The Staicu lexicon in relation to lexicons belonging to the Berynda family: orthography and structure

Affiliations

Faculty of Letters, “Alexandru Ioan Cuza” University, Bd. Carol I 11, 700506 Iași, Romania

History

Received May 12, 2021
Accepted July 5, 2021
Published August 18, 2021

Key words

historical lexicology
comparative analysis

Abstract

The first manuscripts with Slavonic-Romanian dictionaries date from the 17^th century and six of these have been preserved to the present day almost intact. They are all based on Pamvo Berynda’s lexicon (1627), to which several word lists were added in some of the manuscripts. These manuscripts have mostly been studied from a lexical point of view.

Our study aims at describing the way in which the lexicons were elaborated, at observing the significant orthographic variations and also at becoming an additional tool for establishing the network of filiations from which the Romanian lexicons resulted. Our observations focus on the entries for the first three letters in the above-mentioned lexicons. As all these lexicons were available in electronic format, we identified the propagation of several errors in the Romanian antigraphs, emphasized various aspects related to spelling and compared the additional lists.

The data indicates that Romanian manuscripts preserve the orthography of Berynda’s Lexicon and the additional lists to a different degree. These variations suggest the existence of at least one protograph between the source and the Romanian lexicons. Applied to the entire content of the manuscripts, the investigation of these variations could contribute to the identification of the manuscript that is the closest to the initial version.

Copyright

© 2021 The Authors. Publishing rights belong to the Journal. The article is freely accessible under the terms and conditions of the CC-BY Open Access licence.