Der Europäische Master für Lexikographie 2021 an der Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg

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.

Spatial cognition in landscape designations in the area of the Old European Hydronymy

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.

Squeezing Italian dictionaries in search of citrus juice and fruit

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.

Die Villa Vigoni Thesen zur Lexikographie

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.

South and Southeast Asian languages and Renaissance Italy

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.

OED and EDD: comparison of the printed and online versions

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.

Interlinguality in historical conceptography

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.

Words crossing borders

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.