Bohoričev prispevek slovenskemu slovaropisju
Authors: Merše Majda 
Published: January 2021

Bohorič’s Contribution to Slovene Lexicography Lexicography was one of Bohorič’s central activities devoted to the 16th-century Slovene literary language. He is believed to be the author of three types of dictionaries: (1) a lost trilingual glossary with Latin as the source language, compiled for pedagogical use (Nomenclatura trium linguarum, ca. 1580); (2) the index in DB 1584 (perhaps also the shorter one in DB 1578), which contains also dialectal synonyms as well as equivalents from Croatian dialects and thus enables understanding of the central-Slovene lexicon; (3) six Slovene-Latin-German glossaries included in the grammar Arcticae horulae ſucciſivae (1584): the first three described nomina (nouns and adjectives) of all three genders, while the other three described verbs of the main three conjugation types (-am, -em, -im). In terms of their informativity, the glossaries included in the grammar are of several different types. In addition to grammatical information contributing to a better knowledge of the 16th-century Slovene literary language, they also provide lexicological information closely related to the modes of lexicographic presentation. Both features are an important contribution to the beginnings and further development of Slovene lexicography. Slovene headwords are semantically defined by their foreign-language equivalents. In addition, their semantic structure is outlined by one-word or phraseological subentries (with attested meanings, sub-meanings, and terms for specific types, such as štala ‘barn’—volovska štala ‘oxen barn’, ovčja štala ‘sheep barn’, kozja štala ‘goat barn’; set phrases with established use). Entries with subentries and the order of entries itself also bring into focus various types of semantic relations between lexical items, including synonymy, where pairs of loan and native synonyms stand out in particular (e.g. punt—zaveza ‘bond’, gmerati—množiti ‘to multiply’); antonymy (e.g. čast ‘honor’—nečast ‘disgrace’); the semantic difference between the source word and its derivative (e.g. kamen ‘stone’—kamčič ‘little stone’). Verbal entries with added subentries demonstrate various types of formation of aspectual pairs, e.g. sejati—obsejati ‘to sow’, nagniti—nagibati ‘to lean’. In cases where members of the pair differ by the type of action (e.g. gibati se—ganiti se ‘to move’), the semantic difference is added to the aspectual one. A re-comparison of Bohorič’s glossaries and Megiser’s dictionaries—his quadrilingual dictionary with German as the source language (MD 1592) and multilingual dictionary with Latin as the source (MTh 1603)—that included data on how widely the usage of this lexicon was spread, confirmed the hypothesis that the glossaries were one of Megiser’s main lexicographic sources of Slovene equivalents. (This data is one of the results of the complete excerption of the Slovene texts in book publications in the period of 1550–1603). Megiser’s consideration of Bohorič’s glossaries is most clearly evident in approximately 90 words that cannot be found in other works. In addition, the glossaries proved to be a useful reference work for citing widespread and commonly used lexicon. A typological difference between the compared lexicographic works is reflected in differences in their informativity as well as in the number of foreign-language equivalents and included Slovene equivalents. The increased number of Slovene synonyms in Megiser’s multilingual dictionaries was the result of Megiser’s inclusion of the Register (1584) and his ever-improving knowledge of the Slovene literary language and some Slovene dialects (e.g., Carinthian). Keywords: Adam Bohorič, lexicography, glossaries in Bohorič’s grammar, dictionary informativity, Megiser’s multilingual dictionaries