Mirosława Podhajecka

Erazm Rykaczewski’s Dokładny słownik polsko-angielski… (1851) was the first Polish- English dictionary. As well as English equivalents for Polish headwords, it offered a rich selection of Polish illustrative examples paired with their English counterparts to provide the user with information on the way the headwords are used in context. While making a bilingual dictionary requires fluency in both languages, Rykaczewski’s knowledge of English was somewhat less than perfect. In the light of the above, how he compiled the volume’s English side remains largely unresolved. This paper empirically tests the hypothesis that he drew on the works of other lexicographers. The research methodology was twofold. Firstly, Fleming and Tibbins’s Royal dictionary (1844-1845) was examined to ascertain whether it formed a part of Rykaczewski’s background material and, if so, to what extent. Secondly, English examples of usage unrecorded in the Royal dictionary were verified against Google Books, a gigantic corpus of texts, to identify potential sources.

Antoni Paryski, one of the most successful Polish publishers in the United States, was also a bilingual lexicographer. Among other things, he undertook the compilation of Wielki ilustrowany angielsko-polski i polsko-angielski słownik… [The great illustrated English-Polish and Polish-English dictionary…], asserting that it would cover as many as 250,000 headwords. The dictionary appeared in fascicles from May 1899 but was discontinued soon thereafter. Albeit none of the few fascicles published is available today, one page of the first fascicle was reprinted in Paryski’s weekly Ameryka, thus allowing for a preliminary assessment of the quality of the endeavour. Drawing on data culled from issues of Ameryka (1898−1899), this paper also aims at reconstructing the story of the dictionary. 

The present paper is a contribution to the history of Polish-English and English-Polish lexicography. It aims to throw some light on two bilingual dictionaries compiled by Ludwik Krzyżanowski, which have so far been shrouded in mystery. Fonds no. 49 deposited in the New York archives of the Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences of America (PIASA) provide archives in New York provide valuable data on the author and his scholarly activity, as well as a tiny part of a dictionary typescript that allows for a preliminary assessment of the lexicographic endeavour.

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.

The present paper is the second of two papers investigating polyglot dictionaries which comprised Polish and English wordlists. It rests on the assumption that, by providing the earliest documentation material for Polish and English respectively, the polyglots can be regarded as historical antecedents of bilingual dictionaries. While the first paper focused on three Renaissance works of reference, including Calepino’s eleven-language edition, this one concentrates on two relatively little known endeavours of the Enlightenment: Christoph Warmer’s Gazophylacium decem linguarum Europaearum … (1691) and Peter Simon Pallas’ Linguarum totius orbis vocabularia comparativa … (1787–1789). The bilingual material they embrace has been analysed and illustrated with examples in order to shed new light on the two polyglots, which are additionally traced back to their sources.