literary notes: A research-based study on Urdu lexicography.

Byline: Rauf Parekh

'DICTIONARIES are like watches: the worst is better than none, and the best cannot be expected to go quite true', said Samuel Johnson, the wit and the lexicographer.

Johnson has explained the word 'lexicographer' in his Dictionary of the English Language as 'a writer of dictionaries, a harmless drudge'. This is not just his usual witticism but serves as a cue to his frustration as well, since lexicography - or the art and craft of writing dictionaries - is a thankless job and may well be termed as 'harmless drudgery', as some lexicographers, including this writer, may readily testify.

But writing a dictionary 'on historical principles', also known as 'on philological principles', is a double whammy: in addition to word definitions, the lexicographer has to cite brief quotations from authentic authors as illustrative examples of meanings, nuances and usage. This is a herculean task as it aims at 'recording the language' with citations, as is famously said about Samuel Johnson's dictionary that it was the first to record and document the English lexicon comprehensively.

Johnson's dictionary was first published in 1755 and this idea of recording each and every word of the language with citations from English literature ultimately gave birth to the Oxford English Dictionary, often referred to as OED. Before OED, such comprehensive dictionaries with literary quotations had been published in Italian and French. A monumental lexicographic work in German similar to OED had begun in 1854 and was completed in 1971. OED is the largest English dictionary, first published between 1884 and 1928. A mammoth, 20-volume second edition published in 1989, has 21,728 pages and enlists 616,500 entries.

An all-important aspect of a dictionary compiled on historical, or philological, principles is to record the entire lexicon taking into account the different meanings of all the words in a language as they changed their meanings and orthography during different eras - with citations from literature, of course. Sir Syed Ahmed Khan had dreamt of such an Urdu dictionary, but he was too busy with his other educational, literary and political projects to spare time for the dictionary, though he had discussed his plans with Garcin de Tassy, the French scholar of Urdu who much appreciated the idea. In 1930s, Moulvi Abdul Haq began compiling such an Urdu-Urdu dictionary named Lughat-i-Kabeer. Much of the manuscript, housed at Anjuman Taraqqi-i-Urdu's...