The
word Lexicon, which is being used in the English language from the year 1603
onwards, seems to go back, in its origin, to ancient Greek and is derived from
the noun for ‘word’ and the verb ‘to speak’. The Oxford Universal Dictionary
explains it as “a word-book or dictionary; chiefly a dictionary of Greek,
Hebrew, Syriac or Arabic.” A lexicographer is, therefore, a writer or compiler
of dictionary or dictionaries. ‘Dictionary’ is described in the Encyclopaedia
Britannica as “a book listing words of a language, with their meanings in the
same or another language, usually in alphabetical order, often with data
regarding pronunciation, origin and usage.” In one of its Latin forms
(Dictionarius, a collection of words) this term was used in the year 1225 by an
English scholar, John Garland, as the title for a manuscript of Latin words to
be learnt by heart. It may be of interest to note that the words in this book
were arranged not in alphabetical order, but in groups according to the
subject.
In
the Sanskrit language we have works like Vaidika Nighantu, Amara Kosam,
Amarapada Parijatam, Medini Kosam, Viswa Prakasika, Yadava Nighantu, Vyjayanti
Nighantu and so on. The names of about 200 of them are mentioned, though
only 20 are said to be available. All of them are in the form of mnemonic
verses and are learnt by rote in childhood by the students of that language. As
in Sanskrit, so in Telugu, there are extant quite a few Nighantus
(dictionaries) written by the ancient scholars. All of them seem to follow in
the footsteps of their Sanskrit precursors. Jayanti Ramayya Pantulu, in his
preface to the first volume of the Suryaraya Andhra Nighantu(1936),
mentions ten of them. They are:
Samba
Nighantu by Kasturi Ranga Kavi
AnndhraRaltatnakaram
by Pydipati Lakshmana Kavi
Andhra
nama Sangraham by the same author.
Andhra
nama Sesham by Adidam Sura Kavi
Venkatesa
Andhram by Ganapavarapu Venkata Kavi.
Desiya
Andhra Nighantu by the same poet
Andhra
padakaram by Sri Raja Thyadi pusapati Veerapa Raju
The
Kanaams (verses) of Pregadapu
The
Seesams (another form of verse) by Chowdappa and
Andhra
Bhasha Arnavam by Nudurupati Venkata Kavi.
The
last mentioned in the list (viz. the Andhra Bhasha Arnavam) is
considered by some scholars as about the best of the lot, being the most
comprehensive. All these books are also composed in verse form, as an aid to
memory and are, in fact, committed to memory like the Vedas
by the Hindu scholar and the multiplication tables by the school boy. Though
they sometimes give the different meanings (nanarthas)
of a word (with suitable examples), it will be more accurate to describe them
as collections of synonyms than as dictionaries in the modern sense of the
term. As such, they are not very useful to the reader for ready reference, when
he is in doubt about the exact connotation of a word. They are also not
arranged according to the alphabetical order. (Among the Sanskrit Nighantus,
the Kesava Nighantu follows the Aadyakshara Niyama, the Viswa
Nighantu follows the Antyakshara Niyama and the Medini
Nighantu follows the Aadyantaakshara Niyama). They are all strangers to
the strictly alphabetical order of words, that we know of,
which is borrowed from the English and other Western lexicographers.
The
first Telugu dictionary produced by an Indian author to have made a favourable
impression on Western scholars in India is Mamidi Venkataraya’s Andhra
Deepika, completed in 1816. Venkataraya lived in Masulipatam. Though a
merchant by profession, scholarship was his first love. He is also the author
of a good Sanskrit-Telugu Dictionary called the Sabdartha Kalpatharu, which
runs to more than 1,600 pages. It has been reprinted very recently (1961).
Referring to his substantial work, William Brown says, in this preface to a
Grammar and vocabulary of the Gentoo Language(1817): “The assistance of this
man in the compilation of both grammar and vocabulary has been of the greatest
advantage.” William Brown’s concise Telugu English Dictionary, written
in 1807, was first printed in 1818. It was reprinted about 14 years ago, after
a lapse of 137 years. A. D. Campbell makes the following reference in his book
of Grammar: “Mamidi Vencaya, the author of the Andhra Dipica, an
excellent dictionary of Telugu, has in his preface to this work, introduced a
concise analysis of the language.” Campbell
who was Collector of Bellary in 1824, published his dictionary in 1821, the
first of its kind in Telugu, to be designed according to the alphabetical
order. Another dictionary, by one J. C. Morris, was published by the governing
board of the Fort St. George College between 1835 and 1839. It does not seem to
be available now.
It
is, however, with the monumental work of C. P. Brown that we really enter the
modern age in Telugu lexicography. His three dictionaries, the Telugu-English
Dictionary (1852), the English-Telugu Dictionary (1853) and the Dictionary
of the Mixed dialects and Foreign words used in Telugu (1854) mark
the watershed between the tradition of learning by rote and the practice of
thinking for oneself, between the scholastic method and the scientific attitude
to language and literature. Brown was more than the traditional lexicographer
of popular imagination, who is apt to be a rather dreary, cloistered soul, cut off
from the main currents of life. He was a poet and literary critic, editor and
translator, grammarian and philologist, linguist and classical scholar, and
many other things besides. He helped to reform the Telugu script and make
printing popular in Telugu. He was really a many-sided genius. He was,
essentially, a student of life.
A
rapid glance at his early life would give us an idea of the equipment and
outlook he brought to the exacting task of dictionary-making. Charles Philip
Brown was born in Calcutta in 1798, the son of the Rev. David Brown, who was
provost of the East India College at Fort William. In his early years he had,
with his innate flair for languages, picked up some knowledge of Bengali,
Hindustani, Persian and Sanskrit. While still in his early teens, on the death
of his father, he had to leave for England, where he had a good grounding in
Greek and Latin, besides a close familiarity with French. He was quite well
read in the masters of English prose and verse from the Bible, Chaucer, Shakespeare
and Milton to Johnson, Scott and Byron, the last of whom was his close
contemporary. It is reported that he knew the whole of the Bible, Shakespeare
and Milton, almost by heart. He was about 20 when he entered the Civil Service
under the East India Company and reached Madras, which had then as its Governor
Sir Thomas Munro, one of the far-seeing British rulers of the day. Brown did
not know a word of Telugu or Tamil or any other South Indian language when he
landed in Madras.
To
tell the story in his own words: “On leaving college, i. e., presumably the
Fort William College at Calcutta, in the year 1820 I was sent by Sir Thomas
Munro, then Governor, to a Telugu district and was obliged to learn the
language of the populace. I was employed for more than 12 years, chiefly as a
magistrate, among the Telugus and soon began to frame a vocabulary of the
expressions which daily occurred in conversation or correspondence. I had
intercourse with all classes, from the learned pandit or Raja to the illiterate
prosecutor or prisoner. Tradesmen, doctors, hunters and sailors, poets and
painters all became my instructors, as they fell in my way. Gradually, I was
encouraged to study the easier authors and subsequently the better poets. In
their writings, I obtained solutions of many difficulties in grammar and idiom;
and though the task occupied several years I think the object was worth the
trouble of attainment.”
Feeling
the need for explanatory commentaries for the classics of Telugu poetry he was
studying, he employed learned men to frame them for him in their
native Telugu, in the easy simple dialect which could be understood by the man
in the street and the foreign reader. During his fairly long stay at
Masulipatam as a District Judge, Brown collected around him a band
of pandits, well-versed in Sanskrit and Telugu, to read the classics with him
and guide him in understanding them properly, to settle the text, add the
exegesis, and get them ready for the press. This group of scholars, maintained
at his own expense, was popularly known as Brown’s College. (It may be
mentioned here that Brown was a bachelor and literature, for him, was a jealous
mistress. The bulk of his earnings, amounting to Rs. 3,000 to Rs. 4,000 a
month, which may be worth about ten times the sum in the present money, were
devoted to scholarly pursuits, on the purchase of rare manuscripts, on payment
to copyists, on the maintenance of local scholars and so on).
It
was while he was engrossed in the study of the Telugu version of the Mahabharata
that the idea of a Telugu-English Dictionary grew on him and held him in
its grip till the end of his life. For the difficult words in the text, his
learned assistants used to give him the meaning, in colloquial Telugu, or
Sanskrit, or Hindi. But very often, the Pandit, schooled only in the
traditional method, would give him totally
different and even contradictory meanings to an expression, without being able
to convince him about it in a logical manner. “The pandit was a sound scholar”,
he noted, but not accustomed to construing.” In this task of settling the
correct meaning and usage, and the exact connotation of words, he received
little or no help from the Sanskrit and Telugu lexicons, obtaining in his time.
He was, to some extent, satisfied only with Mamidi Venkayya’s Andhra Deepika
which was a distinct improvement on the ancient Nighantus. But, he says,
“The Deepika gives a mere selection of words used in Telugu Poetry.
The ordinary Telugu of common life is but slightly noticed.” Referring to the other
Nighantus, which had served his purpose in some way or the
other, Brown comments: “The Andhra Bkasha Arnavam is a vocabulary of
synonyms in verse. This and five more similar works have been re-arranged
alphabetically at my desire. All the native vocabularies are deficient in
verbs, whereas verbs are the most delicate and peculiar parts of the
language.–The Karkambadi Nighantu is an alphabetical glossary, framed at my
desire: it contains all the words found in the Andhra Nama Sangraham, in
the Andhra Nama Sesham, in the Venkatesa Nighantu and in the Samba
Nighantu.–The Orangallu Dictionary is alphabetically arranged, and
is a supplement to Mamidi Venkayya’s Andhra Deepika; it is anonymous,
and probably is the work of the same author,” He also mentions the Andhra
Bhasha Bhushanam, another vocabulary of synonyms in verse. Among the
Sanskrit dictionaries, Wilson’s Sanskrit-English Dictionary proved very
useful to him.
In
compiling his own dictionaries, Brown proceeded on the new scientific basis
common to European methods of lexicography. The words were all arranged
according to the alphabetical order, so familiar to us now, convenient for easy
reference and suitable for printing. In the words beginning with consonants,
he, however, chose to follow the varga pattern, i. e., grouping them together
as follows: Ka, kha, ga, gha, cha, chha, ja, jha, ki, khi, gi, ghi and so
forth. This method, which he adopted to facilitate the change of Parusha
into Sarala in certain combinations, did not find favour with his successors
in the line. He shifted the emphasis from the mechanical listing of synonyms to
a lucid and intelligent explanation of their meaning. Not only the literal
meaning and etymology, but the usage, grammar and syntax and pronunciation
(when necessary) are given, wherever possible. For Usage he drew from the
language of life as well as from the language of books. He did cite the Kavi
prayoga where available, including, in the process, Vemana and Saivite poets
like the author of the Prabhu-lingaleela hitherto not quite accepted as
respectable references by the orthodox pandits and tradition-bound scholars. He
also made ample use of personal conversation and private correspondence, legal
petitions and judicial records. (Incidentally, he did not hesitate to include
even certain unprintable vulgarisms, which formed part of the colloquial speech
of his day.) This was a revolutionary step, which marked the first shot in the
battle which was to end in the victory of spoken Telugu as a medium of literary
expression a century later.
The
Telugu-English Dictionary is a substantial volume of over 1,300 closely
printed pages, followed by its little companion, a Dictionary of mixed
dialects and Foreign words (especially of Hindi, Urdu and Persian origin).
The English-Telugu Dictionary is a work of almost equal size, learning and
earnestness of purpose. All of them were published by the society for promoting
Christian knowledge. The sallies of wit and strokes of humour that brighten the
pages of these monumental works present the author to the modern reader as the
veritable combination of a latter-day Johnson and a Telugu Fowler born before
his time. He expected them to be revised or superseded by the work of
succeeding generations. But neither his expectations nor ours have been
fulfilled so far. Even now, his works are not quite out of date, though out of
print for more than seventy-five years. They need to be reprinted in toto as
they are without any tinkering or tampering by present-day Telugu scholars who
seem to specialse in ‘editing’ or ‘revising’ such voluminous reference books of
the last century, at the rate of four to five rupees per page!
In
the last century, the only considerable dictionary, which had come out after
those of C. P. Brown, is the Sabdaratnakaram compiled by Bahujanapalli
Sitaramacharyulu and first published in the year 1885 and reprinted a few years
ago by the Christian Literature Society. It was a tour de force, as the
author had worked on it, almost single-handed, for nearly 25 years. It is a standard
work and had obviously made selective use of Brown without any acknowledgment.
It follows a strictly alphabetical order in the arrangement of words and gives
the Kavi prayoga to most of them, excluding all the expressions from spoken
Telugu which had not received the literary stamp of approval by the accepted
poets. Paravastu Chinnaya Suri, the author of the Telugu grammar Bala
Vyakaranam who is the idol of the traditionalists and the bete noire of
the modernists, is believed to have worked on a dictionary of his own, but
could not complete the project. The Andhra Deepika by C. Ranganayakulu
Chetti, a concise dictionary of less than 500 pages, was published in 1895.
Towards the end of the 19th century, Prof. T. M. Seshagiri Sastri of the
Presidency College had planned the preparation of a philological dictionary of
all the four South Indian languages and another relating to Hindi and Sanskrit,
but was snatched away before he could see them through.
The
Lakshmi Narayaneeyam by Kotra Lakshminarayana Sastri of Karapa, on the
model of Sabdaratnakaram was brought out in 1907 and some years later it
was expanded into four volumes by Kotra Syamala Kama Sastri of the same place
under the title of Andhra Vachaspatyam in 4 volumes. The major work (in
lexicography) to be undertaken in this century is the Suryaraya Andhra Nighantu,
named after its patron, the Maharaja of Pithapuram, under the auspices of
the Andhra Sahitya Parishat. Its initial planning was done by its first editor,
Vedam Venkataraya Sastri. The first volume was produced under the general
supervision of Jayanti Ramayya Pantulu, a competent scholar, though a
traditionalist to the core. It contains many Sanskritised words and word
compounds not found in Sabdaratnakaram. It is an ambitious work in several
volumes (now six) whose utility cannot be minimised, though it has defects
which were pointed out by Gidugu Ramamurthi Pantulu and others like Deepala
Pitchayya Sastri. The Vavilla Nighantu in three volumes, (of which 2
have come out) is a kind of mixed bag which leans heavily on its predecessors,
without much of original research work. The English-Telugu and Telugu-English
dictionaries by Sankaranarayana, who cannot forgive Brown for supplying him
with all the material to borrow from, smacks too much of the Bazaar notes got
ready for under-graduates (eager to mug up for the annual examinations) to be
accepted as a standard book of reference.
Among
the smaller dictionaries of this century, the one from Telugu to English
completely in the Roman script by A. Galletti,’ a talented member of the Indian
Civil Service, (published in 1935) is likely to come in handy for foreigners.
Like Brown, Galletti lays the accent on spoken Telugu. His is an experiment
full of possibilities. Sabdardha Chandrika, compiled by Mahakali
Subbarayudu and Ramachandra Vidyarthi Kosam by P. Sriramulu Reddi are
designed for schools. The Vidyardhi Kalpataru, and the Sabdardha
Deepika by Suryanarayana Sastri and the Dachepalli Nighantu are
single-volume editions. The Andhra Pradesh Sahitya Akademi has, in the last few
years, brought out a number of good reference books tike Telugu Sametalu (proverbs),
Padabandhaparijatamu (book of phrases), Vruttipada Kosam
(dictionary of occupational terms) and the concordance of
Nannaya and Nannechoda, all of which may provide the material for a
comprehensive, all-purpose dictionary suitable for the common reader and the
academic scholar alike.
As
far as dictionaries from Telugu to other Indian languages are concerned, I am
aware of at least two relating to Hindi–one by K. Satagopachari and the other
published by the Hindi Prachar Sabha. The Sabdartha Chintamani by
Tadikonda Timmareddi Desai (1906) gives the Urdu meanings for Telugu words. I
have not so far come across any dictionaries worth mentioning from Telugu to
any of the other South Indian languages. There is quite a lot of ground to be
covered in the cultural interflow of this part of India, south of the Vindhyas.
A dictionary of all the South Indian languages will be a significant step in this
direction. As the project might be too ambitious or unwieldy for individual
scholars and private publishers, the Southern universities could think of
taking it up in collaboration, in the spirit which they had shown in the past,
as, for example, in the setting up of the Southern Languages Book Trust. In
this connection, the useful work done in the Madras University on the
preparation of the Dravidian cognates could well be taken advantage of in the
compilation of an authoritative dictionary of the four languages.
Language,
like life, is ever moving and changing, taking in new elements and discarding
or transforming the old at every stage. Words are not like flies in amber or
butterflies in a glass case. Men of vision like C. P. Brown have always been hoping
that this change and vitality would be amply reflected in the dictionaries by a
lively contact with the current modes of speech. In the preface to his father’s
dictionary, R. Galletti looked forward to the day when a Dictionary of Modern
Telugu Usage (on the model of Fowler’s Dictionary of Modern English Usage)
would come into being, “establishing a norm and encouraging men of genius to
use the tools most fitted for their work.” He wrote (1935): “Perhaps,
inspiration will be lacking while the Telugu nation is in tutelage; but when
the full tide of inspirataion begins to flood the land, it is surely the common
people, the people of the villages, who should hear and applaud. It is their
language that must be used.” It is only by continuing the work of such
enlightened savants and dedicated scholars that we could pay our debt of
gratitude to them.