was Mah?vyutpatti. This marvelous volume of ‘precise understanding or essential etymology’ was compiled in Tibet during the late eighth to early ninth century CE, providing a dictionary composed of thousand of Sanskrit and Tibetan terms as means to provide standardised Buddhist text in Tibetan.

The oldest known dictionaries were Akkadian Empire cuneiform tablets with bilingual dictionary Sumerian Acadian word list, discovered in Ebla (modern Syria) and dated roughly 2300 BCE. The early 2^nd millennium BCE Urra=hubullu glossary is the canonical Babylonian version of such bilingual Sumerian wordlist. A Chinese dictionary, serving in the 3^rd century BCE, was the first monolingual dictionary, but some sources cite the 800 BCE Shizopian as a dictionary. Modern scholars consider it a calligraphic compendium of Chinese characters from Zhou Dynasty Bronzes. The first Sanskrit dictionary was written by Amara Sinha in 4^th century. Written in verses, it listed around 10,000 words. The oldest Japanese dictionary was long lost 682 CE Nina glossaries of Chinese characters.

In India, around 1320, Amir khusro compiled the Khaliq-e-Bari that mainly contained Hindi and Persian. Arabic dictionaries were compiled in the 8^th century. The earliest edition of Greek English dictionary by Hennery George Liddell and Robert Scott appeared in1843. An Englishman called John of Garland invented word dictionary in1220. A nearly non-alphabetical list of 8000 English words was the Eliminated by Richard Mulcaster in 1582.

The first purely English alphabetical dictionary was A Table Alphabetical dictionary written by English school teacher Robert Cawdrey in 1604. In 1616, John Bulloker contributed to the history of dictionary with his English Expositor. Elisha Coles published his English dictionary in 1676. Glossographia (1656) by Thomas Blount contains more than 10,000 words along with their etymology. Edward Philips wrote another dictionary, The New World of English words.

Samuel Johnson produced A Dictionary of the English language in 1755. Many people still believe that Johnson was the first author of dictionary for English. Johnson’s dictionary maintained the status of English language for  over 150 years, until the Oxford University press began writing and publishing the Oxford English Dictionary in short fascicles from1884 onwards. In 1806, American lexicographer Noah Webster published his first dictionary: A Compendious Dictionary of English Language. Webster learned 20 languages to compile a comprehensive dictionary, which took 20 years to complete.

The linguistic exploration in the subcontinent began with the arrival of the Europeans and finally the British. The latter established a transit trading post in the coastal city of Surratt in 1608, where the East India Company opened its first factory in 1612 after royal patronage was granted by the then Mughal Emperor Nuruddin Salim Jahangir. The Dutch East India Company (VOC) had already established itself in Cochin on the Malabar Coast in 1605. The Europeans were quick to identify that success in trade lay in their ability to communicate effectively in the local languages. They also identified that India was multilingual but one language practically served as lingua franca, they called it variously as Moors, Moorish, 0Indostan, Jargon, or Hindustani. This common vernacular was known as Hinduwee, Hindavi, Zaban-e-Hind (tongue of India), Zaban-e-Delhi (language of Delhi), Zaban-e-Urdu-e-Mualla (language of the royal camp), ultimately clipped to just Urdu/Oordoo (a Turkish word meaning a “camp or bazaar”).

The roots of early bilingual lexicography lie in the development of grammar books and glossaries which started with a Dutch emissary, Joan Josua Ketelaar in 1698 and continued in the form of early military grammars by Captain George Hadley (1772) and Captain James Fergusson (1773) of the East India Company. This was followed by proper lexicographic works by several eminent scholars, including J B Gilchrist, Thomas Roebuck, Dr Hunter, John Shakespeare, Duncan Forbes, and SW Fallon.