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Document Details : Title: Reviving the Old Teutonic Language Subtitle: An Unpublished Preface by Abraham Mylius (1563-1637) Retrieved from Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz's Heritage Author(s): VAN HAL, Toon Journal: Lias Volume: 38 Issue: 1 Date: 2011 Pages: 129-147 DOI: 10.2143/LIAS.38.1.2126653 Abstract : This contribution contains an edition of, and elementary commentary on, the remaining parts of Abraham Mylius’s unpublished preface to his Glossarium vocabulorum veterum Teutonicorum Celticorumque, presumably written between 1612 and 1617, and preserved in a manuscript of Lingua Belgica, another work by Mylius. It is an interesting preface, because the author explains why the linguistic and historical study of his mother tongue, ‘Teutonic’, is important. It took more than one hundred years before the Glossarium itself was published in Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s (posthumous) Collectanea etymologica (1717), albeit in a slightly adapted form, and without inclusion of the preface under discussion. Although one third of the preface is lost, the remaining text is still worth publishing. For the way in which Mylius stresses the importance of his lexicographical undertaking sheds light on the general climate in which Old Germanic sources were studied during the first half of the seventeenth century. In addition, I will offer some notes on the original contents of Mylius’s Glossarium itself, as well as on the later modifications and enhancements that Leibniz implemented. Following the edition of the text of the preface, I will summarize its contents and discuss some of the issues Mylius touches upon. |
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