The specialness of English
Speakers of English writing about their language are likely to trumpet
the specialness of the language, in particular its enormous
vocabulary. We've returned repeatedly to the Vocabulary Size
trope, most recently in
a
posting by Geoff Pullum:
Despite the fact that we have virtually
no idea of how to
measure
vocabulary size rigorously and fairly (which is one thing
differentiating vocabulary size from
penis
length), nobody cares: people are prepared (it would seem) to
accept imaginary facts about how many words are known by groups of
people about whom they know nothing (or about themselves, as with the
Payack
claims concerning English) as a reliable assay of intelligence
level, or even the sophistication level of a whole language or culture,
and to accept any kind raving nonsense anyone comes up with by way of
vocabulary counting.
English is said to have a humongous vocabulary, as a result of several
factors: the combination of Germanic and Romance sources; within the
latter, layers of earlier borrowings and later ones, based more
directly on Latin (and Greek); and the willingness of English speakers
to take in loans from a great variety of languages. All this is
commonplace, though annoying. Now it's taken to the next level,
in Sol Steinmetz and Barbara Ann Kipfer's
The Life of Language (2006), on
English words. After a discussion of doublets like
legal/loyal,
regal/royal, and
tradition/treason, Steinmetz and
Kipfer conclude:
This is partly why English is the only
language that has books of synonyms like Roget's Thesaurus.
Whoa! English must be
REALLY special, with so
many words that it needs a special resource to catalogue them.
Background comment: the specialness of English stands along with claims
about the specialness of other languages, Japanese and French most
famously, but also a number of others; I have had speakers of Persian
go on at length about the marvels of their language, including the ease
with which it can be learned and its special suitability for poetry.
Another background comment:
Roget's
is not just a synonym dictionary (though it can be used as one), it's a
thesaurus, a conceptual taxonomy (of the furniture of the world and the
organization of thought). It is one of the monuments of such
large-scale taxonomies: Bishop John Wilkins's
Real Character in the 17th century,
the French Encyclopedists in the 18th, Roget in the 19th, and Carl
Darling Buck's
Dictionary of
Selected Synonyms in the 20th. [Addendum: to which we can now add the developing
WordNet, a combination of dictionary and thesaurus organized on a number of dimensions.] All are organized
conceptually, and the last two are designed to supply lists of words
for each of the conceptual categories (for English alone in Roget's
case, for the Indo-European languages as a group in Buck's case).
Now, on the the central claim: that English is the only language with a
resource like
Roget's Thesaurus.
You would have thought that someone making such a broad-brush claim
would have at least tried to check it out. It takes only a few
moments to find thesauruses and synonym dictionaries for a variety of
languages;
here,
for example, is a review of four such books for Japanese, all in
Japanese only.
Meanwhile, for Chinese, Dan Jurafsky points to two popular modern
Chinese thesauruses, organized as semantic taxonomies with synonym
lists:
Mei Jia-Ju,, Zhu Yi-Ming, Gao Yun-Qi
and Yin Hong-Xiang. 1986. TongYi Ci CiLin [Synonym
Dictionary/Thesaurus]. Hong Kong. Commercial Press.
HOWNET AND THE COMPUTATION OF MEANING (With CD-Rom). By Zhendong
Dong & Qiang Dong (Chinese Academy of Sciences, China) ISBN
981-256-491-8. (
link)
and Mark Liberman notes that thesaurus-making has a very long history
in Chinese, going back to the Erya (links
here and
here),
said to date from the 3rd century B.C. and organized mostly in terms of
a semantic taxonomy.
No doubt there are many more examples to be found, especially given the
many modern languages with several strata of vocabulary from different
sources (Swahili, for example). Even languages without such
obvious stratification in their vocabulary have synonym dictionaries
and/or thesauruses; there's a Duden synonyms dictionary for German, for
instance.
My purpose here is not to start an inventory of thesauruses and synonym
dictionaries -- please don't bombard me with further examples -- but
just to show that it takes almost no work to discover that there are
languages other than English with such resources, in some cases
significantly antedating Roget's project. Unfortunately, the idea
of English as a special case was so powerfully attractive for Steinmetz
and Kipfer that they didn't even make an effort.
Semantic taxonomies are very old indeed, usually organized in a kind of
outline fashion, though in prose: things are animal, vegetable, or
mineral; of the animals, there are the animals of the sky, the animals
of the water, and the animals of the land; of the animals of the land,
there are those that go on two feet, those that go on four, those that
go on six, those that go on eight, and those that creep upon the land;
etc.
It's a very natural idea to attach lists of words to the categories at
the bottom level. So it's not really a surprise that people were
doing this a couple of millennia ago.
zwicky at-sign csli period stanford period edu
Posted by Arnold Zwicky at January 5, 2007 12:47 PM