Papias (lexicographer)
Encyclopedia
Papias was a Latin
lexicographer from Italy. Although he is often referred to as Papias the Lombard, little is known of his life, including whether he actually came from Lombardy
. The Oxford History of English Lexicography considers him the first modern lexicographer for his monolingual dictionary
(Latin-Latin), Elementarium Doctrinae Erudimentum, written over a period of ten years in the 1040s. The Elementarium has been called "the first fully recognizable dictionary" and is a landmark in the development of dictionaries as distinct from mere collections of gloss
es. Papias arranges entries alphabetically based on the first three letters of the word, and is the first lexicographer to name the authors or texts he uses as sources. Although most entries are not etymological
, Papias laid the groundwork for derivational
lexicography, which became firmly established only a century later.
Papias seems to have been a cleric with theological interests, possibly living in Pavia
. The name "Papias" means "the guide," and may be a pseudonym or pen name
. Bruno of Würzburg saw an early draft of the Elementarium before he died in 1045, but an unambiguous reference in the chronicle of Albericus Trium Fontium
establishes that it was published by 1053.
in the word entry when ambiguous, and notes the gender
and declension
or conjugation
, recognizing that the lemma may be insufficient for grammatical usage. He does not, however, distinguish between Classical
and Vulgar Latin
forms. Although he pays little attention to etymology, he provides definitions of legal terms
, and gives excerpts from earlier glossaries
such as the Liber glossarum
and from textbooks of the liberal arts
and logic
. Of greater general interest, Papias provides often copious examples and discursive information for each word, and should probably be regarded as an encyclopedist as much as a lexicographer.
Papias renders Greek words and quotations into Latin, including five lines of Hesiod
that he translates into Latin hexameters
; this, however, may be an interpolation
by an editor of the 1485 Venice edition. Although his efforts to deal with Greek are significant, his examples are "often imperfectly understood and interpreted."
The Elementarium anticipated some principles of derivational lexicography (disciplina derivationis), that is, a method that generates vocabulary
through verbal analogy
. The goal is not only to learn the main word in the entry, but to be able to derive other forms of the word. The method had been illustrated earlier by Priscian
in his Partitiones duodecim versuum Aeneidos principalium.
, Boethius, the Physiologus, Remigius of Auxerre
, the glossary of Pseudo-Philoxenus, and Carolingian
commentaries
on Martianus Capella
and classical authors such as Terence
. Papias's work was widely used throughout the Middle Ages
and into the 16th century, and was a source for Hugutio of Pisa, Johannes Balbus, and Johannes Reuchlin. It was so popular that more than a hundred manuscript
s survive, and the name of its author became a synonym for vocabularium. Erasmus, however, disparaged Papias and similar writers for the lack of intellectual rigor in their pedagogy
.
of the Elementarium was published 1476 in Milan. The better-known Venice editions were printed in 1485, 1491, and 1496. The edition of 1496 was published 1966 by Bottega d'Erasmo in Torino. Papias is also credited with an Ars grammatica
that exists in 41 manuscripts.
Latin
Latin is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. It, along with most European languages, is a descendant of the ancient Proto-Indo-European language. Although it is considered a dead language, a number of scholars and members of the Christian clergy speak it fluently, and...
lexicographer from Italy. Although he is often referred to as Papias the Lombard, little is known of his life, including whether he actually came from Lombardy
Lombardy
Lombardy is one of the 20 regions of Italy. The capital is Milan. One-sixth of Italy's population lives in Lombardy and about one fifth of Italy's GDP is produced in this region, making it the most populous and richest region in the country and one of the richest in the whole of Europe...
. The Oxford History of English Lexicography considers him the first modern lexicographer for his monolingual dictionary
Monolingual learner's dictionary
A Monolingual learner's dictionary is a type of dictionary designed to meet the reference needs of people learning a foreign language...
(Latin-Latin), Elementarium Doctrinae Erudimentum, written over a period of ten years in the 1040s. The Elementarium has been called "the first fully recognizable dictionary" and is a landmark in the development of dictionaries as distinct from mere collections of gloss
Gloss
A gloss is a brief notation of the meaning of a word or wording in a text. It may be in the language of the text, or in the reader's language if that is different....
es. Papias arranges entries alphabetically based on the first three letters of the word, and is the first lexicographer to name the authors or texts he uses as sources. Although most entries are not etymological
Etymology
Etymology is the study of the history of words, their origins, and how their form and meaning have changed over time.For languages with a long written history, etymologists make use of texts in these languages and texts about the languages to gather knowledge about how words were used during...
, Papias laid the groundwork for derivational
Derivation (linguistics)
In linguistics, derivation is the process of forming a new word on the basis of an existing word, e.g. happi-ness and un-happy from happy, or determination from determine...
lexicography, which became firmly established only a century later.
Papias seems to have been a cleric with theological interests, possibly living in Pavia
Pavia
Pavia , the ancient Ticinum, is a town and comune of south-western Lombardy, northern Italy, 35 km south of Milan on the lower Ticino river near its confluence with the Po. It is the capital of the province of Pavia. It has a population of c. 71,000...
. The name "Papias" means "the guide," and may be a pseudonym or pen name
Pen name
A pen name, nom de plume, or literary double, is a pseudonym adopted by an author. A pen name may be used to make the author's name more distinctive, to disguise his or her gender, to distance an author from some or all of his or her works, to protect the author from retribution for his or her...
. Bruno of Würzburg saw an early draft of the Elementarium before he died in 1045, but an unambiguous reference in the chronicle of Albericus Trium Fontium
Alberic of Trois-Fontaines
Alberic of Trois-Fontaines was a medieval Cistercian chronicler who wrote in Latin. He was a monk of Trois-Fontaines Abbey . In 1232 he began his Chronica Albrici Monachi Trium Fontium, which describes world events from the Creation to the year 1241...
establishes that it was published by 1053.
Elementarium doctrinae
Papias set forth his principles in a preface to his dictionary and contributes new features to lexicography. He marks vowel lengthVowel length
In linguistics, vowel length is the perceived duration of a vowel sound. Often the chroneme, or the "longness", acts like a consonant, and may etymologically be one, such as in Australian English. While not distinctive in most dialects of English, vowel length is an important phonemic factor in...
in the word entry when ambiguous, and notes the gender
Grammatical gender
Grammatical gender is defined linguistically as a system of classes of nouns which trigger specific types of inflections in associated words, such as adjectives, verbs and others. For a system of noun classes to be a gender system, every noun must belong to one of the classes and there should be...
and declension
Declension
In linguistics, declension is the inflection of nouns, pronouns, adjectives, and articles to indicate number , case , and gender...
or conjugation
Latin conjugation
Latin verbs have four main patterns of conjugation. As in a number of other languages, Latin verbs have an active voice and a passive voice. Furthermore, there exist deponent and semi-deponent Latin verbs , as well as defective verbs...
, recognizing that the lemma may be insufficient for grammatical usage. He does not, however, distinguish between Classical
Classical Latin
Classical Latin in simplest terms is the socio-linguistic register of the Latin language regarded by the enfranchised and empowered populations of the late Roman republic and the Roman empire as good Latin. Most writers during this time made use of it...
and Vulgar Latin
Vulgar Latin
Vulgar Latin is any of the nonstandard forms of Latin from which the Romance languages developed. Because of its nonstandard nature, it had no official orthography. All written works used Classical Latin, with very few exceptions...
forms. Although he pays little attention to etymology, he provides definitions of legal terms
Roman law
Roman law is the legal system of ancient Rome, and the legal developments which occurred before the 7th century AD — when the Roman–Byzantine state adopted Greek as the language of government. The development of Roman law comprises more than a thousand years of jurisprudence — from the Twelve...
, and gives excerpts from earlier glossaries
Glossary
A glossary, also known as an idioticon, vocabulary, or clavis, is an alphabetical list of terms in a particular domain of knowledge with the definitions for those terms...
such as the Liber glossarum
Liber glossarum
The Liber Glossarum is an enormous compendium of knowledge used for later compilations during the Middle Ages, and a general reference work used by contemporary scholars. It is the first Latin encyclopedia whose items are alphabetically ordered. It has alternatively been referred to as an...
and from textbooks of the liberal arts
Liberal arts
The term liberal arts refers to those subjects which in classical antiquity were considered essential for a free citizen to study. Grammar, Rhetoric and Logic were the core liberal arts. In medieval times these subjects were extended to include mathematics, geometry, music and astronomy...
and logic
Logic
In philosophy, Logic is the formal systematic study of the principles of valid inference and correct reasoning. Logic is used in most intellectual activities, but is studied primarily in the disciplines of philosophy, mathematics, semantics, and computer science...
. Of greater general interest, Papias provides often copious examples and discursive information for each word, and should probably be regarded as an encyclopedist as much as a lexicographer.
Papias renders Greek words and quotations into Latin, including five lines of Hesiod
Hesiod
Hesiod was a Greek oral poet generally thought by scholars to have been active between 750 and 650 BC, around the same time as Homer. His is the first European poetry in which the poet regards himself as a topic, an individual with a distinctive role to play. Ancient authors credited him and...
that he translates into Latin hexameters
Dactylic hexameter
Dactylic hexameter is a form of meter in poetry or a rhythmic scheme. It is traditionally associated with the quantitative meter of classical epic poetry in both Greek and Latin, and was consequently considered to be the Grand Style of classical poetry...
; this, however, may be an interpolation
Interpolation (manuscripts)
An interpolation, in relation to literature and especially ancient manuscripts, is an entry or passage in a text that was not written by the original author...
by an editor of the 1485 Venice edition. Although his efforts to deal with Greek are significant, his examples are "often imperfectly understood and interpreted."
The Elementarium anticipated some principles of derivational lexicography (disciplina derivationis), that is, a method that generates vocabulary
Vocabulary development
Vocabulary development is the process whereby speakers of language enhance their working vocabularies with new words.During his/her infancy, a child builds a vocabulary by instinct, with little effort. Infants imitate words that they hear and then associate those words with objects and actions....
through verbal analogy
Analogy
Analogy is a cognitive process of transferring information or meaning from a particular subject to another particular subject , and a linguistic expression corresponding to such a process...
. The goal is not only to learn the main word in the entry, but to be able to derive other forms of the word. The method had been illustrated earlier by Priscian
Priscian
Priscianus Caesariensis , commonly known as Priscian, was a Latin grammarian. He wrote the Institutiones grammaticae on the subject...
in his Partitiones duodecim versuum Aeneidos principalium.
Sources and influences
Among the sources used by Papias in addition to Priscian were Isidore of SevilleIsidore of Seville
Saint Isidore of Seville served as Archbishop of Seville for more than three decades and is considered, as the historian Montalembert put it in an oft-quoted phrase, "le dernier savant du monde ancien"...
, Boethius, the Physiologus, Remigius of Auxerre
Remigius of Auxerre
Remigius of Auxerre was a Benedictine monk during the Carolingian period, a teacher of Latin grammar, and a prolific author of commentaries on classical Greek and Latin texts...
, the glossary of Pseudo-Philoxenus, and Carolingian
Carolingian Renaissance
In the history of ideas the Carolingian Renaissance stands out as a period of intellectual and cultural revival in Europe occurring from the late eighth century, in the generation of Alcuin, to the 9th century, and the generation of Heiric of Auxerre, with the peak of the activities coordinated...
commentaries
Commentary (philology)
In philology, a commentary is a line-by-line or even word-by-word explication usually attached to an edition of a text in the same or an accompanying volume. It may draw on methodologies of close reading and literary criticism, but its primary purpose is to elucidate the language of the text and...
on Martianus Capella
Martianus Capella
Martianus Minneus Felix Capella was a pagan writer of Late Antiquity, one of the earliest developers of the system of the seven liberal arts that structured early medieval education...
and classical authors such as Terence
Terence
Publius Terentius Afer , better known in English as Terence, was a playwright of the Roman Republic, of North African descent. His comedies were performed for the first time around 170–160 BC. Terentius Lucanus, a Roman senator, brought Terence to Rome as a slave, educated him and later on,...
. Papias's work was widely used throughout the Middle Ages
Middle Ages
The Middle Ages is a periodization of European history from the 5th century to the 15th century. The Middle Ages follows the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 and precedes the Early Modern Era. It is the middle period of a three-period division of Western history: Classic, Medieval and Modern...
and into the 16th century, and was a source for Hugutio of Pisa, Johannes Balbus, and Johannes Reuchlin. It was so popular that more than a hundred manuscript
Manuscript
A manuscript or handwrite is written information that has been manually created by someone or some people, such as a hand-written letter, as opposed to being printed or reproduced some other way...
s survive, and the name of its author became a synonym for vocabularium. Erasmus, however, disparaged Papias and similar writers for the lack of intellectual rigor in their pedagogy
Pedagogy
Pedagogy is the study of being a teacher or the process of teaching. The term generally refers to strategies of instruction, or a style of instruction....
.
Manuscripts and editions
The main study of the manuscript tradition is B. Zonta, "I codici GLPV dell' Elementarium Papiae: un primo sondaggio nella tradizione manoscritta ed alcune osservazioni relative," Studi Classici e orientali 9 (1960) 76–99. The extremely rare first editionEditio princeps
In classical scholarship, editio princeps is a term of art. It means, roughly, the first printed edition of a work that previously had existed only in manuscripts, which could be circulated only after being copied by hand....
of the Elementarium was published 1476 in Milan. The better-known Venice editions were printed in 1485, 1491, and 1496. The edition of 1496 was published 1966 by Bottega d'Erasmo in Torino. Papias is also credited with an Ars grammatica
Ars grammatica
An Ars grammatica is a generic or proper title for surveys of Latin Grammar.Extant works known as Ars grammatica have been written by*Aelius Donatus*Maurus Servius Honoratus*Diomedes Grammaticus*Charisius*Pseudo-Remmius Palaemon...
that exists in 41 manuscripts.