The History and Main Avenues of Historical Lexicography in the Comparative Aspect (On the Example of Historical Dictionaries of the Russian and Czech Languages)
Authors:   Masaryk University (Brno, Czech Republic), Truhlarova Oxana G. , Korycankova Simona ,   Masaryk University (Brno, Czech Republic)
Published: January 2021

The aim of the present article is to trace the establishment of the Russian and Czech historical lexicography and conduct a comparative study of the features of historical dictionaries of these languages. Historical dictionaries of the Czech and Russian languages served as the subject matter of the study. The dictionaries are reviewed chronologically and analyzed according to several lexicographical criteria: time of creation, pool of sources, extent of vocabulary, entry structure, manner of representation of a word’s lexical meaning. Historical lexicography is distinguished by a certain terminological vagueness and ambiguity. Thus, the term “historical dictionary” can mean, on the one hand, a lexicographical study that represents the history of words in the course of a certain epoch in a language’s evolution. On the other hand, dictionaries that explain the meaning of words used in ancient writings can also be termed historical. Such ambiguity signifies that the subject of historical lexicography has not received sufficient attention, either in regards to individual languages, or the Slavic lexicography as a whole. This study has isolated the following stages in the development of the Czech and Russian historical lexicography: (1) 17th–18th centuries – scientific study of vocabulary gives rise to predecessors of historical dictionaries (wordlists, lexicons), (2) 19th century – descriptions of vocabulary stress diachronic changes, giving rise to the first historical dictionaries, (3) 20th century – historical lexicography joins linguistics as a distinct branch of scientific study. A methodology for the compilation of historical dictionaries is developed, many new historical dictionaries are compiled that encompass the entire span of a language’s history, as well as only certain formative stages of the Russian or Czech language. (4) Late 20th – early 21st centuries – conceptual changes to the editorial approach to the structure and compilation of historical dictionaries, the relevance of publishing the dictionaries in the printed form is debated. The introduction of IT into the linguistic science has enabled an expansion of the dictionary database. The practice of creating language corpora has given historical lexicography a new direction and made the material accessible to a wide circle of users. The following can be counted among the distinctive features of the Czech and Russian historical lexicography: a keen interest in the history of language on the part of Czech researchers at even the early stages of the linguistic science, adherence to Western European examples by Czech lexicographers, most historical dictionaries of the Czech language have never been published in full because the work on them has either been suspended or discontinued altogether. In the Russian historical lexicography, on the other hand, there is an intense ongoing effort to create new dictionaries.