Dictionary

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A multi-volume Latin dictionary at the University of Graz Library.

The dictionary is a work where you can look up words or terms and provide their meaning, definition, etymology, spelling, fixed pronunciation, syllabic separation, and grammatical form. The information it provides varies depending on the type of dictionary in question. In many cases dictionaries provide the meaning of words, their etymology, their spelling, synonyms and antonyms.

Origins

It is believed that the first dictionaries appeared in Mesopotamia. This affirmation comes, in large part, from the discovery of several cuneiform texts in the Library of Ashurbanipal, in Nineveh, which related Sumerian words.

A Chinese dictionary, the Erya of the III century a. C., is the oldest monolingual dictionary that is preserved; and some sources cite the Shizhoupian (probably compiled sometime between 700 BC and 200 BC, possibly earlier) as a 'dictionary', although modern scholars consider it a calligraphic compendium of Chinese characters from bronzes of the Zhou dynasty. Philitas of Cos (fl. IV century BCE) wrote a pioneering vocabulary Words in disorder (Ἄτακτοι γλῶσσαι, Átaktoi glôssai) which explained the meaning of rare Homeric and other literary words, local dialect words, and technical terms. The first Sanskrit dictionary, the Amarakośa, was written by Amarasimha around the IV of our era. Written in verse, it collects about 10,000 words. According to the Nihon Shoki, the first Japanese dictionary was the now-defunct Niina glossary of Chinese characters from 682. The oldest surviving Japanese dictionary, the Tenrei Banshō Meigi from 835, was also a glossary of written Chinese. In the Frahang-i Pahlavig the Aramaic heterograms are listed together with their Middle Persian translation and their phonetic transcription in the Pazend alphabet. A 9th century Irish dictionary, Sanas Cormaic, contains etymologies and explanations for over 1,400 Irish words. In the 12th century, the Turkish-Karakhan scholar Mahmud Kashgari completed his work "Divan-u Lügat' it Türk", a dictionary on Turkish dialects, but especially Karakhani Turkish. His work contains between 7,500 and 8,000 words and was written to teach non-Turkish Muslims, especially Abbasid Arabs, the Turkic language.Al-Zamakhshari wrote a small Arabic dictionary called 'Muḳaddimetü'l -edeb & # 34; for the Turkic-Khwarazm ruler Atsiz. CumanoTurkish. In Mamluk Egypt, Ebû Hayyân el-Endelüsî finished his work "Kitâbü'l-İdrâk li-lisâni'l-Etrâk", a dictionary on the Kipchak and Turkmen languages spoken in Egypt and the Levant. A dictionary called "Bahşayiş Lügati", written in Old Anatolian Turkish, also served as a dictionary between Oghuz Turkish, Arabic and Persian. But it is not clear who wrote the dictionary and in what century exactly it was published. It was written in the Old Anatolian Turkic of the Seljuk period and not of the late medieval Ottoman period. In India around 1320, Amir Khusro compiled the Khaliq-e-bari, which dealt mainly with Hindustani and Persian words.

Arabic dictionaries were produced between the 8th and 14th centuries AD, arranging words in rhyming order (by the last syllable), in alphabetical order of radicals, or in alphabetical order of the first letter (the system used in dictionaries of modern European languages). The modern system was used mostly in specialized dictionaries, such as those for terms from the Qur'an and hadith, while most general-purpose dictionaries, such as the Lisan al-Arabic (XIII, still the best-known large-scale dictionary of Arabic) and the al-Qamus al-Muhit (XIV) listed words in alphabetical order of stems. The Qamus al-Muhit is the first practical Arabic dictionary to include only words and their definitions, eliminating the supporting examples used in dictionaries such as the Lisan and the Oxford English Dictionary.

Vocabulary dell'Accademia della Crusca, 1612

Types

There are several types of dictionaries, depending on their function and use:

Regulatory

They include terms that are considered correct according to the standard. For the Spanish language, the reference is the Dictionary of the Spanish language (DLE), of the Royal Spanish Academy, prepared jointly by the twenty-three Academies of the Association of Academies of the Spanish Language. The Student Dictionary is the reference work for middle school and high school students.

Practical use

They collect meanings in the words that are not recognized by the competent body (such as the Royal Spanish Academy) but that, nevertheless, are widely used in society. This is the case, for example, of the Dictionary for the use of Spanish (DUE), by María Moliner; the Diccionario Clave, by Concepción Maldonado; and the Dictionary of Current Spanish Usage (DEA), by Manuel Seco, Olimpia Andrés and Gabino Ramos.

Monolingual

They briefly explain the meaning of the words of a certain language. These dictionaries do not contain, unlike the bilingual ones, definitions that include equivalents in other languages.

Bilingual

Dictionaries that consist of translating a word from one language to another, for example, from Spanish to English and vice versa. They are generally used when studying a language other than the mother tongue or when searching for a word that is written or spoken in another language and is not known in the mother tongue.

Learning

They are dictionaries made for native or foreign students. They offer simpler definitions than in dictionaries designed for the general public and more syntagmatic and paradigmatic information is provided in the articles. The number of examples provided for each lemma is also greater. An example of a learning dictionary for native Spanish speakers is the Student's Dictionary, already mentioned. Some learning dictionaries for students of Spanish as a foreign language are the Dictionary for teaching the Spanish language, from VOX-Universidad de Alcalá (DIPELE); the Salamanca Dictionary of the Spanish Language, by Santillana; the Dictionary of Spanish for foreigners, by SM; and the Dictionary for Spanish students, by Espasa.

Etymological

They are the dictionaries in which life is facilitated and information about the origin of the words of a certain language. Perhaps the most prestigious etymological dictionary of the English language is the Oxford English Dictionary. Perhaps the most famous etymological dictionary (although it is no longer the most up-to-date) of the Spanish language is the Treasure of the Castilian or Spanish Language (1611), the work of Sebastián de Covarrubias y Orozco, which is not not only an etymological dictionary, but also provides a great deal of historical data on the language used at the time.

Of synonyms and antonyms

In these dictionaries, words of similar and opposite meanings are related, to facilitate the choice of these when writing texts. The simplest ones are limited to giving a list of words for each entry, but some more complex ones also indicate the differences in nuance with the searched word, without being a thesaurus (see below); Not all words have antonyms. In some cases, thesaurus and antonym dictionaries also include paronyms.

Specialized

These are dictionaries that are dedicated to words or terms that belong to a specific field or technique, such as computer science, gardening, engineering, computing, genetics, heraldry, gastronomy, language SMS, weights and measures, abbreviations, etc. They provide brief information about the meaning of such words or terms. They can also be language dictionaries that indicate the translation into another language or languages of the words or terms they include.

Inverse or rhyming

They are dictionaries of the language with the particularity that they are ordered alphabetically according to the last letters of each word, instead of the first. Its main use is to search for words that rhyme with another(s), for the writing of poems and verses. Some reduced reverse dictionaries do not include definitions, but only the list of words ordered in this way.

On Grammar

In these dictionaries, words are not ordered, but grammatical structures. Its main use is for people who are learning a foreign language, since it allows them to search for grammatical structures in a text and consult their meaning and construction.

Doubts

They collect words and phrases whose meaning has been distorted and do not mean in society what a dictionary of the language indicates. These dictionaries help a copywriter or writer to use the correct terms, without being carried away by the popular meaning. Unlike the previous practical use dictionary, its objective is not to reveal the vulgar use of a word, but to warn against it, and to propose suitable alternatives for specific purposes.

Thesaurus

Thesauruses are works that list numerous words that have a more or less direct relationship with the word or query object. They are not, therefore, synonym dictionaries, since the latter only include words with a similar and equivalent meaning.

Ideological or like-minded

Words are located according to their association with an idea. It starts from general ideas and becomes more specific until reaching a list of words among which the searched one will be found. It differs from the thesaurus in that in the former the words are related to words with some relationship, while in the latter the words are grouped with ideas. For example, to find the name of a certain green color that you don't remember, look in the "nature" group; within this, in the group "light"; inside this, in the "color" group, then in the "green" group; and there, among others, is "glauco", a specific shade of green.

Conceptual analog dictionary

It's a kind of thesaurus. Their characteristics mean that they are presented in electronic format (DVD or web page). It is called conceptual because access is done through concepts, not just through words. For example, too tired to is a multiword concept. This feature makes accessibility easy for the common user.

Visual or images

In a visual dictionary, pictures are mainly used to illustrate the meaning of words. Visual dictionaries can be organized by topic or alphabetical list of words. For each theme, an image is tagged with the correct word, in order to identify each component of the theme in question.

Encyclopedic

The dictionary contains more specific and detailed information and covers much broader topics such as about countries, continents, oceans, famous people; You can also mention how a certain word is spelled in other languages. An encyclopedic dictionary should not be confused with an encyclopedia. The first has brief information about the meaning of a term. An encyclopedia provides a lot of information related to each entry or article, not just a definition. Wikipedia is an example of a specific type of encyclopedia: the online encyclopedia that can be modified by users themselves.

Dictionaries are traditionally books. However, there are also dictionaries on digital support, such as CDs and DVDs, and some can be consulted on the Internet. Portable electronic dictionaries have also become popular, either as an application inside a phone or as a small stand-alone device with a screen and keyboard, often containing several dictionaries inside.

Parts

The parts of an article in a dictionary are as follows:

• Entry: Initial section of the article, written as a black letter motto and presenting the sought-after lexical unit. It consists of two parts: vocablo (or the best version that represents the form of words), and instructions or indications of use.
• Pronunciation: Pre-speak method, for gesticular language, and to form with the acquired reading, the spoken words, depending on the language of the native country.
• Etymology: Origin of words, reason of their existence, their meaning and form.
• Grammatical Category: Each of the words classes established according to their grammatical properties. The fundamental categories are article, noun, adjective, pronoun, verb, adverb, preposition, conjunction and intersection.
• Definition: Delimitation in concepts. It usually structure itself in primitive concepts, and/or that have evolved over time, reaching the latter to alter the length of the definition, even though its fundamental meaning remains intact. It is used, to clarify the fundamental meaning that can be unknown or confused, for some people, and, once structured, allows more understanding in the word and facilitates its use in different usual aspects.
• Aception: Each of the meanings of a word or expression of language, according to the contexts or senses shown, and contain different understanding of the term or article found. If they are not numbered in bold, they are separated by a double bar.
• Locutions or phrases made: Contour or group of words that form a legible and stable lexical unit, with its own meaning, in which the word explained is included.
• Indications about their use: Construction of linguistic norms that indicate the user how to understand and express the content, for the good use of the words or internal parts and avoid confusion, preferably not corrected by lack of learning. In turn, they show examples written in italics, to specify the meaning under a described context, if the found article is still unreadable.
• Synonyms and antonyms: Terms that can be explicitly linked by their meaning, minimum one. The term reciprocal or anonymous can be linked to another, but explicitly contrary to its meaning.

In a common dictionary, a common article is made up of the lemma, etymology, key definition, meanings, locutions, and examples. The delivery order of the divisions of an article can vary between dictionaries, to allow a wide differentiation, but the general concepts are not altered, even when not all the concepts are evolved. Some dictionaries include, in addition to these sections, additional information such as synonyms, antonyms, regional uses or specialized uses of a term, described above, even if this additional information is written before or after the section for searching and reading the words found. Regardless of the final structure of which the articles are not or are divided into all relevant pieces, each piece of information in a dictionary can always be useful to understand the context and proper use of a particular term. In addition, some dictionaries that contain pronunciations can be written or recorded, which can be of great help to those who have difficulty pronouncing certain terms correctly.

Invention of the monolingual dictionary of definitions

Portada del Tesoro de la lengua castellana, de Covarrubias, de 1611. National Library of Spain.

The first European dictionary dedicated entirely to a living language and offering a definition for each entry was the Treasure of the Castilian or Spanish Language by Sebastián de Covarrubias published in 1611. The Italian language was the first to have a monolingual dictionary written by a linguistic academy: the Vocabolario dell'Accademia della Crusca, whose first edition appeared in Florence in 1612. In French, it was not until César -Pierre Richelet who appeared the first monolingual dictionary in French (1680). The English language, although endowed with several dictionaries, will have to wait until 1755 to provide itself with an exhaustive dictionary of the English language with the Dictionary of the English Language, published on April 15, 1755 by Samuel Johnson.