Source Study and Etymological Information in a Regional Historical Dictionary

The article poses the problem of the informative value of illustrative examples in a regional historical dictionary as the most important way of confirming the interpretation of the meaning of a certain type of regionalisms-words borrowed from indigenous languages and regional variants of newly borrowed European words. In historical lexicography, this problem has not been theoretically developed; however, in practice, historical dictionaries of various types sporadically give source study and etymological information. Still, in the latter case, the principles of their presentation are either not specified at all, or their wording is purely applied and pragmatic. Thus, this problem exists latently. The essence of the problem analyzed on the material of ten historical dictionaries, including eight regional ones, is that the main source for a regional historical dictionary is monuments of business writing, which provide valuable lexical material mainly in similar contexts that cannot substantiate a dictionary definition. A regular reference to an authoritative source in which the word is developed lexicographically flawlessly is one of the solutions to the problem. However, for certain regionalisms such a reference is impossible: they are used exclusively in local short-writing documents and thus are not analyzed in various lexicographical works. In this case, another way to verify the meaning of a regional word is efficient-via etymological information. The article considers two functions of etymological information in a regional historical dictionary: the function of verifying the significance of a regionalism and the function of the historical and genetic description of a regionalism. For this purpose, material from the Dictionary of the Russian Language of the 18th Century: Eastern Siberia. Transbaikalia was used, for it presents the experience of including etymological information on regional borrowings in dictionary entries. The peculiarities of the implementation of the first function are due to the usual nature of regionalisms, which are represented in business texts in their phonetic variants as a result of the early stage of adapting autochthonous borrowings in the Russian language in variants of etymon or hapax words. In such cases, etymological information in a dictionary entry is of great value: the variation of a borrowed word or its one-time fixation, on the one hand, and pragmatic presupposition as a communicative factor in the verbal organization of a business text and the cause of poorly informative language examples, on the other, predetermine the weak validity of the definition and raise questions to the content of the entry. The second function is realized when etymological information: (a) reveals the historical evolution of the word, which may manifest itself in the use of a variant of the word, which is unknown to the standard language; (b) explains the spelling of the word, which indicates the conservation of the archaic version of the word in the regional dialect; (c) clarifies the chronological framework of the borrowing process. This additional information allows observing the principle of historicism more strictly, it significantly enriches dictionary entries of a regional historical dictionary.

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