[Lexicog] circular definitions

[cce]

Wouldn’t it be that the question underlying this whole issue is that we don’t really know what a monolingual dictionary is for? Apart from the evident answers, I mean. We obviously don’t know all the words in our own language and occasionally we stumble on a word we don’t understand. Personally, I have two mother tongues, Dutch and French, and every once in a while I have to look up a word I don’t know. More in French than in Dutch, because I read more literature in French. But, on the whole, I hardly ever use the Robert or the Van Dale. But in any case, I would never look up a word like ‘cow’ or ‘bull’ in a monolingual dictionary, not in Dutch or French,  for obvious reasons, and not in any other foreign language, because in that case, Japanese for instance, I would not understand a monolingual dictionary and I would only understand it if the learning of words like ‘cow’ and ‘bull’ would be so far away I couldn’t even remember how and when I learned them. So, in Japanese, I use a bilingual dictionary. 
So I use a monolingual dictionary when it is my mother tongue, and a bilingual one when it’s not. I have never, ever, had any problem because of the, slightly stale, theory that there is no one-to-one correspondence between two languages. The context clarifies it all. So much for decoding. As for encoding, I had to write my PhD in English, of which I had, and have, only a limited command. In spite of the fact that the subject was, in part, ‘Learner’s Dictionaries’, I don’t remember ever to have been helped out by one of them. I already knew words like ‘cow’ and ‘bull’, and words like ‘abide’ or ‘indulge’ which I remember caused me troubles, would be explained in the bilingual dictionaries I’d consult and ‘the rest is corpus’. I could imagine that would be useful for speakers of languages such as Kaxinaua or Guarani, or any language with no decent bilingual English dictionary, speakers who would at any rate be fluent enough to understand a definition in a Learner’s Dictionary. An unlikely, but possible situation. A Learner’s Dictionary is a ‘universal bilingual dictionary’ since it translates one kind of English/German/Japanese/French (and that’s about it) into another kind of English/etc. As for ‘native speaker monolingual dictionaries’, they have undoubtedly a cultural use –you can’t imagine a ‘civilised’ language without its dictionary—, and a practical use when we talk about difficult words (“for the more-knowing women, and the less knowing-men”, as the saying used to go), but to pretend you try to define words like ‘cow’ and ‘bull’ in a book with the intention of explaining what these ‘things’ are to people who wouldn’t have a clue seems to me like one of the best concealed pieces of hereditary-lexicographic-bad-faith there is. One pristine example of a monolingual dictionary, the Crusca, defined a ‘horse’ as “animal notissimo, e di gran generosità.” In other words: “don’t come and tell us you don’t know what a horse is!” Which is quite sensible. If words like ‘horse’, ‘cow’ −“La femmina del bestiame boccino”− and ‘bull’−“Propriamente, il maschio delle bestie vaccine, serve a far razza”− were listed in la Crusca it was because it was a way to delimit the ‘realm’ of the language, if this is understandable in English, – i.e. this is Italian, that is not--, and to allow the authors-lexicographers to maintain an intelligent conversation, between gentlemen readers and writers, displaying a maximum of erudition and wit. The entries ‘cow’ and ‘bull’ are sprinkled with literary and mythological citations. (A tradition which, as we know, Covarrubias and Johnson were to follow.)
So the definition of what a ‘cow’ and a ‘bull’ is, is an existential question, not first a lexicographical one. Lexicographers have been side-tracked by statesmen who wanted to unify the language and centralize the country, and which had little to do with ‘explaining’ words to readers. (Having said that, I must admit that the first edition of the Académie mentions ‘foreigners eager to learn French’ as a possible audience.)
In my opinion, the circularity of definitions is a problem only for lexicographers at work, not for the dictionary audience. It is an interesting academic problem, but its hypothetic future solution will not make dictionaries any better from a user point of view.
 
To state the problem as being one of choosing between defining a ‘thrush’ as a ‘turdus turdus’ or ‘bull’ as a ‘male cow’ is, in my modest opinion, misleading, since it states the difficulty as being a practical one, one of solving a problem a specific audience would have, whereas it is a purely speculative one. I can’t imagine a concrete dictionary user looking up a word like ‘cow’ in a monolingual dictionary just to know what a ‘cow’ is. A situation like, for instance, someone coming across the word ‘cow’ in a sentence like “Did you know that cows love cereal, just like you?” wondering what a ‘cows’ would be? Highly unlikely. All this reminds me of a story by Borges in which, if I remember well, Chinese cartographers discuss on what the best map would be, concluding they should make one exactly the size of what they would like to chart: the size of the world itself.
I would wholeheartedly agree with Patrick when he asks what’s wrong with a circular definition. Nothing at all. It’s all about “classifying clouds by their shapes” anyway, as Wittgenstein would say. A very legitimate occupation for lexicographers trying to master their trade as best as possible, and for philosophers or semanticists.
To ask what someone would prefer, a definition A or a definition B,  is a question which should be answered by means of philosophical, logical, semantic arguments, any arguments, except practical ones, because they will only divert our attention from what really is at stake. In a dictionary, definitions that ‘explain’ are a minority because only difficult, infrequent words can be explained. The rest can only be ‘shown’ by means of words, or by means of images, or translated. In this sense I think Patrick will surely agree with the title of one of Ramesh Krishnamurty’s papers: The corpus ‘is’ the dictionary.
 
Philippe Humblé
 
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