Franciscus à Mesgnien Meninski (first name spelled alsoFrancisci,^{[dubious –discuss]}François andFranciszek) (1623–1698) was the author of a multi-volume Turkish-to-Latindictionary and grammar of theTurkish 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 theearly modern period.

Mesgnien-Meninski was born in theDuchy of Lorraine then in theHoly Roman Empire. He studied in Rome, where one of his teachers was a theoretical linguist, logician, and Jesuit, Giovanni Battista Giattini. Mesgnien-Meninski moved to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth around 1647. In 1649, when aged in his late 20s, he published in Latin a grammar and tutorial for learning the Polish language.^[1] In 1653 at age 30 he accompanied the Polish ambassador to Istanbul. After two to three years of applying himself to the study of the Turkish language in Istanbul, he became the chief translator to the Polish embassy at Istanbul, and subsequently was appointed as deputy ambassador with full ambassadorial powers. Soon after that promotion, he was awarded Polish citizenship, on which occasion he added the Polish termination of "ski" to his last name, which had been Mesgnien or Menin previously.^[2] In 1661 he moved to Vienna in Austria to become interpreter of Oriental languages for the Habsburg monarchy at Vienna. He stayed at that post for the rest of his career, and died at Vienna.

His great work, theThesaurus Linguarum Orientalium, Turcicæ, Arabicæ, Persicæ, 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.^[3] For his Arabic and Persian vocabulary Meninski copied much from the Arabic-Latin and Persian-Latin dictionaries ofJacobus Golius (died 1667). The Turkish was largely and essentially from Meninski himself. In 1687, Meninski published a complementary volume entitledComplementum Thesaurus Linguarum Orientalium, in which the Latin words are organized alphabetically and translated into Turkish.

• This English Wikipedia article has taken some information from the corresponding article in the Polish and French editions of Wikipedia atpl:Franciszek Meninski andfr:François Mesgnien.
• Entry forMENINSKI or MENIN inThe General Biographical Dictionary Containing an Historical and Critical Account of the Lives and Writings of the Most Eminent Persons, by Alexander Chalmers, volume XXII, year 1815.
• A number of copyright-expired volumes written by F. Mesgnien-Meninski arefully readable at Books.Google.com.

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• 17th-century linguists
• 17th-century lexicographers
• Immigrants to the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth
• Scholars from the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth
• Diplomats for the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth
• People from the duchy of Lorraine
• 17th-century scholars from the Holy Roman Empire
• Linguists of Turkic languages
• Ottoman Turkish language
• Orientalists
• 1623 births
• 1698 deaths
• 17th-century writers
• 17th-century male writers
• Lexicographers of Latin

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