Paper short abstract:

For the last 12 years, I was working on a dictionary of Croatian food aiming to create a repository of our food culture. In the end, it has almost 20k words, showing not just lexical richness and the regional distribution of our food habits but also a diachronic image of Croatian food culture.

Paper long abstract:

For the last twelve years, I was working on a two-volume dictionary that was a part of the broader research project on the transformation of Croatian food culture in the 20th century. It as a repository of Croatian food culture, and its main goal was to gather all food lexica in one place. Besides the words from the standard language, dictionary wanted to present regional and local differences in food practices by collecting dialectal words and expressions. Such a wide research scope, presented in the historical timeline and spatial distribution for each word, was planned to be finished in five years with 10k words. Both span and planned number of entries were understatements of the richness in Croatian food vocabulary. After twelve years of research in primal sources such as historical and modern dictionaries and cookbooks, but also dialectal dictionaries, botanical and ichthyological handbooks, ethnographic texts and field research, Dictionary has almost 20k words; showing not just regional distribution of food habits but also their cultural and historical footprint.

This lexicological venture proofed that food vocabulary is strongly tied to the oral culture mostly because much of the food lexica resisted and still resists to any standardization process and witnessing how meanings (and food reality) changed through time and space. Read in this manner, dictionary becomes a starting point for ethnological, anthropological or similar food research helping to trace emergence or disappearance of diverse food phenomena but also historical context, cultural ties and influences that shaped our food culture.

Paper short abstract:

Humans use colour to manipulate their personal appearance and environment (Hutchings 2004: 57). Colour terms play a significant part in both the English and Serbian folklore texts. The paper elaborates on advantages of using lexicographic data as an ethnographic source.

Paper long abstract:

Humans use colour to manipulate their personal appearance and environment. A large part of this usage falls within the area of oral tradition, folklore and symbolism (Hutchings 2004: 57). This paper elaborates on advantages of using lexicographic data as an ethnographic source. Admittedly, colour terms play a significant part in both the English and Serbian folklore texts. For instance, the motivation behind idiom into the blue into the unknown, can be deciphered from the website English Language and Usage: "The blue" generally refers to, either, the ocean or the sky. The wild blue yonder, for example, refers to the sky as it exists as an existential and physical frontier that pushes the limits of human engineering should humans wish to travel to or beyond it." Nevertheless, the corresponding Serbian idiom otići u beli svet lit. leave for the white world, has obscure origin. It could have stemmed from a universal approach to the colour 'white', i.e. a technical interpretation of 'white' as a non-colour, and people began associating 'white' with formless phenomena, something unfamiliar which is yet to be discovered (Colin 2004: 37). It could, however, be also due to an ancient Slavic belief of 'white' being the colour of the west, where the sun sets, as well as the empire of the dead and an unknown place (Filipović 1961: 6977). Finally, there are the geographic and climate reasons, i.e. the English have had centuries-long experience of sailing across the world’s oceans, and the Serbs have experienced heavy snowfall.

Paper short abstract:

Konrad Nielsen’s Lappisk ordbok was produced during a period of intense cultural exchange between Sámi reindeer herding communities and Finnish-speaking settlers. Comparing the dictionary’s material with accounts by Johan Turi transforms the dictionary into a portrait of exchange and hybridity.

Paper long abstract:

Konrad Nielsen’s 3-volume Lappisk ordbok-Lapp Dictionary came to press in the early 1930s, but was based on lexicographic fieldwork from the period 1906-11, i.e., precisely the same period in which the great Sámi author and self-taught ethnographer Johan Turi was preparing the writings that would become his three books Muitalus Sámiid birra (1910, An Account of the Sámi), Sámi deavsttat (1918-19 Sámi Texts), and Duoddaris/Mátkemuitalusat (1931, Travel Accounts). Nielsen was first and foremost a phonologist, and early plans for the dictionary focused particularly on the phonetics of three different dialects of North Sámi in the district of Finnmark, Norway. The lexemes included in the dictionary, however, often contain fascinating details of folklore and expressive culture of the time. They also frequently reflect a period in which cultural contacts between speakers of North Sámi and Finnish-speaking settlers were particularly abundant, in terms of economic relations, religious interactions, and intermarriage. By comparing lexical entries in Lappisk ordbok with accounts of folklore—and especially dealings with the supernatural—as detailed in Turi’s works, it becomes possible to see Nielsen’s dictionary as a glimpse into processes of cultural hybridity and exchange going on in northern Sápmi during the opening decades of the twentieth century. While the organizations responsible for the financing and publication of the dictionary may have imagined it as capturing a documentary image of a static Indigenous culture, the dictionary as completed provides evidence for understanding Sámi culture in a period of dynamic interaction with neighboring settler populations.