Franciscus à Mesgnien Meninski (first name spelled also Francisci, François and Franciszek) (1623–1698) was the author of a multi-volume Turkish-to-Latin

dictionary A dictionary is a listing of lexemes from the lexicon of one or more specific languages, often arranged alphabetically (or by radical and stroke for ideographic languages), which may include information on definitions, usage, etymologie ...

and grammar of the

Turkish language Turkish ( , ), also referred to as Turkish of Turkey (''Türkiye Türkçesi''), is the most widely spoken of the Turkic languages, with around 80 to 90 million speakers. It is the national language of Turkey and Northern Cyprus. Significant sma ...

, first published in 1680, which was ground-breaking in its comprehensiveness at the time, and for historians and linguists today it is a valuable reference for the Turkish language of the early modern period. Mesgnien-Meninski was born in

Lorraine (duchy) The Duchy of Lorraine (french: Lorraine ; german: Lothringen ), originally Upper Lorraine, was a duchy now included in the larger present-day region of Lorraine in northeastern France. Its capital was Nancy. It was founded in 959 following th ...

in today's northeastern France. He studied in Rome, where one of his teachers was a theoretical linguist, logician, and Jesuit, Giovanni Battista Giattini. Mesgnien-Meninski moved to Poland around 1647. In 1649, when aged in his late 20s, he published in Latin a grammar and tutorial for learning the Polish language. In 1653 at age 30 he accompanied the Polish ambassador to Istanbul. After two to three years of applying himself to the study of the Turkish language in Istanbul, he became the chief translator to the Polish embassy at Istanbul, and subsequently was appointed as deputy ambassador with full ambassadorial powers. Soon after that promotion, he was awarded Polish citizenship, on which occasion he added the Polish termination of "ski" to his last name, which had been Mesgnien or Menin previously.Entry fo
MENINSKI or MENIN
in ''The General Biographical Dictionary Containing an Historical and Critical Account of the Lives and Writings of the Most Eminent Persons'', by Alexander Chalmers, volume XXII, year 1815. In 1661 he moved to Vienna in Austria to become interpreter of Oriental languages for the Habsburg monarchy at Vienna. He stayed at that post for the rest of his career, and died at Vienna. His great work, the ''Thesaurus Linguarum Orientalium'', was published at Vienna in 1680 in 4 volumes, consisting of a dictionary of Turkish, Arabic and Persian vocabulary translated to Latin and explained in Latin, plus a grammar and tutorial for learning the Turkish language. For his Arabic and Persian vocabulary Meninski copied much from the Arabic-Latin and Persian-Latin dictionaries of

Jacobus Golius Jacob Golius born Jacob van Gool (1596 – September 28, 1667) was an Orientalist and mathematician based at the University of Leiden in Netherlands. He is primarily remembered as an Orientalist. He published Arabic texts in Arabic at Leiden, ...

(died 1667). The Turkish was largely and essentially from Meninski himself. In 1687, Meninski published a complementary volume entitled ''Complementum Thesaurus Linguarum Orientalium'', in which the Latin words are organized alphabetically and translated into Turkish.

References

External links

* ''This English Wikipedia article has taken some information from the corresponding article in the Polish and French editions of Wikipedia at :pl:Franciszek Meninski and :fr:François Mesgnien.'' * Entry fo
MENINSKI or MENIN
in ''The General Biographical Dictionary Containing an Historical and Critical Account of the Lives and Writings of the Most Eminent Persons'', by Alexander Chalmers, volume XXII, year 1815. * A number of copyright-expired volumes written by F. Mesgnien-Meninski ar
fully readable at Books.Google.com
{{DEFAULTSORT:Mesgnien-Meninski, Francisci 17th-century linguists Lexicographers German orientalists Linguists of Turkic languages Ottoman Turkish language Polish orientalists French orientalists German male non-fiction writers 1623 births 1698 deaths 17th-century Polish writers