Nursery lexicon in Alexander Hojsak’s dictionary of the Lemko dialect (the dialect of the Wysowa village)

Abstract

The aim of the paper is to present nursery lexicon registered in Alexander Hojsak’s dictionary of the Wysowa village Lemko dialect. Among 3000 words registered in the dictionary there are 50 lexemes marked as “nursery words”. They belong to several semantic groups (names of food, body parts, animals, clothes, things, actions and physical conditions, religious sphere) and demonstrate features proved universal for baby talk in most languages. There is a correspondence between Lemko nursery words for animals and Lemko interjections for calling domestic animals which seems to be relevant for other Ukrainian dialects. Some of the Lemko nursery words show broader distribution: they are registered in other Ukrainian dialects, other Slavic and even non-Slavic languages (for example папу ‘to eat’). The idea of mapping nursery words seems to be worth further study.