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Completing the Unfinished: A Descriptive Dictionary of the Croatian Literary Language

Although the Croatian language is represented in works of European bilingual and multilingual lexicography dating back to the 16th century, monolingual lexicography in Croatia did not begin to develop until the 20th century. In 1949, Julije Benešić, a renowned Croatian translator, lexicographer, literary critic and writer, was entrusted with the job of compiling a dictionary of the contemporary Croatian Literary Language. Aspiring to present a portrait of the Croatian Literary Language in the process of its development, Benešić decided to base his dictionary upon quotations excerpted from the works of 113 of the most distinguished Croatian authors who were active writers between the mid-nineteenth and the mid-twentieth century. Benešić worked on collecting quotations and defining the corpus until his death in 1957, leaving an unfinished dictionary with the word serenade as the last completed entry. Some thirty years after the lexicographer's death, the first twelve volumes of the Dictionary of the Croatian Literary Language from the Revival to Ivan Goran Kovačić were finally published. The most recent volume, PROTIVAN–RZATI, was published in 1990. Given that the aspiration for the completion of the dictionary was never completely extinguished, and that the excerpted material used in the dictionary was stored at the Linguistic Research Institute of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts, in 2008 extensive work on the dictionary's completion began anew. In this paper, we have indicated the main typological characteristics of Benešić's dictionary which make it a unique accomplishment of Croatian lexicography and point to the necessity of its completion. For the lexicographers who are working on the completion of the dictionary, these typological properties also bring up questions and dilemmas to which even contemporary lexicography is still looking for answers.

Julije Benešić, stylistic dictionary, literary corpus, publishing new volumes, entry

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