Miroslav Krleža in Dictionary of Foreign Words

Abstract

In his foreword to the Dictionary of Foreign Words, Bratoljub Klaić does not speak much of the dictionary’s literary sources, however he does mention that the dictionary contains “many foreign words from older Croatian literature found by the author in his work as editor and commentator on Five Centuries of Croatian Literature”. In many places, the dictionary itself points to writers and other people who attested the words. In addition to this, quotes in which a particular word is found are also frequent. As stated by Klaić in the foreword, the reason for this is “documentarity”, one of the four principles (alongside “currentness”, “informativeness”, and “usefulness”) mentioned by him in the foreword as the basis for the creation of a dictionary. A superficial overview is enough to show that Miroslav Krleža is one of the most frequently quoted authors in the dictionary, and the entries pointing to him are loanwords, foreign words, and even entire sentence quotes in foreign languages. This paper provides an analysis of entries which Klaić connects with Krleža. The goal of this research is to determine the manner in which these entries correspond with Klaić’s principles of dictionary-making, and what they say about Krleža’s linguistic influence on the 20th-century Croatian language.

Keywords

• Bratoljub Klaić
• Miroslav Krleža
• loanwords