Speakers
Description
The aim of this poster is to present ALON – Archivio della Lessicografia dell’Otto-Novecento (Archive of the Lexicography of the Nineteenth-Twentieth Century), an online portal dedicated to Italian lexicography. More specifically, this poster focuses on the section of the portal dedicated to bilingual dictionaries, particularly Italian-German ones.
During the 19th and 20th centuries, Italian lexicography underwent a process of renewal and reached its peak in terms of quantity, typology, and quality. This development also concerned bilingual dictionaries with Italian. The ALON project, funded by the European Union’s Next Generation EU programme as an Italian PRIN project from 2023 to 2026, aimed at studying and documenting the dictionaries of this period. The online portal described above constitutes the core of the project and contains presentations and detailed entries on the single dictionaries. In addition to a section dedicated to one of the Grandi Dizionari of the time, the Tommaseo-Bellini, and another devoted to monolingual dictionaries, the portal also includes a section on bilingual dictionaries from the same period.
The state of research on Italian bilingual lexicography varies greatly depending on the different language pairs. For Italian-French and Italian-Spanish dictionaries, extensive repertoires already exist in Lillo (2020) and in the Contrastiva portal (directed by San Vicente). For English-Italian dictionaries, an important reference is O’Connor (1990) with a detailed bibliography of dictionaries until 1990. In the case of Italian-German lexicography, the most comprehensive work remains an unpublished thesis (Bruna 1983), alongside the overview by Bruna, Bray & Hausmann (1991) and single studies (e.g. Schweickard, 2000; Giacoma, 2012; A scuola di Tedesco, 2016; Gärtig, 2016). ALON initially focused on this language pair to fill a gap in research and to develop a model for the database structure that could later be extended to Italian bilingual dictionaries with other languages.
At the present time, the ALON portal includes descriptions of 20 Italian-German dictionaries in their first edition (48 when considering further editions), ranging from Domenico Antonio Filippi’s Dizionario italiano-tedesco e tedesco-italiano. Italienisch-deutsches und deutsch-italienisches Wörterbuch (1817) to Martina Lucia Curcio’s Kontrastives Valenzwörterbuch der gesprochenen Sprache Italienisch-Deutsch (1999). Among the dictionaries currently described on the platform, there are some works that represent milestones in Italian-German lexicography. One is Francesco Valentini’s Vollständiges italienisch-deutsches und deutsch-italienisches grammatisch-praktisches Wörterbuch. Gran Dizionario grammatico-pratico italiano-tedesco, tedesco-italiano (1831–1836), one of the most important Italian-German bilingual dictionaries of the 19th century because of its many innovations, later adopted by other lexicographers. Another key work is Giuseppe Rigutini and Oskar Bulle’s Neues italienisch-deutsches und deutsch-italienisches Wörterbuch. Nuovo dizionario italiano-tedesco e tedesco-italiano (1896-1900), which marked the first collaboration between an Italian and a German lexicographer. Giuseppe Rigutini was also one of the most important Italian lexicographers of the century and the author of several dictionaries. His collaboration with Oskar Bulle on an Italian-German dictionary therefore highlights the important role played by the two languages in relations between the two nations. The platform also includes major dictionaries such as Henriette Michaelis’ Vollständiges Wörterbuch der italienischen und deutschen Sprache. Dizionario completo italiano-tedesco e tedesco-italiano (1879–1881), as well as so-called “pocket editions” such as Friedrich Ernst Feller’s Nuovo dizionario portatile italiano tedesco, tedesco Italiano. Neuestes Taschen-Wörterbuch der italienischen und deutschen Sprache (1851).
The database has a modular structure and includes both extensive texts and synthetic information on the dictionaries described. The level of detail varies according to the type of work considered. In addition to identification data for the dictionaries and an overview of their most important sources and research works on them, longer texts may describe their history (conception, publication history, reception, and circulation), structure, and content (paratexts, macro- and microstructure). Under the section “Materials and Resources,” links to digitized full texts are provided where available, together with documents such as images or archive material. This is followed by the bibliography. For bilingual dictionaries, the portal also provides additional summary information, including a transcription of the title page, a reconstructed table of contents, information on entry structure (besides the above-mentioned works cfr. Hausmann, 1989; Marello, 1989; Marello & Rovere, 1999), sources, distribution in Italy, and details of the consulted library. The portal takes into account not only the first edition of a dictionary, but also later editions, which may differ significantly.
The names of the dictionary authors are linked to a separate section describing their lives and works. This allows to illustrate the connections between lexicographical projects: for example, a person may appear as a reviser in one dictionary project and as an author in another.
All dictionary descriptions in the portal are assigned a DOI (Digital Object Identifier). The database is conceived as an expandable resource and offers external authors the opportunity to publish, after peer review, their research on Italian dictionaries from the 19th and 20th centuries in the form described above.