Roderick McConchie and Jukka Tyrkkö (Editors). Historical Dictionaries in Their Paratextual Context

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Polish Americans in the history of bilingual lexicography: the state of the art

This paper measures dictionaries made by Polish Americans against the development of the Polish–English and English–Polish lexicographic tradition. Of twenty nine monoscopal and biscopal glossaries and dictionaries published between 1788 and 1947, four may be treated as mile-stones: Erazm Rykaczewski's (1849–1851), Władysław Kierst and Oskar Callier's (1895), Władysław Kierst's (1926–1928), and Jan Stanisławski's (1929). Unsurprisingly, they came to be widely repub-lished in English-speaking countries, primarily the United States of America, for the sake of Polish-speaking immigrants. One might therefore wonder whether there was any pressing need for new dictionaries. There must have been, assuming that supply follows demand, because as many as eight Polish–English and English–Polish dictionaries were compiled by Polish Americans and pub-lished by the mid-twentieth century. The scant attention accorded this topic suggests a chronologi-cal approach to these dictionaries is in order, firstly, to blow the dust from the tomes; secondly, to establish their filial relationships; and, lastly, to evaluate their significance for the bilingual diction-ary market.Keywords: history, bilingual lexicography, bilingual dictionary, polish americans, source language (SL), target language (TL), equivalent, lexicographer, tradition

RESEARCHING THE BEGINNINGS OF BILINGUAL POLISH-ENGLISH / ENGLISH-POLISH LEXICOGRAPHY: POLYGLOT DICTIONARIES (PART 2)

The present paper is the second of two papers investigating polyglot dictionaries which comprised Polish and English wordlists. It rests on the assumption that, by providing the earliest documentation material for Polish and English respectively, the polyglots can be regarded as historical antecedents of bilingual dictionaries. While the first paper focused on three Renaissance works of reference, including Calepino’s eleven-language edition, this one concentrates on two relatively little known endeavours of the Enlightenment: Christoph Warmer’s Gazophylacium decem linguarum Europaearum … (1691) and Peter Simon Pallas’ Linguarum totius orbis vocabularia comparativa … (1787–1789). The bilingual material they embrace has been analysed and illustrated with examples in order to shed new light on the two polyglots, which are additionally traced back to their sources

Russian loanwords in the Oxford English Dictionary revisited

This study revisits Russian loanwords in the third edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (henceforth, OED3) in order to discuss their lexicographic treatment, including the quality of etymological references. Arguments behind the choice of this dictionary are clear-cut: not only is OED3 the most exhaustive dictionary of English, but it also offers the fullest etymological analysis of the whole of the lexis of English available anywhere. Space restrictions preclude the inclusion in the dictionary every word of Russian origin in English texts. In the past, lexical items had to occur in at least five different sources to ensure inclusion, whereas the frequency necessary to include a word into OED3 today is reckoned in hundreds or even thousands

Największe XX-wieczne słowniki polsko-angielskie w perspektywie porównawczej: szkic z zakresu historii leksykografii

This article concerns two largest Polish-English dictionaries published in the twentieth century, The Kościuszko-Foundation Dictionary: Polish-English (1961) by Kazimierz Bulas, Francis Whitfield, and Lawrence Thomas (1961), and Wielki słownik polsko--angielski [A Great Polish-English Dictionary] (1969) by Jan Stanisławski. Erazm Rykaczewski’s Dokładny słownik polsko-angielski… [A Complete Polish-English Dictionary…] (1851), a key dictionary that appeared in the mid-nineteenth century, was taken into account as a point of reference for comparative purposes. The article is based on two hypotheses, of which the first was verified by applying examples of usage as a research parameter and the other by looking at the dictionaries against the historical background. The analysis reveals that each compiler, as a native speaker of Polish, tried to make up for his imperfect knowledge of English. Faced with obstacles in compiling comprehensive bilingual dictionaries, both Bulas and Stanisławski, therefore, turned to Rykaczewski’s outdated material, modernising it for the sake of the target user. The different types of macrostructure and microstructure employed in both twentieth-century reference works were by no means a novelty, inasmuch as they can be discovered in the history of the Polish-English lexicography

Największe XX-wieczne słowniki polsko-angielskie w perspektywie porównawczej: szkic z zakresu historii leksykografii

This article concerns two largest Polish-English dictionaries published in the twentieth century, The Kościuszko-Foundation Dictionary: Polish-English (1961) by Kazimierz Bulas, Francis Whitfield, and Lawrence Thomas (1961), and Wielki słownik polsko--angielski [A Great Polish-English Dictionary] (1969) by Jan Stanisławski. Erazm Rykaczewski’s Dokładny słownik polsko-angielski… [A Complete Polish-English Dictionary…] (1851), a key dictionary that appeared in the mid-nineteenth century, was taken into account as a point of reference for comparative purposes. The article is based on two hypotheses, of which the first was verified by applying examples of usage as a research parameter and the other by looking at the dictionaries against the historical background. The analysis reveals that each compiler, as a native speaker of Polish, tried to make up for his imperfect knowledge of English. Faced with obstacles in compiling comprehensive bilingual dictionaries, both Bulas and Stanisławski, therefore, turned to Rykaczewski’s outdated material, modernising it for the sake of the target user. The different types of macrostructure and microstructure employed in both twentieth-century reference works were by no means a novelty, inasmuch as they can be discovered in the history of the Polish-English lexicography

Lexical borrowing in the light of digital resources: 'Nyet' as a case study

The mere appearance of a foreign word does not necessarily mark the birth of a loanword, which requires documented usage by the speech community. Relatively little research has been dedicated so far to the “prenatal” stage that would investigate the tentative infiltration of foreign-derived words. Nyet, a borrowing from Russian, is taken as a case in point. Although its first recorded instance in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED3) is dated to 1928, it had been increasingly recognized in English for several decades. This article focuses on textual attestations for nyet discovered in a range of digital resources, including British and American newspaper archives, and discusses their usefulness as potential antedatings for OED3’s entry

Russian loanwords in the Oxford English Dictionary revisited

This study revisits Russian loanwords in the third edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (henceforth, OED3) in order to discuss their lexicographic treatment, including the quality of etymological references. Arguments behind the choice of this dictionary are clear-cut: not only is OED3 the most exhaustive dictionary of English, but it also offers the fullest etymological analysis of the whole of the lexis of English available anywhere. Space restrictions preclude the inclusion in the dictionary every word of Russian origin in English texts. In the past, lexical items had to occur in at least five different sources to ensure inclusion, whereas the frequency necessary to include a word into OED3 today is reckoned in hundreds or even thousands