17 Feb /14

Philemon Holland – translator of the day

Even in his time, he was recognised as a great translator from Latin into English. In an early encyclopaedia of famous men called Worthies of English, Holland was called the “translator general of his age”.

Who was this Philemon Holland? As all Englishmen going to university at the time, he had the choice of only Oxford and Cambridge. Almost all the British people described in the Word of the Day went to one of these universities. This was the case until other universities were established in England in the 1800s.

Philemon went to Cambridge where he graduated in 1571. He then went on to pursue a career as a school teacher and doctor. But his claim to fame was as a translator. He updated a Latin English dictionary, adding something like 6,000 words, leveraging his experience of translating the major Roman writers including Plutarch, Livy and Pliny into English. In his extensive translations, he actually translated the texts he was working on, without missing out unsuitable portions. This was unusual for a “translator” of his time whose editorial work often changed the meaning and political slant of the texts.

He is very important for the history of English words, because he added thousands of words to the English language, most of them obviously directly from Latin or via French. Examples include tomorrow’s word chronic, as well as antipathy, pentathlon, pneumonia and anonymous.

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