PUBLISHED BY WHITTAKER AND CO., AVE-MARIA-LANE. LONDON. GENERAL FRENCH-ENGLISH AND ENGLISH-FRENCH DICTIONARY NEWLY COMPOSED FROM THE FRENCH DICTIONARIES OF THE FRENCH ACADEMY, LAVEAUX, BOISTE, BESCHERELLE, ETC. FROM THE ENGLISH DICTIONARIES OF JOHNSON, WEBSTER, RICHARDSON, ETC. AND THE SPECIAL DICTIONARIES AND WORKS OF BOTH LANGUAGES containing a considerable number of words not to be found in other dictionaries and giving : 1. all words in general use and those employed in the literature of the two languages, comprising those of the present time; -2. the principal terms employed in the army and navy, the sciences. the arts, the manufactures, and trade, especially those contained in the Dictionary of the French Academy; -3. the compounds of words in most general use and those that are not translated literally; 4. the various acceptations of the words in their logical order, separated by numbers; 5. a short example of the ordinary or literary acceptations that present any difficulty to the student;-6. the modification of the sense of words by the addition of adjectives, prepositions, adverbs, etc.;-7. the idioms and familiar phraseology most generally used; -8. the prepositions governed by verbs, adjectives, etc.;-9. the irregularities of the pronunciation, those of verbs, of the plurals of nouns, adjectives, etc.; 10. observations on words presenting grammatical difficulties. With signs showing the literal or figurative use, antiquated words, or those but little employed and the kind of style, followed by a general vocabulary of mythological and geographical names, and those of persons which differ in the two languages. By Professor SPIERS ENGLISH PROFESSOR AT THE NATIONAL COLLEGE OF BONAPARTE (PARIS), author of the Study of English Poetry and of the Manual of Commercial Terms in English and French Each dictionary, one containing 712, the other 615 p., royal 8vo., treble col., is sold separately. Price : School edition 10s. 6d. Library edition 12s. 6d. cloth lettered. Prospectus. Professor Spiers's French and English dictionary has reached a second edition, has been adopted by the University of France for the use of French colleges and has received the approbation of the Institute of France; it is an original work commenced in 1835 under the auspices of the French government; it is the result of the conscientious labour of fourteen years and it has been enriched by the contributions of several of the most eminent men of both England and France. Dictionaries of the two languages are generally reprints of Boyer, a work published in 1699, the French and English of which are 150 years old and from which the greater part of the words since formed are necessarily excluded; Boyer's French too is by no means pure and his English extremely foreign. The definitions of things supposed to be unknown to foreigners are so literally transcribed that the Louvre is still in most dictionaries the palace of the king of France in Paris, which it has ceased to be at least a century and a quarter. At the words TROWSERS, WAISTCOAT, WHISKER, the student must not hope to find the only French equivalents pantalon, gilet, favori. When terms so familiar as these are wanting what can be expected as to literary or scientific words, especially the latter, an immense number of which are of our own century. As Boyer was published before Johnson, the admirable order of the latter is not observed; the confusion is inextricable; the acceptations of words the most distant from each other being huddled together without a figure or a mark of any kind to show that they are not synonymes of the same sense. These works abound in barbarisms, mistranslations and the most ludicrous absurdities of every species. Professor Spiers's Dictionary has been composed from the best dictionaries exclusively English on the one hand and entirely French on the other; the author has introduced the rational order of Johnson; he has collected innumerable terms in ordinary use or literary, and those of the arts and sciences, law, commerce, insurance, banking, exchange, customs, finances, the post-office, political economy, steam-navigation and railways, which must necessarily be sought in vain in dictionaries printed from one written in the 17th century before these various terms existed. At the word porte of 76 compounds, this dictionary contains 61 words not in other dictionaries in general and 29 that are not to be found elsewhere. This dictionary also contains the obsolete words and acceptations of the classical authors of both nations, the coins, weights and measures of each country reduced to those of the other. Important political institutions and public functions are briefly explained. General order (V. title) and typographical arrangement. -Acceptations, definitions, examples, idioms are not as usual jumbled indiscriminately together; all the senses follow each other without interruption in order to present at a glance all the significations of the word; each new acceptation is marked by a number; the senses of the words are separated from the examples; these begin a new paragraph and are in their turn separated from the idioms, which are classified in order to facilitate research. Acceptations. The acceptations of words being presented in their logical order, the various senses form a series of modifications of the same idea logically deduced, and connected like the links of a chain. Prepositions. These are given when they differ in the two languages. Words accompanied by adjectives, adverbs, etc. and idioms. These, after the words themselves, form the most essential part of a dictionary of two languages. Hitherto they have been entirely neglected; Professor Spiers has inserted a very considerable number, all those in general use. Pronunciation. The pronunciation has been given of all the words in the English-French dictionary and in the French-English dictionary of those that are irregular or that present the least difficulty. For each language the author has employed the sounds of the same tongue. The following words are recommended for comparison. Ordinary terms: escalier, fâché, monnaie, pantalon, rhume; arts and manufactures: coton, cuivre, fer, gaz, houille, huile, soie; commercial terms: capital, commis, compagnie, effet, envoi; customs: entrepôt, droit, transit; engineering : écluse, pavé, pont, route, vapeur; grammatical part: gens, s'indigner, je, le (the pronoun), ni, on, pardonner, se; law : détention, emprisonnement, héritier, homicide, vol; military terms: faction, file, garnison; mining: filon, galerie; the navy ancre, armée, bâtiment, flotte, mát, voile; post-office terms: dépêche, lettre, port; railways: convoi, (the other dictionaries have not even this sense of the term), rail, train; general technology: machine, pompe, puits, roue, treuil, vis. It is confidently hoped that a comparison with any page whatever will prove the superiority of this new work, the labour of fourteen years. |