Diachrony factor in lexicography: retrospective content-analysis of Russian-German part of dictionary by N. Lenstroem (1890)

The article actualizes the thesis about the additional heuristic significance of a well-compiled bilingual dictionary of past eras, which emerges over a historical distance, as a source of important information about the current state of languages at the time of its publication and about the specifics of carrying out lexicographic work at a given historical stage (the latter allows us to trace the process of evolution and improvement of this area of applied linguistics). This additive value potential is not connected with the individual creative idea of the compiler, arises independently of his intentional will, represents an objectively determined cognitive result of historical evolution and to some extent compensates for the effect of the loss of the pragmatic informational significance of the dictionary for users of later eras due to the inevitable archaization of its content. Based on the data of an incomplete problem-oriented sample from the dictionary, a brief description of the lexical-phraseological landscape of the Russian language of the late XIX century of the specified period is given, while the focus is on lexical-semantic phenomena marked in relation to the evolutionary essence of natural language, demonstrating the linguistically relevant uniqueness of the Russian vocabulary system of the specified period, revealed in projection onto the modern nomenclature and semantic-pragmatic ontology of the language. In this regard, such phenomena as the phono morphological polyvariance of a significant number of words, the extraordinary activity of word-formation processes in some aspects less characteristic of modern language, the high level of gender differentiation in naming persons, and a special strategy of nomination processes – with an emphasis on maximum detailing of subject-everyday realities, appearance and personality of a person – are of unconditional scientific interest. When examining the technique of lexicographic representation used in the dictionary in the aspect of diachrony, some features of working with the word were revealed, specific to that time and perceived as linguistic archaism from the standpoint of modernity. In this regard, first of all, the absence of a systematic interest of the dictionary compiler in connotative semantics should be mentioned.