The beginnings of Hungarian lexicography. From the first glossaries to multilingual dictionaries

This study aims to present the beginnings of Hungarian lexicography, with a special focus on certain works that are closely connected with Transylvania. The early glossaries, starting with the 13th century, are either marginal or interlinear. The only early source in which glossaries are intertextual, distinguished from the Latin text by underlining, is Sermones Dominicales, a compilation of sermons written in the first half of the 15th century. The vocabularies and nomenclatures under analysis were elaborated between the 14th century and the end of the 16th century, most of them being based on lists of Latin words grouped according to semantic fields. The only work that was elaborated based on the Hungarian lexis is the Nomenclature from Schlägl, a copy dating from around 1405 of a document written a few decades before. Among these vocabularies there are some that could be regarded as the first attempts to elaborate specialized dictionaries. Starting with the 16th century, several dictionaries in which the title-words are arranged alphabetically were identified. However, the early dictionaries are either unfinished or only partially preserved. The most representative dictionaries, mainly multilingual, were elaborated starting with the late 16th century. Our presentation ends with József Benkő’s botanical dictionaries, edited in 1783, which mark the beginnings of modern Hungarian lexicography.