The First Period of Mordvin Lexicography: 17—18th Century Glossaries and Dictionaries; pp. 292-305

The present essay overviews the first period of Mordvin lexicography, from Witsen’s 1692 Dutch-Mordvin glossary containing 324 words to bishop Damaskin’s 1785 dictionary containing 11,000 entries. The texts of the studied period include writings that had been prepared as background material for Pallas’ and Müller’s dictionaries. There are (bi- or multilingual) word lists of only a couple of hundred words and also considerable glossaries containing a few thousand entries. Some of the 18th-century Mordvin glossaries are available only in manuscript form. Here, the material found by Feoktistov in various archives of Moscow, St. Petersburg, Nižnij Novgorod and other cities is discussed in a coherent chronological order, sometimes complemented with orthographic analysis. Issues of Mordvin neologistic tendencies are treated with special attention, i.e. novel words appearing chiefly in the dictionary of Damaskin (and his colleagues) are described with particular care.