Keletas naujų faktų ir hipotezių dėl Pilypo Ruigio Meletemos (1735) Londone

Narodowa w Warszawie), a letter was found written in 1742 by famous London-based polyglot and native of Klaipėda David Wilkins (1685–1745), addressed to the Prussian General Superintendent Johann Jacob Quandt (1686–1772). It reveals new information about the Meletema – a study of the Lithuanian language by Philipp Ruhig (1675–1749), a priest based in Walterkehmen. The work was sent to London in 1735 but was not published, and the manuscript was not returned; for a long time, it was unknown whether it had even reached the recipient. The first publication of Meletema, including a facsimile, transcription, and translation into Lithuanian, was prepared in 1986 by Vytautas Jurgutis and Valerija Vilnonytė, with translation by Vytautas Jurgutis and Kazys Eigminas. The manuscript is now kept in Vilnius, at the National Museum of Lithuania. Ruhig’s linguistic manuscript was intended to be printed in a multilingual Bible, for which Wilkins was already collecting texts and the necessary typefaces. Wilkins informed his friend Quandt about the project in a 1742 letter, asking him to send studies by Prussian scholars on the origins, dialects, and relationships of four languages – Polish, Muscovite, Estonian, and Latvian – which he planned to include at the beginning of the volume. He wrote that he had already collected biblical texts in 21 European languages and that he already possessed “the dissertation on the Lithuanian language by the famous Mr. Ruhig, a priest from Insterburg, both excellent and learned”. These circumstances raise doubts about whether Ruhig’s Meletema reached London through Quandt.