Vol.1, No 5, 1998 pp. 337 - 338
Projects
LEXICOLOGICAL RESEARCH IN SOUTHEAST SERBIA
The Faculty of Philosophy has undertaken the Project "Lexicological Research
in Southeast Serbia". This is, in fact, a subproject of the Research Project
"Serbian Dialectology and Edition of the Serbian Dialectology Collection",
carried out under the auspices of the Institute for the Serbian Language
of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts in Belgrade. The head of the
project is Professor Dr. Nedeljko Bogdanović.
The Project has gathered mainly the teaching staff of the Faculty of
Philosophy in Niš, but the collaborators from other institutions get also
engaged in certain tasks.
The lexicological research includes two major topics - the cattle-breeding
and the farming lexicons.
For the purpose of researching the cattle-breeding lexicon, a questionnaire
had been composed (by N. Bogdanović), and used for the investigation of
more than 50 points in the territory of the southeast Serbia (the territory
of Serbian dialects of the Prizren-Timok region out of Kosovo and Metohija,
that is, the eastern part of this single-accent dialectic region).
Based on the questionnaire and other researches, the Shepherd Dictionary
and the Shepherd Lexicon Atlas of Southeast Serbia should also be prepared
under this Project. Apart from this, the master's degree thesis Foreign
Elements in the Cattle-Breeding Lexicon of Southeast Serbia was prepared
and defended (N. Jović). Also, two monographs have been prepared on the
relationship of the cattle-breeding lexicon and micro-toponymy. One of
them, titled Toponyms of Zoonymic Origin, has been already published (V.
Vukadinović).
Another monograph was also published under the title Vegetable Lexicon
of the South Morava Region (J. Marković).
The Geographical Dictionary of South Serbia (N. Bogdanović) has been
compiled, and it is about to be published soon.
Material is also being collected on traditional crafts, folk costumes,
culinary art, fruit growing, etc.
The Project occasionally includes students of the Department of the
Serbian Language and Literature. In the framework of their seminary or
graduation theses, they are gathering lexical material for particular topics,
mainly related to their own homeland dialects (The Cattle-Breeding Lexicon
of the Village Svodje; The Lexicon of Pirot Carpet Industry; Geographic
Terminology of the Village Donji Striževac; and so on).
One collection of contributions in the field of phyto-linguistics has
been published, while another one is to be published soon. They contain
mostly the papers presented at traditional symposia dedicated to the flora
of the southeast Serbia.
A master's degree thesis on the viticultural lexicon of the Niš vineyard
area is in progress presently (D. Veljković).
However, the lexicological research of southeast Serbia has started
much earlier. Independent of the mentioned Project, following dictionaries
have been published so far: Dictionary of the Leskovac Dialect (B. Mitrović),
Dictionary of the Pirot Dialect (N. Živković), Dictionary of the Timok
Dialect (J. Dinić), Dictionary of the Vernacular of Crna Reka, and Dialect
Dictionary of South Serbia (M. Zlatanović).
The work on the dictionaries of the village Kamenica in the vicinity
of Niš (V. Jovanović) and the village Kalna near Crna Trava (collected
by S. Gligorijević) is underway. This work has also gathered some of the
collaborators in our Project, and they are engaged as authors or revisers
in it.
In the course of the previous few years, detailed research of
the southeast Serbian onomastics has been carried out, parallel to dialectological
description of certain local vernaculars. Several collections of dialectic
vocabulary have also been prepared and forwarded to the Institute for the
Serbian Language in order to be included into the Dictionary of Serbo-Croatian
Literary and Vernacular Language, being presently compiled in the Institute.
The realization of the master's degree thesis Lexicographic Actions
in the Dictionaries of Southeast Serbian Vernaculars (M. Ilić) is in progress,
as well.
In spite of being in the fundaments of the Serbian dialectology
for a whole century now (in the works of Broh and Belić from the beginning
of the 20th century), the Serbian dialects of southeast Serbia are still
provoking many-sided interest, both in the sense of their grammatical systems
and history and concerning their vocabularies. For this reason, the results
of the lexicological research project are expected with particular attention.
Nedeljko Bogdanović
