Avoiding avian litigation

Is your dictionary too up-to-date?

This is not, we admit, a widespread problem.  Our tutor was using his morning commute to brush up on his Spanish.  (It is not really tested in most sessions, where his beginning students are sufficiently challenged to  write grammatical sentences.)  He had a book of poetry from the sixteenth century, for reasons we need not go into here.  One canto was devoted to a pastoral idyll, with crystalline waters reflecting the green of trees and meadows full of cool shade.  Inhabiting this place were birds sowing lawsuits.

“Lawsuits” was obviously the wrong word, but his portable dictionary gave no other translation.  Part of this limitation was due to its small size; the big, non-portable dictionary at home gave other alternatives.  But neither was quite satisfactory for the reason given on their covers: they are up-to-date.  The meanings of words and especially their poetic usage have changed in the past five hundred years.  Our tutor would have been better served by an out-of-date volume.

In fact all his Spanish dictionaries are somewhat out of date.  The oldest strata mention slide-rules but not the Internet; the most recent stratum has the Internet (and no slide-rule) but lacks social media or AI.  Similar things occur with our French- and Russian-speaking consultants.  Neither of them has yet attempted any documents to match our Spanish poet (Garcilaso de la Vega, if you must know), though it’s probably only a matter of time and gathering the motivation.  Then they, like our tutor, will be in need of outdated books.  No doubt useful works are held by University foreign-language departments; perhaps we should look into auditing some courses at a local institution.

But we think the need for old dictionaries is actually much wider than it appears.  Shakespeare’s language is the main obstacle for modern students studying the Bard.  Most editions we’ve seen gloss the more obscure words and phrases, but it would be handy to have the whole set in one place, especially when dealing with more than one play or with other contemporary writers.  We note that the King James translation of the Bible, still used by many congregations, is more or less Shakespearean, and contains many words and expressions that are opaque or misleading to a modern English-speaker.

And we needn’t go so far back.  The language of the Declaration of Independence can baffle students.  Even the world of nineteenth-century novels is quite distinct from our own both in its details of daily life (houses heated by fires, transportation by horse) and in the way words are used.  The young modern reader of Dickens or Conan Doyle could be saved much puzzlement and many mistaken ideas by a dictionary two hundred years old.

We envision a bookcase with shelves dedicated to each language, on which one could find a dictionary with up-to-out-of-date entries for, say, the sixteenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.  (A nautical dictionary would only be needed for specialists.)  Then readers would be much less cut off from the past.

Come to think of it, it would be a good thing if our tutoring consultant’s problem were much more widespread.