Volume 37, Issue 1

In this essay, it is assumed that the languages of Latin Europe do have many semantic features in common, which contradicts the prevailing view of a general semantic particularity of every individual language and thus the exploitation for national-political purposes arising from that view. However, the proposition made here requires a summary and the assessment of different semantic concepts led by the idea of commonality. By means of individual cases that can be understood as relevant examples, a vision of lexicography will follow that aims at replacing the biologistic concept of a genetic explanation for contrastive semantics by the concept of a comparative semantics that is based on socio-historical, cultural-historcial and textual-historical arguments. In doing so, a historiography relating to the subject-matter of “semantics” will be suggested that assigns a semantic bridging function to Late Antiquity / Early Medieval Latin in relation to all languages of Latin Europe. The logic of the argument implies that a new era of semantic history begins upon the development of a structure of national languages in Europe, whose historical basis can still be recognised in the semantic communalities.

The article deals with theoretical and methodological questions raised by the idea of a multilingually oriented lexicography of discourse. The fact that words often cannot be translated exactly, but are to be seen in different lexical field contexts in each individual language will be treated as well as the phenomenon of interlingual influence (especially in cases of active multilingualism shown by single discourse actors). After some introductory remarks and general observations, a proposal will be developed (based on a historical example: the discourse of European Romanticism) as to how a discourse lexicography that crosses language borders could be structured.

Subject of the investigation are settlement names that refer to waters. These oikonyms are often the oldest. The research area is that of the Ancient European Hydronymy. The Old European hydronyms occur in Central Europe, in the Baltic region, in Southern Scandinavia, in the British Isles, in France, on the Iberian Peninsula and in Italy. The research question is, if the expression of spatial relationships in oikonyms with water words is a universal? It turns out to be also other naming strategies. The theoretical framework is Levinson’s (2008) description of spatial cognition. The connection of spatial cognition with landscape terms is new in toponomastics.

The first Diccionario da Lingua Portugueza was published in 1783 by Bernardo de Lima e Melo Bacellar. This title became very successful, as many subsequent dictionaries demonstrate; but the work was a flaw, utterly ridiculed and systematically ignored. This unusual fate for a dictionary may be the outcome of a combination of factors: on one hand, the author himself – a nonconformist clergyman who became a persona non grata in the Portuguese ecclesiastic hierarchy; and on the other hand, his original lexicographic ‘method’ that aimed to provide more information than what was achieved by his predecessors. In this paper, we will present what we know about Bacellar’s biography and describe his dictionary by examining some landscape entries. Finally, we will discuss the role of this dictionary for research within the framework of the LandLex project.<fnote> About LandLex, see Villalva/Williams (2019: 15–25).</fnote>

Southern Mediterranean regions significantly differ from the northern countries not only for their climate, but also and foremost for the influence that the latter has on the landscape and the products that are related to it. Dictionaries should relate the lexical variation used to describe the variety of landscapes and their characteristics, thus reflecting the peculiarities of a given territory. This paper deals with the variety of citrus fruits that can be found in the Italian landscapes, with particular attention to the lexicographic treatment that they receive in both monolingual and bilingual dictionaries, where a precise meaning is not always registered and the treatment of the superordinate agrume (pl. agrumi ) is controversial: its taxonomic status seems not to be recognized and fully exploited in dictionary articles.

The article gives an overview of Estonian landscape terms meaning ‘field’ in historical dictionaries. The main equivalents for English field in Estonian are põld , nurm and väli . Neither in standard Estonian nor in the dialects, these three words are full synonyms. In the historical dictionaries, the Estonian words occur first in the 17 th century as translations of German Acker , Feld and Ackerfeld. Later, for example in the Estonian-German dictionary, published in 1869, their meanings are more precisely defined. The semantic relations of the words in dialect speech and their interpretation in the historical dictionaries will be analysed. The three words are used in all Finnic languages. Comparing the words with dialect and cognate language data, their semantic differences and distribution in dialects will be introduced.

One of the characteristics of language contact is that words from one language are adopted into another language. These words we call loanwords. Often these loanwords travel through more than one language, sometimes even ending up in their original language again. During this journey the form and meaning of these words can change to such an extent that on their return they are hardly recognised in their country of origin. Loanwords can be found in all languages, but for practical reasons this contribution is limited to Dutch. Ever since the Old Dutch period (ca. 500–1200 AD) we see that words from other languages are included in Dutch and that words from Dutch are given a place in other languages. Using a number of examples from the Dutch vocabulary, this contribution discusses how words from other languages over time have acquired a place in the Dutch language and how the Dutch language has contributed to the vocabulary of other languages in the world.

The 17 th century was a time of change in both agriculture and architecture as both nobility and newly rich bourgeois sought to embellish country residences with gardens and orchards. Not only were new plants arriving from overseas, but gardening was being revolutionised by the likes of Le Nôtre, de la Quintinie and the lesser known Fatio. This was reflected in the  Dictionnaire universel  de Antoine Furetière, the first genuinely encyclopaedic dictionary. This paper starts by introducing the LandLex initiative, pan-European synchronic and diachronic collaborative analyses of simple words concerning the landscape in historical dictionaries. We then look at a selected number of orchard trees and their fruit in two editions of the  Dictionnaire universel : the first edition of 1690 and that revised by Basnage de Beauval in 1701. To an extent, Furetière applied a model for classifying trees and fruit that can be extracted by analysis. Some entries went into excessive detail as those of pear, a highly fashionable fruit at the time. One major difference between the two is Basnage’s move from a single author approach to the use of field experts in certain areas, amongst which botany. Much was simply carried over, but when Dr Régis, Basnage’s expert in medicine and natural history, deemed an entry of scientific interest it was given a rewrite with new background texts being cited, thereby widening our vision of developing 17 th -century science.

This essay will show, by the example of FWB-online (the online version of Frühneuhochdeutsches Wörterbuch), some possibilities to enhance the added value of traditional printed historical dictionaries published online by providing their data with deep structured semantic mark-up. This semantic mark-up can basically be used as a foundation for elaborated search and in a further advanced step also for visualizing specific aspects of the dictionary data, thus allowing for new perspectives on it. It will be shown, how these search methods and especially this kind of visualization of dictionary data can enable advanced approaches on both old and new scientific questions.

The purpose of the present paper is to explore the role of John Pickering’s Vocabulary or Collection of Words and Phrases Which Have Been Supposed to Be Peculiar to the United States of America (1816) as one of the major sources of the Dictionary of American English ( DAE ) by William Craigie and James Hulbert (1936–1944).

This paper revisits the issue of the opaque interrelationship between the English Dialect Dictionary ( EDD ) and the Oxford English Dictionary ( OED ). While work on OED3 , the online version, has been in progress since 2000, the EDD was digitised in three phases between 2006 and 2019. EDD 3.0 , with its sophisticated interface, was launched in April 2019. This paper ventures to question the OED ’s policy of providing or omitting source evidence for some of its data. After a survey of the unequal aims and structures of the two dictionaries from their beginnings down to the end of OED2 (1989), the focus of the paper is on their relationship with regard to the two online versions, first as described by recent OED editors, and then by examining the interfaces. A quantitative analysis of the lexical variants attributed to Worcestershire in the two dictionaries is used as a test case to show that OED3 has borrowed more data from EDD ( Online ) than the OED entries attest and the ranking-list of sources misleadingly suggests. The paper critically analyses the OED ’s practice of providing source evidence only for quotations, but generally not for (dialectal) variants.

The article deals with language contact between Italian and South and Southeast Asian languages in the age of the Renaissance. The focus is on South/Southeast Asian lexical elements in Italian travelogues, studies on natural history and missionary reports from the late 15th to the early 17th centuries and their lexicographical treatment.

The 15 Villa Vigoni theses on lexicography emerged from a German-Italian cooperation, being essential for the future of dictionaries as well as dictionaries of the future.

The following report reflects on the activities of EMLex concerning eight consortium meetings, the 6th intake for Erasmus Mundus scholarships and the situation in the corona pandemic. It also gives a short overview over the international summer term which took place at the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg in 2021.