An empress commissioned a 200-language dictionary before linguistics existed

In 1784, Russia's Catherine the Great personally drafted a list of around 300 core Russian words, then in 1785 assigned naturalist Peter Simon Pallas to gather translations of it from every language he could reach across her empire and beyond. Published in 1787-1789 as Linguarum totius orbis vocabularia comparativa, it laid roughly 200 languages side by side decades before comparative linguistics existed as a field. A later expanded edition grew to cover more than 300 languages.

— Wikipedia contributors, Comparative dictionary of Catherine the Great — Wikipedia entry on the comparative dictionary Catherine the Great commissioned from Peter Simon Pallas