Researching the beginnings of bilingual Polish-English / English-Polish lexicography: Polyglot dictionaries (part 1)
Researching the beginnings of bilingual Polish-English / English-Polish lexicography: Polyglot dictionaries (part 1)

Summary/Abstract: This paper aims to provide a survey of the early polyglot dictionaries which paired Polish with English, based on the premise that the polyglots can be considered as predecessors of bilingual dictionaries proper. Following this rationale, the authoress examines chronologically the first three of the multilingual endeavours: Ambrogio Calepino’s Dictionarium undecim linguarum … (1590), Hieronymus Megiser’s Thesaurus polyglottus: vel, dictionarium multilingue … (1603), and Georg Henisch’s Teütsche Sprach und Weissheit. Thesaurus linguae and sapientiae Germanicae … (1616). The focus is primarily on the linguistic material of the polyglots, but the assumed aims and readership are also tackled briefly. As bilingual wordbooks have traditionally catered to the needs of users of one or both of the respective languages, the polyglot dictionaries are additionally looked at from the perspective of Polish-English language contact in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries.

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