engleski

Latin and Italian Influence on Croatian Dictionaries up to Jakov Mikalja’s Thesaurus Linguae Illyricae

In this article, the author analyzes foreign influence in bilingual and multilingual dictionaries and word lists containing a Latin and a Croatian column dating from the early modern period up to the middle of the seventeenth century. The analysis begins with the first word lists, focusing on the first Croatian dictionary, Vrančić’s Dictionarium quinque nobilissimarum Europae linguarum (1595), and concludes with Mikalja’s Thesaurus Linguae Illyricae (1649/1651). These multilingual dictionaries are an important testimony of the linguistic world and offer information useful for the study of the social and cultural history of the languages involved (Verbeke 2015, 29). In them, two languages are in explicit and continuous interaction (Demo 2011). These dictionaries are regarded as a place of language contact and contact-induced syntactic change. The influence of Latin and Italian (due to the dictionaries being mostly compiled by compilers educated in Italy, fluent in Italian, and probably mirroring certain Italian dictionaries) on the syntactic structure of Croatian is analyzed. In compiling a dictionary of a non-standard language, which Croatian was at the time, it was deemed necessary to form new words and constructions, with the Croatian dictionary column mirroring the Latin and/or Italian columns. Word-formation was sometimes the only way to fill the empty space in the Croatian column of a dictionary. The dictionary authors have sometimes filled in these blanks through loan translations or by adopting loan words.

dictionary ; historical lexicography ; Croatian ; Latin ; Italian

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