Johann Theodor Jablonski


Johann Theodor Jablonski was a German educator and lexicographer of Czech origin, who also wrote under the pen name Pierre Rondeau.

Life

Johann Theodor Jablonski was the oldest child of Petr Figulus and Alžběta, the daughter of John Amos Comenius. Comenius' family has been escaping from Bohemian Crown since 1628, together with hundreds of thousands of other Protestant Czech and German Bohemians, to evade from religious persecution and forced recatholization imposed by victorious Habsburgs. Petr Figulus, who served as a secretary for his carer and subsequent father-in-law Comenius, travelled with him throughout whole Europe; finally he found asylum in Danzig. Petr and Alžběta had also four younger children, one of them was Daniel Ernst Jablonski, later religious reformer and scholar. Unlike of other siblings, brothers Johann and Daniel took their surnames Jablonski from the name of father's birthplace.
In his teen years traveled from Memel – his father served there as a teacher and pastor for local Lutherans and Calvinists – to Amsterdam where was educated by his grandfather Comenius; after father's and grandfather's death, he went to Brandenburg-Prussia where became a student in the in Berlin. From 1672 he studied at the Albertina in Königsberg, then in 1674 continued his education at the university in Frankfurt an der Oder.
In 1680, he undertook a trip to the Netherlands and to England, together with brother Daniel. In 1687, he became the secretary of Princess Marie Eleonore of Anhalt-Dessau, the daughter of Prince John George II, thus moved then to Poland-Lithuania where the princess married to. In 1689 returned to the Holy Roman Empire when obtained similar post – to became the secretary of Heinrich of Saxe-Weissenfels, Count of Barby. In 1700 he returned to Berlin as a tutor to Prussian Crown Prince Frederick William. In the same year he was named first secretary of the newly-established Prussian Academy of Sciences.
For the rest of your life Jablonski also held a position of Hofrat.

Works

His masterpiece is the Allgemeines Lexicon der Künste und Wissenschaften, which appeared in 1721.
In the years 1711–12 he published, under the pseudonym of Pierre Rondeau, a Franco-German and German-French dictionary and a grammar of the French language. He also translated from Latin De moribus Germanorum of Tacitus.