3The Historical Origins of

the General-Purpose Dictionary

3.1 Pre-history: The first dictionaries 制作

者 王 静

Outline

The Ancestors of Our DictionariesThe Incentives for Proto-dictionary

MakingProto-dictionaries in European &No

n-European Societies

Introduction

Ⅰ.The Ancestors of Our Dictionaries

Sumerian lists 苏美尔人 苏美尔人 Dating back to the t

hird millennium BC

Introduction

Ⅱ.‘Oral’ Dictionaries They may exist before the writing system Nowadays some societies that don’t have w

riting system have oral dictionaries

Introduction

Having lists of words, sometimes with definitions; bilingual or monolingual

Taking the form half poetry and half lexicography

The Incentives for Proto-dictionary Making

Ⅰ.The Incentives For instruction of future administrators

(Sumer) For commercial and administrative relations

with other communities (Egypt) For poetry (as for some early dictionaries of

Arabic)

The Incentives for Proto-dictionary Making

For religion (giving explanatory notes of the Gospels)

Arabic — 7B.C. the glosses of the Koran( 古兰经 )

China — 21B.C. the glosses of the Buddhist Scripture

The Incentives for Proto-dictionary Making

Ⅱ.Characteristics of the IncentivesThe need actually came from the

compilers not the public.Dictionaries were not simple linguistic

tools

Proto-dictionaries in European &Non-European Societies

Ⅰ.Non-European societies Monolingual or at most ‘bi-varietal’Ⅱ.European societies Glosses ( 注释 ) ① The ancestors of dictionaries ② Helping monks read important texts (La

tin/Greek)

Dictionaries in European &Non-European Societies

Ⅲ.The ‘true’ Dictionaries Commercial or cultural relations with com

munities using different languages The need of translations Those early bilingual dictionaries The Introductory to Wryte To Pronounce French (1521)

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