Le fonti manoscritte per la lessicografia calabrese: l’opera sommersa di Vincenzo Padula

The aim of this article is to highlight the importance of the manuscript lexical collection of the 19th century scholar Vincenzo Padula. This ‘hidden’ collection is a manuscript recording many terms and idiomatic expressions that has received deserved attention only in the last twenty years thanks to the first two volumes publication of the Vocabolario Etimologico Calabrese. First, we focus on some of the most interesting aspects of Padulian notes and on the fact that they contain words never attested before. Second, we show how the same notes can be useful to better understand the history of Calabrian dialects, in particular with reference to the use of past tenses and of subordination strategy by means of the complementizer mo.