La fraseologia nei dizionari tedeschi tra Cinque e Seicento. L’esempio del lemma 'dito/Finger/digitus'

Phraseologisms make their appearance very early in the bilingual dictionaries of the German-speaking area; this contribution aims to analyse them from a diachronic and interlinguistic perspective, based on the German-Latin and German-Italian dictionaries of the 16th and 17th centuries, starting with Dasypodius (1537) and concluding with Matthias Kramer’s Nuovo dizzionario (1676-1678 and 1700-1702), which boasts on the title page that it is “amplified with rich phraseology”. Using the example of the lemma finger/digitus/Finger, the changes in the documentation of phraseology are illustrated. At the beginning dictionaries only recorded erudite phrases from the works of the classics, then they shifted to the ‘living’ phraseology of everyday language. If the stylistic and connotative elements are slow to find lexicographic codification, the recorded polylexical units reflect not only customs and traditions, but also elements of non-verbal communication such as body language, providing valuable insights into the history of language and culture.