Piotr Wierzchon. Depozytorium leksykalne jezyka polskiego. Nowe fotomaterialy z lat 1901-2010

In contrast to dictionaries of English, in Polish lexicography the historical principle has not been important at all. In other words, senses in dictionaries are not arranged according to their history, and the engaging activity of searching for the earliest quotations is simply not pursued, because such quotations are not interesting for the dictionary-maker. It is only recently that specialist dictionaries of etymology have started to include sketchy histories of words in the lexical core of the language. Moreover, no dictionary has the ambition to include all, or most, lexical items. For descriptions of the history of the lexicon, however, some generalizations on chronology are made from time to time, usually on the basis of dictionary data which, logically, are simply not reliable in this respect. This means that one can find highly interesting cases of the ‘Eskimo hoax’ type in accounts of the history of Polish vocabulary, the one most often found being the statement that there are 30,000 ‘new words’ (and one million technical terms) in Polish that appeared after 1945. This claim is not based on adequate empirical data. Piotr Wierzchoń discusses the hoax on pages 178-183 of the book under review

Art · Etymology · Hoax · Lexicography · Lexicon · Linguistics · Literature · Statement (logic · Vocabulary · Central European Literary Studies · Computer Science · Language and Culture · Literature, Language, and Rhetoric Studies · History · Philosophy

• Torujac droge teorii lingwochronologizacji

  Open Access•Piotr Wierzchoń•Investigationes Linguisticae•2010

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