Two Centuries of Spanish and English Bilingual Lexicography: 1590-1880

Abstract

Two Centuries of Spanish and English Bilingual Lexicography: 1590-1880. By Roger J. Steiner. Mouton, The Hague, 1970:130 pages. Very little attention has been paid to Spanish lexicographical history, particularly to the history of Spanish and English bilingual lexicography. This book is a pioneer effort. The work begins with a study of John Thorius' glossary of 1,100 entries, which was appended to his Spanish Grammar of 1590 and Richard Percyvall's work of 1591, which is really the first Spanish and English dictionary. And it then takes up the dictionaries of the following: William Stepney (1591), John Minsheu (1599, 1617, 1623), Captain John Stevens (1705, 1706, 1726), Peter Pineda (1740), Joseph Giral Delpino (1763), Joseph Baretti (1778, 1786), and finally Thomas Connelly and Thomas Higgins (1797-1798). All of these dictionaries were designed for English-speaking users except Connelly's, which was designed for speakers of both languages. Percyvall makes use of the Spanish-Latin dictionary of Nebrija. He uses Nebrija's method of alphabetization and takes etymologies and vocabulary entries from him. And he may have used as sources of the meanings of Spanish words some of the English translations of Spanish works that had been made without benefit of a bilingual dictionary before 1591. Dr. Steiner provides in Appendix A a sample list of such translations under subject headings such as history, literature, navigation, travel, medicine, military science, religion, etc. Native speakers of Spanish were consulted as informants from the first. Percyvall consulted Spanish captives from the Invincible Armada. And all later dictionaries, except that of Connelly, borrowed extensively from their predecessors. Connelly's dictionary was epoch-making. It had recourse to two important monolingual dictionaries for many of its entries, the dictionary of Samuel Johnson (1755) and the dictionary of the Spanish Academy (1734). And it was the first Spanish and English dictionary to be printed in Spain. It became an important source for the development of Spanish and English bilingual lexicography in the nineteenth century. Lexicographers are wont to work with open copies of their predecessors' works on their desks. This probably explains why they are prone to carry over obsolescent and obsolete words, meanings, and spellings, and why they are slow in adopting neologisms. This is also why dictionaries do not always reflect the contemporary state of the language. Dr. Steiner discusses and analyzes the characteristics of each dictionary with examples, the contributions it made in content and technique, and sometimes the retrogressions it was guilty of. This book will be interesting and useful to the lexicographer, the philologist, the literary historian, and most of all the historian of the Spanish language. HENRY HARE CARTER University of Notre Dame