Collateral Data: Abstracts

In this lecture I examine folkloric elements presented in some dictionaries of the dialect(s) of my native county of Lincolnshire, focusing on those dealing with everyday customs, especially around managing poverty; local sports, games and pastimes; beliefs about (super)natural forces, including plant- and weather-lore; and if time permits, attributes of various named places, and personal names that have become proverbial. I consider the extent to which certain elements might be selected for inclusion in the spirit of rescue archaeology or in the spotlighting of otherhood, in keeping with other branches of intellectual endeavour in the period c.1850-1970. What is it that sustains the interest of readers of these works today, and how might that interest relate to aspects of their identity? Where appropriate, I reflect on faint traces of such lore heard in my childhood, especially from my paternal grandmother (1879-1968), a country-born Yellowbelly who lived her adult life in a town.

This keynote examines collateral ethnographic material from a methodological and historical perspective, asking how such material came to be recognised as “collateral” in the first place. It traces the collecting practices, classificatory decisions, and institutional frameworks that shaped both the production of ethnographic data and its subsequent use.

The paper focuses on the work of the Norwegian folklore collector and philologist Torleiv Hannaas (1874–1929) and on the archival contexts in which his material was gathered, reorganised, and later digitised. Situating Hannaas within the close relationship between folklore and philology in the early twentieth century, the keynote shows how vernacular words, place names, and folklore were originally collected within a fluid and interconnected field practice. Drawing on examples from field notes, it demonstrates how linguistic forms, place-name lore, narratives, and belief material frequently appear side by side, recorded from the same informants and within the same collecting situations.

The keynote then traces how this material was later reorganised through institutional divisions between folklore, dialect, and place-name collections. These classificatory processes shaped later scholarly perceptions of what counts as primary data and what is regarded as collateral or incidental. The paper explores the view that collateral ethnographic data can be understood as a historically produced category, emerging from specific practices of collection, classification, and reuse. Finally, it reflects on how digitisation enables previously separated materials to be reconnected, making collateral data both visible and methodologically productive in new ways.

The Votians are a Finnic people in the northwestern part of the Russian Federation, whose language lost its function as a means of communication in the second half of the 20th century. Nevertheless, the Votic language has been documented since the end of the 19th century, mainly by Finnish and Estonian researchers. Various folklore genres, descriptions of customs, and biographical narratives play an important role in the recording of Votic language materials. The role of Paul Ariste (1905–1990), professor of Finno-Ugric studies at the University of Tartu, in collecting Votic language samples and folklore was particularly noteworthy.

The compilation of the Votic dictionary began in the late 1950s. However, this meant continuous fieldwork by Ariste and others, changes in technical capabilities and the political system. The first volume of the dictionary was published only in 1990, the last, seventh volume in 2011. Today, there is also a complete 1824-page volume published in 2013, containing nearly 30,000 entries, as well as an online version (https://arhiiv.eki.ee/dict/vadja/). The long preparation process only benefited the quality of the dictionary. It is a dictionary in which each keyword is accompanied by a rich collection of example sentences from different dialects, with Estonian translations. The keywords are also translated into Russian, as the descendants of the Votians are predominantly Russian speaking today. As the sample material comes from folkloric sources, the dictionary is extremely useful for clarifying information related to any folkloric phenomenon. In a sense, the dictionary duplicates Votic folklore and ethnographic manuscripts and printed sources. Although the dictionary does not contain longer texts, it provides a comprehensive overview and hints as to which direction and sources to pursue for more detailed research when investigating a particular topic."

In 1862, Matthias Lexer published a dictionary of the German dialects of his native Carinthia. The manuscript had formed the basis of his dissertation at the University of Erlangen. Lexer was at the outset of an exceptional academic career that would take the son of a poor miller to the universities of Freiburg im Breisgau, Würzburg and Munich, and ultimately lead to his ennoblement. To this day, Lexer remains a prominent figure, particularly as a lexicographer: his Middle High German dictionaries continue to be consulted, and he single-handedly compiled vast sections of the “Deutsches Wörterbuch” initiated by the Brothers Grimm.

Lexer was influenced by Karl Weinhold, whose lectures he attended at the University of Graz and to whom he dedicated his dictionary. Weinhold, a pioneer of folklore studies, encouraged him to collect dialect vocabulary as well as various forms of folk tradition. It is therefore unsurprising that the “Kärntisches Wörterbuch” contains a considerable amount of ethnographic material. This is already indicated by its subtitle, which could be translated as: “With an appendix: Christmas plays and songs from Carinthia”. Beyond this appendix, the dictionary includes numerous sayings, rhymes, and excerpts from folk and ecclesiastical songs, as well as occasional descriptions of customs, dispersed throughout the entries. Information concerning the provenance of the material can be identified only to a limited extent: in the introduction Lexer comments on the genesis of the work, explaining that its basis lies in the dialect of his home region, the Lesach Valley. Lexical items without explicit localisation are to be attributed to this area. Whether this applies equally to the many folk poems and song texts lacking explicit indications of origin can only be conjectured.

The present contribution aims to assess Lexer’s dictionary — arguably the first scholarly lexicographical representation of an Austrian German dialect — as a source for ethnographic research.

Dialectal, etymological, and historical dictionaries of the Slavic languages represent a well-established repository of various types of ethnographic data. A typical example is provided by terms referring to negatively connoted entities positioned in opposition to society, which, despite being represented by a great diversity and plurality of lexemes, are often generically glossed as “devil” or “unclean force”. The aim of this paper is to examine, in selected Slavic languages and dialects, terms denoting thunder or a thunderstrike (e.g., Pol. piorun, Bel. пярун). These terms are considered, on the one hand, as equivalents of positive supernatural entities, while on the other hand they are themselves glossed as demons or appear as components of phraseological units with negative meaning. The study investigates how processes of semantic development (such as semantic correlation, semantic disambiguation, contrasted meaning, and suspended meaning) can be traced to a large extent through linguistic dictionaries, which in some cases also provide contextual information of particular relevance. In this way, lexicography, dialectology, and etymology merge with ethnography and become an important source of empirical data. This highlights the role of dictionaries not only as descriptive linguistic tools but also as instruments for reconstructing layers of traditional belief and worldview embedded in the lexicon. Consequently, the study contributes to a better understanding of how Pre-Christian mythological concepts persist and are reinterpreted within later linguistic and cultural frameworks.

Dialect dictionaries can preserve not merely words but the attitudes a speech community held toward those words – and toward the people who bore certain names. This paper examines the entry for the personal name Peder (Peter) in H. F. Feilberg's Bidrag til en ordbog over jyske almuesmål (1886–1914), demonstrating how collateral folkloristic data within a lexicographic work illuminate historical social attitudes toward a name and its bearers.

The Peder entry reveals that this common name had become, in Jutish folk speech, a vehicle for social commentary across a surprisingly broad register. Compound expressions encode negative judgments about character: Peder Tot designated a weak, indecisive person who ""does neither good nor bad,"" Peder Tratte marked someone as foolish, and Peder Gante a simpleton. The name's ordinariness made it available for such typecasting – Peder as the hapless everyman onto whom the community projected mediocrity.

Yet the dictionary also preserves a contrasting, ribald dimension. In children's rhymes, figures such as Peder Ronnevæder (Peder the ram) and Peder Ronnelbuk (Peder the buck) appear – dialect ""ronne"" meaning to copulate. Here Peder becomes a vehicle for bawdy farmyard humor, linking the name to virile male animals in explicitly sexual terms. That such material survives embedded in nonsense verse illustrates how obscene folklore persists when its meaning becomes opaque to later generations – and how dialect dictionaries can preserve what polite collections suppress.

The paper argues that dictionary entries for personal names constitute an underutilized ethnographic source, capturing how naming practices intersect with social judgment, sexual humor, and rural life. Feilberg's comprehensive methodology – recording proverbs, rhymes, and compounds without excessive censorship – provides a model for extracting attitudinal data that explicit folklore collections, constrained by propriety, often failed to preserve.

Folk and fairy tales are part of the rich heritage of Armenian folklore. The ‘geography’ of Armenian fairy tales is diverse, as are the language variations in which they were told, resulting in numerous dialectal versions of the same story. The present article examines how the use of dialect dictionaries may help reveal hidden semantics across folk-tale versions and transform divergencies into equivalence.

The fairy tale we examine is a version of Snow White (ATU 709) titled The Pomegranate Maiden. Its plot is very similar to the Grimms’ Schneewittchen, with one remarkable difference. The mother’s question about her beauty is addressed not to a mirror, but to the Moon (lusin in Armenian). This is how a native Armenian speaker would interpret the episode in question. However, a careful reading of the tale, drawing on dialect dictionaries, could reveal a different understanding of the text narrated in the Van dialect. Dialect dictionaries and the glossary of the Van dialect, found in Bishop Servantsian’s collection of Van folklore (Armenian tales in Lang’s Olive Fairy Book were translated from the French of this volume), indicate that, in the Van dialect, lusin had two meanings: ‘moon’ and ‘mirror’. This enables us to see the Armenian tale as a very close version of the Grimms’ text.

It is possible to see the two meanings creating a kind of semantic ‘polyphony’. Their incompatibility within the same context can be addressed by drawing on information beyond the fairy-tale setting, such as the belief that Armenian witches could draw down the moon with the help of mirrors. This leads us to conclude that dialect dictionaries can help uncover the deeper semantics of fairy tales, revealing equivalences that a reader unfamiliar with dialects cannot discern.

One of the earliest recorded notions of the name and figure of Kalevipoeg, the hero of the later Estonian national epic, is found in early nineteenth-century German–Estonian lexicographic additions compiled by Arnold Friedrich Johann Knüpffer, a Lutheran pastor. These appendices were published as part of the journal Beiträge zur genauern Kenntniß der ehstnischen Sprache (Contributions to a Better Understanding of the Estonian Language).

Knüpffer’s word lists were not intended as independent ethnographic or mythological descriptions, but arose from the practical need to clarify the meaning and usage of individual Estonian words. Within these lexicographic materials, the name Kalevipoeg (appearing as Kallewe-poeg) emerges not as a heroic epic protagonist or a coherent mythological figure, but in a fragmentary and ambivalent form: as a problematic giant associated with destructive force, moral ambiguity, and tension with a Christian worldview.

From Knüpffer’s notes, the young student Kristjan Jaak Peterson extracted and further developed this material, subsequently incorporating it into the Estonian-language additions to the German translation of Christian Ganander’s Mythologia Fennica. Peterson significantly expanded the original lexicographic context and sketched Kalevipoeg into his developing hypotheses concerning an Estonian pantheon.

Thus, the lexicographic basis functioned as a pre-epic stratum of mythological tradition and demonstrates how apparently marginal dictionary annotations can prove culturally formative, shaping the emergence of later canonical narratives.

“Satyrs and Fairies will make excellent chapters, and possibly we might find some excuse for a chapter on Charms.” So wrote A.W. Moore to Sophia Morrison in 1909, during the planning for The Vocabulary of the Anglo-Manx Dialect, which only appeared in 1924, by which time two of the three editors were dead (Moore died in 1909, Morrison in 1917), to be shortly followed by Edmund Goodwin in 1925. Nevertheless, appear it did, though not with the chapter titles mentioned by Moore. With the emphasis in this period on the Isle of Man’s “Celtic heritage” (a view embraced certainly by Morrison and Goodwin), and a sidelining of the Island’s Manx-English linguistic situation, the Vocabulary has received little attention since Maddrell (2001). This talk aims to bring the Vocabulary back into focus and to introduce it to a wider audience.

Breesha Maddrell, Contextualising a Vocabulary of the Anglo-Manx Dialect: Developing Manx Identities (PhD, University of Liverpool, 2001)."

How to do about documenting linguistic varieties when there is a scant historical, and even recent, literary record? This was the situation facing the lexicographers of Newfoundland English. Comparable problems have faced lexicographers of other new-world Englishes, such as those of Jamaica, Prince Edward Island, the Southern Appalachians, Trinidad & Tobago, and indeed those of regional speech in the United States tout court, each set of which came up with their own solutions. One particular solution the Newfoundland scholars had to had was drawing on the holdings of the local university’s folklore archive (MUNFLA), which, although its records do not have a great time-depth, do provide a wide geographical spread, and certainly feature vivid examples of local speech. Use of this archive gave the dictionary much greater coverage and heft that it would otherwise have had.

But how good is a dictionary that draws upon a folklore archive as a source of folklore data? Is it just an unnecessary middleman? And how does the dictionary compare with its north American analogues in regard of folklore data? This paper offers some answers and further questions.

The Latin-Tibetan vocabulary (ante 1714), which serves as the primary source for this paper, represents one of the earliest European works in Tibetan lexicography. The first attempts at compiling Tibetan language dictionaries are associated with Capuchin missionaries, notably Father Domenico da Fano (1674–1728), who completed work begun by his colleagues Giuseppe da Ascoli (1673–1710) and François Marie de Tours (?–1709). Although the complete dictionary remains lost, an extract from it played a pivotal role in European Tibetology.

When Russian Emperor Peter I sent a folio containing unknown script to Paris—later identified as Tibetan—French scholars urgently needed a dictionary. Their solution came from the Capuchin missionaries’ dictionary extract, which Domenico da Fano compiled during his 1714 Rome visit. This extract is preserved at the Bibliothèque nationale de France under call number Tibétain 542 and exists in several copies. While unpublished to date, a critical edition prepared by the present author should appear in 2026.

The vocabulary includes 2,599 entries but contains numerous orthographic violations and errors from hindered communication. Some entries defy interpretation. Despite these limitations, it provides valuable documentation of early eighteenth-century Tibetan lexicon and phonetic features.

Of particular lexical interest is the Christian terminology rendered through Buddhist expressions, alongside medical terms. The Capuchin missionaries devoted considerable attention to medical practice as a potential conversion instrument. Consequently, this modest vocabulary includes disease names and treatment methods. Additionally, the dictionary records plant names of practical, gastronomic, or medicinal interest to the compilers.

This paper focuses on these three lexical strata—religious, medical, and botanical—which reflect European missionaries’ daily life in Lhasa, where spiritual pursuits intertwined with practical activities. Moreover, this lexicographic perspective offers a unique window into Tibetan society of that period.

Flora had more significances and functions for the Romanian people in the past, especially from a therapeutic point of view. I have gathered information regarding the healing plants from primary sources such as folkloric texts, starting with healing charms, especially the ones in Simeon Florea Marian’s collection in 1886, a time when they were still widely circulated, and continuing with legends, customs, beliefs and mentalities related with these plants. I have consulted the 1877 Questionnaire of B.P. Hasdeu, ”The Juridical Customs of the Romanian People”, where people all over the country were invited to tell about the customs and beliefs handed down from their ancestors. Also, I used secondary sources such as The Romanian Ethnographic Atlas, The Romanian Folkloric Legend Typology and some important ethnobotanical studies. I want to gather, to organize and to link this information from the past in order to obtain as broad a picture as possible of how these plants were understood and used. It is not only about biological properties, but also about cultural characteristics, not only where the plant grows and how it is used, but also when it is the right time to collect it, how it is prepared and consumed, in relation with different holidays and mentalities. Thanks to various scientific fields, we have a present knowledge about herbal medicinal products. We can make comparisons between the two sets of data about plants and observe how did this certain knowledge evolve. What did we learn? What did we forget? Moreover, this comparison can help us to find out more about the past, about people’s mentalities and beliefs, about the way they understood diseases, their causes, their symptoms and how they sought to cure them.