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本帖最后由 GL_n 于 2018-6-17 09:09 编辑
I should stress that nothing I write here is original, and this is just a personal reading note.
Peter Mark Roget was a British physician, natural theologian and lexicographer. He is best known for publishing, in 1852, The saurus Of English Words And Phrases, Classified And Arranged So AS To Facilitate The Expression Of Ideas And Assist In Literary Composition (Roget's Thesaurus for short), an enormous collection of English words classified by semantic field.
Compiling the Thesaurus extended over many years. As early as 1805 (In the “Preface to the first Edition”, Roget mentions “a compilation” of words from 1805. ) he had compiled, for his own personal use, a small indexed catalogue of words which he used to enhance his prolific writing. From then until 1852, i.e. over almost fifty years, he compiled vocabulary for his ‘classed catalogue’. However, We do not know anything about these years—how he collected the word lists, what his sources were, how he drew up the classifications, etc. Apart from the preface to the first edition, we have no sources which tell us anything about Roget’s thoughts on this topic. All his letters written during the years he worked on the Thesaurus were lost in a fire in 1891 and in an air raid during World War II.
Peter Mark Roget was not an original scientist in the sense in which this can be said of Huxley or Darwin. 【In 1814, he invented a slide rule to calculate the roots and powers of numbers. This formed the basis of slide rules that were common currency in schools and universities until the age of the calculator. The math. paper on side rule gave him access to the Royal Society, and he became a member.】 In 1806, he published, together with two co-authors, a syllabus of their course of lectures: P. Roget, B. Gibson, and J. Hutchinson, Syllabus of a Course of Lectures on Anatomy and Physiology (Manchester). The author of Roget’s authoritative biography (Emblen) regards this early publication as significant for what was to come: “In his ‘prefaratory observations’, Roget showed that his chief interest in the new science of physiology lay in the organization and order of the several aspects of that subject and in the relationship of the subject to such kindred fields as anatomy. This keen interest in relationships and classification was to develop into Roget’s characteristic way of work and to lead, eventually, to his culminating attempt at classification, the Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases (《Peter Mark Roget: the word and the man》by D.L. Emblen, 1970).”
The french naturalist、zoologist and the founding father of palaeontology，George Cuvier, stated himself that perfecting the ordering system in anatomy and biology meant perfecting these disciplines in toto. Moreover, he thought that this task could appreciably improve one’s general logical abilities. Note these pedagogical remarks from the preface to the first edition of Cuvier’s Animal Kingdom: The habit, necessarily acquired in the study of natural history, of mentally classifying a great number of ideas, is one of the advantages of this science, which is seldom spoken of, and which, when it shall have been generally introduced into the system of common education, will perhaps become the principal one: it exercises the student in the part of logic which is termed method, as the study of geometry does in that which is called syllogism, because natural history is the science which requires the most precise methods, as geometry is that which demands the most rigorous reasoning.
Roget was a contemporary of Cuvier, who was Roget’s admired and celebrated model, and he was familiar with Cuvier’s works. When Roget was compiling his Thesaurus, he certainly got much of his inspiration from Cuvier’s works and philosophy. Roget wrote in the “Introduction” to his Thesaurus, if only in a footnote: “The principle by which I have been guided in framing my verbal classification is the same as that which is employed in the various departments of Natural History. Thus the sectional divisions I have formed, correspond to Natural Families in Botany and Zoology, and filiation of words presents a network analogous to the natural filiation of plants or animals (Roget's Thesaurus-1855/introduction/footnote: p. xxiii or 1879/p.xxviii).” With all necessary circumspection we could say that Roget did precisely for language what Cuvier recommended in general.
Roget’s work as a natural scientist was borne along on a sense of admiration for the order of nature. Roget wrote in his work: “The complicated system of an animal’ displayed to him ‘an exquisite and transcendental skill.” He regarded the study of nature as “a fountain of intellectual enjoyment” . We may very well find here the root of his work on the Thesaurus, which extended over almost fifty years.
Roget’s religious background presupposes the general idea of order in nature. This idea can be conceived only by comparisons which reveal “the connection and relationship of every part with the rest of the system” and “afford proofs of the perfection with which all its parts are mutually adjusted”. It is certainly a bold step to proceed from these remarks on biology to the “organization”of the Thesaurus, but the proximity of Roget’s view of nature to his practice of semantics is impressive. With all necessary circumspection we can say that the Thesaurus breathes a spirit which is very similar to that of Roget’s approach to the natural sciences. It is the general conviction that a general entity, like that of nature or of language, can be presented in toto by its constituent parts and that it makes sense to do this, where the philosophy held by George Cuvier play a prominent role.
Roget retired from medical practice in 1840. By 1846 he was working hard on a project on compiling the synonymous words he had devised more than forty years before. As mentioned above, Roget had the idea for the thesaurus, a treasury of words, early in his career. He was sixty-one when he began to concentrate on the thesaurus; he worked on it full time between 1849 and 1852 and completed it aged seventy-three. He was aware of other works aimed at bringing order to words, such as the 'Amata-Kosha' of Asmarha Sinha, a Sanskrit grammarian and poet of the fourth century, and a Pasgragraphie published in Paris in 1797, but Roget developed his own systematic approach which was inspired by his religious background as well as scientific research. It is an ironic twist that this man should be widely remembered for something which he did as a retiree.
The many re-editions after 1852 testify to the generally positive attitude which the general public had to the Thesaurus. But there was hardly any professional criticism and, if there was, it tended to be negative. The lively and successful history of the book was accompanied by a general silence on the part of philologists and other professionals.
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