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Unit 9: Dictionaries

Notes
than are English-to-vernacular dictionaries, and this is certainly the case for Tamil. Excellent
Tamil-English dictionaries of all sorts are available and in print, but English-Tamil
dictionaries tend to be of use only to Tamils, since they list obscure English words of all
sorts but give little information about the appropriate contextual usage of their Tamil
equivalents.
The reason for this state of affairs can be traced to the history of lexicography in India, and
in particular to the development of a lexicographic tradition, beginning with da Proença’s
Tamil-Portuguese dictionary, that departs, not unsurprisingly, from a strictly colonial
point of view. This was a one-way dictionary, specifically designed for the use of Portuguese
speakers wishing to know some Tamil, but not intended for Tamils wishing to know
Portuguese. At no point did it seem to occur to anyone that the needs of Europeans and of
Indians to learn each other’s languages were mutual, and could benefit from being combined
in the same volume. Speakers of ‘vernacular’ languages therefore developed their own
dictionaries, and the two traditions never meshed.

After da Proença’s initial effort at making the Tamil language more accessible to non-
Tamils, other European missionaries followed suit. Beschi compiled (1742) though did not
publish a Tamil-Latin dictionary [D247] and a Tamil-French dictionary (1744?) [D237], and
de Bourges compiled (18th century?) a Tamil-French dictionary [D238]. These circulated in
manuscript form and were widely known among Europeans studying Tamil. Predictably,
they followed da Proença in being dictionaries of a one-way nature, i.e. Tamil-European
language only.
In 1779 Johann Philipp Fabricius published his Malabar and English Dictionary, wherein
the words and phrases of the Tamilian language, commonly called by Europeans the
Malabar Language, are explained in English. [D225]Numbers in square brackets refer to
items in Dhamodharan’s bibliography of Tamil dictionaries, given in the bibliography.
This dictionary formed the basis for several subsequent editions, most recently in 1972,
and is still in print under the title A Dictionary, Tamil and English [D221], published by
the Tranquebar Mission Press. It remains the best one-volume Tamil-English dictionary
available today, although it does not always reflect modern usage, especially not the
spoken language. Fabricius published an English-Tamil dictionary (A Dictionary of the
English and Malabar Languages [D278]) in the same press in Vepery in 1786, and apparently
intended that this companion volume would be bound together with the Tamil-English
volume (Duverdier 1978) but for various reasons—war in Europe, and a severe paper
shortage in India—this hope was not realized and apparently very few of the English-
Tamil volumes ever appeared (or perished because of poor quality paper).

Today only very few copies of it are extant (Duverdier 1978:192, Shaw 1978:172) and it has
lapsed almost completely into oblivion. The fact that the two volumes were never issued
as one Tamil-English/English-Tamil Dictionary is significant and extremely unfortunate,
because it established the tradition of publishing dictionaries of South Asian languages as
either English-to-vernacular or vernacular-to-English that has persisted to this day. Usually
the vernacular-to-English dictionaries have been prepared by indigenous South Asian
scholars as an aid to people learning English. The result is a tradition of lexicography that
fails to recognize that a one-way dictionary does not fulfil the needs of anybody, i.e.
neither non-Tamils nor indigenous scholars. Following this tradition a number of English-
Tamil dictionaries have been produced since the time of Fabricius, many of them building
on his work, such as Knight and Spaulding 1842 Knight and Spaulding and Visvanatha
Pillai have recently appeared in reprinted editions, by Asia Educational Services, New
Delhi, 1989. [D281] (with revisions by Hutchings 1844 and Appaswamy Pillai 1888 [D290]),
Ochterlony 1851 [D290], Brotherton 1842 [D 272], Anketell 1888 [D267], Visvanatha Pillai
Contd....

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