8 - The Burmese-English Dictionary

Summary

“A lexicographer's life is a dog's life; but a lexicographer generally lives to an old age”, so said the late Dr T.C. Onions, a most distinguished editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, when I met him at Oxford about fifteen years ago. I fully subscribe to the first part of his statement, but I should like to add to the second part the words, “even if he has to spend his old age in a lunatic asylum”.

Many of you will have read the excellent objective account of the Burmese-English Dictionary by Mr J. Okell in the Britain-Burma Society Bulletin. In it he “has tried to suggest the immensity of the task, to outline the method of compilation, and to mention some of the difficulties – both those inherent in the nature of the work and those which have occurred incidentally in the history of this particular Dictionary”. My talk, in which I shall be treading on very much the same ground, will be more subjective in approach; I am too much involved with this Dictionary.

I have been associated with the Dictionary for the last twenty-eight years, as a part-time voluntary helper from 1939 to 1946, a paid assistant from 1946 to 1948, and a joint editor since then. We have so far published four out of a possible thirty parts, and Part V is near completion. Yet I feel, in the words of Sir Isaac Newton, “I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me”.

The scope of the Dictionary is vast, the standard aimed at extremely high, and the work entailed most intricate and demanding. The compilation consumes a great deal of time, energy, and learning, chiefly due to the inadequacy of reference works and studies of Burmese language and literature.