Birutė Vanagienė. „Šiaurės vakarų žemaičių žodynas: Ylakių, Lenkimų, Mosėdžio, Skuodo, Šačių apylinkių šnektos“

JŪRATĖ LUBIENĖ Klaipėda University Research interests: lexicology, ethnolinguistics, dialectology, geolinguistics. BIRUTĖ VANAGIENĖ NORTHWESTERN SAMOGITIAN DICTIONARY: THE DIALECTS OF THE YLAKIAI, LENKIMAI, MOSĖDIS, SKUODAS, AND ŠATĖS AREAS Vilnius: Institute of the Lithuanian Language Vol. 1, 2014, 486 pp., ISBN 978-609-411-142-6 Vol. 2, 2015, 502 pp., ISBN 978-609-411-166-2 Recently, another, third1, substantial and long-in-the-making dictionary of the Samogitian dialect has appeared—Birutė Vanagienė’s Northwestern Samogitian Dictionary: The Dialects of the Ylakiai, Lenkimai, Mosėdis, Skuodas, and Šatės Areas (Vilnius: Institute of the Lithuanian Language, 2014 [vol. 1], 2015 [vol. 2])2. The history of dictionaries of not only Samogitian but Lithuanian dialects in general begins with the Dictionary of the Northeastern Dünininkai Dialects (Vilnius: Mokslas, 1976), compiled four decades ago by the linguist Vytautas Vitkauskas, who came from Kuršėnai. For thirty-five years, this was the only dictionary devoted to the Samogitian dialect—more precisely, to part of the Southern Samogitian Varniškiai dialect. The first person to conceive of writing a dialect dictionary was another Samogitian, Juozas Aleksandravičius, a researcher of his native Northern Samogitian Kretingiškiai dialect; however, the Dictionary of the Kretinga Dialect, which he wrote over a long period and intermittently (compiled by Prof. Dr. Danguolė Mikulėnienė and Assoc. Prof. Dr. Daiva Vaišnienė, Vilnius: Institute of the Lithuanian Language, 2011), was prepared for publication and released only five years ago, through the initiative and efforts of the Institute of the Lithuanian Language staff. Juozas Aleksandravičius collected material mainly from Kretingiškiai dialect sites in the northwest, whereas the dictionary under review 1 Another work published is the small Dictionary of Lithuanian Minor Dialects. Compilers: Žaneta Jokužytė, Loreta Liutkutė, Virginija Veiverienė. Vilnius: Eugrimas, 2014. 2 In the following text, the dictionary is referred to more briefly, without mentioning its subtitle. Recenzijos / Reviews 355 JŪRATĖ LUBIENĖ the author of the dictionary, Birutė Vanagienė, mainly from dialect localities in the northwest, in the Telšiai region, as the dictionary subtitle specifies: the environs of Ylakiai, Lenkimai, Mosėdis, Skuodas, and Šatės. It is true that the small part of the Lenkimai and Mosėdis environs studied by Vanagienė belongs to the Kretinga subdialect of Northern Samogitian, so the two dictionaries symbolically overlap in terms of the area studied, complement each other harmoniously, and reveal a picture of the vocabulary of some Northern Samogitian, Telšiai, and Kretinga dialects from approximately the second half of the 20th century to its end. The two dictionaries are similar in structure: their final preparation for publication was undertaken not by the authors themselves, so introductory articles acquainting readers with the authors’ biographies and editorial work are included at the beginning of the volumes. From the introductory article by Prof. Habil. Dr. Giedrius Subačius, Birutė Rokaitė-Vanagienė’s dictionary and other works, we learn that for about three decades (1960–1990) the lexicographer gathered material on various occasions when she travelled to her native Mosėdis. Later, she decided to supplement the material she had collected with data from a much larger area, encompassing Lithuania’s farthest northwestern corner and, as the author of another introductory article, Mikulėnienė, notes, more than 80 settlements. Vanagienė succeeded in turning her plan to collect material from a large territory into reality by organizing eight dialectological expeditions (1989–1996), during which young, enthusiastic philologists—students and colleagues—helped her collect words. Reviewing Vanagienė’s various linguistic works and providing their bibliography, Subačius clearly demonstrates her excellent professional training, which enabled her to record and systematically interpret the facts of her native dialect impeccably. While gathering material, the dictionary’s author “would try to interview the oldest people in each locality, and was delighted to obtain dialect data from people born in the 19th century” (p. XI). Thus, the lexicographer gathered lexical data according to the traditional view that the oldest forms are the most valuable in a dialect, but she collected and included in the dictionary all the vocabulary she recorded; consequently, the explanatory Dictionary of the Northwestern Samogitian Dialects belongs to the comprehensive dictionary type (unlike, for example, the first Dictionary of the Northeastern Ūnininkai Subdialects). Both authors of the introductory articles—Mikulėnienė and Subačius—write briefly but very warmly about Vanagienė as a person: they emphasize her extraordinary diligence, meticulousness, sense of responsibility, and love for her native land, its people, and, of course, its language. In her short text The Dictionary’s Journey (which opens the first volume), Mikulėnienė, who oversaw all the editorial work on the Dictionary of the Northwestern Samogitian Dialects, introduces the main stages in organizing the material. She notes that much of the editorial work was carried out by professional Samogitians: editor Assoc. Prof. Dr. Juozas Pabrėža, together with the dictionary’s author, refined the presentation of words, phonetic transcription, and stress marking; the text was later revised by the experienced editor Aldona Kaluinienė. Such facts guarantee the dictionary’s high scholarly value. 356 Acta Linguistica Lithuanica LXXIV Birutė Vanagienė Dictionary of the Northwestern Samogitian Dialects: The dialects of the Ylakiai, Lenkimai, Mosėdis, Skuodas, and Šatės areas These very necessary and informative introductory articles are followed by the dictionary text, which has a traditional structural division. It consists of Preface, Introductory Notes, Abbreviations (the list of abbreviations is repeated in the second volume), and, of course, the main section—an impressive alphabetical dictionary corpus spanning 988 pages across the two volumes. In addition, both volumes include a map (prepared by doctoral student Laura Geržotaitė); its usefulness leads to the conclusion that a map should be an obligatory structural component of every dialect dictionary. In the Introductory Notes, as is customary in dialect dictionaries, readers are introduced to the features of the dialects in the area described: the discussion covers stress, vowel assimilation, the pronunciation of nasal vowels, shortening of long vowels, palatalization of consonants, stem mixing, suffixes, as well as the use of the dual and of prepositions and pronouns. This concise description of dialect features is intended more for specialists; given that the dictionary will also be used by language (dialect) practitioners, a somewhat more detailed description of the dialects would be desirable. Explanations of the principles used in formulating definitions help readers understand which words or variants are presented differently from those in the Dictionary of the Lithuanian Language (LKŽė). The use of transcription (in a simplified form) to record illustrative sentences particularly enhances the dictionary’s scholarly value and broadens its functions3. The explanations in the Introductory Notes concerning variation in the transcription of unstressed sounds make the dictionary easier to use. For many scholarly studies, it is important that sentences transcribed from recordings are marked with a special conventional symbol—a preceding asterisk (*). Headwords are presented in normalized form. As we know, normalization is also a theoretical interpretation of one linguistic phenomenon or another. The author’s and editors’ expertise made it possible to carry out this work to a very high standard, consistently adhering to the chosen scholarly principles. Perhaps one or another case will prompt scholarly discussion (for example, concerning the interpretation of certain suffixes) or inspire a practical decision to improve dialect dictionaries (for example, the pronunciation/non-pronunciation and notation/omission of word-initial j, v; cf. ašoklis I 27 and [v]ašas II 419, érmija I 157 and jéibė I 235, varaplānas II 410). Undoubtedly, the publication’s greatest asset is the dictionary corpus itself, which above all demonstrates the immense quantity and variety of words used and still in use among Northwestern Samogitians. Alongside widely known words familiar to many Samogitians (e.g., čyru­lis ‘lark’ I 62, kastinys / kāstinis ‘butter’4 ‘made from churned, heated cream’ I 150, 3 Such a practice has not become established in all dialect dictionaries; for example, the illustrative sentences in Vitas Labutis’s Dictionary of the Daukšiai Region (Vilnius: Alma littera, 2002) are not transcribed. 4 Cf. the definition given in the electronic Dictionary of Contemporary Lithuanian: ‘a type of Samogitian dish made from churned, heated cream.’ Recenzijos / Reviews 357 JŪRATĖ LUBIENĖ kniuisís ‘mosquito’ I5 178, kūlis ‘stone’ I 193), which, one might say, constitute a distinctive cultural code of Samogitian identity; the dictionary also contains a particularly large number of dialect words with a narrower or very narrow distribution and rarer or very rare usage. When reading the dictionary, a lexicologist’s attention is first drawn to the particularly extensive layer of lexical and semantic dialect words, which attests to the distinctiveness of the Samogitian lexicon. It is worth noting that there are quite a few words or meanings not recorded in LKŽe, for example: batėlis ‘ornamental, highly poisonous medicinal plant, monkshood’ I 51, biednelė ‘poor porridge without milk’ I 59, bimberis ‘base of the tail, tailbone’ I 62, blābė ‘talkative woman’ I 65, blēzgatas ‘chatterbox’ I 67, bumbulėlis ‘ear cartilage, mushroom’ I 81, didkulỹs ‘womanizer, skirt-chaser’ I 119, drēženos ‘pieces and scraps of meat’ I 120, droby nėlės ‘warp-threaded strips, squares’ I 120, eirōnas ‘gladiolus’ I 153, gaidēlis ‘roof ridge ornament, rooftop horse’ I 163, gáuras ‘tassel’ I 163, gliōrgyne ‘a dilapidated object’ I 193, pakandà ‘informer’ II 8, pakendōkis, -ė ‘someone or something lanky, gangling, or overgrown’ II 9, būzis ‘young children’s belly’ I 85, patatāšas ‘boletus, slippery jack’ II 35, pažabōtai ‘bridle’ II 41, pelēlē ‘dumpling made from mashed potatoes and given to a child’ II 45, prāmaišis, -ė ‘foreigner’ II 92, rainōji ‘euphemism for snake’ II 92, rākas ‘potato hollow from which a sprout, or eye, grows’ II 92, rārinti ‘figuratively, to talk’ II 127, salantinis, -ė ‘blowing from Salantai, southeastern (wind)’ II 164. Lexical and semantic dialect words could be studied as a distinct subject in research on naming, motivation, or linguistic worldview. Phraseological expressions would also be very useful for the latter type of research, as one of the best repositories of ethnic worldviews. Not all the dictionary’s phraseological expressions are attested in LKŽe; they vary greatly in both semantics and structure, for example: blusōms āpkaklēj sukilti ‘to become concerned’ I 69, liežuvį įbraukti ‘to scold’ I 74, dainę dainiuoti ‘said of talking about some intention’ I 102, į krāmę įdūrti ‘to tell, order’ I 144, nesugāuna (nebsugāuna) mūnės ‘said of a garment that is too large’ I 175, giliē griebti ‘to want far too much’ I 184, antlēisti āšarą ‘to cry’ I 380, nórs pēlkē dēgē ‘no matter what’ II 46, galvā kūlio vērstis ‘head over heels’ II 431. In the Northwestern Samogitian Dictionary, following the tradition of LKŽ and dialect dictionaries, loanwords are marked with special abbreviations. Vanagienė carried out a tremendous amount of analytical work—the dialect words marked with abbreviations for loanwords make up a rich and heterogeneous layer of the lexicon. A distinctive feature of the speech varieties documented in the dictionary is the use, both past and present, of Latvianisms and Germanisms; for example, Latvianisms: bārioti, -ioja, -iojo ‘to feed’ I 49, čỹbas ‘slipper’ I 95, dīcinas ‘large knife’ I 95, esỹs ‘figure-eight-shaped link’ I 158, gōtina / gōtina ‘heifer’ I 196, pañtas ‘grain or hay shed’ II 18; Germanisms: blūkis ‘thick club, chopping block’ I 69, brāntas ‘turkey’s wattles’ I 71, cinà ‘tin’ I 90, cỹklingas ‘wood shaver’ I 90, cìrkelis ‘compass’ I 91, čēmālai ‘decimal scales’ I 93, drūpė ‘drops’ I 136, glēnčius ‘shine’ 5 The dictionary does not record the variant kūisis. 358 Acta Linguistica Lithuanica LXXIV Birutė Vanagienė Šiaurės vakarų žemaičių žodynas: Ylakių, Lenkiimų, Mosėdžio, Skuodo, Šačių apylinkių šnektos I 193, vėrpelė ‘beer barrel’ II 430. The dictionary also, of course, includes Slavicisms, for example: čerapākas ‘tortoise’ I 93, čēras ‘spell’ I 93, čiṅtas ‘piece, chunk’ I 96, čiuprynà ‘1. hair of the head; 2. nape, back of the neck’ I 96, delėnka ‘cutting, logging compartment’ I 113, gōnčas ‘hound’ I 196, zars ‘quickly, right away’ II 466. There are very few cases in which a loanword is not marked with an abbreviation (e.g.: dūlis ‘summer pear’ I 138, fūi / fūi ‘used to express negation’ I 161). As mentioned, the dictionary under review includes not only words belonging to the traditional dialect lexicon but also words that have recently entered the dialect or were recently coined within it—neologisms, which are usually marked in the dictionary with a special abbreviation. Some new words or new word meanings supplement the data in LKŽe, for example: bibliotekinė ‘female librarian’ I 59, birbynėlė ‘motorcycle’ I 62, dujinis ‘someone who delivers gas’ I 137, dišlius ‘transmission, drive’ I 62. The Northwestern Samogitian Dictionary is an inexhaustible and reliable source of material for researchers of word formation and morphology, since its headwords alone record a wealth of morphological and derivational dialect words. A small selection of examples: nouns with a different stem, for example: bruknìs ‘lingonberry’ I 78, drevà ‘tree hollow, cavity’ I 132, eketỹs, ėketis ‘see eketė’ I 157, giñklė ‘see ginklas’ I 186, gitāras ‘guitar’ I 189, pāšelė ‘see pasėlis’ II 27; derivational dialect words formed according to another pattern, with different derivational means, or with other synonyms or variants of the derivational base, for example: baidyk­lūtis ‘mischievous, good-for-nothing person’ I 42, bjāurìs ‘ugliness’ I 64, būgniāmusis ‘drummer’ I 80, dainiuškà ‘female singer’ I 103, dažỹvės ‘dyes’ I 110, drìbsmiltė ‘fine sand’ I 132, džỹtena ‘drought’ I 151, antsigérti, ants-igera, antsigére ‘to drink after’ I 181, ėdėklis, -ė ‘someone who eats a lot, glutton’ I 152, gýdysena ‘treatment’ I 183, gyvatinis ‘snake catcher’ I 190, piemenāšas ‘adolescent, young fellow’ II 52, sāntelis ‘confluence’ II 167. When surveying the dictionary from the perspective of parts of speech, one is struck by the abundance of ideophones and their structural and semantic diversity. Ideophones are among the dictionary’s ornaments, conveying the distinctiveness, expressiveness, emotionality, and vividness of Samogitian speech. By way of illustration, here is a small group of rarer ideophones not recorded in LKŽe: biñkt ‘to indicate a blow’ I 62, či čiči̇r ‘to imitate a tree sparrow’s chirping’ I 95, fiùmt ‘to indicate a bang’ I 160, pakiùkiu ‘to describe running in leaps’ II 10, páṅkš ‘to indicate a quick splitting’ II 18, pỹl ‘when calling ducks’ II 56, pi̇m tararaĩ ‘to describe a blow or strike’ II 60, plàk ‘to describe a heartbeat’ II 68, plał ‘to describe gossiping’ II 69, pučỹ ‘when calling a dog’ II 103, pùru ‘to describe shaking or rattling’ II 60, ruruĩ ‘to describe a noisy collapse’ II 60, šiùmel tūrnel ‘to describe rummaging or fiddling about’ II 286, šnùlkt ‘to indicate throwing down’ II 297, ūlulu ‘to describe a turkey’s gobbling’ II 383. There are also ideophones with a different meaning not given in LKŽe, for example: pùšt ‘to describe a sudden action’ II 116, spýkt ‘to describe a jump’ II 226, šlèk ‘gentle opening Recenzijos / Reviews 359 JŪRATĖ LUBIENĖ ‘to describe’ II 290. Interjections are also interesting from the perspective of phonosemantics or phonetics; for example, in them i, u are most often pronounced without being lengthened. The dictionary most often gives carefully catalogued phonetic dialectal forms as independent headwords, for example: besmagėnis ‘see besmegenis’ I 58, erbetà ‘see arbatà’ I 157, brižėktorius ‘spotlight’ I 77, driaũgas ‘friend’ I 132, gintà ‘see gvintà’ I 186, gysakiai ‘gyvasakiai’ I 189, vėbras ‘see bebras’ II 421, vendrỹkštė ‘see vengrykštė’ II 428, verbūzas ‘see arbūzas’ II 429, vėrėlis ‘see ėrelis’ II 429; there are many accentual dialectal forms, which become apparent through the transposed headwords. A great value of the dictionary lies in its illustrative sentences. They are an excellent source for possible studies of morphology and syntax, documenting various morphological forms atypical of the standard language, as well as instances of syntactic valency. Sentences recorded from living speech capture the life of people in a particular period: details of everyday life and celebrations, shifts in moods and thoughts, and distinctive ways of seeing and evaluating the world. They therefore constitute a new and substantial source for researchers in pragmatics, ethnolinguistics, and even ethnography. Every new dictionary contributes to the store of lexicographic theory and practice. For example, the dictionary under review includes a considerable number of polysemous words, especially verbs, some of which have a dozen or more meanings (e.g., dėti, dėda, dėjo I 116 — sixteen; eiti, eita (eina), ėjo I 153–154 — fifteen; versti, verčia, vertė II 431 — twelve). It should be noted that Vanagienė successfully addressed the problems of tracing the development of meanings and distinguishing polysemy from homonymy. Only a few specific cases are open to discussion; for example, the meanings of the polysemous lexeme panėlė ‘1. see pana 1’ and ‘2. one of the posts to which a bobbin is attached’ II 18 could be treated as a pair of homonyms; the ordering of meanings in an entry such as batėlis ‘1. a decorative, highly poisonous medicinal plant, monkshood; 2. dim. see batas 1’ I 51 could also be reconsidered. Some definitions may offer rather more grounds for discussion. For various reasons—the adequacy of a definition to the meaning of its headword, consistent explanation of meanings for absolute synonyms listed in the dictionary, the frequency of use of the lexeme chosen for a definition, ambiguity of meaning, and so on—some definitions could be refined. For example, paršėlaitis ‘pig’ II 25 would be more accurately represented by a descriptive definition and/or a diminutive (‘a young pig’ / ‘piglet’); paliepà ‘aptaka’ II 13, dėselė ‘vedega’ I 115—the lexemes used in these definitions are rather rare in usage, so descriptive definitions would be more appropriate (cf. LKŽe); bakėlis ‘a small packet’ I 43—this definition is redundant; ‘packet’ would suffice; eironas ‘gladiolus’ I 153 and Eirono rýkštės ‘garden gladioli’ I 153—different definitions are given for synonyms denoting the same real-world entity (the entities are not in a genus–species relationship genus: species); blaivà ‘river smelt’ I 65—an imprecise definition that makes it difficult to identify the entity (common bleak?). Thus, questions concerning the formulation and refinement of definitions could attract the attention of lexicographic theorists. 360 Acta Linguistica Lithuanica LXXIV Birutė Vanagienė Šiaurės vakarų žemaičių žodynas: Ylakių, Lenkinų, Mosėdžio, Skuodo, Šačių apylinkių šnektos In summary, it can be stated that the dictionary under review has been prepared with exceptional professionalism, meets high academic standards, and thoroughly documents the state of the dialects of the western part of Northern Samogitia in the second half of the 20th century. The abundance and reliability of its material make it distinctive and especially valuable to scholars in a range of fields: it is needed not only by researchers whose fields draw on data from lexicology, phraseology, morphology, syntax, lexicography, ethnolinguistics, or other areas of dialectology. It was also eagerly awaited by another group of readers—the people of the region. After all, the data recorded in the dictionary come from Samogitian dialects with an especially strong appeal in social terms, which are actively used in spoken form and, in some social and cultural spheres, also in writing. The dictionary is undoubtedly needed not only as a source on the vocabulary of Northern Samogitian dialects in the second half of the 20th century, but also as a multifaceted corpus of living language from that period. For its publication as a substantial two-volume work, we must thank not only the dictionary’s author but also all those who championed its publication, especially the literary historian, the dictionary’s supporter, and Birutė Vanagienė’s husband, Vytautas Vanagas. It is a great pity that the author herself did not live to see her opus magnus6 published; nevertheless, through this outstanding work, the scholar gave meaning to her entire life as a linguist and erected a monument to the language of her native region. Received on June 6, 2016. JŪRATĖ LUBIENĖ Klaipėda University Herkaus Manto g. 84, LT-92294 Klaipėda, Lietuva [email protected] 6 The dictionary was named so precisely by Giedrius Subačius. Recenzijos / Reviews 361