engleski

The conceptual background of the first Croatian dictionary

Dictionarium quinque nobilissimarum Europae linguarum, Latinae, Italicae, Germanicae, Dalmaticae et Ungaricae, written by Faustus Verantius [Faust Vrančić] and published in Venice in 1595, is considered to be the first dictionary of the Croatian language to appear in print and the first Hungarian dictionary as well. Vrančić’s dictionary had a significant influence on subsequent lexicography. Many Croatian lexicographers of the old generation drew extensively on Vrančić’s work, while already in 1605 a Prague Benedictine, Petr Loderecker, incorporated Dictionarium into his seven-language Dictionarium septem diversum linguarum (1605), adding to it Lingue Bohemice and Polonice. This quinquelingual dictionary consists of alphabetically ordered word-lists – mostly single-lemma entries – with Dalmatian (i.e., Croatian) words in the fourth column. Juxtaposing the Croatian language of Dalmatia (the Čakavian dialect) with Latin, Italian, German, and Hungarian, Vrančić assumed that the Croatian language was one of the five noblest European languages, comparing its Dalmatian idiom with the Florentine in Italian. He based his opinion upon the glory of the then Dalmatian literature. The criteria adopted for the selection of ca. 3, 500 Croatian words basically depend on Latin as the headword language in the dictionary. The Latin column was most likely based upon Calepinus’ Dictionary. Like many polyglot dictionaries published at that time, the purpose of Vrančić’s Dictionarium was to provide equivalent word-lists in Italian, German, Hungarian, and Dalmatian (Croatian), which he thought was too infused with Italian and therefore in need of its own vocabulary. The aim of this paper is to establish a synopsis of categories of the Dictionarium by converting its alpabetical arrangement into a conceptual, i.e., thematic, organization according to word-fields (semantic fields). Changing the format of the Dictionarium (in fact its Dalmaticae column) aims at revealing the fields of interest that were provided as well as the overall conceptual background of the first Croatian dictionary.

Vrančić's Dictionarium ; Croatian language ; conceptual organization

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