Franciscus a Mesgnien Meninski

Franciscus à Mesgnien Meninski (first name spelled also Francisci,[dubious – discuss] François and Franciszek) (1623–1698) was the author of a multi-volume Turkish-to-Latin dictionary and grammar of the Turkish language, first published in 1680, which was ground-breaking in its comprehensiveness at the time, and for historians and linguists today it is a valuable reference for the Turkish language of the early modern period.

He studied in Rome, where one of his teachers was a theoretical linguist, logician, and Jesuit, Giovanni Battista Giattini.

His great work, the Thesaurus Linguarum Orientalium, was published at Vienna in 1680 in 4 volumes, consisting of a dictionary of Turkish, Arabic and Persian vocabulary translated to Latin and explained in Latin, plus a grammar and tutorial for learning the Turkish language.

For his Arabic and Persian vocabulary Meninski copied much from the Arabic-Latin and Persian-Latin dictionaries of Jacobus Golius (died 1667).

In 1687, Meninski published a complementary volume entitled Complementum Thesaurus Linguarum Orientalium, in which the Latin words are organized alphabetically and translated into Turkish.