Abstract
As a bilingual German-Prussian document, the Elbing Vocabulary (EV) bears direct witness to historical language contact, not least in that several of its Prussian lexemes are identified as borrowings from
German and Slavic. But it also represents the lexical pathway of continuity, exhibiting many Prussian lexemes that are clearly of Baltic inheritance. Moreover, the EV offers us an invaluable window onto the
Prussian language prior to its endangerment and later demise under assimilative pressures. The sole extant copy of the EV dates to the late 13th or early 14th century and thus predates the later Old Prussian corpus of the 16th century catechisms by some 250 years.
The EV has been subject to lexicological investigation since the latter half of the 19th century, with commentary and explanations on offer for all of its 802 entries - though seldom in English translation.
Each entry comprises a German and a Prussian lexeme in parallel, presumably understood by the document's compiler as being of equivalent meaning. Accordingly, interpretation of a German lexeme - typically the less daunting task - can offer valuable insight into how its paired Prussian lexeme may be linguistically analyzed and interpreted. Yet even the German lexemes are not always transparent in their meaning or even grammatical features. They straddle the dialectal divide between Middle and Low
German and pertain in their interpretation (and Prussian pairings) to the specific context of the Prussian lands under the Teutonic Order's ascendant cultural and political domination.
Based on a comprehensive survey of the EV's entries and their standard explanations, there appears to be room for improvement upon several of the less certain interpretations. As a first step, a wholistic investigation of the EV's German contents taking into account dialectology, the historical background and the structural properties of the EV itself can enhance our understanding of the document as a whole and allow more informed choices to be made with respect to lexical semantics. This task I have undertaken in good part in connection with Pietro Dini's (Universita di Pisa) forthcoming book
Foundations of Old Prussian (Lexington Books) pursuant to the goal of providing within it reliable English translations for the entries of the EV. In the present contribution, I will further expand upon my notes made behind the scenes of this book and show both my methods of lexicological investigation and their results pertaining to a select number of the ca. 32 semantic fields contained within the EV.
It is hoped that the gains made in this way may contribute, in future, to studies that would challenge and deepen our understanding of the earlier Prussian lexicon of the late 13th century.