Le Notre Père est-il un bon échantillon linguistique ? (d’après le Mithridates de Conrad Gessner)

In his Mithridates (1555), Conrad Gessner (1516-1565) offers one of the first linguistic compilations. Keen to highlight “the differences between languages, both the ancient ones and those in use ‘at his time’ in the various nations all over the circle of the earth” (according to the work’s full title), he offers one of the first collections of Lord’s Prayer (Oratio dominica, 27 versions), thus initiating a long list of compilations that extended at least as far as Adelung’s. The purpose of this article is to situate these versions among the other language samples provided by Gessner, and to assess their linguistic relevance. Starting with the Greek and Latin originals, we analyze the Lord’s Prayer from the point of view of its most elementary grammatical content : presence of parts of speech and linguistic categories ; illustration of syntactic and morphosyntactic facts; semantics. The transcription difficulties faced by Gessner are then mentioned, along with some problematic cases, such as the Lord’s Prayer in Arabic, Hebrew, Hungarian and Icelandic. Finally, we look at the ways in which scholars might have adapted the transcription to help the reader understand the content from a linguistic point of view, for example by means of an interlinear transcription. Gessner may have used this technique sporadically, but it was not until his successors that it was implemented systematically.