English/German Bilingual Dictionaries in the Eighteenth Century: An Overview

ABSTRACT: This article charts a path—now made possible by digitization of almost all key texts—through the tangled history of eighteenth-century English/German lexicography, which emerged in response to growing German interest in English language and culture, and which rested entirely in the hands of teachers of English in Germany until the (hitherto almost completely overlooked) intervention of Adelung's English–German dictionary (1783). The dictionaries of Christian Ludwig (1706, 1716) and Theodor[e] Arnold (1736, 1739, 1757) laid the foundation for two partially interconnected lexicographical strands, until they were drawn together by Ernst Klausing (1770, 1771). While Ludwig based his works on existing bilingual dictionaries for other language combinations (French/English, Italian/German and German/French/Italian), Arnold used, besides Ludwig, Nathan Bailey's English orthographical dictionary (1727)—rather than Bailey's 1730 dictionary, as previously believed. Rogler (1763) preferred to use Samuel Johnson's recently published English dictionary (1755) as a source; so too did Adelung (1783), using the fourth, 1773 edition. In the 1790s, Johannes Ebers (whose 1796–1799 dictionary has not before been examined in detail in published work) was the first to draw on Adelung's German dictionary as an authoritative monolingual German source. Ebers was also the first to take into account the needs of English students of German, while also, like Ludwig at the start of the century, relying heavily on another bilingual dictionary, this time the German/French dictionary of Friedrich Schwan (1782–1784).