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The Collation

Guten Tag! Como vai? Parlez-vous français?

Spring is Conference Season for many academics, allowing us to travel far and wide for our academic and professional enrichment. Sometimes, we find ourselves traveling in places where the local language is not one of the ones we are most comfortable with. (Until someone invents a time machine, my relative fluency in classical Latin isn’t going to help me order dinner, is it?)

So what’s a traveling scholar to do? Today, one of the more common answers is probably “download a translation app for my smart phone.” However, before the predominance of smart phones, one might first have reached for a foreign language dictionary or phrasebook.

If you’ve ever walked around with a “pocket sized” Berlitz or Lonely Planet book of words and phrases in your travel bag, you’re really just continuing a tradition that has been going on for 400+ years.

While the Folger holds dictionaries in many different languages (and combinations of languages), of particular note is our collection of polyglot dictionaries. These seven- or eight- language “dictionaries” are more than basic Word X = Word Y kind of books. 1 This genre of book is based on Noël de Berlemont’s Flemish-French colloquies and dictionary, of which the earliest surviving copy is a 1536 Antwerp edition at Harvard

  1. The seven languages typically included are Latin, French, Flemish, German, Spanish, Italian, and English; in eight-language guides, Portuguese is added.
  2. measurements of the phones taken from the Apple and Samsung websites

Comments

This is fascinating; many thanks for it. I like your phrase “hokey dialogue”; I’ve often had the same thought about the odd dialogue in John Florio’s various Worlds of Words. If only there were a way to know if these bits were hokey or real. Has this book been digitised? Are images available?

William Ingram — May 10, 2015

Reply

Thank you! Yes, those stilted bits of dialog are so fascinating (in a train wreck sort of way). Our copy has not been digitized, but the BL’s copy is in EEBO.

Abbie Weinberg — May 11, 2015

Reply

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