On the Russian Dictionary Based on Historical Principles:the Dictionary of Russian Words’ History
The work on the first dictionary of Russian based on historical principles, История русских слов (Исторический словарь русского языка) (Dictionary of Russian based on Historical Principles): the RDHP, was launched by the Moscow Institute of Foreign Languages in 1999, being supported and financed by E. Volodarskaya’s mother - Zekkie Ablyamitovna Shamileva. The guiding policy of the Dictionary is to attempt to record each word’s most-known usages and forms in all styles of Russian past and present. Following this policy, we aim to present in alphabetical series the words that currently form the Russian vocabulary from the time of their earliest records up to the present day, with all the relevant facts concerning their forms, sense history, pronunciation, and etymology. The Dictionary intends to embrace not only the standard language of literature and everyday speech, whether current at the moment, or becoming obsolete, or archaic, but it also aims to give the technical, dialectal (where possible), and slang vocabulary.The idea of the historical approach in the making a dictionary was first expressed in 1812 by the German classical scholar and lexicographer Franz Passow who created the Handwörterbuch der griechischen Sprache, Dictionary of the Greek Language. He believed that authentic quotations should be arranged in chronological order. This method was then taken up by the broth- ers Grimm in their work on Das Deutsche Wörterbuch (The German Dictionary), influencing their decision to collect all German words from the era of Luther to the time of Goethe. In 1857, the members of the Philological Society of London decided that the existing English language dictionaries were incomplete, and that they therefore did not reflect the wealth of the English language and literature. In time the decision was taken to adopt the historical approach in creating a new dictionary which would present a complete re-examination of the English language and, as James Murray wrote in the Preface to the first volume in 1888, furnish ‘an adequate account of the meaning, origin, and history of English words now in general use, or known to have been in use at any time during the last seven hundred years’. As a result, today the world has the masterpiece of the lexicographic art, the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), which has been taken as a model for the new Russian dictionary. The work is based on collecting mate- rial for the Dictionary from Old Russian manuscripts and other sources of written Russian.In the Dictionary, each word entry is structured as follows: headword division with information on spelling forms, grammatical marks, first record in Russian and in dictionaries;etymology;usage labels applied to the word or its meanings with appropriate quotations;semantic divisions furnished with illustrative quotations;set phrases and idioms with explanation and illustration;derivatives of a headword together with information on spelling, dates when recorded, and elucidatory quotation.Main entries are the basis of the Dictionary, with headword and sense divisions presenting information about the earliest and most recent forms of a word and its meanings. The usage of each word, meaning, or idiom in the Dictionary is docu- mented through appropriate quotations taken from printed texts of the past and the present. The paragraphs containing these examples begin with the earliest recorded occurrence of a term, and follow its development up to the modern period. The Dic- tionary does not include those words whose forms and meanings have fallen out of use. This basic arrangement holds true for all entries, though some entries are more complicated than others due to the character of the cited material and its availability. The length of each entry is normally determined by the material available for the word in question, i.e. the number of spelling forms and meanings it has accumulated during its history. Being the subject of the Dictionary, the headword entry focuses exclusively on a headword’s form - its main spelling and possible alternatives, pronunciation, grammatical forms, gender, its origin, evolution, and other relevant information. It also explains the headword’s function in a sentence: whether the particular form is used as a verb, noun, adjective or other part of speech.