Филологический класс (Dec 2021)
Dahl – a Man and a Dictionary (for the 220th Anniversary of the Birth)
Abstract
The author reflects on the fate of the most popular dictionary in Russia, written by the lexicographer, ethnographer and folklorist V. I. Dahl, analyzing the principles of building this “encyclopedia of Russian folk life of the first half of the 19th century” (V. V. Vinogradov). Contemporaries critically evaluated the dictionary, finding the word family method of organizing the material inconvenient, looking for factual errors and being outraged by the use of original Russian words instead of borrowings, sometimes constructed by Dahl himself. Admitting some drawbacks, it is necessary to emphasize that the organization of the material is not accidental and is caused by a polemic with the normative and dialect (regional) dictionaries that were published at that time, in which the word was presented in isolation from its realization in language and speech. The key word in the characterization of the language for Dahl was the word alive, and it is precisely on the representation of the living connections of words in the language that the principles of dictionary compilation “work”: word family method of presentation, a visual demonstration of the paradigmatic and syntagmatic connections of the word within the framework of one dictionary entry, combination of the vocabulary of all forms of the existence of the national language in the dictionary. Modern lexicographers, as a rule, avoid implementing these principles, focusing on the creation of reference dictionaries, in which words are presented in alphabetical order, supplemented with a scientific definition and identification of grammatical and stylistic markers. It is only examples illustrating the meanings of the words that have supplemented the content of the modern dictionary entry in comparison with the dictionaries of the 19th century. There are practically no followers of Dahl in lexicography. Mentioned as steps on the way to follow Dahl is Solzhenitsyn’s “Russian Dictionary of the Language Extension” and the Sictionary of dialects of Russian first settlers of Siberia near Lake Baikal by G. V. Afanasyeva-Medvedeva, in which illustrative examples successfully solve the problem of demonstrating the life of the word in speech and the language system. Meanwhile, a return to the principles of a talented lexicographer can be very productive.
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