Worlds of Reference

Worlds of Reference is a history of dictionaries, encyclopedias and reference materials.

Tom McArthur (Author)

9780521314039, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 14 April 1988

244 pages
23.2 x 15.6 x 0.5 cm, 0.8 kg

Worlds of Reference is a history of dictionaries, encyclopedias and reference materials, but it is also far more than that, because it is concerned with the growth of civilisation, education and culture - and particularly how the human race learned to store information beyond the brain. It looks at how our species moved from being able to communicate only orally and to store information only in the head (rote memorisation) to the evolution of technologies for external reference: clay- and cunieform, reed-and-hieroglyph, bamboo-and-ideogram, parchment-and-alphabet, codices, books, pages, columns and so forth through the print revolution to the current electronic revolution. Along the way it looks at how this has affected languages like Latin, french, and English and people's attitudes to those languages - and to words and the listing of information about words. This intensely human subject is as compelling and important today as any account of kings, queens, wars and social upheaval.

Part I. Mind, word and world: 1. Knowing, referring and recording: storing information beyond the brain
2. Information and World 3: in the beginning was the Word
Part II. The Ancient World: 3. Containers of knowledge: the first reference technologies
4. Systems for knowledge: school and letter, book and library
5. The taxonomic urge: class, classic and classification
6. Missionaries and monasteries: reference and reverence
Part III. The Medieval World: 7. Faith versus reason: summations of truth
8. The elites of knowledge: universitas
Part IV. The Early Modern World: 9. All knowledge for all men: the omne scibile and the printing press
10. Theme versus alphabet: the roots of lexicography
11. A blurring of languages: Latin and the vernaculars
Part V. The Modern World: 12. The legislative urge: authoritative wordbooks
13. Reference and revolution: the encyclopedia proper
14. Thematic lexicography: word order and world order
15. Alphabetic lexicography: the unendable dictionary
16. Universal education: dictionaries for the people
17. Semantic fields and conceptual universes: the unshapeable lexis
18. Tensions and trends: overt alphabet, covert theme
Part VI. Tomorrows World: 19. Shaping things to come: the priests of High Technology
20. Knowledge, knowledge everywhere: planetary network, global book.

Subject Areas: Encyclopaedias & reference works [GB]