Największe XX-wieczne słowniki polsko-angielskie w perspektywie porównawczej: szkic z zakresu historii leksykografii

Abstract

This article concerns two largest Polish-English dictionaries published in the twentieth century, The Kościuszko-Foundation Dictionary: Polish-English (1961) by Kazimierz Bulas, Francis Whitfield, and Lawrence Thomas (1961), and Wielki słownik polsko--angielski [ A Great Polish-English Dictionary ] (1969) by Jan Stanisławski. Erazm Rykaczewski’s Dokładny słownik polsko-angielski … [ A Complete Polish-English Dic-tionary… ] (1851), a key dictionary that appeared in the mid-nineteenth century, was taken into account as a point of reference for comparative purposes. The article is based on two hypotheses, of which the first was verified by applying examples of usage as a research parameter and the other by looking at the dictionaries against the historical background. The analysis reveals that each compiler, as a native speaker of Polish, tried to make up for his imperfect knowledge of English. Faced with obstacles in compiling comprehensive bilingual dictionaries, both Bulas and Stanisławski, therefore, turned to Rykaczewski’s outdated material, modernising it for the sake of the target user. The different types of macrostructure and microstructure employed in both twentieth-century reference works were by no means a novelty, inasmuch as they can be discovered in the history of the Polish-English lexicography.