Mark Ridley (physician)

Dr. Mark Ridley was sent to Russia by Elizabeth I as a personal physician to the Tsar. While there, ca. 1594-1599, he compiled a Russian-English, English-Russian dictionary, which is now to be found in the Bodleian Library in Oxford. The dictionary's primary significance is in recording spoken Russian language of that era, as the written language differed considerably in its vocabulary and grammar under the strong influence literary tradition of the Orthodox church texts. Thus dictionaries compiled by foreign visitors who came to Russia for business reflected the actual Russian language use that they learned through daily interaction. Both the spoken and written traditions later laid the foundation of the Modern Russian language (18-19 centuries). Whereas the contribution of written tradition can be studied using a multitude of preserved texts, the contribution of the spoken language can be studied through the records of foreign visitors who were not influenced by local stylistic and other constraints and recorded language as it was spoken. This thesis was realized in the works of Prof. B.A. Larin (1937, 1948, 1959) and others. The manuscript of Mark Ridley dictionary was originally reviewed by Simmons and Unbegaun (1951, 1962), Unbegaun (1963) from Oxford University, and later studied by a team of scholars from Kazan State University in Russia (Galiullin & Zagidullin, 1996, 1997). The manuscript was published in 1996 under the title "A Dictionarie of the Vulgar Russe Tonge: attributed to Mark Ridley / edited from the late-sixteenth-century manuscripts and with an introduction by Gerald Stone" by Bohlau Verlag thanks to the excellent editorial work of Gerald Stone.

The Kazan research team in the period of 1994-2000 has conducted an extensive comparative analysis of the dictionary materials in relation to the existing dictionaries of Russian language of the 16th century (to be published). These studies have confirmed undoubted historical value of the dictionary in several aspects. The correspondence of the majority of material to the already existing records indicated reliability of Ridley's linguistic observations. This correspondence permitted significant chronological corrections and expansion of semantics of particular words when there were discrepancies with the major Russian historical dictionaries. Mark Ridley's dictionary also included a significant number of words or phrases never recorded before (2249 entries out of total 6975).

Other known studies of Mark Ridley dictionary were conducted by Konnova (2000), who examined its medical terminology.