Christian Ludwig (1660–1728) and the beginnings of German/English lexicography

Abstract

Christian Ludwig’s 1706 A dictionary English, German, and French and his 1716 Teutsch–Englisches Lexicon were the first bilingual dictionaries published in response to an emerging German interest in learning English. Setting the dictionaries in the wider context of European bilingual lexicography, I argue that such dictionaries are valuable sources for linguistic and cultural history, in parallel to the more widely studied monolingual dictionaries. Taking advantage of the digitisation of Ludwig’s dictionaries, I show that in his 1706 English–German dictionary, adapted from the English/French dictionaries of Abel Boyer to fill a gap he identified as a practising teacher, Ludwig did not merely translate, but made systematic changes. In his larger German–English dictionary of 1716, Ludwig took his word-list largely from Kramer’s German–Italian dictionary (1700–1702), but used his own judgement in structuring entries and choosing — as well as expanding the range of — examples, reflecting his experience as a teacher and translator. I suggest that the different approach taken in dictionaries by teachers of non-native learners to explaining word meaning, pronunciation, and usage has yielded sources which — newly accessible thanks to digitisation - will enrich our understanding of language change and language standardisation, and of cultural change and exchange, where I argue for the value of taking a cross-linguistic, comparative perspective.

Keywords:

• Christian Ludwig
• Bilingual dictionaries
• English
• German
• History of lexicography

Introduction

This paper presents a study of the first two German/English dictionaries, which emerged in the eighteenth century in response to growing German interest in learning English.¹ Dictionaries are potential goldmines for linguistic and cultural history, and monolingual dictionaries (such as those of the French Academy in 1694 and 1740; the English dictionary of Johnson in 1755; and the German dictionary of Adelung) have been analysed not just within the history of lexicography, but also as part of the history of language standardisation and nation-building.² Bilingual dictionaries have received somewhat less attention,³ perhaps partly reflecting an assumption that bilingual dictionaries are largely derivative of the monolingual tradition. It is therefore important to emphasise that the first English–German dictionary, published by Ludwig in 1706, is based neither on an English nor on a German monolingual dictionary, but on Boyer’s French/English dictionaries; the German equivalents given are Ludwig’s own work.⁴ As for Ludwig’s 1716 German–English dictionary, we shall see below that it too was a pioneering work building on earlier bilingual lexicography, rather than on monolingual dictionaries.⁵

The fact that nearly all of the eighteenth-century German/English dictionaries are now readily available in digital form makes comparison and detailed study of them more feasible than ever before. However, with a dozen editions of Ludwig’s two dictionaries, and numerous other dictionaries from the 1730s onwards,⁶ there is much to do. This article examines Christian Ludwig’s two dictionaries in their first editions only (English–German, 1706; German–English, 1716), not only the first of their kind but also ‘so good, they were to dominate the market for an entire century’.⁷ I examine Ludwig’s approach to pronunciation and the microstructure in his dictionaries; I analyse how Ludwig arrived at his equivalents for his lemmas, and the examples that he gives; and I give some very preliminary hints of the insights to be gained from such close analysis for the history of language learning and teaching, as well as for (inter)cultural and linguistic history. However, I first sketch the wider context of bilingual lexixography in Europe at the time.

The wider context: bilingual lexicography in early eighteenth-century Europe

Polyglot vocabularies, with languages printed in parallel columns, were published from the sixteenth century onwards. A first group, thematically arranged, were developed by adding languages to existing bilingual vernacular vocabularies, with their origins either in Adam von Rottweil’s Italian–German dictionary of 1477 or in the 1536 French–Dutch dictionary of Noel de Berlaimont, first published in 1536. Some 180 editions make up these two strands, according to John Considine, although he judges that they would have been of limited practical use. Ambrogio Calepino’s somewhat larger 1522 Vocabularius, alphabetically ordered by the Latin wordlist, also spawned over a hundred polyglot editions, which Considine considers would have been ‘fairly useful’, and which also conveyed the message ‘that the languages of Europe could all express the same concepts, and […] Europeans shared a heritage of concepts’.⁸ Mention should also be made of John Minsheu’s 1617 Guide into Tongues, an etymological dictionary of eleven languages.⁹

A nearer relative of vernacular bilingual lexicography as we might recognise it today are trilingual dictionaries of the sixteenth century, often the result of adding a third language to an originally bilingual work and often involving Latin, as in the 1548 French–German–Latin Dictionariolum puerorum, in which Johannes Frisius added German to the Latin–French dictionary of Robert Estienne (Frisius 1548).¹⁰ Similarly, the already trilingual Latin–German–Czech dictionary of Jan Murmelius (1513) was adapted by Franciszek Mymer, replacing Czech with Polish, in his Latin–German–Polish dictionary of 1528. (The first bilingual Polish–German bilingual dictionary appeared only in 1718: Andrzey Faber’s Celaryus polski).¹¹

Bilingual dictionaries pairing two vernacular European languages emerged from the end of the sixteenth century. An early contributor to the genre was John Minsheu with his Dictionarie in Spanish and English (1599, 1623) and Most Copious Spanish Dictionarie, published in 1617 in the same volume as the Guide into Tongues just mentioned; the next bilingual Spanish/English dictionary was not published until John Stevens’ New Spanish and English Dictionary (1705–06).¹² French/English dictionaries also began relatively early, beginning with the monodirectional French–English dictionary of Randle Cotgrave (1611, rpt. 1679; a bidirectional version with the addition of an English–French part by Robert Sherwood appeared in 1632). Guy Miège’s New Dictionary of French and English was published in 1677, reprinted in 1679 with the addition of a Dictionary of Barbarous French; Miège’s Short Dictionary appeared in 1684, and his Great French Dictionary in 1688. These all pre-date the first monolingual dictionaries of French and English. Abel Boyer’s bidrectional French/English Royal Dictionary appeared in 1699, with an abridged version in 1700; they are the key sources of Ludwig’s 1706 English–German dictionary. For the language pair Dutch and English, after Henry Hexham’s Copious English and Netherduytsch Dictionarie of 1647–48, which saw various editions in the later seventeenth century, William Sewel’s New Dictionary English and Dutch was published in 1691, with a second edition in 1708, and a third in 1727. Matthias Kramer produced an Italian–German dictionary in 1676, followed by his Herrlich Grosses Teutsch–Italiänisches Dictionarium in 1700–02. (An English/Italian dictionary did not emerge until Ferdinando Altieri’s dictionary of 1726–27).¹³ Kramer also produced a French/German dictionary in 1712; the first such French/German work had been that of the Fleming Levinus Hulsius as early as 1586.¹⁴

Thus when, in 1706, Ludwig inaugurated the history of bilingual German/English lexicography, it was as a somewhat late first entrant to the history of bilingual dictionaries among what we might today consider the ‘major’ languages of Europe, and certainly notably later than English–French, English–Spanish, English–Italian and English–Dutch lexicography. It is telling that Ludwig had recourse to the older practice of adapting an existing bilingual source. There were as yet no monolingual German dictionaries on which to draw.¹⁵ For English, he might have used Kersey’s 1702 New English dictionary, for isntance, which Cormier considers the first ‘general dictionary of English’; but he did not.¹⁶

Christian Ludwig (1660–1728): language teaching and the beginnings of German/English lexicography

Christian Ludwig (1660–1728) was a German who had travelled as a ship’s doctor and spent some years in New England in America, then in England, before settling in Leipzig as a translator and teacher of English, including at the school of the Pietist Francke Foundations in Halle.¹⁷ In 1705, Ludwig published his Choise [sic] English and High-Dutch Dialogues and Letters, together with a Vocabulary for German learners of English, consisting of a grammatical overview (complete with a fold-out summary table of declension and conjugation); bilingual dialogues in parallel columns; a number of letters, likewise presented bilingually; and an onomasiologically grouped vocabulary (pp. 90–136).¹⁸ The model letters include a request to purchase an English–German dictionary, a reply that no such dictionary yet exists, and a recommendation to make do with an English–French dictionary instead (p. 80).¹⁹ When Ludwig’s English–German dictionary appeared in 1706 (786 pp. quarto), he was, then, responding to a clear need he had identified as a practising teacher, using as a basis one of the two English–French dictionaries recommended in his Choise Letters, that of Abel Boyer (1667?–1729). Ludwig’s German–English dictionary then appeared in 1716 (2672 columns, quarto), followed in 1717 by a detailed English grammar.²⁰ The need Ludwig identified among his students reflects the growing interest in English at this time, in turn the consequence of wider socio-historical factors. Dedicating his 1706 dictionary to Sophia, Electoral Princess and duchess-dowager of Hanover, Ludwig remarked on the change in Anglo-German relations from previous entfremdung und widerwillen (‘alienation and antipathy’) to eine erwünschte vereinigung (‘a desired unification’) through the anticipated royal dynastic connection (Ludwig 1706, b1^v; Sophia was heir to throne at the time, but died before she could ascend to it). In 1716 Ludwig similarly pointed out that his German–English dictionary was timely (‘an der zeit’), since the ascent of the Hanoverian George I to the throne in 1714 meant English and German people were now ‘würcklich verknüpfft’ (‘really connected’, p.)(2^r)).

Who would have used Ludwig’s dictionaries? Rogler, in his 1763 revision of Ludwig’s English–German dictionary, jusified the inclusion of ‘sehr leichte Redensarten’ (‘very easy idioms’) with the argument that dictionaries are ‘hauptsächlich für Anfänger’ (‘chiefly for beginners’). More specifically, Ludwig presumably expected most users of his dictionaries to be, like his own students, Germans learning English, although he did at least allow for the possibility of the other way round in his 1716 German–English dictionary, commenting there on the need for a native speaker to help with pronunciation: ‘Es lasse sich ein Teutscher von einem gebohrnen Engeländer aus einem Englischen buch, und ein Engeländer von einem gebohrnen Teutschen aus einem Teutschen buch, zum öfftern was vorlesen’ (my emphasis).²¹ In practice, however, the growing German interest in English was still only weakly reciprocated in Britain, where interest in German grew notably stronger only towards the end of the eighteenth century. There existed only three manuals of German aimed at English–speaking learners before 1730, and in 1731 Benedictus Beiler was the first manual author to make any mention of reading German literature rather than learning for purely practical everyday purposes.²² Faute de mieux, such English learners of German as there were are likely to have used Ludwig’s dictionaries. In 1774, Gebhardt Wendeborn’s Elements of German Grammar for English learners recommended the most recent (1765) edition of Ludwig’s German–English dictionary, for example (as well as a 1770 edition of the other main German/English dictionary of the eighteenth century, the work of Theodor Arnold).²³ Johannes Ebers’ New and Complete Dictionary of the German and English Languages was the first to attend to the needs of English learners of German (‘den Engländern, die sich die Erlernung der Deutschen Sprache angelegen seyn lassen’),²⁴ and in 1797 Wendeborn updated his 1774 recommendations accordingly to include both Ebers’ new German–English work and his English–German dictionary.²⁵

Ludwig’s Dictionary English, German and French (1706): the first English–German dictionary

Ludwig’s 1706 dictionary followed Boyer’s 1699 bidirectional English–French Royal Dictionary of French and English, but also drew on Boyer’s 1700 abridgement, especially for the newly added accentuation of English words (see below). Ludwig also demonstrably used both halves of Boyer’s dictionary in compiling his entries.²⁶ Ludwig’s inclusion of French may seem a mere artefact of its French/English sources, but Germans embarking on the study of English in the eighteenth century had generally learnt French first,²⁷ so the French terms could also be useful as a tertium comparationis. Below, I explore how Ludwig re-used and built on the work of Boyer, first examining his indication of pronunciation, then the microstructure of his dictionary entries, and finally the German equivalents he gave.

Ludwig and English pronunciation

The pronunciation of English was considered a significant challenge for Germans. Between 1770 and 1840, some 33 English pronunciation guides were published in Germany, averaging about one every two years.²⁸ Ludwig, in promising in his title that the dictionary contains ‘not only the English words in their Alphabetic Order […] but also their proper Accent […]’ (as in Ácrimony, Acróss; Philósophy, but Philosóphical), stands at the head of a tradition in which titles and/or prefaces often highlighted the indication of pronunciation as a selling-point. Ludwig took the marking of word-stress from Boyer’s 1700 dictionary, where the indication of accent in all English words was ‘a thing never attempted before, and now perform’d with great exactness by an English Gentleman, in order to facilitate the Pronunciation of the English Tongue to Strangers’.²⁹ This innovation in bilingual lexicography, first by Boyer and then by Ludwig, precedes the first marking of accentuation in the English monolingual tradition, in Dyche's Dictionary of all Words Commonly Used in the English Tongue (1723).³⁰ Ludwig had already published some guidelines on word stress in his Choise Letters,³¹ noting there, for example, the difference between verbs with final stress and related nouns taking initial stress (e.g. ‘absent/ ab'sent). In his dictionary, Ludwig now followed Boyer in using both acute and grave accents to mark stress,³² although he adapted his system. Boyer had explained that an acute accent on a stressed syllable marked ‘Elevation of the voice in the Syllable’, while a grave indicated ‘the falling or depression of the Voice’ (preface). Ludwig rather more accurately referred to (vowel) length: the acute marked ‘an Acute, or short & quick Accent’, while the grave marked a ‘long Accent’ in the stressed syllable (similarly already in Ludwig’s 1705 manual, p. 7). Boyer always placed the accent over the vowel, but for long vowel sounds, Ludwig’s (or his typesetter’s) convention seems to have been different. He marked a grave before (rather than over) long stressed vowels (e.g. `Oval, `Ate), but placed the grave over the vowel itself where he perceived a diphthong, seemingly taking the presence of a vowel digraph as his criterion: contrast `Ate with Màin. However, Ludwig’s practice was not fully consistent: we find `Eight, for example. Long vowels represented by a single letter could be marked short, as in Mé (by both Boyer and Ludwig). As well as systematic differences, Ludwig also departed from Boyer’s indications for some individual words: for example, Boyer's acute-accented Péony, Péople is corrected to Pèony, Pèople with a grave to indicate a long vowel.

Neither Boyer nor Ludwig made any mention of secondary stress. However, Boyer gave òver as a free-standing word, yet used an acute accent for óver- in compounds such as óver-áwed, óver-bíg¸ perhaps reflecting a dim awareness that over carries only the secondary stress in such compounds, resulting in a phonetically shorter vowel than when carrying the main stress. Ludwig seems not to have understood the principle, if that is what it was. At any rate he did not follow it: the over- in compounds in Ludwig’s entries have no accent marked, except where primary stress is intended, as in the noun `Over-weight (in the sense of the extra given over and above the stated weight, rather than today’s adjective over’weight).

The microstructure of Ludwig’s (1706) dictionary

Ludwig followed Boyer very closely in his nomenclature (i.e. list of headwords): in a sample of headwords from LET to LIGHTEN,³³ Ludwig reproduced Boyer’s 1700 nomenclature without omission. One of Ludwig’s few positive interventions was to list items within entries more strictly alphabetically than Boyer sometimes did. For example under light, we find the compounds light-fingered, light-footed, light-hearted in alphabetical order, diverging from Boyer. However, in general Ludwig’s entries remain very close to the French source.

Nevertheless, Ludwig used different conventions to Boyer for the internal organisation of entries. In both halves of his longer 1699 dictionary, Boyer first listed the headword in block capitals, then gave the part of speech, followed by the first sense, described in brackets in the language of the headword (see Table 1). One or more equivalents in the other language follow, and short examples, given in both the source language and target language. Boyer marked each subsequent sense with a manicule (☛) on a new line. This principle is diluted, however, since some idioms or examples, rather than distinct senses, are also marked with a new line and a manicule, such as (under ESPRIT) ‘Avoir l’esprit malin, ou malicieux; Un homme d’esprit’; and ‘Avoir l’esprit mal fait’, before returning to the standard pattern with a new distinct sense: ‘☛ Esprit, (Genie, Humeur, Caractere) Spirit, Genius, Temper, Humour, † Kidney’.³⁴ The same word used as another part of speech is likewise given a new manicule, rather than a separate new entry (see Table 1, showing the entries under the English headword spirit in Boyer’s two dictionaries, and in Ludwig’s English–German dictionary).³⁵

Table 1 The entries for spirit in the dictionaries of Boyer and in Ludwig’s A dictionary English, German, and French; the numbering of senses is my addition.

Boyer, The Royal Dictionary. In Two Parts (1699)   SPIRIT. Subst. [1] (a Substance distinct from Matter) Esprit, Substance immaterielle   God is a Spirit, Dieu est un Esprit.   [2] ☛ Spirit, (Virtue, or supernatural Power than animates the Soul) Esprit, Vertu, ou puissance surnaturelle, qui remue l’ame.   He is acted on by the Spirit of the Devil. C’est l’esprit du Demon qui agit en lui.   [3] ☛ Spirit (or Soul) L’Esprit, l’ame.   [4] ☛ Spirit (or Ghost of a dead Body) Esprit ou l’ame d’une Personne morte   [5] ☛Spirit, (a Term of Chymistry, the subtlest substance extracted from mixt Bodies) Esprit, Terme due Chymie   5. Spirit of Salt, Esprit de Sel   [6] ☛ Spirits, (in the Plural Number) Esprits   6. [6a] The Vital or Animal Spirits, Les Esprits vitaux, ou animaux   7. [6b] The Spirits of Wine, and other strong Liquors, Les Esprits du vin, & d’autres liequeurs fortes   [7] ☛ Spirit, (Genius, Humour, or Nature) Esprit, genie, Caractere, humeur   8. Ex. That’s the Spirit of their Society, C’est là l’esprit de leur Société.   9. ☛ To do a thing out of a Spirit (or Principle) of Chairty, Faire une chose un Esprti, ou par un principe, de Charité   [8] ☛ Spirit, (wit or liveliness) Esprit, feu, vivacité   [9] ☛ (Courage or Pride) Coeur, courage, fierté.   10. To pull down one’s Spirit, Abbatre la fierté de queuqu’un, l’humilier   11. To have a high, or great Spirit, Etre fier.   12. ☛ To put Spirit into one, Animer, encourager quelqu’un.   13. ☛ To recover one’s Spirits, (to come to one’s self again) Reprendre ses Esprits, se remettre, se reconnoitre, revenir à soi   14. [10] ☛ Spirit, V. Kidnapper [under KIDNAP we duly find: Kidnapper, S. Un Voleur d’Enfants, and, before that under To kidnap (V.A.) a Child, Enlever un Enfant pour l’envoyer aux Indes]

Boyer, The Royal Dictionary Abridged (1700)  Spírit, S. Esprit ☛ Spirit, (wit or liveliness) Esprit, feu, vivacité. ☛ (Courage or Pride) Coeur, courage, fierté

Ludwig, A dictionary English, German, and French (1706). [The French also found in Boyer is underlined; the numbering of senses corresponds to the senses in Boyer (1699) as I have numbered them]  Spírit, [1, 4,] ein geist; [2] die seele; das gemüthe; [3] ein gespenste; [6b] ein (distillirter) spiritus; [7] die natürliche zuneigung, die art, weise, ein principium, ursprung oder bewegende ursache; [8] die munterkeit, muthigkeit, lebhafftigkeit; [9] der muth, das hertz; ein hochmuth, trotz; [10] ein kinderräuber, kinderdieb, der kinder entführet, und nach America in die Englische plantationen zu sclaven verkauffet, esprit; Coeur; fierté; un voleur d’infans. To recover his spirits, wieder zu sich selbst kommen, reprendre ses esprits.

As Table 1 shows, Ludwig’s layout is more efficient than Boyer’s, but correspondingly denser for the reader as a result. (See also Figure 1 for an illustration.) Ludwig does not generally give the part of speech, and Ludwig also omits Boyer’s explicit English–language disambiguations of each sense. Senses are separated from each other by a semi-colon only, and within each sense, there is no clear distinction between a lexeme equivalent and what might be read as a paraphrase to delimit the sense. For example, in Table 1, Ludwig’s sixth grouping contains three one-lexeme equivalents and two paraphrases: ‘die natürliche zuneigung, die art, weise, ein principium, ursprung oder bewegende ursache’. French equivalents for the headword, taken from Boyer, are grouped together after German equivalents. Any examples or idioms come after the full list of sense and equivalents, rather than being linked to each sense as in Boyer; they are given first in English, followed by the rendering in German, then French.

Fig. 1 A sample page (p.643) from Ludwig’s Dictionary English, German, and French.

Source: SLUB Dresden, http://digital.slub-dresden.de/id366206370/187 (Public Domain Mark 1.0).

It is plausible that for Ludwig — who we know expected his main audience to be Germans reading English, and not the other way round — there was no need to provide a clearer scaffold to mark out the different senses, because the likely German user would be able to use the wider context of the English text that they were reading, to identify which German lexeme would apply. Boyer, by contrast had both audiences in mind in his bidirectional dictionary: those needing receptive knowledge and those seeking to express themselves in the other language, who would need support in choosing an appropriate equivalent.

While Table 1 shows that Ludwig clearly followed Boyer closely, it shows too that he also used his own initiative, for example omitting Boyer’s senses [4] and [5], where a suitable German equivalent would be the same as for sense [1], geist, and would have created repetition. Often Ludwig also reduced the number of French terms compared to Boyer. For example, in Example 1 of Table 2, Ludwig gives two one-word equivalents for let as a past participle; he supplies two in German, as Boyer had done for French, but keeps just one of Boyer’s two French terms. Similarly, for let as a noun, in the sense of a hindrance (Example 2 in Table 2). Ludwig gives three German equivalents, just as Boyer had given three French ones. Again, though, Ludwig omitted one of the French equivalents. In general, Ludwig gives fewer example phrases, collocations, and idioms than Boyer, as under the head-word letter, where Ludwig retains only the most basic collocation ‘einen brief schreiben’ from Boyer’s fuller ‘to write, seal, direct a letter’ (Example 3). Boyer’s Letters Patent entry is omitted by Ludwig altogether. However, Ludwig also added details in places, as in Example 4, for letter-case, where Ludwig offers an explanation going beyond Boyer, disambiguating brieffutter by adding a relative clause to elucidate: ‘darein man seine brieffe & c. stecket’ (‘in which one puts one’s letters etc.’).³⁶ In Example 5, for Boyer’s let-in, renvoi, where Ludwig was unable to provide a German one-lexeme equivalent, he instead gave an explanation in German.

Table 2  Comparing selected entries in the dictionaries of Boyer and Ludwig.

Example	Boyer, The Royal Dictionary Abridged (1700)	Ludwig, A dictionary English, German, and French (1706)
1	Let, Adj. Loué, affermé &C. V. To let	Lét, A. vermietet, verpachtet &c. loüé, &C. S. To let.
2	Let, S. Obstacle, empêchement, retardement.	Lét S einen hindernüß, verhinderung, versaumnüß, obstacle, retardement
3	Letter, (Missive or epistle) Lettre, Epitre, Dépeche, † Missive^34 To write, seal and direct a Letter Ecrire, cacheter addresser une lettre	Létter, ein buchstabe, letter [sic, presumably an error for lettre]; ein brieff, schreiben [sic]
4	Boyer (1699) A letter-case, Un Porte-lettre	Ludwig (1706) letter-case ein briefffutter/ darein man seine brieffe & c. stecket, porte-lettre
5	Boyer (1699) A Let-in, (or Reference) Un Renvoy.	Ludwig (1706) A let-in ein merckzeichen im schreiben, wo etwas noch hinein kommen muß, un renvoi

In at least some cases, Ludwig went beyond mechanical translation of French equivalents, to add details or clarifications to his German equivalents. Spírit (Table 1) offers an interesting example. Ludwig must have followed a cross-reference in Boyer’s Royal Dictionary (‘V. Kidnapper’, i.e. ‘see kidnapper’), to arrive at the — to modern eyes — somewhat surprising specification of voleur d’infans as a sense of spirit. Ludwig also expanded on Boyer’s curter statement (s.v. To kidnap) that kidnappers send children aux Indes, to explain more fully that such children were sent to be slaves in the plantations of America: kinderdieb, der kinder entführet, und nach America in die Englische plantationen zu sclaven verkauffet.³⁷ Here it seems Ludwig drew on his own cultural knowledge to add an explanation found in neither of the Boyer dictionaries.

These examples all demonstrate that Ludwig applied his own judgement in adapting Boyer’s lexicographical material. It remains broadly true that Ludwig’s task consisted ‘simply in squeezing German equivalents and definitions in between Boyer's English and French text; his definitions, which are mere translations, can only be considered as his own work to a minor extent’.³⁸ However, there were many subtle re-organizations of material: omissions, re-ordering, and additions. Minor though such differences are, they are numerous, and they show, like his adjustments to Boyer’s pronunciation markings, that Ludwig applied his own judgement in every detail of the dictionary.

From English–French to English–German–French: ‘mere translations’?

I turn now to analyse what Hausmann & Cop dismissed as Ludwig’s ‘mere translations’, i.e. the task of supplying the German equivalents for English words. The task was, I submit, more significant than Hausmann & Cop’s judgement allows for, since it was being undertaken for the English–German pairing. Following Rettig, we can identify three possible relationships between an English lemma, its senses, and Ludwig’s German equivalents:³⁹

1. the absence of an equivalent;

2. congruence, where there is a one-to-one match between the two languages;

3. multivergence, where there is either more than one German equivalent (3a divergence), or where several terms in English converge in a single German equivalent (3b convergence).

Analysing such relationships is more complicated in the case of a dictionary like Ludwig’s where entries include a third language. In some instances, there is a straightforward congruence, with single-word lexeme equivalents across the three languages, as in Examples 1 and 2 in Table 3. In other cases, there is an apparent congruence between English and French lexemes, but a divergence from these to two (or more) German terms, as in Example 3 of Table 3. In others again, single French and English terms are treated as congruent, but lack a single-lexeme equivalent in German, as in Examples 4 and 5. A single English term may also diverge into two or more terms in both French and German (Example 6). Finally, it is possible that multiple terms in both English and German may converge on fewer terms in French, as seems to be the case for putain and prostituée (a case to which I return below with regard to Ludwig’s German–English dictionary). However, Ludwig often reduced the number of French equivalents anyway; so in Example 3, where Leisure seems to be congruent with one French term, loisir, Boyer had in fact given a second term besides loisir: Commodite [sic]. Apparent convergence is in the eye of the beholder, in other words. Nor is it easy to distinguish between near-synonyms and divergence into distinct meanings. In Examples 3 and 4 in Table 3, we might argue that rather than true divergence in German, the terms are close synonyms, by contrast with Example 7, where Ludwig clearly identified separate senses, separated by semi-colons.

Table 3  Sample entries from Ludwig (1706) illustrating congruence, convergence, divergence, or absence of an equivalent.

Example	Ludwig, A dictionary English, German, and French (1706)	absence OR extent of congruence OR divergence?
1	Lèek, lauch, porreau	congruence of lexemes across all three languages
2	‘Epitaph, eine grabschrifft, epitaphe	congruence of lexemes across all three languages
3	Léisure, die weile, musse, zeit, loisir (Ludwig 1706)	congruence of English and French, divergence in German
4	Eréct, recht, gerade in die höhe, aufgerichtet, droit, dressé.	congruence of English and French, divergence in German
5	Dástard, ein feiger, verzagter, weibischer kerl, poltron	congruence of English and French, absence of single-lexeme equivalent in German
6	‘Episod [sic], eine kleine historie in einem freudenspiele, episode.	congruence of English and French; absence of single-lexeme equivalent in German
7	Small, A. klein; gering; schlecht; dünne, nicht starck; wenig, petit.	congruence of English and French, divergence in German

Rettig’s framework thus provides a useful way to describe the semantic relationships between the three languages in Ludwig’s dictionary. What can we learn about Ludwig’s lexicographical process of navigating among the three languages, using this framework? Ludwig’s approach may have been:

1. a two-step process, taking Boyer’s existing English to French mapping, and adding a second step of mapping French to German; or

2. a single-step process, from English to German (with the French intermediary more or less overlooked by Ludwig, and simply added at the end of each entry without further consideration); or

3. a combination, where Ludwig took into account both English and French terms from Boyer to arrive at his German equivalents.

Let us consider option (1) first. It is theoretically possible that to get from French to German equivalents for English words, Ludwig looked up Boyer’s French equivalents in an existing French–German dictionary and used their English renderings. While not all candidate dictionaries were accessible to me, several can be ruled out, taking Ludwig’s entry for lewd as an example (Table 4). Boyer’s Royal Dictionary has seven French lexeme equivalents for English lewd (dissolu, débauché, infame, libertin, perdu, abandonné, impudique). Ludwig offers nine in German (and retains only the first three of Boyer’s French terms). Of Ludwig’s nine German equivalents, just one can be found under the relevant French terms (as in Boyer s.v. lewd) in the earliest French–German dictionary, that of Hulsius (¹1596, here the ²1607 ed.) and in the 1650 edition of Stoer’s French–German–Latin dictionary: unzüchtig for impudique. Duëz’s 1664 French–German dictionary gives a total of 16 separate German terms for the seven French terms given by Boyer, of which only four — gottlos (under dissolu), unehrlich (under infame), unzüchtig (under impudique), and üppig (under both dissolu and desbauché) — are among Ludwig’s nine. Oudin’s 1694 dictionary offers just unzüchtig (as well as [gar zu] loß for libertin), while Pomey’s 1700 French–German–Latin dictionary offers three of the terms (unordentlich, unehrlich, unzüchtig) among some 14 adjectives;.⁴⁰ Altogether, then, these five works between them give only five of Ludwig’s nine German equivalents for the French words found in Boyer under LEWD. It therefore seems unlikely, from this admittedly single sample, that any of these dictionaries — whether singly or in combination — inspired Ludwig directly. A debt to some other source, such as Widerhold’s French–German–Latin dictionary (1669), which was not accessible to me, cannot be ruled out.⁴¹ However, it is worth noting that Ludwig’s German equivalent leichtfertig is arguably closer in meaning to the sense of Boyer’s English disambiguating terms wanton, riotous than it is to any of Boyer’s French terms. This suggests that Ludwig did indeed use his own knowledge of English: he had, after all, spent many years in America and England, and worked as a translator from German to English. He did not, then, merely translate from French into German.

Table 4  Boyer and Ludwig’s entries for lewd.

Boyer, Royal Dictionary (1699)	Ludwig, Dictionary English, German, and French (1706)
LEWD, Adj. (wicked, wanton, riotous) Dissolu, débauché, infame, libertin, perdue, abandonné, impudique A lewd life, une vie dissoluee, ou debauchee A lewd Discourse, Un Dicsours infame A lewd Man, Un Débauché, un Dissolu, un abandonné A lewd woman, Une Debauchée, une Abandonnée, une dissolue	Lèwd, leichtfertig, gottlos, lose, schändlich, unordentlich, unehrlich, unzüchtig, unverschämt, üppig Dissolu, débauché, infame

As for option (2), that Ludwig proceeded straight from English to German without significant reference to French, the discussion of Spírit above already showed that Ludwig relied on the division of semantic space that Boyer’s French terms offered, albeit with some adjustments of his own. Ludwig took advantage of the partial congruence of spirit and geist (and esprit) to reduce the number of senses he distinguished, and so reduce redundancy in the dictionary entry. As a second illustration, Table 5 gives a simplified representation of equivalents for the English adjective light given by Boyer and Ludwig. Boyer’s Royal Dictionary had identified a total of nine senses (again the numbering is mine, added for clarity), even though in some cases (as in senses [1] to [3]), the same French equivalent is given for more than one sense. Across the nine senses, Boyer gave a total of 15 French lexeme equivalents for light, but leger is the first equivalent for seven of these nine senses. Ludwig distinguished only seven individual senses (separated by semi-colons), but gave a total of 19 different German equivalents for light (including five for each of sense 3 and 4). Ludwig had only seven rather than nine senses for two reasons. First, he did not separate out Boyer’s sense [2] ‘that is not full weight’, perhaps because it is derivable in context from the more general sense of [1]. Second, he also omitted sense [7] (‘superficial’), possibly because it is adequately covered by the equivalents in [4] (‘small or trifling’). The fact that the first equivalent given by Boyer, leger, serves as the first equivalent in seven of Boyer’s nine senses of light shows that there is congruence between light and leger in multiple senses. By contrast, Ludwig’s first German equivalent, leicht(e), is applicable only to senses [1] and [5]. There is, in other words, far greater divergence from English light to the multiple different German equivalents than there is from light to the French equivalents. Nevertheless, the fact that Ludwig’s German terms are grouped into the same senses as his French terms, and in the same order as Boyer’s, strongly suggests that, as in the case of spirit, he used Boyer’s French structuring of the semantic space when identifying his German equivalents.

Table 5  LIGHT: French and German equivalents given by Boyer (1699) and Ludwig (1706).

English lemma	Senses, as disambiguated by Boyer (1699)	French lexeme equivalents given by Boyer (1699)	French equivalents given by Ludwig (1706)	German equivalents given by Ludwig (1706)
LIGHT A. [i.e. adjective]	[1] (the contrary of heavy)	leger	leger	leicht
				nicht schwer
	[2] (that is not full weight)	leger	[…]	[NONE SPECIFIED]
	[3] (or nimble)	leger	[…]	hurtig
		agile		behend
		dispos		fertig
	[4] small or trifling	leger	petit, frivole, mediocre	klein
		petit		liederlich
		frivole		gering
		mediocre		schlecht
				mittelmäßig
	[5] light or light-armed	leger	legerement armé	leichte (in rüstung oder waffen)
		legerement armé
	[6] inconstant	leger	inconstant	unbeständig
		inconstant		leichtsinnig
		volage
	[7] (or superficial) knowledge	legere	[…]	[NONE SPECIFIED]
		superficielle
	[8] (or bright)	clair	clair	lichte
		brillant		hell
		eclatant		klar
		lumineux		scheinend
	[9] (of a flaxen colour)	blond	blond	lichtfarbig
		clair		flachsfarbig

It also seems that Boyer’s French terms may have inspired German equivalents directly too. Ludwig (implicitly) splits Boyer’s fourth sense of light (‘small or trifling’, see [4] in Table 5) into two senses, as Boyer’s French equivalent mediocre appears to have inspired Ludwig to identify an additional sense that we might call ‘of poor quality’, for which Ludwig gives two equivalents, schlecht and mittelmäßig. It is unlikely that light would have yielded these German equivalents without the intermediary step of the French.⁴² This example — together with the analysis already given of the spirit entries — suggests that the intermediary French could, and did, play a role in Ludwig’s selection of German equivalents for English lemmas.

In sum, then, this tentative exploration suggests that option (3) applies: Ludwig took into account both Boyer’s English lemmas and his French equivalents, as well as Boyer’s structuring of semantic space, to arrive at his German equivalents. We can also summarise that:

• English light and French leger are congruent in seven of nine senses;

• all three of English light, French leger, and German leicht are congruent in senses [1] and the closely-related sense [5];

• there are no senses where English light and German leicht are congruent but leger is not congruent with them.

The beginnings of German–English lexicography: Ludwig’s Teutsch–Englisches Lexicon (1716)

Ten years after his pioneering English–German dictionary, Ludwig’s Teutsch–Englisches Lexicon, again the first of its kind, has been called ‘the most important dictionary of its time with German as a source language that is strictly alphabetically arranged’.⁴³ (Kramer’s Herrlich Grosse Teutsch–Italiänische Dictionarium, published 1700–02, was arranged by rootword, in contrast.)⁴⁴ Compiling it was also far more challenging. For his English–German dictionary, Ludwig had the path smoothed before him (a ‘gebahnten weg vor sich’) thanks to Boyer, as we have seen. But for his German–English dictionary, Ludwig had to ‘break the ice himself’ (‘selber das eiß brechen’, p.)(2^v). In his 1705 language manual, Ludwig had admittedly already compiled a modest vocabulary of the ‘most needful parts of Speech’ of about 45 pages, grouped thematically and by part of speech,⁴⁵ but this new work was very much more ambitious in scope. It was almost twice as extensive as the English–to-German dictionary (1335 quarto pages vs 786 quarto for Ludwig’s 1706 dictionary). A sample page is shown in Figure 2.

Fig. 2 A sample page of the Teutsch–Englisches Lexicon (cols. 1983–84).

Source: SLUB Dresden, http://digital.slub-dresden.de/id365273635/1006 (Public Domain Mark 1.0).

To compile the Teutsch–Englisches Lexicon, Ludwig claimed to have drawn on the best English and German ‘scribenten’, and to have made use throughout (‘durchgehends’) of other bilingual dictionaries (‘mit andern sprachen verknüpffte Dictionaria’, p.)(2^v), but no further details are given. In fact, Ludwig’s main source was Kramer’s German–Italian dictionary (1700–02),⁴⁶ but Ludwig also made significant additions. Some additional headwords seem to come from von Erberg’s German–French–Italian dictionary of 1710,⁴⁷ including, for example, abfeuern, abfillen, abfilzen, abfolgen, abformen, abfreyen. Ludwig also expands many entries compared to Kramer. Under Ach, we find eight of Kramer’s 14 phrases and idioms, supplemented by another 21 of Ludwig’s own. Under Achsel, six of nine idioms or exemplifications come from Kramer’s twelve; and under the number acht, nine of the 16 phrases are taken from Kramer’s 14.

Ludwig’s German–English entries contain no information about German pronunciation, in contrast to the guidance given about English in the 1706 dictionary. Indeed, German pronunciation was to remain long neglected. Among monolingual German dictionaries, Adelung’s Grammatisch-kritisches Wörterbuch in the last decade of the eighteenth century offered some very limited guidance (arguably as a direct result of Adelung’s experience of indicating the word-stress and vowel-length in his English dictionary),⁴⁸ but it was only with Heinsius’s Volksthümliches Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache that pronunciation was indicated for every lemma.⁴⁹ German pronunciation does not feature in German–English dictionaries until the 1840s.⁵⁰

Despite Ludwig’s debt to Kramer and, probably, von Erberg’s dictionary (and perhaps others) for headwords, the structure of his German–English entries seems to be his own, and it is an impressive achievement from a standing start. First, both in comparison with his own 1706 work and with the works to which he owes a debt, the Teutsch–Englisches Lexicon shows some refinements in the microstructure of entries. In particular, Ludwig now sometimes explicitly numbered different senses.⁵¹ In some cases, the numbering in fact distinguishes what we would consider to be homonyms, i.e. homologous but distinct words with different etymologies, whether with different genders (as in Example 1 in Table 6), or with the same gender (as in senses 1 and 2 in Example 2 of Table 6). In other cases, the numbering implicitly distinguishes different parts of speech, e.g. adjective, adverb, and noun in Example 3 in Table 6. In comparatively few cases, Ludwig’s numbering does indeed identify different senses of the same word, as under Mannsbild (Example 4 in Table 6). Ludwig’s implementation of the microstructure is not completely consistent, however — note the slightly differing ways in which the gender is presented for sense 1. of Marter, Marck, and Mannsbild respectively.

Table 6  Selected entries from Ludwig’s Teutsch–Englisches Lexicon (1716).

Example	Dictionary entry
1	Marter (1. der), a marten or martern., s. marder. 2. Die marter, folter, qual oder peinigung, tomernt, tormenting, torture, pain.
2	Marck (1. das) in den beinen der menschen und thiere, the marrow within mens and animals [sic] bones […] 2. Das Marck, merck oder zeichen, a mark. […]. 3. Die marck, acht untzen, sechzehn loht, ein halb pfund, a mark a weight of eight ounces.
3	Leicht. 1. seyn, to be light, easy, facil or facile. […] 2. er geht leicht oder leichtlich zu werck, er überlegt die sachen nicht, he acts lightly, rashly, unadvisedly, unconsiderately [sic], foolishly, unwarily. […] 3. Die leichte oder leichtigkeit, the facility, lightness, easiness.
4	Mannsbild (das) 1. Die manns-person, a man a person of the masculine sex. 2. Ein bild eines mannes, a statue or figure of a man.

The task of finding suitable English equivalents for the German headwords was made easier by the fact that Ludwig’s English–German dictionary already provided pairings of English and German terms, and Boyer’s dictionaries could furnish additional equivalents for the associated French terms. To take an example from the semantic field of prostitution (chosen here because it forms part of a wider, separate investigation of how gender and sexuality have been represented in English–German bilingual dictionaries), in 1706, Ludwig’s English headword Whore had just two German and one French equivalent (‘eine hure, metze, putain’). By contrast, in the Teutsch–Englisches Lexicon the German headword Hur oder hure (die) has ten equivalents: ‘A whore, wench, harlot, prostitute, strumpet, crack, cucquean, trull, cockatrice, doxy’; eight of these are found under the French headword Putain in Boyer’s Royal Dictionary (1699): ‘Whore, Wench, Harlot, Prostitute, Strumpet, Crack, Cockatrice, Doxy’. But Ludwig inserted two further terms, cucquean and trull, which (like all the other eight) appeared as English headwords, with their French equivalents including Putain, first in Boyer and then, accordingly, in Ludwig’s 1706 Dictionary.

Listing a larger number of single-lexeme compounds as headwords may explain some of the additional bulk of Teutsch–Englisches Lexicon,⁵² but entries generally also contain far more examples and idioms. For example, Ludwig’s English–German dictionary offers a ten-line entry for between, betwixt, zwischen darzwischen, entre, containing just one full example sentence and two phrases (between wind & water, between whiles), with equivalents in French and German. By contrast, the 1716 entry for zwischen, between or betwixt, is over thirty lines long (even without any French terms which make up some of the 1706 entry), and includes fully sixteen examples of usage. Closer examination reveals that all the examples given in the entry are cases where a German speaker could run the risk of making an error by translating too literally, in the absence of guidance to the contrary, whether because of a fixed idiom; a figurative usage; a different default ordering of terms; a different preposition required; or a different syntactical structure (see the analysis in Table 7). The approach taken in the zwischen entry no doubt reflects Ludwig’s teaching and translating experience, putting into practice Ludwig’s stated aim to show ‘wie man die natur beyder sprachen am füglichsten vergleichen, und nach erforderung der einen den sinn der andern aufs eigentlichste ausdrücken möchte’ (Preface, p.)(2v).

Table 7  Selected examples from the Teutsch–Englisches Lexicon entry under zwischen.

	German	English	Potential pitfall
1	Wie gehts? So zwischen beyden	how do you do? So so; indifferently; tolerably; passably	Idiom, cannot be translated literally
2	Zwischen thür und angel stecken	to be in the mouth of danger	Figurative usage, cannot be translated literally
3	Zwischen furcht und hoffnung	between hope and fear	Idiomatic order of nouns is reversed in English
4	Zwischen der abendmahlzeit	at supper-time	English requires a different preposition (two further similar examples)
5	Zwischen ihnen entsteht leicht ein widerspruch	them [sic!] two are apt to interfere with one another	Different syntactical structure preferred, specifically subjectivization of the prepositional object (three further examples where the same principle is applied)
6	Die liebe so zwischen ihnen ist	Their mutual, or reciprocal love; their love to one another; their loving one another mutually, or reciprocally; their reciprocation, or exchanging, of love	Variously: three different syntactical structures using either adjective, noun or adverb in lieu of preposition; or different preposition

Bilingual dictionaries in linguistic and cultural history

Analysing Ludwig’s work in structuring entries, identifying and selecting examples, and furnishing appropriate equivalents can contribute to the history of lexicography and to the history of language learning and teaching. But the linguistic features of the dictionary entry for zwischen in Table 7 incidentally also reveal the value of such dictionaries as sources for language history. Note, for instance, Ludwig’s use of so as a relative pronoun in the German in Example 6 of Table 7, and the non-standard use of them as subject in the English in Example 5. German equivalents supplied for words and examples in the earlier English–German dictionary could yield similar data. Besides such grammatical features (to which pilot work suggests we could certainly also add the use or omissions of zu with infinitives in German), we might also add the history of compound formation (such as the preference for a Fugenelement or not, e.g hursohn vs hurensohn), and spelling, including varying practices in capitalisation and indications of vowel length.⁵³ Some of Ludwig’s entries are among the words’ earliest lexicographical attestations in German, predating their listing in any monolingual German dictionary, even if Ludwig himself took them from the even earlier (1700–02) German–Italian dictionary of Kramer. Examples from the semantic field of marriage, for example, include Eheschänder, Ehefeind, for which the attestations given in the Deutsches Wörterbuch are later.⁵⁴

Finally, early dictionaries of German and English are also potentially valuable sources for cultural history and the history of cultural exchange. Stein already noted Ludwig’s explanatory gloss for the entry ‘Billings-gate-oratory’, ‘die fluchenden und scheltenden redensarten, so man zu London an dem orte, genannt Billings-gate, unter dem gemeinen volcke höret’,⁵⁵ a far fuller explanation than Boyer offered in 1700: ‘le Langage des halles’. (There is no equivalent entry in his 1699 dictionary). The discussion of the word spirit in Ludwig’s English–German dictionary similarly alerted us to encounters with Britain’s West Indian colonies; other entries show a similar knowledge of its colonial cultures. It would be instructive to investigate at what point English/German lexicography starts to reflect nuances of usage in the colonies. A set of English dialogues printed in Halle in 1750 with learners of English in mind (based on the author Benjamin Schultze’s 1730 English–Telugu manual) provides ‘THE EXPLAINING Of Some Words not known in Europe’ (p.)(2c).⁵⁶ Some of these are already included by Ludwig in his 1706 English–German dictionary, such as Plantain, Pudding and Punch, but others are not, such as Bambou, Pallaquin and Paddy. The last two, indeed, are still not found in two major dictionaries which appeared in the 1790s, those of Johannes Ebers and of Johnann Christoph Adelung.⁵⁷ Plantain, while listed already by Ludwig and his successors, was not given the additional equivalent of Pisang, Paradies-Feige until Ebers (in 1794), though fig and pisang were both given as descriptors by Schultze in his glossary in 1750.

Conclusion and outlook

I have presented Christian Ludwig here as a pioneering German/English lexicographer, who, even in the seemingly straightforward task of adapting an existing French/English dictionary to a new German audience, gave careful and independent thought to his treatment of pronunciation, to the structure of his dictionary entries, and to his selection of German equivalents. In this Ludwig was guided, in varying degrees, by both the English and the French lexemes he found in Boyer’s works. Ludwig also refined his craft, introducing some minor improvements in microstructure and adding idioms in his more ambitious and much fuller 1716 German–English volume compared to the earlier English–German dictionary.

More broadly, we have seen that from the very start, German bilingual lexicography was the meeting point of a network of connections across a multilingual lexicographical landscape. Having used a French/English source for his 1706 dictionary, Ludwig turned to Kramer’s 1700 German–Italian dictionary for his 1716 nomenclature. Once authoritative monolingual sources became known, they were drawn on too. Thus, Ludwig’s younger competitor Theodor Arnold used the 1727 English dictionary of Nathan Bailey as a source for his 1736 dictionary; in a 1763 revision of Ludwig’s own dictionary, John Bartholomew Rogler looked to the recently published English dictionary of Samuel Johnson for his numerous additions; and Adelung used the 1773 edition of Johnson’s dictionary as the basis for his 1783 English–German work. Finally, at the tail end of the eighteenth century, Christian Friedrich Schwan could draw for his German–French dictionary both on the highest French monolingual authority — the dictionary of the Académie française — and on the authority of Germany’s leading lexicographer in the shape of Adelung’s monolingual German dictionary.⁵⁸ Yet the habit of looking sideways to existing bilingual dictionaries also continued, with Johannes Ebers — teacher of English at the Collegium Carolinum in Kassel⁵⁹ — in turn making use of Schwan’s German–French volumes in the preparation of his own German–English work.

We have found evidence that Ludwig’s dictionary — in particular his choice of examples — seems to reflect a teacher’s sensitivity to likely idiomatic, grammatical and syntactical pitfalls for a German learner seeking to translate from German to English. The practical teacher’s approach may also explain why, at the other end of the century, despite the superb credentials of Adelung’s English–German dictionary (prepared by Germany’s lexicographer par excellence, on the basis of the dictionary of Britain’s most highly regarded lexicographer Johnson) it was not Adelung’s but Ebers’ English–German dictionary which enjoyed greater success and which was, as we have seen, recommended by London-based teacher Wendeborn to his readers. One obvious consideration is Ebers’ indication of pronunciation for every English word, but there may be other factors too.

Bilingual dictionaries are, indeed, likely to give somewhat different accounts of the language compared to the monolingual tradition, precisely because nothing can be taken for granted when explaining words and their usage to learners. Not just the meaning, but also the pronunciation, guidelines for appropriate usage, and — sometimes — the cultural context of usage are all candidates for explicit pedagogical description and discussion. This makes bilingual dictionaries’ labelling of how words can or should be pronounced and used a rich but largely untapped vein to explore in the history of linguistic prescriptivism and normativity, in parallel to what is known from the national normative traditions.⁶⁰ Finally, regarding the history of cultural exchange, I have also hinted here at the presence of the language of colonialism in Ludwig’s dictionaries, as an indication of the promise of German/English bilingual lexicography as a corpus for the study of social and cultural history and for the history of intercultural exchange. Given the overlaps and multiple intersections points of monolingual and bilingual dictionary traditions, any such undertaking will, however, certainly benefit from a cross-linguistic comparative approach, something that has now become feasible thanks to digitisation of most primary sources.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Nicola McLelland

Nicola McLelland’s areas of research interest include the history of linguistics, encompassing the history of language learning and teaching, with a particular focus on the history of German linguistic thought and the history of how Germans and English speakers have studied each others’ languages. She has also published on language standardisation and multilingualism.

Notes

1 I use ‘German/English’ as the general label for such bilingual dictionaries; ‘German–English’ indicates a German-to-English dictionary (one-way), and ‘English–German’ the reverse.

2 Académie françoise, Le Dictionnaire de Académie Françoise, Dedié au Roy (Paris: J. B. Coignard, 1694); Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language (London: printed by W. Strahan, for J. and P. Knapton […]); Johann Christoph Adelung, Versuch eines vollständigen grammatisch-kritischen Wörterbuches der hochdeutschen Mundart (Leipzig: Breitkopf, 1774–86; ²1793–98 as Grammatisch-kritisches Wörterbuch der hochdeutschen Mundart). Studies of monolingual lexicography from a variety of perspectives include: John Considine, Academy Dictionaries 1600–1800 (Cambridge: CUP, 2014); Charlotte Brewer, Treasure-House of the Language. The Living OED (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014); Ulrike Haß-Zumkehr, Deutsche Wörterbücher — Brennpunkt von Sprach- und Kulturgeschichte (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2001); Lynda Mugglestone, Lost for Words: The Hidden History of the Oxford English Dictionary (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005); Linda C. Mitchell, ‘Dictionaries as Behavior Guides, in Adventuring in Dictionaries: New Studies in the History of Lexicography, ed. by John Considine (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010), pp. 82–93; Stephen Turton, ‘Unlawful Entries: Buggery, Sodomy, and the Construction of Sexual Normativity in Early English Dictionaries’, Dictionaries: Journal of the Dictionary Society of North America, 40 (2019), 81–112; Giovanni Iamartino, ‘Words by Women, Words on Women in Samuel Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language’, in Adventuring in Dictionaries: New Studies in the History of Lexicography (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing), pp. 94–124.

3 However, relevant studies include Monique C. Cormier, ‘From the Dictionnaire de l’Académie Francaise Dediée au Roi (1694) to the Royal Dictionary (1699) of Abel Boyer: Tracing Inspiration’, International Journal of Lexicography, 16 (2003), 19–41; Monique C. Cormier, ‘Usage Labels in the Royal Dictionary (1699) by Abel Boyer’, International Journal of Lexicography, 21 (2008), 153–71; Laurent Bray, Matthias Kramer et la Lexicographie du Français en Allemagne au XVIIIe Siècle: Avec une Édition des Textes Métalexicographiques de Kramer (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2000). See Agnieszka Fraczek, Zur Geschichte der deutsch-polnischen und polnisch-deutschen Lexikographie (1772–1868) (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1999, rpt. 2017); Heberto H. Fernández, Dictionaries in Spanish and English from 1554 to 1740: Their Structure and Development (Vertere: Monográficos de la revista Hermēneus, 12. Soria: Hermēneus, 2010).

4 Christian Ludwig, A Dictionary English, German, and French (Leipzig: bey Thomas Fritschen, 1706; later editions in 1736, 1763, 1791, 1808, 1821, 1832); Abel Boyer, The Royal Dictionary. in Two Parts, First French and English. Secondly, English and French [ … ] (London: Printed for R. Clavel, H. Mortlock […], 1699); Abel Boyer, The Royal Dictionary Abridged […]. To which is Added, the Accenting of all English Words, to Facilitate the Pronunciation of the English Tongue for Foreigners (London: Printed for R. Clavel, H. Mortlock […], 1700).

5 Christian Ludwig, Teutsch–Englisches Lexicon (Leipzig: Bey Thomas Fritschen, 1716; later editions in 1745, 1765, 1789, 1808, 1821, 1832).

6 Other German/English dictionaries in the eighteenth century include Theodore Arnold’s two dictionaries, Mr. Nathan Bailey's English Dictionary […] Translated into German […], by Theodore Arnold (Leipzig: Printed for the heir of the late Mr. Gross, 1736); and Neues Deutsch = Englisches Wörter = Buch (Leipzig: In der Grossischen Handlung, 1739), both with further editions into the nineteenth century; J. C. Prager’s Neueingerichtetes englisches Wörterbuch and its German–English counterpart, Neueingerichtetes englisches Wörterbuch […] Zweyter Teil (Coburg/Leipzig: verlegts Georg Otto, 1757, 1760); Johann Christoph Adelung, Neues Grammatisch-kritisches Wörterbuch der englischen Sprache für die Deutschen (Leipzig: Schwickert, 1783 and 1796); Johannes Ebers, Vollständiges Wörterbuch der englischen Sprache für die Deutschen (Leipzig: Breitkopf, 1793, 1794).

7 Franz Josef Hausmann and Margaret Cop, ‘Short History of English–German Lexicography’, in Symposium on Lexicography II. Proceedings of the 2nd International Symposium on Lexicography, ed. by K. Hyldgaard-Jensen and Arne Zettersten (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1985), pp. 183–97, here p. 187.

8 John Considine, Dictionaries in Early Modern Europe. Lexicography and the Making of Heritage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), here p. 289.

9 Minsheu, John, Ductor in Linguas = : Guide into the Tongues ; and, Vocabularium Hispanicolatinum = a Most Copious Spanish Dictionary (1617, rpt. Delmar: Scholars' Facsimiles and Reprints, 1978).

10 Robert Estienne, Dictionarium Latino-Gallicum, (Paris: Robert Estienne, 1538); Johannes Frisius, Dictionariolum Puerorum (Zurich: Froschauer, 1548).

11 See Fraczek, Zur Geschichte der deutsch-polnischen […] Lexikographie, here p. 27; Andreas Faber, Celaryus Polski, oder nach der Methode des lateinischen Libri Memorialis Cellarii, Vortheilhafftig eingerichtetes polnisch- und deutsches Wörter-Buch (Brzeg: n.p., 1717); Franciszek Mymer, Dictionarius trium linguarum: latine: teutonice et polonice, potiora vocabula continens (Krakow: Hieronymus Vietor, 1528); Jan Murmelius, Dictionarium trium linguarum: latine teutonice bœmice potiora vocabula continens (Vienna: Hieronymus Vietor, 1526).

12 See Heberto H. Fernández, Dictionaries in Spanish and English, pp. 249–88.

13 See Monique C. Cormier, ‘Bilingual Dictionaries of the Late Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries’, in The Oxford History of English Lexicography (Oxford: OUP, 2009), pp. 65–85; N. E. Osselton, The Dumb Linguists. A Study of the Earliest English and Dutch Dictionaries (Leiden: Leiden University Press, 1973); P. L. M. Loonen, For to Learne to Buye and Sell. Learning English in the Low Dutch Area between 1500 and 180 (Amsterdam: APA-Holland University Press, 1991), esp. pp. 278–325 for a list of language learning materials for the language pair Dutch/English published 1500–1800. On Kramer, see Bray, Matthias Kramer; Edgar Radtke, ‘Kramer (Krämer), Matthias’, in Lexicon Grammaticorum. Who's Who in the History of World Linguistics, ed. by Harro Stammerjohann (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1996), pp. 529–30; Helmut Glück, ‘Matthias Kramer als Grammatiker und Lexicograph’, in Matthias Kramer. Ein Nürnberger Sprachmeister Der Barockzeit Mit Gesamteuropäischer Wirkung, ed. by Mark Häberlein and Helmut Glück (Bamberg: University of Bamberg Press, pp. 17–32). Glück’s mention of German/English dictionaries by Kramer (p. 25) is an error; the two dates given are in fact the dates of Ludwig’s dictionaries.

14 Franz Josef Hausmann, ‘Das erste französisch-deutsche Wörterbuch. Levinus Hulsius’ Dictionaire von 1596–1607, Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie, 100 (1984), 306–20.

15 On the history of German lexicography, see Peter von Polenz and Claudine Moulin, Deutsche Sprachgeschichte vom Spätmittelalter bis zur Gegenwart. Vol. II 17. und 18. Jahrhundert (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2013), pp. 193–208; William J. Jones, German Lexicography in the European Context: A Descriptive Bibliography of Printed Dictionaries and Word Lists Containing German Language (1600–1700) (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2000); Helmut Henne, ‘Deutsche Lexikographie und Sprachnorm im 17. Und 18. Jahrhundert’, in Deutsche Wörterbücher des 17. und 18. Jahrhunderts. Einführung und Bibliographie, ed. by Helmut Henne (Hildesheim: Olms, 1975, ²2001); Peter Kühn and Ulrich Püschel, ‘Die Deutsche Lexikographie vom 17. Jahrhunderts bis zu den Brüdern Grimm Ausschließlich’, in Wörterbücher. Ein internationales Handbuch zur Lexikographie 5.2, ed. by Franz Josef Hausmann and et al. (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1990), pp. 2049–77.

16 John Kersey, A New English Dictionary, Shewing the Etymological Derivation of the English Tongue, Etc. (London: Printed for Henry Bonwicke, at the Red Lion, and Robert Knaplock, at the Angel in St. Paul's Church-Yard, 1702); Cormier, ‘From the Dictionnaire de L'académie Francaise’, p. 39.

17 Herbert E. Brekle and others, Bio-Bibliographisches Handbuch zur Sprachwissenschaft des 18. Jahrhunderts. Die Grammatiker, Lexikographen und Sprachtheoretiker des deutschsprachigen Raums mit Beschreibungen ihrer Werke (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1992–2010), vol. 5, p. 382; Alexander Schunka, ‘In Usum Angliae: Engländer, Englische Sprache und Englischunterricht an den Franckeschen Anstalten im frühen 18. Jahrhundert’, in Halle als Zentrum der Mehrsprachigkeit im Langen 18. Jahrhundert, ed. by Mark Häberlein and Holger Zaunstöck (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2017), pp. 139–56, here pp.148–49.

18 Christian Ludwig, Choise English & High-Dutch Dialogves & Letters: Together with a Vocabvlary (Leipzig: Fritsch,1705).

19 Ludwig, Choise Letters, p. 80. Gabriele Stein identified 134 titles published before 1700 containing an English–German or German–English word list, but in all cases they are polyglot materials in which German featured. See Gabriele Stein, ‘Englisch—German/German—English Lexicography: Its Early Beginnings’, Lexicographica, 1985 (1985), 155–64. Stein considered Offelen’s Double Grammar for Germans to Learn English and for English–Men to Learn the German Tongue (London: Old Spring Garden by Charing Cross, 1687) to be the only pre-1800 work for German and English specifically, containing a relatively modest vocabulary. It is therefore worth noting the very first textbook of German for English learners, Martin Aedler’s, High Dutch Minerva (London: printed in Little Britain, 1680), which, while not including a word-list, offered a substantial list of German and English idioms (pp. 177–254).

20 Christian Ludwig, Gründliche Anleitung zur Englischen Sprache (Leipzig: Fritsch, 1717). On the history of Germans learning English, see Friederike Klippel, Englischlernen im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert. Die Geschichte der Lehrbücher und Unterrichtsmethoden (Münster: Nodus, 1994); Friederike Klippel, ‘The History of English Instruction in the German-Speaking World’, in English in the German-Speaking World, ed. by Raymond Hickey (Cambridge: CUP, 2020), pp. 77–95.

21 Christian Ludwig, Teutsch–Englisches Lexicon […] (Leipzig: Bey Thomas Fritschen, 1716), p. [14].

22 Nicola McLelland, German through English Eyes. A History of Language Teaching and Learning in Britain, 1500–2000 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2015), pp. 198–99, 344.

23 Gebhardt Friedrich August Wendeborn, The Elements of German Grammar (London: Heydinger, 1774), p. 156; Theodor Arnold, rev. Anton Ernst Klausing, Neues Deutsch-Englisches Wörter-Buch […] (Leipzig und Züllichau: in der Buchhandlung des Waysenhauses, bey Nathanael Sigism. Frommann, 1770).

24 Johannes Ebers, The New and Complete Dictionary of the German and English Languages Composed Chiefly after the German Dictionaries of Mr. Adelung and of Mr. Schwan (Leipzig: Breitkopf and Haertel, 1796–1799), vol. I, Vorbericht, p. [1].

25 Johannes Ebers, Vollständiges Wörterbuch der englischen Sprache für die Deutschen (Leipzig: Breitkopf, 1793–1794). Wendeborn, Exercises to Dr. Wendeborn’s Introduction to German Grammar ([London?]: Printed for the Author, 1797), p. 199. There is, interestingly, no mention of Adelung’s English—German dictionary (see note 6), although his monolingual dictionary is listed. On Adelung’s English-German dictionary, see Nicola McLelland, ‘Adelung’s English—German Dictionary (1783, 1796): its Achievements and its Relationship to the Dictionaries of Samuel Johnson and Johannes Ebers’, Historiographia Linguistica, forthcoming (2024).

26 See Hausmann and Cop, ‘Short History’, pp. 185–86, and Cormier, ‘The Reception of Abel Boyer's Royal Dictionary in the eighteenth Century’, Journal of the Dictionary Society of North America, 26 (2005), pp. 174–193.

27 Johann Anton Fahrenkrüger, Nathan Bailey Dictionary, English-German and German-English, vol. 1 (Leipzig: Frommann, 1796), Vorrede, p. [1]).

28 Klippel, Englischlernen, p. 109, citing Konrad Schröder, Lehrwerke für den Englischunterricht im Deutschsprachigen Raum 1665–1900. Einführung und Versuch einer Bibliographie (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1975).

29 Boyer, The Royal Dictionary Abridged, first page of preface, unnumbered.

30 Thomas Dyche, A Dictionary of All the Words Commonly Us'd in the English Tongue (London: Samuel Butler, and Thomas Butler, 1723). See Joan Beal, ‘Pronouncing Dictionaries — I. Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries’, in Oxford History of English Lexicography, ed. by Anthony Paul Cowie (Oxford: OUP, 2008), pp. 149–75, here p. 149; Hausmann and Cop, ‘Short History’, p. 186. Believing that Bailey’s 1731 English dictionary was the first in the monolingual tradition to mark stress, Brekle and others (vol. 5, p. 384), commended Ludwig’s indication of stress as astonishing (‘erstaunlich’), seemingly not realizing that Ludwig took this innovation from his source. I can find no evidence for the suggestion by Brekle et al. (p. 384) that the pronunciation of English words is also indicated ‘with German letters’, though something like this is found in some parts of the pronunciation section of Ludwig’s 1717 grammar, e.g. p. 6 ‘place plähß, […] Ireland, eyhrländ’; the opening of John’s Gospel is similarly transcribed, sentence by sentence, pp. 152–58.

31 Ludwig, Choise Letters, pp. 7–11.

32 Boyer also offered English learners of French some limited assistance with other aspects of pronunciation, for example using an asterisk to indicate where an <h> was to be aspirated.

33 The LET to LIGHTEN sample matches part of the sample of Boyer’s Royal Dictionary, amounting there to 100 entries, used by Cormier and Fernández, who counted the proportion of Boyer’s entries which were inspired by the dictionary of Guy Miège; those inspired by other dictionaries; and those original to Boyer. They found, for example, that more than half of Boyer’s 56 definitions in the sample follow Miège verbatim; ten are modified. See Monique C. Cormier, and Heberto Fernández, ‘From the Great French Dictionary (1688) of Guy Miège to the Royal Dictionary (1699) of Abel Boyer: Tracing Inspiration’, International Journal of Lexicography, 18 (2005), 479–506.

34 The † marks ‘A Mean or Vulgar Word or Expression, as also, Words and Expressions of Humour and Burlesk’. On metalinguistic marking in Boyer and Ludwig, see Nicola McLelland, ‘Language Authority, Language Ideologies, and Eighteenth-century Bilingual Lexicographers of French, German and English: Comparing Abel Boyer, Christian Ludwig, and Lewis Chambaud’, in Historical and Sociolinguistic Approaches to French¸ ed. by Janice Carruthers, Mairi-Louise McLaughlin and Olivia Walsh (Oxford: OUP, 2024, pp. 181–197.

35 Ludwig used different fonts for each language: gothic for German, antiqua for English, and italics for French. Here I have used the same font for both German and English.

36 Hausmann and Cop, ‘Short History’, p. 186, similarly noted Ludwig’s addition to Boyer’s definition of gesture as movement of the body, ‘sonderlich aber der Hand’ (‘but especially of the hand’).

37 Ludwig further specifies in German, under the lemma kidnap ‘und nach West=Indien schicken’, where the French indicates only ‘aux Indes’.

38 Hausmann and Cop, ‘Short History’, p. 187.

39 Wolfgang Rettig, ‘Die zweisprachige Lexikographie Französisch—Deutsch, Deutsch—Französisch. Stand, Probleme, Aufgaben’, Lexicographica, 1 (1985), 83–123, here p. 94.

40 Levinus Hulsius, Dictionarium Frantzösisch–Teutsch (Frankfurt a.M.: Hulsius, Becker: 1607 [first ed. 1596]). Iacob Stoer, Dictionaire Francois–Allemanlatin (Geneva: Iacob Stoer, 1650 [first ed. 1610–11]); Nathanael Duëz, Dictionarium Germanico–Gallico–Latinum (Amsterdam: Elzevier, 1664); François Pomey, Le Grand Dictionnaire Royal, I. François-Latin-Alleman. II. Latin-Alleman-François. III. Alleman-François-Latin, (Frankfurt a.M.: Imprimé …  Par Jean Philippe André, 1700); Antoine Oudin, Nouveau et Ample Dictionnaire de Trois Langues, Divisé en Trois Parties: 1. Italien–françois–alleman. 2. François–italien–alleman. 3. Alleman–françois–italien (Frankfurt a.M.: Zubrodt, 1674).

41 Johann Widerhold, Neues Dictionarium in Französisch–Teutscher und Teutsch–Französischer, samt Beigefügter Lateinischer Sprach (Basel: in Verlegung Johann Herman Widerholds, 1669).

42 In 1763, the Arnold–Rogler dictionary admittedly gives schlecht as an equivalent for light, but in the sense of superficielle (cf. Boyer’s sense 7 in Table 5): Christian Ludwig rev. John Bartholomew Rogler, A Dictionary English, German and French, […] by Mr. Christian Ludwig Now Carefully Revised, Corrected […], by John Bartholomew (Leipzig: Gleditsch, 1763). Adelung’s equivalents for light (in a somewhat differently structured entry in his 1783 Enlglish–German dictionary) include seichte, geringe, and nicht gründlich, which are potentially negatively connoted as lacking depth, but they still do not signal poor quality in the way that schlecht and mittelmäßig do.

43 Hausmann and Cop, ‘Short History’, p. 187. Although no author is named on the 1716 title page and the preface is unsigned, Hausmann & Cop’s doubts about authorship (p. 187) are easily resolved: the printer’s running title appearing in the footer of some recto pages is ‘Ludw. T.Engl.Lex’ (for the first time at col. 241). While the 1745 reprint simply repeats the 1716 preface and still makes no mention of Ludwig by name, the title page of the third edition of 1765 attributes the dictionary to Ludwig. In Jöcher’s Allgemeines Gelehrten = Lexicon Ludwig was also already named as author of both dictionaries: Christian Gottlieb Jöcher, Allgemeines Gelehrten=Lexicon (Leipzig: Gleditsch, 1750–51), vol. 2 col 2585, noted by Timothy Buck, ‘Breaking the Ice. Christian Ludwig’s Teutsch–Englisches Lexicon, the First German–English Dictionary‘, in Das Unsichtbare Band der Sprache. Studies in German Language and Linguistic History in Memory of Leslie Seiffert, ed. by John Flood et al. (Stuttgart: Heinz, 1993), pp. 237–51, here pp. 238–39.

44 Matthias Kramer, Das Herrlich Grosse Teutsch–Italiänische Dictionarium (Nuremberg: Endter, 1700, 1702, rpt. Hildesheim Olms, 1982).

45 Ludwig, Choise Letters, pp. 90–136 (citation from p. 90).

46 The debt was noted by Hausmann and Cop, ‘Short History’, p. 187.

47 Matthias von Erberg, Gran Dizzionario Universale & Perfetto. 2: Le Grand Dictionaire Universel et Parfait (Nuremberg: Endter, 1710).

48 See McLelland, Adelung’s English-German dictionary, pp. 9–11.

49 Theodor Heinsius, Volksthümliches Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache: Mit Bezeichnung der Ausprache und Betonung für die Geschäfts- und Lesewelt (Hanover: Hahn, 1818).

50 See Nicola McLelland, ‘English/German bilingual lexicography in the nineteenth century'. Submitted to Angermion.

51 Noted already by Reinhard Hartmann, ‘300 Years of English–German Language Contact and Contrast: The Translation of Culture-Specific Information in the General Bilingual Dictionary’, in Interlingual Lexicography: Selected Essays on Translation Equivalence, Contrastive Linguistics and the Bilingual Dictionary, ed. by Hartmann (Munich: Niemeyer, 2007), pp. 175–84, here p. 179.

52 Compared to just five derivations and two compounds of whore listed as additional headwords in Ludwig’s Dictionary English, German, and French, (Whòredom, Whòrelike, Whòremaster, Whòreson, Whòring, Whòrish, and Whòrishly), Ludwig’s German–English dictionary listed some thirty or so hur-compounds (e.g. huren-blick, huren-haus, huren-sohn).

53 Voeste has shown how examining successive editions of Ludwig’s German–English dictionary — which largely pre-date Adelung’s epoch-making monolingual dictionary — can reveal changing responses to phonological, morphological and syntactical variation in German. See Anja Voeste, ‘Beispiel und Regel im 18. Jahrhundert. Ein Blick in Christian Ludwigs Zweisprachige Wörterbücher’, forthcoming in Stildiskurse Im 18. Jahrhundert. Beiheft Der Zeitschrift Für Deutsche Philologie Berlin 2023, ed. by Eva Axer, Annika Hildebrant, and Kathrin Wittler, pp. 143–159.

54 Similarly, Kramer offers early attestations for Hurenblick, Hurenhengst, hurentzen (all also listed in Ludwig’s Teutsch–Englisches Lexicon).

55 Stein, p. 150.

56 See Nicola McLelland, ‘Benjamin Schultze's (1750) Dialogue Book about Madras and the Learning of English in Eighteenth-century Germany’, Hallesche Forschungen, submitted.

57 On the probability that the second volume of the Adelung English–German dictionary is not, in fact, the work of Adelung, see Nicola McLelland, ‘Adelung’, pp. 18–22.

58 Christian Friedrich Schwan, Nouveau dictionnaire de la langue françoise et allemande composé sur les dictionnaires de M. Adelung et de l'Académie Francaise (Mannheim: Schwan et Fontaine, 1787–1798).

59 On Ebers’ biography (including as a teacher of English at Collegium Carolinum in Kassel), see Derek Lewis, ‘Die Wörterbücher Von Johannes Ebers. Studien Zur Frühen Englisch-Deutschen Lexikographie’ (Ph.D. diss., University of Würzburg, Würzburg, 2013) <https://opus.bibliothek.uni-wuerzburg.de/opus4-wuerzburg/frontdoor/index/index/docld/6388>, here pp. 44–49.

60 See Nicola McLelland, ‘Language Authority'.