Two more great (albeit slightly old) six-language dictionaries

Tuesday, July 17, 2012

I came across two more excellent six-language dictionaries on Archive.org the other day, these two thanks to searching in French instead of English as that is the primary language these were written in. As always it is too bad that the orthography and usage is now slightly out of date, as the length of both of them is quite impressive. Interestingly, French and English with their antiquated and etymological orthographies seem to have changed the least, showing one of the benefits of not moving to a simpler spelling. Spanish looks like it has changed the most, though overall the changes are still quite minimal. The 1900 dictionary (the newer one) shows doubled consonants in Portuguese that do not exist anymore, and the older one from 1861 is even more interesting with words like deste written as d'este and even de being elided before a word that begins with a vowel just like in French.

And now to the dictionaries and their titles:

--- Manuel de la conversation et du style épistolaire à l'usage des voyageurs et de la jeunesse des écoles en six langues : français, anglais, allemand, italien, espagnol, portugais (1900)

--- Nouveau guide de conversations modernes : ou, dialogues usuels et familiers contenant en outre de nouvelles conversations sur les voyages, les chemins de fer, les bateaux à vapeur, etc. en six langues: Francais, Anglais, Allemand, Italeien, Espagnol, Portugais à l'usages des voyageurs et des personnes qui se livrent à l'étude de l'une ou de plusieurs de ces langues (1861)

I love how the titles in these books seem to grow as one moves back in time.

Any brave groups out there I wonder that feel like transcribing, updating and combining these two? Some of this could also be directly put into Tatoeba.org, which specializes in this sort of thing.

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