On the Purposes of Etymological Information in a General-Purpose Dictionary (On the Example of the Dictionary of the Russian Language of the 21st Century)

In the article, the purposes of etymological information in a general-purpose dictionary entry are discussed. The research concerns the newly borrowed vocabulary of the contemporary Russian language. In their analysis, the authors rely on their experience in working on the Dictionary of the Russian Language of the 21st Century project (Dictionary) led by G.N. Sklyarevskaya, and refer to its working materials. The Dictionary aims at describing the contemporary Russian language in its ultimate richness and variety. Its scope thus includes a great number of recent borrowings, both special terms and words in general use. The core of this category of words is formed by (but not confined to) the terms of sciences actively developing nowadays, the vocabulary of various professional groups as well as neologisms designating the newest notions and objects of everyday life (e.g., apdeyt ‘update’, implant ‘implant’, kollayder ‘collider’, autsorsing ‘outsourcing’, vebinar ‘webinar’, bloger ‘blogger’, khard-rok ‘hard-rock’, tok-shou ‘talk show’). The words that are used in the Russian texts in Latin or both in Cyrillic and Latin forms are also taken into consideration (after party, ATL-reklama ‘ATL advertising’, al’fa-versiya and alfa-versiya ‘alpha version’, wi-fi and vay-fay ‘WiFi’, VIP and VIP ‘VIP’). To describe this lexis, new etymological information sections must be compiled, which contain data on the immediate source and explain the literal meaning of an etymon and its morphological structure. The following aspects of a lexicographical description turn out to correlate with the etymological section: the choice of spelling and pronunciation variants, the elaboration of dictionary definitions and usage examples, and the distinguishing between homonymy and polysemy. The research has shown that etymological information is closely related to the main sections of a dictionary entry such as the headword, the definition and illustrative examples. Etymology is regarded as one of the criteria for the determination of spelling and pronunciation of the words whose forms have not yet been firmly established in the Russian language. On the other hand, descriptive definitions and examples containing cultural and historical information complement the clarification of the morphological and semantic structure of the etymon presented in the etymological section. Thereby it is asserted in the article that despite the widespread evaluation of etymology in a synchronic dictionary as a marginal component intended mainly to satisfy the readers’ curiosity it seems rather to be an integral part of a lexicographical description, being to a considerable degree addressed to dictionary compilers and linguists in general.