The Rise and Development of Modern Labels in English Dictionaries

The Rise and Development of Modern Labels in English Dictionaries Frederic G. Cassidy The labels in modern dictionaries are traffic signals. They tell us "go slow" or "caution" or "stop." Experienced drivers may not need them, but it'sjust as well to know what the Traffic Department considers legal and how the rules came to be. Labels answer a felt need. It has been a long development following the English language itself as it slowly evolved. The labeling story begins with Rome and involves most of western Europe, the Celtic and Germanic vernaculars, and the various grades of Roman Latin that spread with the empire. Developed languages are never homogeneous, always fluid, changing with the speaker or writer, the occasion, time, place, purpose . Plucking an example from the classical Latin years of Rome, one might raise a Shakespearean question: What language would Mark Antony have spoken when he came to bury Caesar? It could not well have been the high Ciceronian: that would hardly have captured the popular ears Antony was asking to borrow, nor would it have aroused in the populace the violent reaction it did. Antony would have spoken the everyday vernacular of the time, though in a rhetorically heightened form. This was the language that Caesar and his legions had carried into the world beyond Rome and that produced, in succeeding centuries, the affirmative si of Italian, the oïl of northern France, and the oc of southeastern France — vernacular variants that are still with us. Varieties of the Roman language, ever changing, regrouped as the "Romance" languages of today; the old classical Latin of scholars and the Church became what etymologists call "Late Latin" or "Medieval Latin." By the early 14th century the vernaculars had emerged to the point where they must be recognized as literary languages, so insisted a young Italian poet, Dante Alighieri. Banished from his native Flor- 98Frederic G. Cassidy ence, Dante made himself the spokesman for the vernacular as the basic language. He traveled throughout Italy observing critically the speech ofvarious cities and made his case afterwards in the treatise De Vulgari Ebquentia (ca. 1304), in which he writes: Since I find that no one before me has dealt with the matter of eloquence in the vernacular; and since I see how necessary such knowledge is to everyone ... I shall attempt ... to be of service to the speech of the common people .... I will proceed immediately to define the vernacular as the language which children gather from those around them when they first begin to articulate words; or more briefly, that which we learn without any rules at all by imitating our nurses. From this we have another, secondary language which the Romans called grammar. This secondary language is also possessed by the Greeks and others, but not by all; and indeed few attain it because it is only in the course of time and by assiduous study that we become schooled in its rules and art. Now of the two the nobler is the vernacular: first because it is the first language ever spoken by mankind; second because the whole world uses it though in diverse pronunciations and forms; finally because it is natural to us while the other is more the product of art. (47-48) So Dante sought to find out which of the provincial vernaculars would be the best to be adopted for a national literature. Though a loyal Florentine, Dante made no special plea for the language of Florence . But of the other cities his opinions are, to say the least, acerb. He starts with Rome: "Of all vernaculars the Roman tongue, no vernacular but a dismal, disagreeable noise, is the worst of all. And no wonder, since it matches the deformity of their manners and customs" (58). So much for Rome! He dismisses similarly the accents of half a dozen cities ofTuscany when he writes, "in their vast stupidity, [they] claim ... the most illustrious vernacular"; it is in fact "not courtly but municipal" (61). The popular speech of other parts of Italy he finds variously harsh, feminine, plebeian, certainly not noble. In the end he considers no single dialect worthy but imagines a kind of Italian...