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- DICTIONARIES. The
compilation of dictionaries of Lithuanian began in the first half of
the 17th century. It was a matter of practical necessity; in Lithuania
Minor (East Prussia) dictionaries were required by the German
Protestant pastors who were working among the Lithuanian population,
and in Lithuania itself they were needed for Jesuit schools and for
those priests who did not know Lithuanian. Thus in 1629 the first
trilingual dictionary (Polish-Latin-Lithuanian) was printed with the
title Dictionarium trium Linguarum. It was published in Vilnius.
It’s author was Jesuit priest Kostantinas Sirvydas. He used several
dictionaries of Polish, Latin and Greek in preparing his Dictionarium.
Sirvydas also had to coin many neologisms for Lithuanian. Some of them
have remained in use until present time, e.g., kiekybė
quantity; kokybė quality; pratarmė foreword; taisyklė
rule; virtuvė kitchen; and many others. Five editions of this
dictionary were published between 1629 and 1713. Many lexicographers
'of the 18th and 19th centuries copied and used Sirvydas' dictionary.
- The first dictionary intended for
Lithuania Minor was published in 1730: Friedrich W. Haack, Vocabularium
Lithvanico-Germanicum et Germanico-Lithva'nicum. This dictionary
was specially written for those students who were studying Lithuanian
at the Lithuanian Seminar (Institute), which was established at the
University of Halle in 1723. Haack's dictionary claimed to contain all
the words found in the Bible, but otherwise it was of poor quality.
- In 1747, Philip Ruhig (Ruigys)
published another Lithuanian dictionary for Lithuania Minor: Deutsch-Littauisches
Lexicon. It also contained a grammar of Lithuanian and some
remarks on the historical development of the Lithuanian language. In
addition to the dictionaries of Sirvydas and Haack, Ruigys used
several unpublished dictionaries and collected many words from the
contemporary spoken language of the Lithuanian people. Ruigys was the
first to use a systematic orthography: he distinguished clearly
between the vowels e and ie, o and uo (he wrote u).
In his dictionary Ruigys also indicated the place of the accent and
the main grammatical forms. This dictionary thus was much better than
those previously published. It had 616 pages, namely 192 for the
Lithuanian-German part and 424 pages for the German-Lithuanian part.
- At the beginning of the 19th
century Lithuanian because of its archaic character became a subject
of investigation in comparative Indie-European linguistics, and
scholars working in this area needed a better, fuller dictionary of
the language. To meet that need George H. F. Nesselmann in 1851
published a new and expanded dictionary: Worterbuch der
Littauischen Sprache (Lithuanian-German). He used all the
dictionaries available to him, also several dictionaries in manuscript
which could be found in the archives of the University of Konigsberg.
Especially useful was a large dictionary compiled by Jacob Brodowski.
Nesselmann made use of many folksongs and folk-tales. He also
organized a network of helpers, who supplied him with words and
phrases from contemporary life. Nesselmann's dictionary is about three
times larger than that 'of Mielcke. Unfortunately Nesselmann did not
indicate the type of intonation (pitch), and even in marking the place
of the (main) stress he made many mistakes. His orthography is faulty,
and the whole dictionary is "alphabetized" following a very
complicated "Sanskrit system".
- The best and most important
dictionary in Lithuania Minor was compiled by the greatest linguist of
his age Fridrichas Kurgaitis (Friedrich Kurschat). The first volume of
his Worterbuch der littauischen Sprache (German-Lithuanian)
came out in two parts: A-K, 724 pages, in 1870; L-Ž, 392 pages, in
1874. In 1883 Kursaitis finally published the second volume of his
dictionary (Littauisch-deutsches Worterbuch), 530 pages. This
dictionary was well constructed, according to the lexicographic
standards of the time. Its Lithuanian part is provided with accent
marks which also indicate the type of intonation of the stressed the
Lithuanian language (and literature) of Lithuania Minor. However,
linguists continued to rely on this dictionary until recently.
Kursaitis' nephew, Aleksandras Kursaitis (Alexander Kurschat) prepared
a new and greatly expanded edition of the Lithuanian-German part. This
dictionary is now being published in three large volumes, as: Litauisch-deutsches
Worterbuch: Thesaurus Linguae Lituanicae. At the time of writing
two volumes have appeared (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Gottingen).
- In the second half of the 19th century
Russian linguists also became interested in having a complete
Lithuanian-Russian dictionary. In 1882 the Russian Academy of Sciences
started publishing a large dictionary compiled by Antanas
Juškevičius (Juška). But this was a very slow process; between 1882
and 1922 only one volume and part of a second were published covering
A-Ku, in all 997 pages, about 30,000 words. This dictionary is very
valuable because almost all of the basic Lithuanian entries were
collected from the spoken idiom. However, not all of them are
completely reliable, and it would be almost impossible to check them
now. Mykolas Miežinis (1826-1888) about 1868 compiled a dictionary of
four languages, Lithuanian, Latvian, Polish and Russian. After many
difficulties this appeared in 1894 as Lietuviszkai
- latviszkai - lenkiszkai - rusiszkas žodynas.
- Among Lithuanians in the United States a
need was long felt for a Lithuanian-English, English-Lithuanian
dictionary. Several small dictionaries did indeed appear before 1900.
In 1903, however, the publisher A. Olsauskas brought 'out a
Lithuanian-English dictionary compiled by A. Lalis. Its
English-Lithuanian part appeared in 1905. The first part was expanded
and reissued in 1905. Both parts, usually bound together, were later
reprinted several times. Lalis used several dictionaries but he also
took in the neologisms used by various Lithuanian writers. Although by
now rather obsolete, Lalis' dictionary is especially useful for the
study of the formation and usage of the neologisms in Standard
Literary Lithuanian.
- When Lithuania regained its independence
in 1918, there were no easily available and usable Lithuanian
dictionaries, bilingual or monolingual. In 1920, after Kazimieras Buga
returned to Lithuania, the government entrusted him with the
preparation of a large dictionary of Lithuanian. This dictionary was
supposed to contain not only all the available words of Lithuanian,
but also give their histories, etymologies and dialect forms. In
addition to that, it would have given all the name3 of rivers, other
bodies of water, family names, local names, etc. Before his untimely
death in 1924 Buga published only two fascicules, containing a very
long and important introduction and introduction and 82 pages of the
dictionary text itself.
In 1930 Juozas Balcikonis was appointed editor-in-chief of this
dictionary. He and his co-workers soon realized that they needed more
material for the project; the material collected by Būga, although
extensive, was not enough. With the help of many enthusiasts in the
whole country, Balcikonis developed a campaign to collect additional
material for a major dictionary. Under Balcikonis' leadership it was
decided to publish a full dictionary of contemporary spoken and
literary Lithuanian, including also old writings and the works of
well-established writers. Very little was taken from the most recent
literature, and the contemporary periodical press was not considered
at all. The first volume of this dictionary was published before the
occupation of Lithuania by the Soviet Union (June 15, 1940). The
volume was ready for distribution in May, 1941. However, the Communist
Party Central Committee forbade its distribution. The objection was
that this dictionary was not edited according to the Marxian ideology.
When the Germans occupied Lithuania in June, 1941, they permitted the
distribution of this first volume. It contained the words beginning
with A and B; it had 34 and 1008 pages. The second volume was prepared
during the German occupation (1941-1944) by the staff of the Institute
of Lithuanian Language and Literature of the Lithuanian Academy of
Arts and Sciences. After Lithuania was again occupied by the Soviet
Union in the summer of 1944, it took three years to bring out the
second volume; it appeared in 1947 (C-F). Some changes were made in
the text. Balcikonis is listed again as the editor in chief. Actually
there are two versions of this volume, both published, however, in
1947. In the second version all the references to the Lithuanian
writers, scientists and other men of letters who had fled to the West
from the Russians were omitted.
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- Text from the ENCYCLOPEDIA LITUANICA
I-VI. Boston, 1970-1978
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