LEKSIKU I SHQIPES NË DY FJALORË: J. G. VON HAHN (1854) - K. KRISTOFORIDHI (1904)
ALBANIAN VOCABULARY IN TWO DICTIONARIES: J. G. VON HAHN (1854) - K. KRISTOFORIDHI (1904)

Summary/Abstract: Naim Frashëri had been one of the signatories of the letter of the presidency of the Istanbul Society to Bucharest on July 23, 1882, in which it was requested for the Dictionary of the Albanian language by K. Kristoforidhi to be printed, because it was a work "that we waited for open-mouthed" and in their prayer that it should not be delayed was also the prayer of "the whole nation and the boys for the rest of their lives." However, on September 5, 1896, in a letter sent back to Bucharest to Vasil Tërpon, Naim wrote: "Do not spend money on Kristoforidhi's dictionaries, because it is not true, we saw it, he took some words here and there from a list made by Hahn, but he does not have them neither in order nor in big sums’’. However, I consider it necessary to examine objectively the issue raised by Naim, that Kristoforidhi had taken here and there some words from the Dictionary of J. G. von Hahn in 1854. This statement of Naim is completely untrue. If we just compare the total number, in Kristoforidhi we have 11675 words, almost twice as many lexical units as in J. G. von Hahn 6210, and on the other hand, it is quite natural, that when the lexicon is small, most words will be encountered equally in different authors. I have pointed out, that those few words that had been recorded by Arnold von Harff in the fifteenth century, are widely consistent with those few words recorded by Evlija Çelebi in the seventeenth century, though they were two different centuries and two completely different authors. Approximately 4500 words of Hahn’s lexicon are also in Kristoforidhi’s.

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