Uudne sõnaraamat vanadest tekstidest
Dictionary of First Occurrences – a New Type of Dictionary in Estonian Lexicography

Summary/Abstract: The workgroup of Old Literary Estonian at the Estonian Chair of the University of Tartu is working on a dictionary of first occurrences (DFO) to provide a most exhaustive survey of the gradual accumulation of Estonian literary vocabulary over the past 500 years, showing by whom, when and in what text this or that word of modern standard Estonian was first used. The project would hardly have been feas- ible without modern information technology and corpora enabling reliable fixation of words. In a lemmatized exhaustive corpus the researcher can find out exactly when a word made its first appearance in writing. The resulting information is necessary for both lexical and cultural history. The article points out the differences between the DFO, the Dictionary of Old Literary Estonian and an etymological dictionary. An analogous dictionary for Finnish is also described and some specific problems concerning the identification of first occurrences in Old Estonian texts are discussed. Added is a sample from the initial part of the dictionary.

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