Abstract
The paper presents the “Vocabolar dl Ladin leterar “ (VLL; http://vll.smallcodes.com), a new dictionary of the Dolomite Ladin which is being realized at the Ladin Department of the Free University of Bolzano. The dictionary is based on a corpus of literary texts and aims to be exhaustive for all Ladin idioms. In order to achieve this goal, a fully computerized textual basis has been set up, which is currently made up of 1,834 texts with 45,289 words (types) and 590,828 occurrences (tokens). The first volume of the VLL will include the Ladin literary lexicon documented in a corpus of 198 texts written before 1879, with 29,827 types and 84,524 token. The paper discusses two very positive consequences deriving from the systematic analysis of the Ladin literary texts: on the one hand the first attestation of many words can be antedated, on the other hand several lemmata can be detected which have so far been excluded from Ladin lexicography. An example of this is the word gröpa, which is the subject of an etymological and lexicographical note. The word was considered extinct as appellative and documented only in the toponymy of the Ladin valleys. Instead, it still appears as appellative with the meaning ‘crest (of a hill/mountain)’ in a literary text of Val Badia dating back to the end of the nineteenth century. Thanks to this documentation it is now possible to review the etymology that has been so far proposed for the toponyms with the same lexical basis.