日本における英語辞書学の成立

英蘭辞書学と蘭和辞書学の融合

抄録

In the early part of the nineteenth century, paralleling the increasing number of foreign ships threatening the coast of Japan, the need for learning foreign languages, English in particular, rose to an unprecedented height in the Edo government and efforts were made to produce English-Japanese dictionaries. The first product was『諳厄利亜語林大成』 (1814). Technically, this was not a dictionary in the modern sense of it, but rather a list of about 6000 English words with Japanese equivalents, based on an English-Dutch/ Dutch-English handbook, possibly Sewel's Korte Wegwyzer der Engelsche Taale....// A Compendious Guide to the English Language....The second work, never completed beyond the letter B, was known as『エゲレス語辞書和解』 (1854).The most possible main source forthis work was Holtrop's English and Dutch Dictionary (1823). Four years after the conclusion of the unequal Commercial Treaty with the United States in 1858, there appeared a dictionary which far superseded those preceding it in quality and quantity. This was『英和対訳袖珍辞書』, virtually an English-Japanese version of Picard's A New Pocket Dictionary of the English and Dutch Languages (1857). All these “dictionaries”, it should be noted, were compiled by Japanese interpreters of Dutch, who had practically no working knowledge of English. They translated Dutch definitions of English headwords into Japanese, by making use of existing Dutch-Japanese dictionaries and their own knowledge acquired as Dutch interpreters.
So far attention has been more or less exclusively paid to the Japanese part of these early English-Japanese dictionaries in the context of Dutch-Japanese studies which culminated in the late nineteenth-century. In this paper I will turn attention to the English-Dutch lexicography explored and developed by Hexham, Sewel and Holtrop in the Netherlands. From this perspective I will look at the English content of these works and exemplify how Dutch bilingual lexicography contributed to laying the ground for English-Japanese lexicography on which practical and theoretical lexicographers of modern English-Japanese dictionaries have based their more sophisticated work.