Pamięć o Żydach w wielkich słownikach języka polskiego. Rekonesans
Remembrance of Jews in the Great Dictionaries of the Polish Language: Reconnaissance

Part 1

Summary/Abstract: Nine centuries of Polish-Jewish contacts in all spheres of life left a mark in Polish. The author of thearticle decided to check how significant and how durable this trace is, looking in the great dictionariesof the Polish language for units considered as carriers of memory of Jews. The author asksthe question which prejudges the fact that a certain unit of language can be considered as a carrierof the memory of Jews and wonders in which linguistic forms this Jewish element can be manifestedin dictionaries. The initial analysis included 240 carriers of memory (“verbal judaics”), sampled fromjournals, memoir literature and tourist guides edited after 2000, as well as two dictionaries intendedfor the mass audience: the Dictionary of Polish edited by M. Szymczak and Another Dictionary of Polishedited by M. Bańko. It turned out that these dictionaries recorded only 25% of the collected corpsof verbal judaics, often depriving the definitions of these units of the Jewish component. The authorreflects on the social consequences of this state of affairs and its relationship with the “collective narcissism”of the Polish society, and on the historical policy pursued by the Polish state.

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