woodworking dictionary in Danish

For no particular reason, this reminds me of a project which has little or nothing to do with woodworking, but . . . . what the heck . . . . I'm waiting for glue to dry on an 8-sided construction and have nothing better to do. So, here's the story . . . .

In the 1500's a German doctor named George Bauer became interested in mining; mineral extraction; smelting and metalworking. As a hobby, over a period of about 20 years, he wrote a book describing all the processes that were involved.

The tricky part is that the crafts were passed along as oral tradition. The craftsmen were illiterate Germans and Bauer was writing in Latin. This required some creativity in creating Latin terms for items and procedures what were explained to him in colloquial, 16th century German. He published the book in Latin with a shit-load (technical term) of descriptive woodcuts. The book was titled De Re Metallica. He published under the name of Georgius Agricola.

Now . . . . flash forward about 400 years.

A mining engineer, classical scholar and Stanford graduate (this is one guy) and his wife decided to translate this sucker into English. As a hobby project, this fits the description of what my momma would term "a real booger". To do this, they had to be comfortable with Latin, familiar with the technical metallurgic processes involved and sufficiently conversant in German to recognize linguistic complications involved in the transition from Kraut to Latin. The English translation was first published in The Mining Magazine, London in 1912.

Both versions . . . . original Latin and the English translation are still available on Amazon.

The translator was Herbert C. Hoover, 31st president of the U.S.

Gotta check some glue joints . . . . . . .