Jean Nicot's Thresor and Renaissance Multilingual Lexicography

JEAN NICOT'S THRESOR AND RENAISSANCE MULTILINGUAL LEXICOGRAPHY Roy Rosenstein Kurt Baldinger, editor-in-chief of the DEAF (Dictionnaire étymologique de l'ancien français) and dean of French lexical studies since the death of Walther von Wartburg, has noted that the history of the French lexicon is better known than that of any other language. No doubt few lexicologists would disagree with this bold statement. The history of the French dictionary, however, is considerably less well known than that of the French lexicon. This paper is intended as a step toward clarifying and completing what has been said about and what may be learned from the first monolingual French dictionary: Jean Nicot's Thresor de la langue francoyse (Paris: David Douceur, 1606; reprint, Paris: Picard, 1960 and Paris: Le Temps, 1979). To say that the Thresor is the first monolingual French dictionary is a considerable simplification of its long genesis, complicated history, and even disputed paternity. Aside from medieval glosses and glossaries, French lexicography begins with the work of the compiler-publisher Robert Estienne (1503-1559). In a monograph on Estienne and the French dictionary, Edward Ewing Brandon established some eighty years ago the now famous sequence in the development of the several dictionaries produced by the learned Stephanus. Estienne first prepared a Latin thesaurus that, with progressively more French translation and fewer Latin citations, became a Latin-French dictionary (1531-1538). In its bilingual form, Estienne intended his work to replace the polyglot Calepin (Calepinus), which was a Latin-vernacular dictionary that would eventually span up to eleven languages by the end of the century ( 1 502 and countless later revisions and reprints). Then, in 1 539, Estienne reversed his DLG (Dictionarium Iatinogallicum ), creating the DFL (Dictionnaire Françoislatiri). This was the first lexicographical compilation in which French was the source language; its title contains the earliest 32 Roy Rosenstein33 attestation of the French word dictionnaire. The DFL was a major lexicographic event but a sadly inadequate French inventory. Estienne had earlier noted his difficulties in translating the Latin entries of his DLG into French, and thus the DFL, constituted by reversing the earlier work, is incomplete and arbitrary. A later edition (1549) included more French, but not without adding perhaps as much Latin to the entries, in large part a result of Estienne's training under Guillaume Budé. After Estienne's death in 1559, his work was continued and enlarged further by his family and collaborators in the 1560s and 1570s. By the fourth edition (1573), Jean Nicot appeared on the title page as revisor. Finally, in 1606, after more than thirty years' effort, Nicot published his Thresor, now under the title its author had expressly chosen for it. If this was in a sense the fifth and final edition of Estienne's original DFL, it was the first and only edition of the Thresor. (The 1621 Douceur reprint changed only the title page.) Nicot had died in 1604, with his goal perhaps unrealized, and there remained no one of Estienne or Nicot's circle to continue their work. In the eyes of many, however, it was already a triumph. To what extent may this work be called the first monolingual French dictionary? Bernard Quemada has written that the DFL of 1539 was the first alphabetical listing of French words followed, aside from the Latin equivalents, by glosses in French. Despite the presence of some French-French entries, this was nevertheless the reversal of a Latin-French dictionary, and the vernacular still played a decidedly minor role. From a bilingual unidirectional inventory, Estienne's dictionary, in later editions and especially under the influence of Nicot, gradually developed toward the first truly monolingual French dictionary, the Thresor, the bulk of the material added to this work, as old as the septuagenarian Nicot, is in French. Until just recently, Brandon's 1904 study on Estienne and two short articles by Charles Beaulieux and Oscar Bloch in the same year were the most recent studies according more than summary attention to the Thresor. Several brief notices have 34Jean Nicot's Thresor appeared dealing with Nicot's career as diplomat (Ambassador to Portugal, 1560-1561), man of letters (editor, author, poet...