quote:

The antecedents of the modern dictionary of a language were the glossaries or vocabularies, as we should now call them, of rare words or dialect words or words of a given author or group of writings. The early Greek terms for such were λεξεις [lekseis] or γλωσσαι [glōssai] (whence Lat. glossarium > Eng. glossary, etc.), later λεξικον (sc. βιβλιον) [leksikon (scilicet (that is to say, namely) biblion)], whence MLat. lexicon and the similar forms familiar in the modern Eur. languages, though less common than those listed.

Grk. ονομαστικον [onomasticon], the title of the well-known work of Pollux (more properly pl. τα ονομαστικα [ta onomastika] for the whole work, -κον for each book), with its classification by subjects, neut. (sc. βιβλιον) [scilicet (that is to say, namely) biblion] of adj. ονομαστικος [onomasticos], deriv., through vb. ονομαζω [onomazō], of ονομα [onoma] 'name'. Hence also ονομασια [onomasia] or pl. ονομασιαι [onomasiaa] applied to similar classified lists.

MLat. dictionarium (or dictionarius sc. liber), deriv. of Lat. dictio 'saying', in MLat. also 'word'. Hence the Romance and Eng. words.

[...]

The other words are obvious derivitives or compounds ('wordbook' in Gmc. and W. geirlyfr) of the usual words for a 'word' as listed in 18.26, e.g., NIr. faclōir (W. geiriadur), Lith. žodynas, SCr. rječnik, Russ. slovar'.

[Carl Darling Buck. 1949 [1988]. A Dictionary of Selected Synonyms in the Principal Indo-European Languages, University of Chicago Press, §18.27. Still in print and a must-have for the true word-lover.]

(NB: vocabulary is a collection of vocables and glossary one of tongues.)

quote:

While dictionary, and occasionally lexicon, are the current words of choice when describing a wordbook arranged in alphabetical order, there have been a number of contenders for that role. Among the titles given to wordbooks have been an abecedarium (an alphabetical order), an alveary (a beehive), a catholicon (a cureall), an ortus (a garden), a medulla (a marrow or pith), a glossary, a manipulus (a handful), a sylva (a wood), a promptuarium or thesaurus (both a treasury or storehouse), a vocabulary and a vulgar (a common thing). By 1700 dictionary, from the Latin dictionarius: "a repertory of dictiones, phrases or words," [in the OED] had won through, and ever since it has been the predominant term.

[Jonathon Green. 1996. Chasing the Sun: Dictionary Makers abd the Dictionaries They Made, pp.10f.]

Re: the first book, how does one read those odd letters? Or must you learn the individual languages in order to do that?

The Green book sounds particularly interesting to me. Some of them make sense, like glossary or thesaurus...but medulla?

how does one read those odd letters?

If you mean the Greek letters, I've provided a transliteration of each word in the Latin alphabet. If you mean the others, heres what they stand for:

Lithuanian žodynas, Serbo-Croatian rječnik, and Russian slovar'.

The upsidedown circumflex is usually called a haček after the Czech name for this diacritic. It is similar to putting an h after the letter modified in English: c /ts/ as in English bits, č /tʃ/ as in church, r /r/ as in German heraus, ř (a raised alveolar non-sonorant trill) as in Czech Dvořak, š /ʃ/ as in ship, and ž /ʒ/ as in (some) pronunciations of garage or azure. The Cyrllic letter represented in transliteration by the foot sign (note, it's not really an apostrophe as that character curls slightly like the number 9) is called (in Russian) a мягкий знак (mjagkij znak) 'soft sign', although some linguists refer to it by its older name in Old Church Slavonic yer. It changes the letter it follows in pronunciation, usually by palatalization. The letters with the haček over them are refer to as having the caron diacritic which seems to be a non-existent English word used by the Unicode committee. Once named, characters cannot be renamed, so c with caron instead of c with haček is what we're stuck with.

I've seen a book, in English, for the use of librarians that covers many languages and their writing systems, orthographies, and pronunciations. Maybe CW knows about it.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: zmježd,

The soft sign and the hard sign are listed in the Russian alphabet. Not much guesswork regarding the pronunciation of Russian words, once you decipher the alphabet - which is mostly Greek, BTW.

mostly Greek

The Latin alphabet is mostly Greek, too, and the Greek alphabet is mostly Phoenician. (And a synonym for Phoenician is Punic.) And, my personal fave, of the Greek-derived alphabets: the Gothic.

[Added final sentence.]

This message has been edited. Last edited by: zmježd,

Which brings up another question: What languages, besides Russian and VietNamese, have alphabets and/or written languages as a direct result of another culture's intervention?
Cyril in Russia, the French in VietNam - and what else?

the French in VietNam

Asa, I, too, always assumed that the Vietnamese alpahbet (chữ quốc ngữ 'script of the national language') was created by the French, but in fact, it was an earlier colonizer, the Portuguese who created it. The earlier writing system which the Vietnamese used was based on Chinese characters. Saints Cyrl and Methodius, OTOH, were both Byzantine Greeks. One of the most logical writing systems, from a phonological POV, is the Korean Hangul (한글, hangeul). It was supposed to have been invented by Sejong the Great, but a team of specialists developed it and he put it into use (in the 15th century CE). It is a syllabary, but is pretty easy to learn owing to its structure.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: zmježd,

Wellll, live and learn! So, what other languages fit this description of alphabets supplied from outside? Surely most indigenous languages of the Americas - and what others?

Coptic started to use a Greek alphabet, when Egyptian finally dropped those hieroglyphs. The Polynesians use the Latin alphabet. The Turks adopted the Latin alphabet and dropped their Arabic-derived after the Ottoman Empire fell. Some languages use two different writing systems based on religious considerations. We've discussed Urdu vs Hindi here before. Also, Kurdish has both Arabic- and Latin-derived alphabets. Some Turkic languages in the old USSR used the Cyrillic but have since adopted the Latin. How about Cherokee, Hmong Messianic script, and Inuktitut?

quote:

So, what other languages fit this description of alphabets supplied from outside?

One language I once tried to learn was avesta, related to Sanskrit, that Zarathusthra wrote in. The "gathas" were orally passed down, but would have been written in a kind of cuneiform script at the time of their creation. Later, an arabic style script was invented to preserve them. At the time the script was used to preserve the language, I don't believe it was actually used for normal communication, only liturgies.

The Avesta is written in an Iranian language (related to Old Persian and, more distantly, to Vedic Sanskrit) over a period of about four centuries, starting in roughly 1000 BCE. The texts, like the Vedas, were preserved orally until about the second through fifth centuries CE when they were collated and written down in the Dīn Dabireh (aka Avestan) script (which is derived from the Pahlavi script used for writing down Middle Persian). The Pahlavi script is derived from the Aramaic alphabet which is in turn derived from the same Phoenician alphabet which the Greeks borrowed. The Avesta texts are still used today by Parsees, most of whom don't live in Persia (Iran) anymore. It is one of the fastest shrinking religions in the world, because it does not recognize converts or exogamy.

[Corrected wrong word.]

This message has been edited. Last edited by: zmježd,

Pahlavi? Any connection to Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, the late Shah?

Any connection to Mohammed Reza Pahlavi

The word itself is Parthian and means Parthian. Ther Shah's father Reza Khan Mirpanj named his dynasty thus after his coup.

quote:

Originally posted by zmjezhd:
It is one of the fastest shrinking religions in the world, because it does not recognize converts or endogamy.

I'm puzzled: wouldn't it be not recognizing exogamy that would cause a religion's population to shrink? Or is my logic bassackwards somehow?

Phroggye

exogamy

Right you are, Froeschlein. Wrong I was. I've corrected my post above. Sorry about that.

What I find amazing about Zarathusthra's gathas is that they were orally transmitted rather than written down for hundreds if not over a thousand years.

What was so special about them that made this possible? At some point there was political pressure to continue the tradition, but was there anything about the language that contributed to their success?

quote:

Originally posted by Asa Lovejoy:
Wellll, live and learn! So, what other languages fit this description of alphabets supplied from outside? Surely most indigenous languages of the Americas - and what others?

Some languages in southeast Asia, like Javanese and Balinese, now use the Latin alphabet instead of their earlier Brahmi-derived scripts.