The ''Vortaro de Esperanto'' (), published by

Kazimierz Bein Kazimierz Bein (1872 – 15 June 1959), often referred to by his pseudonym Kabe, was a Polish ophthalmologist, the founder and sometime director of the Warsaw Ophthalmic Institute (''Warszawski Instytut Oftalmiczny''). He was also, for a ti ...

in 1911, was the first monolingual dictionary ever published in

Esperanto Esperanto (, ) is the world's most widely spoken Constructed language, constructed international auxiliary language. Created by L. L. Zamenhof in 1887 to be 'the International Language' (), it is intended to be a universal second language for ...

. It is considered the predecessor of the '' Plena Vortaro de Esperanto'', published in 1930, and of the current ''

Plena Ilustrita Vortaro ''Plena Ilustrita Vortaro de Esperanto'' (PIV; ''Complete Illustrated Dictionary of Esperanto'') is a monolingual dictionary of the language Esperanto. It was first compiled in 1970 by a large team of Esperanto Linguistics, linguists and speciali ...

'', whose last edition came out in 2020. The first edition of the ''Vortaro de Esperanto'' was published in 1911, the second in 1922 and the third in 1925 (they were, in truth, merely reprints). Overall 8500 copies of the dictionary were printed; the book was 175 pages long. The only Esperanto dictionary published previously had been the ''Plena Vortaro'', an Esperanto–Esperanto and Esperanto–French dictionary published in 1909 by

Émile Boirac Émile Boirac (26 August 1851 – 20 September 1917) was a French philosopher, parapsychologist, promoter of Esperanto and writer. Biography Boirac was born in Guelma, Algeria. He became president of the University of Grenoble in 1898, a ...

; nevertheless, it contained somewhat imprecise definitions in its monolingual section. Esperantologists consider the ''Vortaro de Esperanto'' a valuable source of information about the Esperanto of the early 20th century, given the presence of many

archaism In language, an archaism is a word, a sense of a word, or a style of speech or writing that belongs to a historical epoch beyond living memory, but that has survived in a few practical settings or affairs. lexicon, Lexical archaisms are single a ...

s and old-fashioned meanings of words.

Structure

The definitions, brief but clear, contain example phrases. However, the dictionary lacks any etymological references to the first use of a word and does not mention whether or not a word was personally introduced to the language by Zamenhof, or possibly even mentioned in his '' Fundamento de Esperanto''. The structure has remained essentially the same throughout the ''Plena Vortaro'' of 1930 and in the modern ''Plena Ilustrita Vortaro''.

References

* {{cite book , title=Enciklopedio de Esperanto , last=Various authors , year=1934 , publisher=Literatura Mondo , location=Budapest , url=http://www.eventoj.hu/steb/gxenerala_naturscienco/enciklopedio-1/encikl.htm Esperanto dictionaries 1911 non-fiction books

Structure

See also

References