Materialul românesc din Dicţionarul ţarinei Ecaterina cea Mare
The Romanian Material in Catherine the Great’s Dictionary

Summary/Abstract: In 1787–1789 two volumes of a huge lexicographic work were published, with the title Linguarum totius orbis vocabularia comparativa […], commonly called Catherine the Great’s Dictionary. The dictionary contains 273 Russian entries from different thematic groups, each one with semantic equivalents in two hundred European and Asiatic languages. All the words, with no exception, are transcribed in the Russian Cyrillic alphabet from that time, independently of the language they represent. The paper gives a detailed analysis of Romanian material included in the dictionary, thus allowing to make remarks on some phenomena on the phonetic-graphic, morphological and lexical level. It is stated, among others, that most of Romanian words were collected in a field survey because they are transcribed based on the phonetic criterion. This leads to the conclusion that forms pronounced by informants, most likely from the regions of Moldavia and Transylvania, were directly recorded in Russian Cyrillic characters. On the other hand, in some cases one could suppose an influence of the Romanian Cyrillic alphabet, as some records probably constitute transliterations of Romanian written forms. Inconsequent adoption of these two criteria has created an interesting mix: either the phonetic principle clearly predominates, or the graphic one. Anyway, the diversity of inconsistencies gives the impression that Romanian words were not transcribed by a single person nor in the same time.

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