Dictionarium Valachico-Latinum, the first original bilingual lexicon in Romanian

Affiliations

• Faculty of Letters, University of Bucharest, Str. Edgar Quinet 5–7, Sector 1, 010017 Bucharest, Romania
• Romanian Academy, Calea Victoriei 125, Sector 1, 010071 Bucharest, Romania

History

Received September 14, 2021
Accepted September 25, 2021
Published December 12, 2021

Key words

philology
text editing
old documents

Abstract

Dictionarium Valachico-Latinum, a text written in the Banat–Hunedoara area in the mid-17^th century, holds a special place among the old Romanian lexicographic works. This first original dictionary of the Romanian language, most probably conceived for the presentation of a representative corpus of the Romanian language vocabulary through Latin equivalents, was the first such work to use the Latin model of organization and presentation of selected words. Following the same Latin model, the author of the text, who proved to have a very good command of the Romanian language, both in its literary and spoken version, created graphemes for rendering sounds specific to the Romanian language and recommended forms and spellings, as an incipient form of establishing literary norms and as a way of lexicographic organization.

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.