Kernerman Dictionary News • Number 13 • June 2005

The Twelfth EURALEX International Congress, Turin 2006

Carla Marello

Carla Marello is a Professor of Applied Linguistics at the Faculty of Foreign Languages of the University of Turin and Director of Ph.D. studies in Linguistics, Applied Linguistics and Linguistic Engineering. She has published extensively on lexicography, lexicology, and theoretical and applied linguistics, is associate editor of the International Journal of Lexicography, and series editor at Zanichelli and Guerra publishing houses. She has been on the executive board of Euralex since 1992 and is the organizer of its forthcoming 12th Congress due in Turin in 2006.

carla.marello@unito.it

Turin (Torino, Italy) hosts the XII Euralex Congress on 6-9 September 2006. Situated near the French border, Turin has always had a strong lexicographic tradition, reinforced during the nineteenth century in parallel to the unitary policy of the Savoy family.

TurinLEX will have among its organising partners the Florentine Accademia della Crusca, whose the Vocabolario degli Accademici della Crusca appeared in 1612 and has turned Florence into the very birthplace of modern European monolingual lexicography, a model for dictionaries of French, Spanish, Portoguese, English and German. Nowadays the Accademia della Crusca represents Italy in the European Federation of National Institutions for Language. With this double role, Italian and European, it will welcome in Turin lexicographers from all over the world.

The international character of Turin has both historical and contemporary reasons. As the capital of the multilingual Savoy Kingdom, which spread across the Alps and included Sardinia, since the eighteenth century it has had fine production of dialectal dictionaries, of dictionaries for French, Latin and Greek, and of onomasiological dictionaries. At the end of the nineteenth century 17 publishing houses operated in Turin, and since most of them were active in the school book market, nearly all had at least one dictionary in their catalogue. The most known were Paravia, Loescher, Rosenberg & Sellier, Petrini and UTET (Unione Tipografica Editrice Torinese), all of whom still produce dictionaries today.

When in 1861 Luigi Pomba began the publication of the great dictionary later known as Tommaseo-Bellini (ended 1879, eight volumes, 7300 pages), he was well aware of promoting “a national monument” of the history of Italian language and was doing it in Turin, the capital of the freshly formed Kingdom of Italy. One hundred years later, the same publishing house, UTET, started the great dictionary known as Battaglia, Grande dizionario della lingua italiana, with the aim of pursuing and updating the Tommaseo-Bellini work.

Rosenberg & Sellier specialised in Latin dictionaries, but Paravia and Loescher also published good Latin and Italian dictionaries. The most recently compiled Ancient Greek and Italian Dictionary, by Montanari, was published by Loescher. SEI (Società Editrice Italiana), Petrini and Paravia printed bilingual dictionaries for French, German, English and Spanish which had their share of buyers, constantly eroded in the last part of the twentieth century by Zanichelli and Garzanti dictionaries. Malcolm Skey’s 1977 adaptation and bilingualization of the Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary for SEI and the recent series of Tullio De Mauro’s Italian monolingual dictionaries (published by Paravia and by UTET) are among the most original and innovative lexicographic works to appear in Italy in modern times.

The humanistic faculties of Turin University (TU) were not without some part in these lexicographic activities, since most members of local in-house editorial teams graduated in TU. In the last three decades there has also been remarkable experimental work – carried out by TU professors together with software and publishing houses – on classroom use of dictionaries and the creation of corpora.

TU is also the seat of Atlante Linguistico Italiano (ALI) and attracts scholars and experts in sociolinguistic surveys. The Turin school of engineering and applied-sciences (Politecnico) is well known and has contributed to the industrial past of the town and to its present transformation. Many scientists teaching at the Politecnico have contributed to encyclopaedic or specialist dictionaries published in Turin and elsewhere.

Piedmont, the region at the feet of the Alps in the middle of which Turin is located, will host the 2006 Winter Olimpic Games, but in September next year EURALEX participants will enjoy the warm end of summer and the sight of first reddish leaves in the numerous vineyards.

The organisers will do their utmost so that the guests can appreciate a part of Italy which has always been a hinge between North and South and which will be an important stopping place on the European East-West corridor.

The congress programme will include plenary lectures, parallel sessions on the usual topics of previous congresses, software demonstrations, a book and software exhibition, and social events. We hope to welcome many of you in a town which offers a lively human and scientific milieu.

The ancient university courtyard (seventeenth century) of Università degli studi di Torino

where the opening ceremony of TURINLEX2006 will be held.

Further details:

euralex2006@unito.it

www.euralex.org

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