May 3-4, 2019 Tbilisi/ Georgia ISSN: 2298-0180 / e-ISSN: 2587-472 Page | 450 PRIOR TO D. R. PEACOCK: NOTES ON THE EARLIEST ENGLISH-MEGRELIAN LEXICOGRAPHIC RESOURCE Zaal Kikvidze International Black Sea University, Georgia zaalk@yahoo.com Levan Pachulia Sukhumi State University, Georgia l_pachulia@yahoo.com Abstract The paper is a discussion of the Megrelian data contained in George Ellis’s book Memoir of a Map of the Countries Comprehended between the Black Sea and the Caspian; with an Account of the Caucasian Nations, and Vocabularies of Their Languages (1788). The final part of the book presents specimens of the Caucasian languages, including those belonging to the Kartvelian branch. There are 128 entries. The resource is organized in the following way: the leftmost column displays headwords in English, followed by translations into Georgian, Megrelian, and Svan. The latter two (Megrelian and Svan) segments are deficient: not all of them contain translations into all the three languages. There are 62 entries with Megrelian equivalents. Detected spelling and/or transliteration errors and translation inadequacies may seem abundant for a sample consisting of only 62 entries; however, G. Ellis’s lexicographic resource should be valued for adequate representations of Megrelian linguistic data and for being the earliest work in the history of English-Megrelian lexicography. Key Words: English-Megrelian; George Ellis; Caucasian languages; Lexicography Introduction In our two previous joint papers (Kikvidze & Pachulia, 2018, 2019), we dealt with the work of Demetrius Rudolph Peacock (1887) as an early (but not the earliest) landmark in the history of English-Megrelian and English-Caucasian lexicography, at large. We wrote: “An English component have hardly been visible in the history of the lexicography of Megrelian. Does it imply that there have been no relevant works? No, it does not; there have been a few attempts to compile lexicographic resources including English and Megrelian” (Kikvidze & Pachulia, 2018: 490). Actually, those attempts do not include either a comprehensive or abridged or even a fragmentary English-Megrelian or Megrelian-English dictionary (such a dictionary does not exist yet); they are, as we have referred to them, “lexicographic resources including English and Megrelian.” Interestingly enough, one of such rare lexicographic works Georgian-Megrelian-Laz-Svan-English Dictionary (Kurdadze et al., 2015) was published four years ago. In the present paper, we will discuss the Megrelian data contained in a lexicographic resource appended to George Ellis’s book Memoir of a Map of the Countries Comprehended Between the Black Sea and the Caspian; with an Account of the Caucasian Nations, and Vocabularies of Their Languages (1788). This lexicographic resource is the earliest in the scarce history of English-Megrelian lexicography.