Jacques François
University of Caen-Normandy
www.interlingua.fr

1. A forgotten German Enlightenment philosopher

Johann Christoph Adelung (1732–1806) was one of the main promoters of the Volksaufklärung (popular Enlightenment) in the vein of Christian Wolff, eager to synthetize what the broad cultivated audience of the second half of the 18th century could benefit from in the philosophy of the Enlightenment.

Today the memory of his achievements has faded in Germany and he is scarcely known abroad, despite two memorable aspects of his prolific work: on the one hand his dictionaries, and on the other the Mithridates, a vast collection of the languages of the world known at the time, of which he was only able to complete the first volume, before Johann Severin Vater finished editing the next three volumes in 1817 with the participation of Alexander and Wilhelm von Humboldt (see François to appear).

2. Adelung, critical emulator of Samuel Johnson

Adelung was a connoisseur of the English language due to his intense activity as a translator.[1] He admired Samuel Johnson’s reference dictionary, the greatest of its kind in the mid-18th century, and held it up as the sole model against which he wished to measure his own work. He made observations to this effect in his “Small grammatical and critical dictionary of the English language for German people” (Kleines grammatisch-kritisches Wörterbuch der englischen Sprache für die Deutschen, 1783) and in the third of his Philological essays published in English in 1798.

Fig.1 : Frontispieces of Adelung’s bilingual dictionary (ed. of 1796) and Three philological essays (1798)