German–Serbian dictionary (1791)
The 1791 German–Serbian dictionary, referred to as the Avramović Dictionary (Serbian: Аврамовићев речник or Avramovićev rečnik; full title in German: Deutsch und Illyrisches Wörterbuch zum Gebrauch der Illyrischen Nation in den K. K. Staaten; full title in Slavonic-Serbian: Нѣмецкïй и сербскïй словарь на потребу сербскагѡ народа въ крал.
державахъ, transliterated as Německij i serbskij slovar' na potrebu serbskago naroda v kral deržavah, meaning "German and Serbian Dictionary for Use by the Serbian People in the Royal States"), is a historical bidirectional translation dictionary published in the Habsburg Empire's capital of Vienna in 1791, though 1790 is given as the year of publication in some of its copies.
At the beginning of the 18th century, the principal literary language of the Serbs was Church Slavonic of the Serbian recension or Serbo-Slavonic, with centuries-old tradition.
[8][9] The empress sanctioned a Cyrillic press in Vienna to reduce the massive importation of Russian books requested by the Serbian Orthodox Church and schools.
[12] Between 1779 and 1785, there was an intensive campaign in the Habsburg Empire to eliminate the Cyrillic script and the Church Slavonic language from Serbian schools and secular publications.
This campaign eventually failed as it was effectively resisted by Serb educational and religious authorities, including the Metropolitan of Karlovci, Mojsije Putnik.
[13] After an agreement with Metropolitan Putnik, Joseph Kurzböck undertook the project of producing a German dictionary for the Serbian people.
At that time, highly regarded as the German–Russian bidirectional dictionary composed by Jacob Rodde in Riga and printed in 1784 in Leipzig.
Emanuilo Janković, whose petition to found a Serbian printing house in Novi Sad was rejected, criticized the dictionary and Kurzböck's Cyrillic production in general; he owned a press in Leipzig.
Kurzböck sent a copy to Count Francis Balassa, the head of the Illyrian Court Chancellery,[14] which was a Habsburg ministry focused primarily on the Serbs.
It was bought by students, priests, scholars, merchants, and other people, mostly in Vienna, Budapest, Novi Sad, Osijek, and Oradea, where Avramović was the district inspector for Serbian and Romanian schools from 1792 until his death in 1806.
[26] All variants have the same foreword written by Kurzböck,[14] while none of them mentions Jacob Rodde as the source or Teodor Avramović as the editor of the dictionary.
[27] Its source and editor have been identified respectively by Samuel Linde at the beginning of the 19th century[28] and Pavel Jozef Šafárik in 1865, since when the book has been referred to as the Avramović Dictionary.
[29] The academy's dictionary is created through adding a Russian component to the German–Latin part of the Lexicon bipartitum Latino–Germanicum et Germanico–Latinum, written by Ehrenreich Weismann and first published in 1673 in Stuttgart; it had eleven more editions.
Polysemes are entered as separate headwords accompanied by a disambiguating remark; thus, four senses of the noun Frucht (fruit) are found s.v.
[31] While Rodde's work uses the civil version of Cyrillic, introduced in Russia by Peter the Great, the Avramović Dictionary uses an old ecclesiastical type of the script, including the archaic letters ѕ, ѡ, ꙗ, ѧ, and ѵ.
Schnitt, a German phrase meaning "he made a good profit from it" is interpreted with a popular Serbian saying, pala mu sekira u med (his axe fell into honey).
[33] Phonologically, morphologically, and lexically, vernacular Serbian used in the Avramović Dictionary reflects a dialect of the Serbs of Vojvodina.
Some of those found in the dictionary are also part of modern literary Serbian, such as торта (torta, torte), харинга (haringa, herring), шупа (šupa, shed), паръ (par, pair), нула (nula, zero), цицъ (cic, fine printed calico), and баïонетъ (bajonet, bayonet).
