AUGUST 20 – 27, 2018
The exhibition, Serbian Lexicography From Vuk to the Present Day, will be the main event accompanying the International Congress of Slavists, which is to be held in Belgrade from August 20 to 27. The main organizers of the Congress are the International Committee of Slavists and the Serbian Association of Slavists and the co-organizers are the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts and the Faculty of Philology of the University of Belgrade. The authors of the exhibition are Prof. Rajna Dragićevič, PhD, and Nenad Ivanović, PhD. The first goal of the exhibition is to mark the 200th anniversary of the publication of the first edition of Српски рјечник (A Serbian Dictionary) by Vuk Stefanović Karadžić. The marking of the anniversary of this key work for the establishment of the modern Serbian standard language represents an important task for Serbian scientific and cultural historiography.
The second goal of the exhibition is of a cultural nature: to draw the attention of the public to the significance of Serbian dictionaries as “books that are more than mere books” – they are treasure troves of lexical wealth and ethnographic and culturological data on the history of the Serbian people. Besides, dictionaries also reflect the spiritual and scientific ideas followed by the Serbian people in different periods, as well as the people’s scope of understanding of the world around them and the language they used.
The third goal of the exhibition is of a scholarly nature and consists in familiarizing foreign Slavists with the development of the most important Serbian dictionaries in the course of time. In this context, the exhibition is also didactic in character: its task is to acquaint foreign Slavists with the development of lexicographic ideas and concepts within Serbian linguistics of the 19th and 20th centuries.
The exhibition will be accompanied by a sumptuous catalogue in the form of a voluminous collective monograph on the development of Serbian lexicography from Vuk’s Dictionary to contemporary dictionaries of the Serbian language. The editors of the Catalogue are Academician Milosav Tešić, Prof. Rajna Dragićević, PhD, and Nenad Ivanović, PhD.
