ABSTRACT
The beginnings of dictionary-making for most of the European languages ('dictionary' is here understood as including word lists and vocabularies) lie in language contact situations. This means that for these languages monolingual lexicography was preceded by bilingual and multilingual lexicography. In the Middle Ages (and for a long time afterwards) the language of learning in Europe was Latin. The first bilingual word lists for many European languages are therefore collections of Latin words and phrases with translation equivalents in the respective vernaculars. The early history of lexicography has so far attracted little scholarly attention. This may in part be due to its extreme complexity. For the linguistic predominance of Latin makes the lexicographical history for one particular language to a great extent a European phenomenon. An early Latin-English dictionary, f<>r instance, may go back to an earlier Latin-French dictionary where the compiler retained the original Latin headwords but replaced the French translation equivalent by English ones. In such a case, the origin of the lemma list as well as the lexicographical treatment and presentation of the Latin headwords with their English equivalents will therefore have to be explained largely in the context of French lexicographical tradition as it had developed at that time.
