John Minsheu (1560–1627) has long been known to historians of lexicography as the author of an impressive comparative and etymological dictionary, Ductor in Linguas (1617). Less well known is his grammar of Spanish (1599), which is unusual for its time in displaying interest in socio-linguistic… read more
Thomas Harriot (1560–1621) was an outstanding mathematician and astronomer whose scientific writings – had they not been allowed to remain in manuscript – would long ago have earned for him an international esteem comparable with that of Galileo and Kepler. Only in recent decades has his status… read more
Although political, social and cultural relationships between 17th-century England and the Netherlands have inspired several books and articles, no general account has yet been produced of the linguistic achievements, academic and applied, which resulted to a large extent from the common personal… read more
Accounts of Christian missionary linguists in the 16th and 17th centuries are usually devoted to their achievements in the Americas and the Far East, and it is seldom remarked that, at the time when English Protestant missionaries were attempting to meet the challenge of unknown languages on the… read more
John Brinsley (1566-c.1630) seems to have been the first English scholar to publish a comprehensive language-teaching course for students of Latin. His first textbook, which appeared in 1612, was a lengthy discussion of teaching method; it was followed by a grammar, and by translations of Latin… read more
One of the major achievements of Britsh linguistic scholarship before the 19th century was John Wilkins’ (1609–72) Essay towards a Real Character, and a Philosophical Language (1668), which attempted to construct, for scientific purposes, a language in which the elements were isomorphic with the… read more