Notes for a Dictionary from Seventeenth-Century Scotland

Abstract

This paper presents a transcription of a previously unknown manuscript wordlist of English terms from the vocabulary of moral philosophy, apparently compiled in Scotland in the mid-seventeenth century. It contextualizes it in the lexicographical activity of seventeenth-century Scotland; discusses its sources, prominent among which are Hobbes’s Briefe of the arte of rhetorique (1637) and John Healey’s translation of St Augustine’s De civitate Dei (1610); and comments on its relationship with other contemporary philosophical wordlists of English.

Keywords:

• lexicography
• dictionaries
• Early Modern English
• Scotland
• moral philosophy

I am grateful to Andrew Linn and Will Poole for their comments on an earlier version of this contribution.

Notes

1 For the majority of the persons named, see their respective notices in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, but for Andrew Duncan, see Small (1874); for Alexander Hume, see Upton (1984: 135–61) and Kniezsa (1997a); for Lhuyd and Gaelic, see Campbell (1962: 77–78); for Junius on Scots, see Considine (2008: 231); and for Gordon as dictionary copyist, see Birgegård (1985: 29–30); for Dalgarno’s Ars signorum, see esp. Salmon (1966).

2 See Kniezsa (1997b: 40) for this use of <w> as a diagnostic feature. As for dating, the last instance of wndo ‘undo’ in DOST (pre-1700) is from the historical works of Sir James Balfour (a1657) and it does not occur in SND (post-1700). Likewise, the forms ewen/ewyn/ewin ‘even’ are common in DOST, where they can be found as late as Patrick Gordon of Ruthven’s Britane’s distemper (c. 1650), but are not attested in SND.

3 See DOST s.v. wele wisher, quot. 1665–67; goud in later Scottish texts is usually a variant of gowd ‘gold’.

4 The index is at f. 241v. 1627 is the date of the earliest of the historical memoranda for which Ware used the book after changing its purpose (Sherman, 2003: 19).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

John Considine

John Considine teaches English at the University of Alberta. He is the author of Dictionaries in Early Modern Europe (2008) and the editor of Ashgate Critical Essays on Early English Lexicographers, vol. 4, The Seventeenth Century (2012), and, with Sylvia Brown, of The Ladies Dictionary (2010). He has recently finished a book on academy dictionaries from 1600 to 1800, and is writing a book on small dictionaries.

Correspondence to: John Considine MA DPhil, Department of English, 3–5 Humanities Centre, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB T6G 2E5, Canada. Email: [email protected]