Pamięć o Żydach w wielkich słownikach języka polskiego. Rekonesans

Cz. I

Abstract

REMEMBRANCE OF JEWS IN THE GREAT DICTIONARIES OF THE POLISH LANGUAGE: RECONNAISSANCE: PART 1

Nine centuries of Polish-Jewish contacts in all spheres of life left a mark in Polish. The author of the article decided to check how significant and how durable this trace is, looking in the great dictionaries of the Polish language for units considered as carriers of memory of Jews. The author asks the question which prejudges the fact that a certain unit of language can be considered as a carrier of the memory of Jews and wonders in which linguistic forms this Jewish element can be manifested in dictionaries. The initial analysis included 240 carriers of memory (“verbal judaics”), sampled from journals, memoir literature and tourist guides edited after 2000, as well as two dictionaries intended for the mass audience: the Dictionary of Polish edited by M. Szymczak and Another Dictionary of Polish edited by M. Bańko. It turned out that these dictionaries recorded only 25% of the collected corps of verbal judaics, often depriving the definitions of these units of the Jewish component. The author reflects on the social consequences of this state of affairs and its relationship with the “collective narcissism” of the Polish society, and on the historical policy pursued by the Polish state.