2023-11-05 12:07:09
Last week the latest volume of the Svenska Akademiens ordbok, that is, the dictionary of the Swedish Academy, went to press. It is a dictionary that, due to its volume, care and number of voices, has no comparison in the world. It not only includes current words, but also terms used in the past, with their etymology, examples and quotes from famous texts. It took one hundred and forty years to finish it. But what’s worse, the work isn’t done yet. It is the most complete dictionary made so far on the Swedish language and the evolution of its history, which, as any unwary person can guess, is very long.
The Svenska Akademiens ordbok was commissioned by the Swedish Academy, founded in 1786 by King Gustav III of Sweden, to promote the country’s language and literature. The dictionary covers the Swedish language from 1521 to the present day, and contains more than 450 thousand words and 9 million citations distributed in 39 volumes, with a total of 33,111 pages. Just to give an idea, the most updated version of the Dictionary of the Royal Spanish Academy contains 93 thousand words and has 2,376 pages.
The dictionary began to be produced in 1883, and in all these years 137 people worked on it. There are only 200 copies of the entire dictionary that can be consulted – it is generally used by linguists, translators and historians, that is, all those who may need to consult and decipher an ancient Swedish text – but true to current times, a version of the dictionary can be consulted online. The curator of the project is called Christian Mattsson, who in a talk with Agence France-presse said that the work continues. For example, volumes A to R were completed so long ago that they have to be revised to include recent words, such as “app”, “computer” or “allergy”, a very common word but, since it entered the lexicon, Swedish around 1920, in the first volume, printed in 1893, it does not appear. According to Mattsson, in the next seven years they plan to include 10 thousand more words.
It is remarkable how happy it can be to have a good dictionary in hand, especially if the activity to which the person consulting it is dedicated is translation. As can be imagined, today’s translator rarely resorts to a cartaceous dictionary: since there are countless online dictionaries, to consult which you only need to move your fingers, not repeat your arms and sit-ups, consulting them is much more comfortable and, above all, does not exclusive. The translator, distrustful by nature, does not usually stick with the first version of anything, neither what he translates, nor what he thinks, nor what the dictionary tells him. And yet he cannot get rid of the volumes of those old dictionaries that he turned to at a time, when the world of the web did not exist.
Something, however, is strange about those times: the continuous commitment to finding the page that wanted to be consulted. So much physical exercise, so much muscular effort, led him to be able to guess on which page the term he was looking for could be found. It was something difficult to get right in a thick volume of around 2 thousand pages, an impossible game in 39 volumes. And yet the Swedish translators are happy. Rarely will you find yourself translating a text from the 16th century, but if that happens you already know which dictionary to turn to. Consulting the Svenska Akademiens ordbok is free, online, and the fact that 137 people have worked there since 1883 gives some peace of mind to their paranoid tendencies: so many people can’t have been so wrong.
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