"The Balkan Thesaurus": Beginning and Beginnings
The article discusses the new pilot project “The Balkan Thesaurus” (BT) which is supposed to generalize the results in the semiotic Balkan studies and to give new momentum to the development of this discipline. The notion of the beginning is analyzed in its synchrony and diachrony, from the ancient time till today, with all the Balkan languages taken into account, in the fields of linguistics, ritual, folklore and literary studies. A brief review of the notion of beginning as reflected in the Balkan model of the world, in the first parts of the texts and deixis exemplifies the principles of BT.