The vocabularies of La escalera (Costantinople, 1888)

Abstract

The aim of this article is to present and describe the form and content of the vocabularies included in the work of the Rev. Alexander Thomson, La escalera o Lecciones progresiṿas en la ciencia y literatura (Constantinople, 1888), written in Judaeo-Spanish. These vocabularies, characterized by the etymological information that they often include, and the encyclopaedism and the recourse to the opposition definition that they exhibit, are the best known example of Sephardic lexicography relative to the so-called Languages of Speciality, and seem to be inspired by previous pedagogical works such as Una mirada a los cielos (Constantinople, 1850), which already presents those same features in the glossaries it contains.