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Paths to a Dictionary of Early Modern Czech
Nejedlý, Petr
Existing diachronic dictionaries record the Old Czech lexicon (from the period 1300–1500 approximately) quite well. Despite this fact, a dictionary of Middle Czech (1500–1780) is still missing. For such a type of dictionary, it will be necessary to gather representative material capturing characteristic features of its age, i.e. the increase in general literacy enabled by gradual development of the school system and the discovery of book-printing and, in addition, the Renaissance/humanistic worldview. The material will inevitably show elements of discontinuity with the previous phase of the language. In order to express all the mentioned qualities of the lexicon, there is a need to gather c 120–140 thousand lexemes, and, even in such a case, we have to take a certain percentage of words into account, which will not be recorded in the final database. The systemic description of the period lexicon will only be misrepresented at the very minimum.
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The lexical database MADLA and possibilities of its use
Chybová, Barbora ; Záhořová, E.
The lexical database of the humanistic and baroque Czech MADLA covers vocabulary from 1500–1780. It contains about 750 000 hand-excerpted documents stemming from dictionaries, herbaria, chronicles and other literary documents from this historical period. Using this database, it is possible to monitor the development of meaning, word formation, paradigm and other grammatical categories, and it serves as a basis for further research on the vocabulary from the 16th–18th centuries. The text describes a representative sample of change in the meaning of the substantive kredenc („cupboard“), the meaning of which has shifted from the original „tasting“ to the contemporary „dresser“. Emphasis is placed on the proof and comparison of different meanings of this word.
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