“DICTIONARIES are like watches: the worst is better than none, and the best cannot be expected to go quite true”, said Samuel Johnson, the wit and the lexicographer.

Johnson has explained the word ‘lexicographer’ in his Dictionary of the English Language as “a writer of dictionaries, a harmless drudge”. This is not just his usual witticism but serves as a cue to his frustration as well, since lexicography — or the art and craft of writing dictionaries — is a thankless job and may well be termed as ‘harmless drudgery’, as some lexicographers, including this writer, may readily testify.

But writing a dictionary ‘on historical principles’, also known as ‘on philological principles’, is a double whammy: in addition to word definitions, the lexicographer has to cite brief quotations from authentic authors as illustrative examples of meanings, nuances and usage. This is a herculean task as it aims at ‘recording the language’ with citations, as is famously said about Samuel Johnson’s dictionary that it was the first to record and document the English lexicon comprehensively.

Johnson’s dictionary was first published in 1755 and this idea of recording each and every word of the language with citations from English literature ultimately gave birth to the Oxford English Dictionary, often referred to as OED. Before OED, such comprehensive dictionaries with literary quotations had been published in Italian and French. A monumental lexicographic work in German similar to OED had begun in 1854 and was completed in 1971. OED is the largest English dictionary, first published between 1884 and 1928. A mammoth, 20-volume second edition published in 1989, has 21,728 pages and enlists 616,500 entries.

An all-important aspect of a dictionary compiled on historical, or philological, principles is to record the entire lexicon taking into account the different meanings of all the words in a language as they changed their meanings and orthography during different eras — with citations from literature, of course. Sir Syed Ahmed Khan had dreamt of such an Urdu dictionary, but he was too busy with his other educational, literary and political projects to spare time for the dictionary, though he had discussed his plans with Garcin de Tassy, the French scholar of Urdu who much appreciated the idea. In 1930s, Moulvi Abdul Haq began compiling such an Urdu-Urdu dictionary named Lughat-i-Kabeer. Much of the manuscript, housed at Anjuman Taraqqi-i-Urdu’s Delhi office, was looted or burnt down during the riots in the wake of independence in 1947. Though two volumes of Lughat-i-Kabeer were published by the Anjuman, first in 1973 and the second in 1977, the rest of the manuscript was never recovered or, perhaps, was never prepared.

In 1958, the government of Pakistan decided to publish the Great Urdu Dictionary. The dictionary was to be compiled on the lines of OED. Its offices were established at Karachi, with Moulvi Abdul Haq as chief editor. To cut a long story short, the last volume was finally published in 2010, taking 52 years to complete. It is Urdu’s most comprehensive and largest dictionary, consisting of 22 volumes, named Urdu Lughat (Tareekhi Usool Par). Though the long journey was not without its surprises, disappointment and usual bureaucratic wrangling, the dream somehow survived and finally came true.

This monumental work in Urdu is in fact something we all can be proud of. But such gigantic works need evaluation, critical reviews and objective assessments so that the revision is easy and free of the errors that might have crept in during the compilation or printing. Luckily, some researchers and scholars have begun reviewing and critically assessing the 22-volume Urdu-Urdu dictionary complied on historical principles. This writer personally knows some PhD scholars working on this dictionary. But the first scholar to complete such a research-based study is BiBi Ameena, an academic teaching at Islamabad’s International Islamic University.

The dissertation, for which a doctoral degree was conferred upon her, has now been published by Anjuman Taraqqi-i-Urdu, Karachi. The book offers typology of dictionaries and a brief history of Urdu lexicography in the first chapter. The next chapter discusses Urdu Dictionary Board’s history, its working, the historical principles and the lines on which the board’s dictionary was compiled. The critical study of the entries of the dictionary has been taken up in the third, fourth and fifth chapters, pinpointing some errors, analysing a large number of entries and critically evaluating the criticism on the dictionary as offered by some renowned scholars such as Rasheed Hasan Khan, Shams-ur-Rahman Farooqi, Mushfiq Khwaja, Shaukat Sabzwari and some others.

The scholar has done justice to the research work on a technical subject that required back-breaking hard work and a meticulous sifting through entries of 22 volumes spreading over 20,000 pages.

One hopes that Urdu Dictionary Board would take advantage of this work when it decides to revise its dictionary and considers the lacuna pointed out in the research work. The suggestions that the scholar has offered in the conclusion, too, should be taken into account at the time of preparing the second edition.

drraufparekh@yahoo.com

Published in Dawn, June 16th, 2020