From multilingual to monolingual dictionaries. A historical overview of Polish lexicography 1

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1 Studies in Polish Linguistics vol. 8, 2013, issue 4, pp doi: / spl Włodzimierz Gruszczyński University of Social Sciences and Humanities Polish Academy of Sciences Zygmunt Saloni University of Warsaw From multilingual to monolingual dictionaries. A historical overview of Polish lexicography 1 Abstract The article is devoted to the history of Polish lexicography from its origin in the late Middle Ages until now. Its first important period is the sixteenth century when both practical dictionaries for students and a large Latin-Polish dictionary were published. The greatest achievements of Polish monolingual lexicography were gained in the 19 th century and at the beginning of the 20 th century, when Poland did not exist as a state and its territory was divided between Russia, Austria and Prussia (Germany). These were 6-volume Samuel Linde s Dictionary ( ) and 8-volume Warsaw Dictionary ( ) by Jan Karłowicz, Adam Antoni Kryński and Władysław Niedźwiedzki. After the Second World War the team led by Witold Doroszewski compiled the third large dictionary of Polish ( ). It became the point of departure for other dictionaries prepared in Poland. Key Words Polish lexicography, history of lexicography, Polish dictionaries,warsaw Dictionary, Doroszewski Streszczenie Od słownika wielojęzycznego do jednojęzycznego. Rzut oka na dzieje polskiej leksykografii Artykuł jest poświęcony dziejom polskiej leksykografii od jej średniowiecznych początków do czasów obecnych. Pierwszy ważny okres jej historii to wiek XVI, kiedy opublikowano zarówno praktyczne słowniczki przeznaczone do nauki łaciny, jak i obszerny słownik 1 The article was originally written for The Oxford Comparative History of World Lexicography, edited by Professor Henri Béjoint (therefore it is not a typical historical review, such as for example Urbańczyk (2000), Piotrowski (1998), Piotrowski (2001: ) or Żmigrodzki (2009), but focuses on innovations in the Polish lexicography and origins of these innovations). However, the publication of the volume was abandoned. The authors are indebted to Professor Henri Béjoint and to anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions. The first part (to the end of 18 th century) was written by Włodzimierz Gruszczyński, the second by Zygmunt Saloni.

2 206 Włodzimierz Gruszczyński, Zygmunt Saloni łacińsko-polski. Najważniejsze dzieła polskiej leksykografii powstały w okresie rozbiorów. Były to: sześciotomowy Słownik języka polskiego Samuela Lindego ( ) i ośmiotomowy Słownik warszawski ( ) Jana Karłowicza, Adama Antoniego Kryńskiego i Władysława Niedźwiedzkiego. Po drugiej wojnie światowej zespół kierowany przez Witolda Doroszewskiego przygotował trzeci wielki słownik polszczyzny ( ). Stał się on punktem wyjścia dla innych polskich słowników. Słowa klucze leksykografia polska, historia leksykografii, polskie słowniki, Słownik warszawski, Doroszewski 1. Beginnings The oldest Polish lexicographical works originate in the late Middle Ages. They were small lists of Latin-Polish equivalents created for current needs (e.g. foreign priests in Poland at that time were obliged to teach in Polish, cf. Klemensiewicz 1961: 74 75): vocabularies of names of days, months or family relations (Wydra and Rzepka 2004: ). Many dictionaries were derivatives of monolingual Latin word registers, which helped to teach and learn Latin and read Latin texts. Copies of these registers often brought from Italy, Bohemia, or Germany were supplemented with Polish glosses mostly by Polish monks, who knew Latin and had access to books in this language. Such vocabularies, while generally common in medieval Europe, only appeared in the fifteenth century in Poland and became more widespread in the sixteenth century, both in manuscripts and in print. The earliest relatively independent Polish dictionaries evolved from such Latin dictionaries with added glosses. The oldest known and somewhat comprehensive Latin-Polish dictionary is the so-called Wokabularz trydencki (Vocabulary of Tridentum), compiled probably in 1424 (Urbańczyk 1962; Winkler 1960a, 1960b; Steffen , 1963) as part of a larger manuscript which belonged to the Mazovian prince Alexander, the rector of the Jagiellonian University, later bishop of Tridentum (It. Trento) and finally a cardinal. It contains nearly 500 Latin words with Polish equivalents. Most entries refer to everyday life, some words are connected with law and public activity. The order of entries is erratic, based on the compiler s associations. The source of the Latin words is unknown. The largest and best-known handwritten Latin-Polish dictionary developed by adding glosses to a monolingual Latin dictionary was compiled by a Bernardine Bartłomiej from Bydgoszcz (Bartholemew de Bromberg, ca ). Well versed in the lexicographic achievements of Europe, he interpreted and supplemented the Latin entries of Johann Reuchlin s Vocabularius breviloquus (Kędelska et al. 1999: 21ff.), first published in Basel in In 1544, he added over 11,000 Polish equivalents in the margins of the diction-

3 From multilingual to monolingual dictionaries. A historical overview 207 ary s 1488 edition, which had been the largest collection of Polish words in the first part of the 16 th century. Earlier, in 1532, Bartholemew had compiled a smaller work, Vocabularius ex Calepino, Brevioloqo et Mamotrecto recollectus, which contains over 4,000 Polish words. Aside from Reuchlin s Vocabularius, he used the most famous dictionary of sixteenth-century Europe, the Dictionarium latinae linguae... by Ambrosius Calepinus (the 1502 edition or a later one) and the almost equally popular late-thirteenth-century Mammotrectus super Bibliam by Johannes Marchesinus. There are two more such dictionaries that have survived to this day: the Mammotrect from Kalisz (1471) and the Mammotrect from Lubin (1470), both undoubtedly based on Czech models such as perhaps the Mammotrect from Mikulov (Żurowska-Górecka and Kyas, ). 2. First printed dictionaries The history of Polish printed dictionaries begins in 1526 with the Polish adaptation of a dictionary for students of Latin by a Dutch philologist, Joannes Murmelius, which was an addition to his Latin schoolbook Pappa puerorum, published in The Polish version, prepared probably by Hieronymus Spiczyński (Skoczylas-Stawska 1995; Gruszczyński 1997), is entitled Dictionarius Ioannis Murmellii variarum rerum [...] cum Germanica atq[uae] Polonica interpretatione... and is substantially modified. The editor added translations of the Latin entries into German and Polish, the languages commonly used in sixteenth-century Cracow. The entries are ordered thematically, but there is also an alphabetic index of Latin entries. The dictionary contains over 3,000 entries (mainly nouns), most of them (ca. 2,600) having German and Polish equivalents. A detailed analysis of its contents (Kędelska 1986: 19) did not confirm the hypothesis that it had been modeled on the Dictionarius trium linguarum, latine, teutonice, Boemice published in Vienna in In the sixteenth century, the Dictionarius variarum rerum was the most frequently republished Polish dictionary; it had at least sixteen editions, the last ca (Cygal-Krupowa 1979: 34 35; Kędelska 1986: 45 54; Gruszczyński 2000: 60 74, Kędelska 2001: 77 79). From the fourth edition (1535) onwards, the order of languages was changed: Polish was moved to the second place (after Latin), testifying to changes in the importance and prestige of the language in sixteenth-century Poland, especially in Cracow and in the Jagiellonian University, whose students were among the main users of the dictionary. Two years later, in 1528, a pedagogic school dictionary of similar volume size (about 2,400 entries) was issued: the Dictionarium trium linguarum by Franciszek Mymer (Mymerus). It was modeled on the Czech Dictionarium trium linguarum of 1513 (though not a mere translation, cf. Kędelska 1986:

4 208 Włodzimierz Gruszczyński, Zygmunt Saloni 67 74) and, to some extent, on Murmelius s 1526 dictionary. Mymer s innovation was the alphabetical ordering of the Latin entries inside thematic chapters. This dictionary also ran through several editions. The first Polish law dictionaries were alphabetic Latin-Polish dictionaries by Joannes Cervus Tucholiensis, published as appendices to his Latin handbooks of law (1531 and 1540). Dictionaries of this type were very useful in offices, courts, seminaries because Latin was the primary language of official documents, but many people did not know that language sufficiently. The author based his work on the oldest printed Latin-Czech dictionary, Vocabularius dictus Lactifer, published in Pilsen (Bohemia) in 1511 (Kędelska 1986: ). In the same period, dictionaries including languages other than Latin and German appeared as well. The oldest was the so-called Słowarz, i.e. Dictionarius seu nomenclatura quatuor linguarum. Latine. Italice, Polonice, et Theutonice... published in Cracow in 1532 (Łopaciński 1899; Kędelska 1986: 77 87) and republished in The introduction of Italian to Polish lexicography was the result of the influence of Queen Bona Sforza ( ) and her compatriots living in Cracow, as well as of academic connections with Italian universities, where many Poles studied. As Kędelska (1986: 81 84) demonstrated, Słowarz was an adaptation of a tetralingual dictionary 2 published in Rome in 1510, in which French was replaced by Polish. In 1548, the first Polish dictionary without Latin was published. It was a small (ca. 200 entries) Turkish-Polish glossary added to Bartholemeus Georgijević s book Rozmowa z Turczynem o wierze Krzesciyańskiey (A dialogue with a Turk about the Christian faith) published in Cracow. The author knew the Turkish language since, as he emphasized, he had been a prisoner of the Turks for fourteen years. The glossary had no practical effect. The whole book was rather a response to the growing interest in Turkey among Poles because of the various (also military) contacts with this Muslim country. 3. Dictionaries of th centuries The first Latin-Polish dictionary compiled by a professional lexicographer was the Lexicon latino-polonicum by Jan Mączyński (Ioannes Mączyński), 500 copies of which were printed in 1564 in Królewiec (Königsberg). The author was highly educated, having attended important universities including those in 2 Full title of this dictionary: Utilissimus vocabularius pro his, qui desiderant intelligere et scire legere sine uisitatione scholarum, sicuti sunt mechanici et muliers. Etiam quilibet Latinus potest addiscere Italicum, Gallicum et Alamanicum et econuerso quilibet illorum Latinum: quia in hoc opusculo continentur omnia nomina uocabula et uerba, que possunt proferri in diuersis modis. (Impressum Romae per magistrum Iacobum Mazochium [...]. Anno M.D.X.). Kędelska (1986: 82) used the microfilm of this dictionary stored in Cambridge University Library.

5 From multilingual to monolingual dictionaries. A historical overview 209 Wittenberg, Strasbourg and Zürich. His teacher in Strasbourg was a distinguished philologist, Peter Dasypodius, the author of the well-known Latin- German dictionary, and while in Zürich he was in touch with Johannes Frisius, the author of another Latin-German dictionary, as well as with Conrad Gesner, the editor of Calepinus in 1544 (Kędelska 1995: 29). The manuscript of Mączyński s dictionary, modeled on Dasypodius, was probably finished in Zürich in The published dictionary (515 sheets in folio) consists of over 20,000 entries set in alphabetical order with nested entries. Mączyński introduced many innovations, e.g. labels marking the register and acceptability of both the Latin and the Polish vocabulary. There are indications that Mączyński also prepared a manuscript of a Polish-Latin dictionary, but it was never published. His Lexicon latino-polonicum was well received by contemporaries, but severely criticized by later lexicographers, Volckmar and especially Knapski who argued that it missed more than a thousand Latin entries, included nonclassical and barbaric words, did not give the Polish equivalents to some entries, sometimes gave false explanations and did not specify the sources from which individual Latin words came. Not all the charges were fair. For example Mączyński did not give equivalents of some Latin words (arborius, caesum, iambus), because their equivalents did not even exist in 16 th century Polish (Plezia 1959: XV). Eighty years later, when Knapski worked on his dictionary, the Polish language was much richer. Although Mączyński s Lexicon was used at the Jagiellonian University, there were no subsequent editions. In 1603, it was even registered in the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, because Mączyński was a Protestant. In 1579 in Wrocław (Breslau), Andreas Calagius, a teacher and a poet writing in Latin, published a trilingual German-Polish-Latin dictionary of synonyms. It contains the oldest alphabetical index of ca. 1,600 Polish words with references to the entries where they are discussed (Kędelska 1995: 15). In the sixteenth century, the last thematically-ordered Latin-German-Polish dictionary for schoolchildren appeared in Toruń (Thorn 1591) under the title Nomenclator... It was the most frequently republished dictionary containing Polish in the seventeenth century. Interestingly, most editions were signed with Murmelius name (Kędelska 1995: 128; Gruszczyński 2000: 64 74), although the text was an adaptation of a Latin-German dictionary by J. Byber and M. Mylius published in Zgorzelec (Görlitz) in The author of the Polish version, published in Toruń, was Piotr Artomiusz or Krzesichleb (Petrus Artomius), a Lutheran theologian and preacher, religious writer, the author of a famous hymnbook. A work of crucial importance for Polish lexicography was the Dictionarium trilingue tripartitum by Nicolaus Volckmar, a Polonized German. It contains the first alphabetical dictionary with Polish words used as headwords. Printed in Gdańsk (Danzig) in 1596 (the hypothetical edition of 1594 probably never

6 210 Włodzimierz Gruszczyński, Zygmunt Saloni existed; see Kędelska 1995: 86), it was republished several times (in 1603 with the inclusion of Greek). From a methodological perspective, Volckmar based his dictionary on Dasypodius and Mączyński s works, but the Polish-Latin part was his own contribution to Polish lexicography. The importance of Volckmar s dictionary diminished after the publication of the most important Old Polish lexicographic work, the Thesaurus of the Jesuit Grzegorz Knapski (Cnapius, ). The first edition was published in 1621 and it was revised in It met the demands of Jesuit schools, which were dominant during the Counter-Reformation in the Polish Commonwealth educational system and did not allow any textbooks prepared by Protestants. The dictionary consisted of three volumes: a trilingual Thesaurus Polono-Latino-Graecus (over 1,500 pages, ca. 40,000 entries), a bilingual Latin-Polish index, and a trilingual Adagia, a dictionary of idioms and proverbs. The dictionary was largely an original work, though some solutions (for example arranging the different meanings of an entry from the general to the specific) may have been taken from the sixteenth-century dictionaries of the Estienne family. Although the source language of the dictionary is Polish, the Latin equivalents have detailed grammatical characteristics and are illustrated by quotations from classic Latin literature. The Polish lexical material is presented in great detail. The Polish entries are in strict alphabetical order, with idioms and collocations often introduced as separate entries. Synonyms are often evaluated stylistically by labels. The Thesaurus has a normative inclination: barbarisms and borrowings deemed by the author to be unnecessary are not included and are sometimes replaced by neologisms, some of which were later accepted by the language and are still in use today (e.g. nosorożec rhinoceros cf. Puzynina 1961). The Thesaurus was reprinted only once, but in the seventeenth and eighteenth century its parts (especially the Polish-Latin and the Adagia) had many shorter editions 3 and several modifications, the last one in 1796 (Plezia 1959: XX XXI). The Thesaurus was also the model for two dictionaries containing the same material in Baltic languages: the Dictionarium trium lingvarum for Lithuanian (1629) and the Dictionarium Polono-Latino-Lothavicum for Latvian (1683), both compiled by Jesuits (Puzynina 1961: 205). They were the first comprehensive dictionaries of those languages and the first dictionaries containing both Polish and Baltic words. Knapski s Thesaurus also influenced some later Polish dictionaries 4, especially Troc s and Linde s dictionaries (see below). 3 The short version of the first volume entitled Synonima seu dictionarium Polono-Latinum ex Thesauro Gregorii Cnapii had thirty-seven editions over 150 years (!), and a similar short version of the third volume entitled Idiotismi Polonici seu voces Polonicae, que Latine de verbo ad verbum reddi nequeunt, sed periphrastice reddendae sunt had seventeen editions in the same period. 4 A Polonized version of the well known dictionary Dasypodius catholicus (1642) has been even called a plagiarism by the second edition of the Thesaurus.

7 From multilingual to monolingual dictionaries. A historical overview 211 Other important dictionaries published in the seventeenth century included the Dictionarium hexaglosson, printed in Warsaw in 1646, in which, for the first time, Spanish was introduced, besides Latin, Italian, French, and German 5, and an interesting Forytarz języka polskiego (The Guide to Polish) by Johann Ernesti, published in Wrocław in Its entries (mainly nouns and adjectives) are grouped according to grammatical gender and further in reverse alphabetical order; for example, the list of masculine nouns begins as follows: schab, wárcab, drab, grab, korab... The author was aware that such an order had a great didactic importance in a dictionary of a language with a rich suffixal inflection. A similar macrostructure, using the reverse alphabetical order, was seen in another dictionary designed for learners of Polish language, namely, the glossary in the manual Kleiner Lust-Garten, Worinn Gerade Gänge zur polnischen Sprache angewiesen werden written by Jan Karol Woyna issued in Gdańsk 1690 (see Frączek 2011: 40 45). The reverse order only reappeared in Polish lexicography in the second half of the twentieth century. In the seventeenth century Poland had many contacts with the Orient. As a result, in addition to Georgijević s work mentioned above, another little thematic glossary with the Turkish language appeared in this period. It was published as part of Marcin Paszkowski s book Dzieje tureckie i utarczki kozackie z Tatary (History of Turkey and Cossacks skirmishes with Tartars), Cracow The surprising feature is the order of the languages, because the source language is Polish. To the history of Polish lexicography we should also include Thesaurus Linguarum Orientalium Turcicae, Arabicae, Persicae, considered the greatest achievement of seventeenth-century European lexicography of oriental languages. Written by the Polonized Lorrainer Franciszek Meninski (François à Mesgnien Meninski), a translator and diplomat at the court of John II Casimir Vasa, as well as a lexicographer and a grammarian, it was published in three folio volumes in Vienna (1680). In many entries words from Turkish, Arabic and Persian languages have not only equivalents in Latin, German, Italian and French, but also in Polish (Stachowski 2000). In the eighteenth century, many translation dictionaries were compiled, especially including French, which had replaced Latin as lingua franca in Europe. The most important were the Polish version of Danet s Nouveau grand dictionnaire, published in two volumes between 1743 and 1745 (the Polish part was prepared by Rev. Dymitr Franciszek Kola) and the original and innovative Nouveau dictionnaire françois, allemand et polonois by Michał Abraham Troc (Trotz), also printed in two volumes between 1744 and 1747 with further volumes in a different language order. It is difficult to understand why 5 About the languages compiling with Polish in dictionaries of the 16 th 18 th century see: Gruszczyński 2011.

8 212 Włodzimierz Gruszczyński, Zygmunt Saloni the Nouveau grand dictionnaire, in spite of its value and popularity, did not have a significant impact on other dictionaries (for example, Linde did not use its material), but Troc s work (the first large Polish dictionary not to include Latin) ushered in many technical solutions that have been used in Polish lexicography ever since, e.g. the way of introducing differentiated meanings of the same word (different meanings are in the same entry and every meaning has its number), the place of collocations, idioms, and proverbs (in the entry relating to the most important word of a given phrase), the placement and the method of providing the inflection (giving the most important inflectional endings or forms directly after the headword). Troc s dictionary may be considered the first modern Polish translation dictionary and a step toward bilingual lexicography as we know it. In its third volume, with Polish as the source language, the author characterizes words from the semantic, grammatical and occasionally stylistic point of view as precisely as possible. 4. Nineteenth century At the beginning of the nineteenth century, two bilingual dictionaries methodologically belonging to the previous period should be mentioned, which in turn influenced subsequent monolingual dictionaries: Słownik dokładny języka polskiego i niemieckiego 6 (Exact Dictionary of Polish and German) by Jerzy Samuel Bandtkie (Breslau 1806) and Krzysztof Celestyn Mrongovius s Dokładny słownik polsko-niemiecki (Exact Polish-German Dictionary published in Königsberg in 1835) whose second, German-Polish volume appeared in 1837 (see first of all: Nowowiejski 2011 and Frączek and Lipczuk 2004: 43 54). The beginning of the nineteenth century was marked by one of the greatest achievements of Polish lexicography: Linde s Słownik języka polskiego 7 (Dictionary of Polish). The period was crucial in the history of Poland and the idea of compiling a general monolingual dictionary was closely connected with the political and cultural situation. Immediately before the loss of independence and the final partition of the territory between Russia, Austria and Prussia in 1795, Poland enjoyed its period of Enlightenment, characterized by intensive political and cultural development. The last attempt to rescue the state was the Constitution of May 3, 1791, promptly questioned by conservative circles and rejected. Polish political activists escaped abroad, mainly to Saxony. There, at the University of Leipzig, they found a lecturer of Polish, Dr. Samuel Theofilus 6 More detailed information about this dictionary give, among others, Frączek and Lipczuk (2004: 33 38). 7 There are a lot of works on this dictionary and its author. Most of these lists and discusses Matuszczyk (2006). English-language discussion of Linde s dictionary see: Adamska-Sałaciak (2001).

9 From multilingual to monolingual dictionaries. A historical overview 213 (Bogumił, Gottlieb) Linde ( ), who had started to work on a vocabulary, and with whom some of the activists became friends. This resulted in close contacts between the very young scholar and Polish elites, which turned out to be very beneficial for Polish lexicography. Linde found sponsors for his ambitious project and could realize it during the following twenty years. His dictionary was published in six volumes in Warsaw between 1807 and 1814 (the second edition, slightly corrected and modernized, was published in Lwów, now Lviv in Ukraine, between 1856 and 1860). Linde s dictionary, whose aim was to interpret Polish words, is a paradigm example of a work founded on the ideas of the Age of Enlightenment. The author, knowledgeable in contemporary lexicography, particularly Adelung s German dictionary, started to work on his own dictionary for his personal needs. In the introduction to the dictionary, Linde, whose mother tongue was German, mentions that at the beginning of his teaching career his knowledge of Polish was limited to the urban vernacular of Toruń (then and now in Poland) and he felt the need to improve it, especially based on written sources. In the course of the following years he collected extracts from Polish printed documents ranging from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. A lover of languages, etymology, and philology in general, he included equivalents from other Slavic languages in the dictionary as well. The collection grew during the 10 years Linde spent working as a librarian for Józef Ossoliński, the main benefactor of the dictionary; it improved step by step and became the manuscript of the dictionary. The dictionary was published in Warsaw at a time when the political situation, during the Napoleonic wars, was particularly unstable. It had been financed by subscribers belonging to the Polish financial and cultural elites, although their ranks also included the rulers of the three annexation powers. The word list of the dictionary was determined by its sources. It contains ca. 60,000 entries. Sometimes, Linde added words that did not occur in texts but were known to him from other Slavic languages, mainly Russian in the foreword, he expressed Pan-Slavic ideas, treating Polish as one of the most important Slavic dialects. It is interesting that the use of these sources as the basis for the dictionary caused important gaps in the list of entries. For example, some words used in the introductory texts are not included in the dictionary. The microstructure reflects the preparatory stages on Linde s cards. The entries contain, beside grammatical characteristics and definitions (in Polish), German translations or explanations as well as equivalents in Latin and other Slavic languages (suggesting etymology). Although the author included a long essay on etymology at the beginning of the dictionary, his ability to compare words in different languages was limited and based on intuitive comparison of words. This was a natural consequence of the fact that the dictionary was compiled before the formulation of the principles of historical-comparative linguistics.

10 214 Włodzimierz Gruszczyński, Zygmunt Saloni Often stylistic and pragmatic labels were also added. The words were characterized by abbreviations defining their important features. The entries for inflected parts of speech were provided with endings of typical forms other than the headword (genitive for nouns, some forms of present and past tenses for irregular verbs, aspectual derivatives for verbs). Uninflected parts of speech were labeled with Polish or Latin names. The great merit of Linde s dictionary that made it so useful for later users was the collection of examples. The quotations, sometimes abbreviated and slightly modernized (but not censored), were taken from Polish printed documents, both literary and non-literary. Two periods were favored and particularly well-covered by the author: the Golden Period of Polish culture (i.e. the sixteenth century) and Linde s period, which incidentally was the second era of intensive development of Polish literature. Linde s dictionary has influenced the lexicography of other Slavic languages, mainly Czech and Russian. In the period of the partitions of Poland, two other important monolingual dictionaries were compiled, called the Vilnius Dictionary and the Warsaw Dictionary after the places of publication. Compiling a dictionary was a national task; it was important for the continuity and the development of Polish culture, endangered by the political situation. The Vilnius Dictionary had a much more modest goal than Linde. It was intended as a desk dictionary for the general public. In the editor s preface, it is stressed that the aim was to provide a tool not for the educated philologist studying the treasures of languages in vast volumes and book collections, but for the vast number of educated Poles who needed explanations of Polish words. The idea of compiling such a dictionary came from Maurycy Orgelbrand, a member of the publishers family, who was a prominent representative of the Polish culture (his brother Samuel was the editor of the famous nineteenth-century Polish encyclopedia). In 1853, Maurycy Orgelbrand founded a bookstore and publishing house in Vilnius (Wilno in Polish), which for centuries had been an important center of Polish culture. In 1854, he started to assemble a team of editors for a new dictionary of Polish, headed by Aleksander Zdanowicz, although he was not the official editor-in-chief. There were no distinguished specialists on the team except Bronisław F. Trentowski, a wellknown Polish philosopher. The title of the Vilnius Dictionary is the same as Linde s, i.e. Słownik języka polskiego (Dictionary of Polish). The detailed subtitle is adequate to its contents: including, apart from proper Polish words, a considerable number of words adopted into Polish from foreign languages, nomenclatures, both old and newly introduced into usage, of various disciplines, sciences, arts, and crafts; names of coins, measures, and weights; the principal countries and provinces, the mythology of Slavic and other important tribes; as well as a separate table of Polish irregular verbs together with their inflections [translation ours, WG & ZS].

11 From multilingual to monolingual dictionaries. A historical overview 215 The dictionary was useful for any person literate in Polish as it included almost all the entries of Linde s dictionary, complemented by material from bilingual dictionaries and literary works published after Linde s, as well as by systematic additions of words characteristic of special domains, mainly professional. These sets of words were worked on by specialists, who sometimes proposed neologisms. In this period, special terminology began to be used in Polish; the collaborators of the dictionary were among the best Polish specialists in their fields and they actively participated in the creation of the terminology of their respective branches. Incidentally, the musical terms were partially browsed by Stanisław Moniuszko, the greatest Polish composer of the nineteenth century after Chopin, but the favorite master unfortunately left his admirers and his editorial work at Vilnius and went to Warsaw to become the director of the Grand Theater opera house (Preface, p. III). Philosopher Trentowski had an inclination for coining new words, and his (and other authors ) suggestions had special labels in the dictionary, although the preface says that some of them were already accepted by other authors. The choices were generally felicitous. The dictionary contains ca. 110,000 entries, almost twice as many as Linde s, in only two volumes. Such economy was achieved through the abridgement of the entries. These are in strict alphabetical order (in Linde s dictionary, they are partially nested) and printed very clearly. There are no equivalents from other languages unless they are particularly informative (e.g. Latin names of animals or plants, especially of their families, species, etc.). Instead of original quotations, there are concise examples, often shortened quotations from Linde. Longer entries are divided into meanings, clearly marked by numbers. Entries and meanings are labeled and all the labels are listed at the beginning of the dictionary. For some time, the Vilnius Dictionary was regarded as a popular work of no scientific importance in Polish lexicography. Of course, preparing such a dictionary was comparatively easier than the preparation of the dictionaries that preceded or followed it. However, its merits have recently been recognized and it is now referred to as an important source of information about the Polish language and culture of the nineteenth century (see Walczak 1991). An ambitious new project for a large monolingual dictionary was initiated in Warsaw in the last years of the nineteenth century. It was published in eight volumes between 1900 and 1927 under the same title as its two predecessors: Słownik języka polskiego (Dictionary of Polish) and is informally but generally called the Warsaw Dictionary (Majdak 2008). The names printed in the volumes had changed but it is generally assumed that the authors were Jan Karłowicz, Adam Antoni Kryński and Władysław Niedźwiedzki. Their contribution in preparing and compiling the dictionary was different with respect to the amount of time and the nature of their work. The idea for a new

12 216 Włodzimierz Gruszczyński, Zygmunt Saloni unabridged monolingual Polish dictionary came from Jan Karłowicz ( ), a multidisciplinary non-academic scholar, the author of the six-volume Słownik gwar polskich (Dictionary of Polish Dialects, ). In earlier years Karłowicz had envisaged a very ambitious project of a Polish dictionary (Karłowicz 1876). The scope of this dictionary was defined very broadly, with very thorough source documentation and statistical data, also including not only variants of the basic forms of the entry words but also varying inflected forms. It seems that at the time these plans were formulated it was impossible to put them into practice in any dictionary; in any case the Warsaw Dictionary as it was eventually published cannot be regarded as the realization of Karłowicz s vision from a quarter of a century before. Karłowicz began to plan and organize the work on the dictionary more precisely later, in The idea was accepted by the Polish intellectuals who participated in the discussion and formed (with the participation of patrioticallyinclined financial elites) an economic committee for the dictionary. During the period of publication, the dictionary lacked a stable financial support and a publisher. The first volume was published by subscribers, the following seven by subscribers and a foundation, Kasa im. Mianowskiego (the Mianowski Fund). The other two co-authors differed sharply in their background and attitude toward the work they were compiling. Adam Antoni Kryński ( ), a linguist and genuine expert in the Polish language, wanted to achieve some level of scientific precision and adequacy; Władysław Niedźwiedzki ( ), who was the main executive power in the team, insisted on the effectiveness and efficient timing of the work. These differences caused substantial disagreement in the team, especially after Karłowicz s death and Kryński s move from Warsaw to Lwów, where he was offered a professorship at the university (it was impossible for him as a Pole to become a professor at the Russian university in Warsaw) and from where he initially tried to participate in editorial work. It can be said that the work on the dictionary was initiated by a threeperson team, but brought to an end by a single editor. Nevertheless, the result was of high quality, thanks to the contribution of many collaborators, consultants, and volunteers, whose participation in the work is difficult to estimate, especially in the absence of a preface. 8 The Warsaw Dictionary comprises almost 8,000 pages and contains ca. 280,000 entries. With regard to the number of entries, it is the largest Polish dictionary ever. The selection of entries was, as it seems, over-generous. The authors aim was to cover the whole of the Polish language in its history and dialectal varieties, and there are many entries describing variants (sometimes only in pronunciation or spelling) of common words. However, the content 8 Probably the authors planned to include one in one of the volumes but it was impossible to complete because of their disagreements; the first pages of the volumes contain only the lists of abbreviations (grammatical, stylistic, technical labels) and the references to the sources.

13 From multilingual to monolingual dictionaries. A historical overview 217 is not repeated, thanks to a system of cross-references, which is why the entries, although elaborate, are not too long or complicated. The longer entries, provided with labels, are divided into numbered meanings (though the separations are not clear enough). Meanings are defined descriptively or by synonyms, illustrated by typical collocations, often with quotations. The quotations are marked only by the abbreviation of the name of the author, but their exact location in the source text is not provided (a decision criticized by many). 5. Modern lexicography Despite its shortcomings, the Warsaw Dictionary proved very useful. It was the model dictionary for at least three generations of educated Poles. After its completion, there were almost instant plans for the preparation of a supplement. This was indeed prepared in Warsaw by the team led by Witold Doroszewski ( ), a professor of Warsaw University immediately before the outbreak of World War II, but unfortunately all materials were burnt during the Warsaw Uprising in The editorial team planned to reconstruct them, but their plans changed under the influence of the new political, social, and economic situation in Poland after World War II. In the centralized socialist economic system of Poland, educational, scientific, and publishing activities were the domain of the state. The idea of compiling an entirely new dictionary was suggested to Doroszewski by the management of a state-owned publishing house around An editorial team was soon assembled. In the meantime, in 1951, the Polska Akademia Nauk (Polish Academy of Sciences, henceforth PAN) was created and the work on the dictionary, also named Słownik języka polskiego (Dictionary of Polish), was included among its activities, although the editorial staff of over twenty persons was employed full-time consecutively by three different state-owned publishing houses. Finally the dictionary was published under the auspices of the PAN, which suggested that it was the result of the academy s work. It appeared in ten volumes between 1958 and 1968 after 1963 by the Państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe (National Scientific Publishers; henceforth PWN), the main academic publisher in Poland and a supplementary eleventh volume was issued in The editing, as for all similar works, was financed by the state and was accomplished by the professional editorial board led by Doroszewski, who was a very strong personality and who designed the main structure of the work. The decision was that the dictionary should be based on real language data, providing original quotations from the sources. The examples were carefully selected from over 3,000 printed sources, and the card index for the dictionary consisted of ca. 6.5 million items. It sufficed to document rare and peculiar

14 218 Włodzimierz Gruszczyński, Zygmunt Saloni words. However, for adequate illustration of the common and most frequent words several texts were excerpted fully. The scope and the principles behind the dictionary were discussed broadly in the scholarly and cultural circles in Poland. The most important point of the discussion was the date of the earliest sources. It was decided that the dictionary should include Polish vocabulary from the second half of the eighteenth century to the present. In spite of the data sources, the dictionary was meant to be normative. Therefore, some words and expressions deemed unacceptable were not included in the 125,000 entries. Vulgarisms were ultimately listed in the supplement but some meanings and expressions were omitted completely. These mostly concerned the sphere of political and social life and the official image of reality in the socialist society. For example, the adjective bolszewicki in the specific Polish meaning, connected with the Soviet Union (unofficially, scornfully called Bolszewia), was banned from the dictionary, together with other incorrect concepts and expressions. This feature of the dictionary was a major drawback. In general, however, phraseology and collocations were described very carefully. Useful examples were also introduced, though some critics complained that original editions had not been consulted and that fiction was overrepresented. The dictionary was based on a thorough linguistic analysis of the source texts. The long entries were divided into meanings, and subentries for derived (converted) lexemes (the same word in the function of another part of speech) were sometimes included. The definitions were formulated in traditional terms. Doroszewski strove for exactness and adequacy, which sometimes caused excess of extra-linguistic, encyclopedic information. One of the most successful aspects of the dictionary was the grammatical description, which is very important for Polish as a highly inflectional language. The idea of the presentation of entries with inflectional information was developed by Jan Tokarski ( ). The declensional and conjugational tables were given in the front matter of the dictionary. Ideally, all forms of the words given in the dictionary were supposed to be generated from the information in the dictionary, either from the entry, or, when the form was not included in the entry, from the tables. This was an ambitious and a very difficult task to achieve; in fact, the dictionary does not always provide all the necessary inflectional information. Dictionary edited by Doroszewski has been comprehensively analyzed (results see: Saloni ). In the socialist state, conditions were also favorable for the development of specialized, scientific dictionaries. The preparation of the dictionary of medieval Polish (Słownik staropolski) was an old task of Polish linguistics, explicitly formulated at the beginning of the twentieth century during Jan Baudouin de Courtenay s stay in Cracow, but the dictionary was published only in the sec-

15 From multilingual to monolingual dictionaries. A historical overview 219 ond half of the century ( ). Its preparation was undertaken in the activities of the PAN, which planned the lexicographical coverage of all the history of the Polish language. The sixteenth century, crucial for Polish culture, was to be treated in a special dictionary (Słownik polszczyzny XVI wieku), for which an ambitious plan was formulated in the Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences. The editorial team started to work in the early 1950s, and as of 2010, 35 volumes have been published with Maria Renata Mayenowa ( ) as editor-in-chief. This work is the largest Polish dictionary, not because of the volume of the contents, which is only 8,000,000 word forms in the sources, but because of the thorough analysis of the texts and the inclusion of detailed statistical data in the entries. The project was initiated before the era of computers and was published fully on paper. The computerization of the dictionary is a new ambitious task for Polish lexicographers. Before 1960, the work on the dictionary of Polish of the seventeenth century and the first half of the eighteenth century (Słownik języka polskiego XVII i 1. połowy XVIII w.) also began in the Institute of the Polish Language of the PAN. However, probably too many lexicographical projects had been started and it was impossible to carry all them out efficiently. Soon after the publication of the initial sections of the dictionary (Siekierska ) the decision was made to switch to the electronic form. Around fifteen thousand entries are now available on the Internet. Moreover, several other special dictionary projects have also been initiated, such as the new Słownik gwar polskich (Dictionary of Polish Dialects), but their future is unclear. These developments constituted a separate academic agenda in the development of Polish lexicography in the last quarter of the twentieth century. General contemporary dictionaries followed a different path. An important factor in this branch of lexicographic activity was the PWN. In the socialist system, it became the main if not the only Polish publisher of dictionaries, including specialized ones. Earlier, two types of dictionaries had gained great popularity in the Polish society. One was spelling type of dictionaries. Their popularity in Poland was the result of the special situation of Polish orthography, which was not unified until the regaining of independence in The other type of dictionary that became very popular in Poland was the dictionary of foreign (i.e. borrowed) words. Both types of dictionaries were issued by the PWN and compiled by the team created for Doroszewski s dictionary, but were not immediately derived from it. However, the latter was the source for other contemporary dictionaries of various sizes and purposes, mainly prepared in the PWN. The most important 9 During the partitions of Poland, rules of Polish spelling differed between annexation states.

16 220 Włodzimierz Gruszczyński, Zygmunt Saloni derivatives were one-volume and three-volume dictionaries, which enjoyed great popularity. The three-volume dictionary Słownik języka polskiego (Dictionary of Polish) 10 was edited by a PWN team under the supervision of Mieczysław Szymczak ( ). It had a normative, prescriptive character and was based on Doroszewski s dictionary. Many mistakes and misprints were corrected; sometimes the analysis of entries was more precise, and new words and meanings were added. The content of the dictionary, some 72,000 entries, was generally modernized. The reduction in the word list was achieved through the elimination of old, obsolete, and dialectal words, but arguably too many entries were excluded. Many rare and stylistically marked words were omitted because they had been labeled old in the source dictionary. On the other hand, new layers of terminological words were introduced. Their definitions have a very technical character and are almost encyclopedic. The economy in the microstructure was achieved mainly by replacing exact quotations with prepared examples the changes were generally appropriate and user-friendly, although sometimes the principles were debatable: for example, verbal examples in the infinitive are not sufficiently instructive, because it does not join with the nominative. The grammatical description was taken from Doroszewski s dictionary, but some changes were not beneficial, namely the principle that all forms of the lexeme could be derived on the basis of the information in the entry and the tables were not retained. 11 However, the general public received the dictionary favorably (towards the end of the socialist system in Poland it was the only general dictionary on the market). Its first edition ( ) had been reprinted six times by 1992 and over a million copies were sold. It has been the most popular general Polish dictionary ever. After the political changes of 1989 starting with the Solidarność movement, the content of the dictionary has become partly obsolete. In general, biased definitions based on the official picture of reality had to be changed. Therefore, in 1992 PWN quickly prepared a revised (slightly modernized) version with a supplement containing new lexical units, as well as words omitted from the original edition for political or moral reasons. In 1995 the supplement entries were merged with the main text and the dictionary, together with the dictionary of foreign words, was published in digital 10 For the editor who commissioned the present article, Professor Henri Béjoint, the fact that most successive Polish dictionaries had the same title is very interesting, suggesting that all successive lexicographers thought they were producing THE dictionary of Polish, the dictionary that would be the ultimate, the only one, the perfect one which is peculiar in the lexicographical tradition. The authors are indebted to Professor Henri Béjoint for this comment. 11 A detailed discussion of all of the above mentioned problems and many others in the dictionary edited by Szymczak, see Gruszczyński et al. (1981/1990).

17 From multilingual to monolingual dictionaries. A historical overview 221 form; this innovative adaptation, prepared by the company Litterae, marks the beginning of computerized lexicography in Poland. The political and economic changes in Poland influenced its lexicography to a great extent. The PWN was privatized and its team of lexicographers was gradually reduced and eventually disbanded. Nevertheless, the company managed to prepare many dictionaries during the last 20 years, including two general dictionaries. Uniwersalny słownik języka polskiego (Universal Dictionary of the Polish Language), published in 2003, is a strict continuation of previous dictionaries published by the PWN. Its editor-in-chief was Stanisław Dubisz. The methodology was not changed but the content of the dictionary was enriched (totalling ca. 100,000 entries) and modernized. It is equipped with new lexicographic tools: a reverse index and a CD with an application enabling advanced searches. The second dictionary published at the turn of the 21 st century by PWN, Inny słownik języka polskiego (Alternative Dictionary of the Polish Language), prepared by an editorial team led by Mirosław Bańko, is of an experimental character (it had only one edition in 2000). It was modeled after the Collins COBUILD English Language Dictionary (Bańko 2010). Previous achievements of Polish lexicography are exploited only indirectly. First, the lexical material is limited to general contemporary Polish, dispensing with most of the specialized terminology. Because of this, the dictionary contains only ca. 50,000 entries. However, according to the preface it is lexical units (words, idioms, phrases), not entries, that are of concern of the dictionary. These units (ca. 100,000) are highlighted in bold in longer entries with a traditional headword. The other innovation is the structure of the definitions: they are contextual (i.e. full sentences as in the Collins COBUILD Dictionary). The grammatical features of the units (mostly, the part of speech label and syntactic properties) are given in a special block in the margin. The problem of Polish inflection is solved by algorithms for the generation of word forms based on several forms given in the entry; for nouns and adjectives, these algorithms are to be found in a chart; for verbs, the algorithm additionally features a schematic drawing. The selection of entries and examples is based on the Polish PWN corpus, initiated for use in the dictionary project. Inny słownik języka polskiego was praised in many reviews (cf. Piotrowski 2001a; Seretny 2003) for providing precise information about contemporary Polish as well as for being multifaceted and richer than other dictionaries, but it was not a commercial success. It appears that for the average user, it contains too few entries and is too innovative. In the last twenty or so years only two general dictionaries of Polish have been published outside the PWN. One is Słownik współczesnego języka polskiego (Dictionary of Contemporary Polish), prepared by an editorial team mainly composed of linguists from the Jagiellonian University in Cracow (led