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The Dictionary and the Historian

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 May 2014

Jan Vansina
Jan Vansina*
Affiliation:
Universiteit Katolieke te Leuven
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Despite their uninviting aspect, dictionaries make for engrossing historical reading. Seemingly dull compilations conceal an ample description of a society and its culture at a given moment in time. Each entry in the original language constitutes a bit of information. For African languages the amount of information varies between one thousand or fifteen hundred entries in the shorter vocabularies to as many as eighty thousand for the fullest dictionaries. Anything less than a thousand words may be considered to be only a wordlist, the longest of which rarely exceeds five hundred items. Most dictionaries seem to contain between six thousand and thirty thousand entries. The extent of information is astonishing because the form is usually so condensed that it consists only of a gloss as translation of the term given. The best dictionaries contain explanations of the gloss, references to relevant publications, and examples taken from everyday speech as well as from literary usage, and they begin with a short grammatical introduction. Unfortunately, this kind of dictionary has been and remains all too rare; usually the gloss is unnecessarily laconic. Even so, the most exciting as well as the most trivial information is to be found in these tomes. For example, we learn from the 1652 Kongo dictionary (7200 entries) collected or recopied by van Geel, both that the Kongo were matrilineal–a fact stated nowhere else for the old kingdom–and that playing cards was a popular pastime.

Type
Notes
Information
History in Africa , Volume 1 , 1974 , pp. 149 - 152
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 1974

References

Notes

1. E.g., Hulstaert, G., Dictionnaire Lomongo-Français (Tervuren, 1957), pp. xxxix, 1949.Google Scholar

2. van Wing, J. and Pendeis, C., Le plus ancien dictionnaire Bantu (Louvain, 1928).Google Scholar Adrien Willems Qater called Joris van Geel) was a Capuchin missionary who arrived in Kongo in 1651 and died of wounds the following year. While there he recopied the dictionary probably composed by Emmanuel Roboredo, a Kongo priest. See Hildebrand, P., Le martyr Georges de Geel et les débuts de la mission du Congo, 1645-1652 (Antwerp, 1940).Google Scholar

3. Edminston, A.B., Grammar and Dictionary ofthe Bushongo or Bukuba Language (Luebo, [1929]).Google Scholar

4. Guthrie, M., Comparative Bantu, 4 vols. (Farnborough, 1967–1970), 3:486.Google Scholar

5. Sims, A., Vocabulary of the Kiteke as Spoken by the Bateke (Batio) and Kindred Tribes on the Upper Congo: Kiteke-English (London, 1888).Google Scholar

6. Vansina, J., “Quelques questions dtiistoire des Tio (Batéké),” Voix Muntu, 4 (March 1967), p. 22.Google Scholar The eighteenth century is the most likely time for the Tio to have lost the art of smelting.

7. Doneux, J., “Bibliographie du programme Lolemi,” Africana Linguistica II (Tervuren, 1965), pp. 199–221.Google Scholar

8. Greenberg, J., “Linguistic Evidence for the Influence of the Kanuri on the Hausa,” JAH, 1 (1960), pp. 205–12.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Since some linguists have believed that loan words between closely related languages cannot be discerned, examples for the Bantu areas of Africa are instructive. See, e.g., Vansina, J., “Probing the Past of the Lower Kwilu Peoples,” Paideuma, 19 (1974), tables 4 and 5Google Scholar, which argue that the whole system of the four names of the marketing week were borrowed over a wide area and pinpoint the source to the market north of the Pool. Work in progress shows that it is unjustified to abandon the search for loanwords simply because two or more languages are closely related. One must, however, make careful use of the slightest irregularities to make points as well as work with groups of terms.

9. Because of their value high priority should be given to the publication of manuscript dictionaries from any period.