The Origin of the Dictionary and the Rise of English in Foucaultian Terms

Introduction

There is a significance of the English dictionary in the disciplining of the academic field now known as “English”. I would like to suggest that the English dictionary serves as a kind of symbolic central tower in the panoptican of English studies. The dictionary has a kind of invisible power that subjects us to write correctly and, at the same time, gives us our identities as proper English students who can write correctly. With this I have tried to echo Foucault’s theory of power, that it both oppresses and, more importantly, produces us as subjects of a certain system.

I will be doing a little bit of Foucaultian archaelogy, looking at the history and purpose of the English dictionary – culminating on Samuel Johnson’s monumental A Dictionary of the English Language, published in 1755 – and how the dictionary has shaped the literary consciousness of English Enlightenment.

History of the Dictionary

Believe it or not, the first ever English dictionary was not published until the year 1604, with Cawdrey’s A Table Alphabeticall. This work has only a measly 2500 headwords and provides nothing more than the most basic definitions and etymologies. Cockeram, in 1623, published The English Dictionarie, which ontains three volumes, arranged according to usual words, vulgar entries and encyclopedic entries. Perhaps the next great dictionary is Thomas Blount’s Glossographia, published in 1656, which has twice as many words as Cockeram’s work. Linguistic authorities in general, however, cite no other great dictionaries in the 17^th century.

At the turn of the 18^th century, however, there was an explosion of English dictionaries published in the market, beginning with John Kelsey’s Dictionarium Anglo-Britannicum in 1708, and ending with John Walker’s A critical pronouncing dictionary and expositor of the English language in 1794. In between is Samuel Johnson’s great dictionary, which went through many editions; Johnson himself was constantly revising the dictionary up until his death. Going through the catalogue of 18^th Century online collection, I was able to find at least 40 different English dictionaries published in the 18^th century, and all of them went through at least a handful of editions and revisions.

So why is there this great explosion of demands for the dictionary? After all, people have been writing all this time: in the history of English literature we have seen the genius of Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare and Milton, and they did not need dictionaries. In our consideration, perhaps it is best leaving out anytime before the 17^th century, since hardly anyone actually knew how to write anyway: writing was a privilege of the elite. But by the time of Milton, the seventeenth century saw a higher and increasing literacy rate, and people were beginning to read and write. But the 17^th century did not see the need for a grand dictionary, and indeed, no one attempted to put one together. Perhaps if we consider the purpose of the dictionary at the time, we might be able to gain some insight as to why the grand dictionary was all of a sudden in demand.

Purpose of the Dictionary

The 17^th century dictionary is actually not exactly the dictionary we have in mind. Several major differences can be noted between the 17^th and the 18^th century dictionaries: Firstly, 17^th century dictionaries lack several features of the modern dictionary: they do not teach its user how to pronounce or the word class of the word, nor teach their users how to use the word. Secondly, they define only supposedly difficult words that readers might encounter. The dictionary’s purpose is not to give exact definitions to all words; it only wants to clarify some words. These difficult words are often words that a reader might encounter in the scripture. Thirdly, they are also concerned with borrowed words from other languages that are in the circulation of common English usage, a point which is actually the exact opposite of the goal of the modern English dictionary. Most importantly, the arrangement of the dictionaries is not necessary always alphabetical; there might be some other agendas. Cockeram’s dictionary, for example, is structured in three volumes, curiously arranged this way: the first book has to do with “choicest” words; the second, “vulgar” words; the last, encyclopedic words. By the time we get to Johnson’s dictionary, the major form of a “definition” – which includes the word’s correct spelling, word class, grammatical forms, pronunciation, definition, etymology and usage – is shaped. User of the dictionary can readily look up any aspects of a word as that in his or her writing the word can be used correctly.

Linguistic historians point out that between the seventeenth and the eighteenth century there is a pedagogical shift from the studying of (Latin) grammar to the studying of (English) usage. At the time of Cawdrey’s Table Alphabeticall, the grammarians dominate the study of language. Specifically, Latin is the main body of knowledge that students (of presumably upper class aristocrats as well as those of the clergy) had to master. By the time of Johnson’s dictionary, he is able to speak of “assist[ing] the students of our language”. The English language, by mid 18^th century, has become a language to be studied, and therefore to be used correctly and perfectly.

Indeed, we ought not to be surprised by this indication: it is in the 18^th century that we see the rise of the English language into prominence. From an economic view point, the 18^th century did see the rise of a certain group of people which many historians termed as the “middle class”: these are people who began to profit from the expanding trade and commercial activities that were for sure on the rise at the turn of the 18^th century. The world of commerce spoke not Latin but English. Correct and efficient standardizations of communication are vital for prosperous trades. From a political point of view, the 17^th century in general saw the dominance of Louis XIV; the French language and culture were extremely influential. Nearing the end of the 17^th century, English was exhausted from decades of civil war, which was more or less put to rest by the Glorious Revolution of 1688, with the installment of William and Mary. Conscious or unconscious, England has a need to unify itself into a National character, and what better way to do it than having a nationally unified language, upheld by the supreme authority of the dictionary? In fact, getting rid of the French influence is the subject of many dictionaries and grammar texts in the 18^th century; Samuel Johnson, in the Preface to his dictionary, notes that the dictionary would help English speakers not to “babble a dialect of France.” Finally, socially, the rising middle class needs instruction to acquire the aristocracy’s “culture”; while they might not have a chance to learn Greek in order to read Homer’s Odyssey, why not learn English and read Pope’s heroic translation? Many of these dictionaries are concerned with giving their users the tools to write elegantly, and certainly this is no mere stylistic concern.

Foucaultian Archaeology of the Dictionar

Foucault famously stated that “People know what they do. People also know why they do what they do. What people do not know is what what they do does.” I have talked about what people do (which is to write and use the dictionary); I have also talked about why they do what they do (which are the different reasons for the prominence of the dictionary in the 18^th century). Now, as an archeologist, I have to find out what what they do does.

I have suggested that the dictionary is symbolically the central tower of the panopticon. For Foucault this is not a metaphor because the panopticon is literally how power operates. But in order for us to understand how the authority of the dictionary operates, we need to consider the panopticon as a metaphor. If the dictionary is the central tower, then individual cells represent individual learners of the English language. Recall Foucault’s two ways of training subjects: hierarchical observation and normalizing judgment. Without the dictionary, there is no normalizing judgment: English users are a blob of people who all have their own ways of speaking “English”; there are already many different dialects of the language, each with its own little variations. This did not matter in the 17^th century, since English was not the necessary language of communication for important issues (such as politics and, more importantly, the scripture). Everyone who dealt with these important issues knew their classical languages. But in the 18^th century, when commerce began to be prominent, and a new generation of “middle-class” who did not have classical training began to rise, there emerged a need to standardize the language: there needed to be some kind of normal English, so that people of the entire country can communicate without trouble. Once the dictionary is constructed, how to standardize the language becomes a much simpler task: the vague question of “how to use English correctly?” now can be categorized as how to spell correctly, how to use different forms of verbs, how to use a word correctly, how to pronounce each English word correctly, and so on. In each category the dictionary becomes the objective authority whereby normalizing judgments can be grounded upon.

Not only judgment upon the English language is normalized, it is also hierarchized. This is why many (if not most) of the advertisements of the dictionaries try to sell the dictionaries as tools that will allow writers to write with more elegance. (If you are not upper class, at least you can sound upper class!) For Foucault, where there is a site privileged by a mass of people, there will be differences; where there are differences, there is power. The English language, now a privileged site, now with a normalizing judgment, symbolized by the mighty authority of the dictionary, begins to slot different people into different hierarchal positions according to the value of the differences. A certain range of vocabulary, a certain kind of pronunciation or dialect, a certain kind of sentence structure (“The structure of his sentence is French”), and so on, all contribute to how a certain way of using the English language rank within the hierarchical system. Shakespeare? Sometimes he is too vulgar; Milton? Too Latinated. Pope? Now here’s an English poet! Samuel Johnson? Who does not want to write like him? The dictionary itself does not form any kind of ranking system; but the presence of the dictionary allows people to use it to form arbitrary ranks. The dictionary, then, clearly disciplines the English language.

The dictionary also metaphysically surveys (to play on the word “surveillance”, although the dictionary will most certainly point out my usage error) the users or subjects of the English language; in other words, we have internalized the power matrix opened up by the dictionary: without the dictionary, there would be no authority to judge us; there would not be so many categories in which we as writers are judged by; we would not be thinking that we are constantly judged; we would not automatically go look words up in the dictionary whenever we feel like that we are not writing correctly in English – the notion of “correct English” would not even exist. We literally think that we are constantly being gazed at by a personified dictionary, and that is why we automatically regulate our literary behaviours. We ought not to be surprised to see that at the precise moment of Johnson’s A Dictionary of the English Language we have truly reached an age in which English emerges as its own language; the 18^th century brought to England the climax of English poetic elegance as well as English prosaic prowess – Johnson himself was a brilliant writer of essays and poet of satires.

I must reiterate that power, for Foucault, is both oppressive and productive. We cannot think that power is only oppressive. Power is oppressive because it subjects us to its gaze and its systems of hierarchy; but more importantly, it is also productive because it allows us to become subjects of that system – it gives us an identity we can cling onto and identify ourselves as. Without the dictionary, anyone is just part of a random group of “English speakers”; the dictionary sorts out who we are – it identifies us both positively (“we are capable of spelling latinated words”) and negatively (“we are not those who does not know what latinated words are”). As Foucault writes, “We must cease once and for all to describe the effects of power in negative terms: it ‘excludes’, it ‘represses’, it ‘censors’, it ‘abstracts’, it ‘masks’, it ‘conceals’. In fact, power produces; it produces reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth. The individual and the knowledge that may be gained of him belong to this production.” (194)

秋意 / Autumn Mood

秋風奔馬呼聲叫﹐
落葉蝶膀霧影飄﹔
葉靜風停回憶看﹐
秋風再起未來雕。

The autumn wind, like the breath of a sprinting horse, howls,
The falling leaves, like the shadow of the wings of a butterfly in heavy fog, float;
When the leaves are still and the wind is paused, memories are reviewed,
But when the autumn wind rises again it carves the future.

* * *

This is probably my first poem in Chinese in which the meter is actually correct. I finally understand how the meter works, and, I have to say, writing in the Chinese meter is incredibly difficult, especially since I do not have enough Chinese vocabulary.

The Chinese meter depends on the tone of the character. In the Chinese language, the character's pronounciation is a combination of the sound and the tone of the character. Hence two characters may have the same sound (e.g. piao), but one may be in the first tone, and the other in the second (and there are four tones in total). The Chinese meter is determined by the tone of the character. The meter has two parts, called "ping" and "zi". This is kind of like the English "stress" and "not-stressed". In my poem, the meter goes something like this:

ping ping zi zi ping ping zi, (a)
zi zi ping ping zi zi ping; (b)
zi zi ping ping ping zi zi, (c)
ping ping zi zi zi ping ping. (b)

(The letter at the end refers to the rhyming scheme.) With the necessity to fit in the meter, writing parallel structures become a lot more difficult, since many words do not fit in with the meter, even though in terms of parallels they are perfect fit. If this poem seems especially bad, please forgive me. It is the first time I tried with the correct meter. May experience give me better poems!