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Small Dictionaries and Curiosity: Lexicography and Fieldwork in Post-Medieval Europe

Online ISBN:
9780191827211
Print ISBN:
9780198785019
Publisher:
Oxford University Press
Book

Small Dictionaries and Curiosity: Lexicography and Fieldwork in Post-Medieval Europe

John Considine
John Considine

Professor of English

Professor of English, University of Alberta
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Published online:
22 December 2016
Published in print:
5 January 2017
Online ISBN:
9780191827211
Print ISBN:
9780198785019
Publisher:
Oxford University Press

Abstract

Small Dictionaries and Curiosity is a contribution to the history of lexicography, which gives an account of the first European dictionaries and wordlists of minority languages and dialects, from the end of the Middle Ages to the early nineteenth century. These wordlists were collected by people who were curious about the unrecorded or little-known languages they heard around them. They come from the whole of Europe, from the British Isles to the Ottoman Empire, and from the Basque country to the eastern parts of European Russia. Between them, they document more than forty language varieties. The book gives an account of about ninety of these dictionaries and wordlists, some of them single-page jottings and some of them full-sized printed books, paying attention to their content and their context alike. Its perspective is not only that of the history of linguistics, but that of the cultural history and the intellectual history of Europe.

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