Della Bella Ardelio: Dizionario Italiano, Latino, Illirico

Ardelio Della Bella: Dizionario italiano, latino, illirico
 

first edition!

Dizionario italiano, latino, illirico (with grammar Istruzioni grammaticali della lingua Illirica) (1728)
 

Having learned the Croatian language well, Della Bella wrote an Italian-Latin-Croatian dictionary Dizionario italiano, latino, illirico (Venice, 1728) with instructions for reading, writing and stressing Croatian words and a short grammar of the Croatian language, written in Italian (Istruzioni grammaticali della lingua Illirica) and a Latin-Italian index at the end. The second edition was prepared by Petar Bačić (Dubrovnik, 1785), and the grammar was published as an independent work (Principi elemetari della grammatica illirica) for the third time (Dubrovnik, 1837).

The dictionary was created on the basis of Dubrovnik speech and about forty works by Štokavy and Čakavy writers of the 16th and 17th centuries, and is therefore the first Croatian historical dictionary, abundantly exemplified by texts confirmations of the use of quotation marks, with many phrases and proverbs. It contains about 30,000 entries. For a long time in the literature, it was claimed that the grammar is similar to Kašić's in everything, which cannot be true, but also because the Croatian language described by Della Bella is quite different from Kašić's, but also because of completely new interpretations of linguistic phenomena. There are original observations about the prosodic system, the observation of the category of liveness, the category of verb sight, and there is a better division of words into lexical-grammatical classes and subclasses. Della Bella observed that the accent has a distinguishing function, that some nouns change the accent in oblique cases, that they are the suffix for G jd. the e-declension noun and the suffix in Gmn of all three declensions are always long, that the adjective and the adverb formed from it can be in opposition in terms of quantity, that the indefinite and definite characters in descriptive adjectives differ in accent, that some verbs change the accent in the 2nd and 3rd person singular in the aorist, and that variable words can be classified into accentual types. Among the forms, compared to Kašić, there are more Shtokavian and even Neo-Stokavian features, for example Gmn, Amn, Imn in the nominative declension.

The time of appearance of Della Bell's dictionary and grammar was crucial for the role these works would play. They were a novelty at the time because almost eight decades had passed since the appearance of the last Štokavian dictionary (Mikaljina), and a full 124 years had passed since the only Croatian grammar until then (Kašić's). Della Bella's grammar was more accessible than Kašić's and certainly more current, so it had a much greater influence. The language of Dubrovnik literature, with two and a half centuries of rich tradition, and the developed Dubrovnik urban language in its diachronic and synchronic perspective was described for the first time precisely in Della Bella's work, and thus that language could be a model for many writers, lexicographers and grammarians. This influence can also be directly seen in the revivalist, from which it can be concluded that Della Bella had a large part in shaping the Croatian standard language, especially with his regulation on the monosyllabic Jacobean substitution of long and short jata.

Ardelio Della Bella (Foggia, 1655 - Split, 1737), Italian Jesuit preacher, missionary, scientist, writer, lexicographer.
Ardelio Della Bella was not only a preacher and missionary, but also scientist and lexicographer. In a period of twenty years, during his stay in Croatia, he collected material for his dictionary Dizionario italiano-latino-ilirico, which he published in Venice in 1728. Petar Bašić (Dubrovnik, 18th/19th century) improved and prepared for printing the second edition of Della Bellino's dictionary, which was published in two volumes in Dubrovnik in 1785.
In addition to the dictionary, in Venice in 1805 Matija Čulić posthumously published his sermons in the Croatian language held in the brotherhood of the Good Death in Dubrovnik, under the name ivom Conversations and sermons by Ardelia Della Bella.