Śląski tezaurus na rozdrożu
The Silesian Dialects Dictionary at the Cross-roads

Summary/Abstract: The process of working on {Silesian Dialects Dictionary} has been continued since 1998. Seven volumes of the dictionary were published in 2000-2004. The dictionary is based on materials base that has been created since the end of the 50s of 20th century. Many chronological cultural layers of the materials cause a lot of methodological problems. After the publishing of the few volumes of the dictionary and gathering some editorial experiences there is a possibility of modifying some of the principles. Nevertheless, they do not destroy the methodological bases of the dictionary. First modifications were introduced in 6th volume and they concern etymological information. In place of the shorter information about origin of the words the full form appears. Because of the specificity of the region it mainly concerns the Germanisms that bring about a lot of interpretative problems. Because of the chronology and because of the level of the adaptation there should be distinguished a few layers, however we bring all of them to one type. The phonetics also makes a lot of trouble. The high phonetic diversity of Silesian dialects causes that different forms have to be brought to the one common form. There are also some artificial structures which do not appear in dialects. The next problem is connected with the phonetic transcription. It may be a barrier for the reader who is not a philologist. Therefore, in the future we mayreplace the phonetic transcription with a half-phonetic one. The idea has not been decided upon yet. In the process of working on the dictionary we are faced with new problems which were impossible to predict during early stages of the dictionary development.

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