PREFACE

HISTORY OF THE PROJECT

This dictionary has been many years in the making and some account of the origins of the project and its history is called for.

The present Macedonian English Dictionary was conceived in the early 1980s as an English version of the pioneering RECHNIK NA MAKEDONSKIOT JZID (Dictionary of the Macedonian Language), which first appeared in the 1960s. Work on the latter began in 1951, under the general editorship of the well-known linguist Blaze Koneski. Todor Dimitrovski, Blagoja Korubin and Trajko Stamatoski devoted many years to the compilation of this first dictionary of the modern Macedonian language, working in adverse conditions and with no precedent to guide them. The first volume (A-N) appeared in 1961. It was followed by Volume Two (O-P) in 1965, the disastrous Skopje earthquake of 1963 having intervened and caused disruptions to most areas of life, and Volume Three (R-Sh) in 1966.

Despite its title, Recnik is in fact a bilingual dictionary, in which the main purpose was not to provide definitions in Macedonian (though these frequently appeared), but equivalents in Serbo-Croat (Latin script). The reality of this was recognized when Volume Two (O-P) was published in 1965, now bearing the sub-title so srpskohrvatski tolkyvawa" (with gloesses in Serbo-Croat). The third and last volume, which was published in 1966, retained the sub-title.

There was, however, another marked difference between the first volume and its successors. In the two later volumes, besides the Serbo-Croat equivalent, definitions in Macedonian were given for far more headwords than was the case in the first. Thus, although the revised title indicated a form of bilingual dictionary, it was possible for the monolingual Macedonian to use it, or large parts of it, to establish the meaning of a word without recourse to a second language.

In addition to this, while the first volume gave few examples of usage, the later two were generous in their provision of examples, some of them drawn from Macedonian literature, as is common practice in authoritative monolingual dictionaries, and from folk poetry