The Dictionary and the Historian

Despite their uninviting aspect, dictionaries make for engrossing historical reading. Seemingly dull compilations conceal an ample description of a society and its culture at a given moment in time. Each entry in the original language constitutes a bit of information. For African languages the amount of information varies between one thousand or fifteen hundred entries in the shorter vocabularies to as many as eighty thousand for the fullest dictionaries. Anything less than a thousand words may be considered to be only a wordlist, the longest of which rarely exceeds five hundred items. Most dictionaries seem to contain between six thousand and thirty thousand entries. The extent of information is astonishing because the form is usually so condensed that it consists only of a gloss as translation of the term given. The best dictionaries contain explanations of the gloss, references to relevant publications, and examples taken from everyday speech as well as from literary usage, and they begin with a short grammatical introduction. Unfortunately, this kind of dictionary has been and remains all too rare; usually the gloss is unnecessarily laconic. Even so, the most exciting as well as the most trivial information is to be found in these tomes. For example, we learn from the 1652 Kongo dictionary (7200 entries) collected or recopied by van Geel, both that the Kongo were matrilineal–a fact stated nowhere else for the old kingdom–and that playing cards was a popular pastime.