Despite the evidently thriving lexicographical activity in Slovene medieval monasteries, the first attempts at Latin-Slovene dictionaries are not found earlier than in the works by Slovene ...Protestants. In the history of Slovene lexicography, a place of honour is held by the German humanist Hieronimus Megiser, the first to collect systematically a large portion of Slovene vocabulary and use it in his lexicographical work. However, three Slovene attempts to supply a Latin-Slovene dictionary (by Matija Kastelec, Gregor Vorenc, and the Rev Hipolit) failed. The first serious attempt to finally provide the Slovenes with a dictionary was made in the 1870’s, under the editorial guidance of Janko Pajk, but the work was never published and the lexicographical materials are lost as well. The first Latin-Slovene dictionary actually published was Latinsko-slovenski slovnik za tretji in četrti gimnasijski razred The Latin-Slovene Dictionary for the Third and Fourth Gymnasium Forms (1882), the team project of dedicated teachers. Lexicography was long hindered by financial difficulties, by the lack of properly qualified workers willing to engage in such projects, by Austrian pressure, by the unfavourable social status of teachers, as well as by other factors. The situation, however, changed in the year 1894, which witnessed the beginnings of the most comprehensive Latin dictionary - and one of the largest lexicographical projects in Slovenia ever - under the supervision of Fran Wiesthaler. The first part of the project was finished immediately before World War I, which prevented its publication. The first volume (the entries from A to facilis) was published in 1927, after which time the work remained at a standstill for over 60 years. Despite the editor’s lifelong work on the project, he did not live to see its complete publication. Work on the dictionary was revived by the publishing house Kres in 1990. In 2007, after 17 years of work and 4,087 pages in six volumes, the project has reached completion after 113 years.
Transplanted into the vernacular languages and later periods, Classical art forms sometimes assume very different characteristics from the original ones, largely under the influence of the cultures ...into which they have been adopted. This applies to the genre of elegy, which is addressed in the present paper. In Greco-Roman times, the ‘elegy’ was any longer elegiac form (that is, a poem composed in the elegiac couplet), which could deal, especially in Ancient Greece, with a number of themes expressing personal feelings or opinions exhortations to war or virtue, reflections on serious or light topics, epitaphs or laments, and often love. In English poetry, the term ‘elegy’ first appeared in the 16th century, which also witnessed the beginnings of a separate sub-genre - the funeral elegy. From an initial generalised meaning, which reflected the broad thematic scope of the Classical genre, ‘elegy’ gradually narrowed down to a poem expressing lament or displaying a grave, pensive tone. An important influence on the funeral elegy was Classical pastoral poetry, or rather the laments for dead persons which were sometimes embedded in eclogues. As a result, a number of devices used by the founder of pastoral poetry, Theocritus, in the 3rd century BC recur as conventions in the major English elegies from the 16th to the 20th centuries, although recent English elegy often defies tradition. Another important divergence from the Classical genre is the arbitrariness of form ever since its beginnings, the English elegy has displayed a variety of verse patterns, and nowadays even a novel may be labelled an ‘elegy’. Thus the decisive criterion of the genre has shifted from form to content and especially to mood.
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