Abel Boyer

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Abel Boyer (born June 24, 1667 in Castres , † November 16, 1729 in London ) was an English Romanist , Anglist, historian, journalist and lexicographer of French origin.

life and work

Boyer came from a southern French Huguenot family . He studied at the Huguenot Academy in Puylaurens , was forced to emigrate by the Edict of Fontainebleau in 1685, studied at Franeker University and went to London in 1689. Here he was the French teacher of William Duke of Gloucester (1689-1700), the son of the future Queen Anne .

Boyer published a bilingual dictionary French-English, English-French in 1699, which far surpassed Guy Miège's predecessor and had more than 40 editions in more than 150 years. In the French part, he benefited from the just beginning of monolingual French lexicography (namely the first Dictionnaire de l'Académie française from 1694, but also from the dictionaries of Antoine Furetière 1690 and César-Pierre Richelet 1680). Because of its quality, the English part of his dictionary also took on the role of a monolingual English dictionary, since such a dictionary did not yet exist and the first, the Dictionary of the English Language by Samuel Johnson from 1755, was largely based on Boyer's dictionary.

Works

Dictionaries

  • The Royal Dictionary. In two parts. First, French and English. Secondly, English and French . The French taken out of the Dictionaries of Richelet, Furetiere, Tachard, the Great Dictionary of the French-Academy, and the Remarks of Vaugelas, Menage, and Bouhours. And The English Collected chiefly out of the Best Dictionaries, and the Works of the Greatest Masters of the English Tongue; such as Archbishop Tillotson, Bishop Sprat, Sir Roger L'Estrange, Mr. Dryden, Sir William Temple, & c.London: Printed for R. Clavel, H. Mortlock, S. Lowndes, J. Robinson, D. Brown, W. Hensman, S. Crouch, E. Evets, J. Laurence, R. Sare, A. Churchill, S. Smith, L. Meredith, J. Taylor, F. Saunders, T. Bennet, J. Knapton, J. Wyat, E. Casde, and D. Midwinter, London 1699 (over 40 editions, until 1862)
    • Dictionnaire royal, François et Anglois , The Hague 1702
  • The Royal Dictionary. Abridged , London 1700 (numerous editions)

Other works (selection)

  • The compleat French-master for ladies and gentlemen being a new method, to learn with ease and delight the French tongue, as it is now spoken in the court of France, in three parts, I. A short and plain grammar, II. A vocabulary, familiar dialogues, the niceties of the French tongue, London 1694 (numerous editions)
  • (Ed.) Letters of wit, politics and morality , London 1701, Hildesheim 1982
  • The History of King William the Third , 3 vols., London 1702-1703
  • The History of the Reign of Queen Anne digested into annals , 11 vols., 1703-1713
  • The Political State of Great Britain , being an impartial account of the most material occurrences, ecclesiastical, civil, and military, in a monthly letter to a friend in Holland, 38 vol., 1711-1729
  • The History of the Life and Reign of Queen Anne , London 1722, 1740

literature

  • GC Gibbs, Boyer, Abel (1667? –1729) , in: Oxford Dictionary of National Biography 2004
  • Franz Josef Hausmann , 309. La lexicographie bilingue anglais-français, français-anglais, in: Dictionaries. Dictionaries. Dictionnaires. An international handbook on lexicography. Third volume , ed. by Franz Josef Hausmann, Oskar Reichmann, Herbert Ernst Wiegand and Ladislav Zgusta, Berlin. New York 1991, pp. 2956-2960
  • Monique C. Cormier, The Reception of Abel Boyer's Royal Dictionary in the 18th Century, in: Dictionaries. Journal of the Dictionary Society of North America 26, 2005, pp. 174-193

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Boyer, Abel
BRIEF DESCRIPTION English Romanist, Anglist, historian, journalist and lexicographer of French origin
DATE OF BIRTH June 24, 1667
PLACE OF BIRTH Castres (Tarn)
DATE OF DEATH November 16, 1729
Place of death London