Presentation of the volume
This issue of “Diacronia” (14/2021) includes the papers presented at the workshop “Medieval and pre-modern lexicography in the digital age”, held on May 28, 2021 – within the International Colloquium “Romanian Academic Lexicography. The Challenges of digitization”, 10th edition, organized by the Lexicology-Lexicography Department of “A. Philippide” Institute for Romanian Philology – as part of the project “The First Romanian Bilingual Dictionaries (17th century). Digitally Annotated and Aligned Corpus (eRomLex)”, funded by a grant of the Ministry of Research, Innovation and Digitization, CNCS/CCCDI – UEFISCDI, project code: PN-III-P1-1.1-TE-2019-0517, within PNCDI III (scriptadacoromanica.ro).
The main objective of the eRomLex project is to compile a comparative edition of the first Slavonic-Romanian dictionaries, namely six extensive lexicons whose source is the Slavonic-Ruthenian lexicon published by Pamvo Berynda (Kiev, 1627), presented in interpretative transcription and aligned according to the headword in the source. The chosen format allows the comparative study of the lexical material, in order to verify a series of hypotheses regarding the relations between the Romanian lexicons, on the one hand, and the relations between these lexicons and their source, on the other hand.
A second objective of the project is to establish contacts with foreign researchers who deal with old lexicography in their respective areas, in an attempt to understand the way in which linguistic information circulated in the old and pre-modern period in Central and Eastern Europe. In this respect, the old lexicography workshop organized within the eRomLex project had a twofold objective.
The first was to place the six 17th century Slavonic-Romanian lexicons in context (see the section Lexicography in the old and premodern era: sources) as landmarks of old Romanian writing and examples of old lexicography. We considered, first of all, the national context, namely their place among the other lexicographic works of the time (see the studies on Anonymus Caransebesiensis and Teodor Corbea’s Latin-Romanian dictionary signed by Gheorghe Chivu, respectively Alin-Mihai Gherman), as well as the regional context (see the presentation of the beginnings of Hungarian lexicography signed by Emese Fazakas, as well as the studies on plant names in the Russian dictionaries and the beginnings of Polish lexicography), and finally we focused on the source of the Romanian lexicons (to this end we invited Alexandr Levichkin, from the Russian Academy Institute of Linguistics in Sankt Petersburg to contribute to this volume; Alexandr Levichkin is currently responsible with elaborating an online digital edition of Berynda’s lexicon and contributed with an article in which he detailed the issue of the sources of the Slavonic-Ruthenian lexicon; see oldlexicons.ru).
The second aim of the workshop was to assess the way in which the written heritage is preserved and capitalized within various national cultures; in other words, we aimed at placing the eRomLex project into the larger context as an activity directed at preserving an essential part of the written cultural heritage (see the section Capitalization of written cultural heritage: projects, resources, instruments). This section includes presentations of a series of important research and digitization projects conducted in Bulgaria (Electronic Research Infrastructure for Bulgarian Medieval Written Heritage, see cyrillomethodiana.uni-sofia.bg), Russia (the PhytoLex database, phytolex.iling.spb.ru), Poland (the Rozariusze z glosami polskimi project, rozariusze.ijp.pan.pl), the Czech Republic (Gorazd – The Old Church Slavonic Hub, gorazd.org). The same section includes a presentation of Transkribus, a tool for the automatic recognition of printed and handwritten texts that can also be used for the Romanian Cyrillic writing (readcoop.eu). The last article included in the second section, authored by Ion-Mihai Felea, also deals with issues related to the fonts used in the process of digitization of Cyrillic alphabet writings and their standardization.
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The workshop on old lexicography and, therefore, the papers published in this volume provided us with the opportunity to relate to other projects aimed at the conservation of the written heritage, to identify the specific problems challenging other written cultural traditions, the solutions that were adopted, the tools and resources created for the presentation, preservation and capitalization of the old culture. We want to express our gratitude to all the participants in the workshop who contributed to this volume for kindly accepting our invitation and sharing their valuable experience. Our special thanks go to Professor Anna-Maria Totomanova, PhD, for providing us with the Slavonic Unicode font developed within the project Cyrillomethodiana. We are hopeful that this workshop will also be the starting point for further fruitful collaborations. We thank our colleagues from “A. Philippide” Institute of Romanian Philology for collaborating in the organization of the workshop, the members of the eRomLex project team for their assistance with proofreading, translation and editing and the editors of ”Diacronia” journal for kindly hosting this discussion in the pages of the journal, contributing thus to the visibility of the research and also for the excellent editorial conditions they provided.
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