His favorite word is the first to incorporate: abbreviations o Pressthe iron chains that held the pot on fire. It took two months to do it. For all others, more than twenty thousand words, work would last twenty years to complete the Current Leonese lexicona dictionary in six volumes with more than 5,400 pages of a language that is still alive in some works of the writers of the Leon province, although many of their words are almost forgotten, because only the oldest remember them. Or not even. The Philologist Janick Ivonne Le Loyer is the author of this dictionary, for which they usually compare it with María Moliner. Born in 1950 in Minihy-Téguier, within the canton of Tréguier, in the known as Pink granite coastin the French region of Brittany, Janick Le Men is the daughter of a road and seamstress. He was a father orphan very soon, since he died with 42 years, which left his four children in a very difficult situation. Even so, they went ahead. One of his brothers, the poet Yvon Le Men, has been distinguished with the Théophile-Gautier Award of the French Academy and the Goncourt of Poetry. For his part, Janick Le Men would end up becoming a professor, now retired, of the University of León and one of the greatest experts in the Leon, cataloged by UNESCO as a language in danger of disappearing.
“The Dictionary of María Moliner is great, mine is different, although it is true that the work was very similar, especially at the beginning. Before I could use a computer had already filled thirty thousand chips,” says Le Men about the comparison, which always gives him a little hurry, with the famous philologist and Zaragozan library. For his Leonese lexicon actual “He emptied “words, as he says, about three hundred vocabularies, in addition to looking for them in essays and in books of any genre, in the Leonese regional magazines and in all the theses and thesis he found on the subject. And, of course, he added contributions made by the speakers themselves.” When people knew what I was doing, I sent me lists of words that were used in their villages, “he recalls.
“The Leonese geography is very special and the linguistic borders have nothing to do with administrative borders. So I started comparing with the Asturian vocabularies, because León and Asturias have a lot to do. And also with what is the old Leonese domain, because when Ramón Menéndez Pidal speaks of the Leon does not speak of León, but of the old domain of León, which in the middle ages With enclave in Portugal, “explains Le Men. “Every word that collected in León compared it to the Asturian dictionaries, also some Cantabrians, and with the whole west of the Leonese domain, Zamora, Salamanca and Extremadura. And as the Bierzo is border with Galicia, which is border with Portugal, because I also compared with dictionaries of those territories. And with border Leon reapers were going to work there. headwhich means beam of grass, cereal or firewood, is also found in the Canary Islands. O Words of the West of León that are in Huelva, as in Aracena, where there are many words related to the water we also have in León. ”
Janick Le Men arrived at his Leon dictionary in an unexpected way. Bachelor of French Philology, Spanish was not even his second language, but the German. But he came to Spain, to Oviedo, as a professor at the French Alliance. She met her husband, Leonese painter Alejandro Vargas, who died in October last year, and in 1984 she moved to León to have her daughter, Gaëlle. As I found no work as a French teacher, because English was already the predominant language, he began studying Hispanic philology. The poet Antonio Gamoneda, a great family friend, made a selection of the classics of Spanish literature that he had to read. Le Men finished the race with excellent notes, but an administrative error caused him not to receive the scholarship of the Ministry of Education for his doctorate. Luckily, he was able to achieve a scholarship of the Diputación de León, so the issue of his thesis should be related to the province. “My thesis director, José Ramón Morala, told me why he did not do a dictionary of the Leonese. And I accepted. I didn’t know what I was getting,” he jokes.
Last May, Janick Le Men was chosen Leonese character of 2025 by the Juan del Enzina de León Secondary Institute, where a tribute was paid that served to bring his work closer to the new generations. Currently, despite the large group of writers that the province has, the publications in Leonese, or Llionés, are few. Francisco González-Banfi, Beatriz Blanco Fontao, Xairu López, Fran Allegre and Abel Aparicio stand out. Other authors are using Leonese vocabulary in works published in national editorials. This is the case of novels Flush y Clothes lyingby Óscar García Sierra (La Robla, León, 1994), published in Anagrama. García Sierra, also a philologist, begins the first of the two novels with an explanation that the protagonist makes to a friend about the term flushwhich serves as a title to the novel. The Facendera, in the Janick Le Men dictionary, is defined as “collective work of all the residents of the town and destined for communal work, such as road arrangements, prey cleaning, etc.”. Also the writer and journalist Marta del Iriego Anta (La Bañeza, León, 1970) has published in January this year the novel Cordillera (DNA, Editorial Alliance), in which some dialogues appear in Patsuezu, “name of the speech of the Northwest Leonese region,” according to the Le Men dictionary, especially in the Alto Sil and in the regions of Laciana and Babia. A differentiating characteristic of Patsuezu is the combination ts In some words, known as Che Vaqueira. The main author in Patsuezu was the writer Eva González (Palacios del Sil, 1918-2007) and the broader vocabulary of Patsuezu, in two volumes, it is Tseite, tsinu, tsume, tsana —Milk, linen, fire, wool—made by Manuel Gancedo Fernández. Last June this author also presented his translation to Patsuezu of Quijoteentitled El Inxeniousi Fidalgu Don Quixote de la Mancha.
Since 2020, the Leon Dictionary of Janick Le Men can be consulted on the Internet, thanks to a joint work between the Chair of Leon Studies of the University of León and the Royal Spanish Academy. This helps many terms to leave the fog in which time has immersed them. “The Leonese has many words for snow,” says Janick Le Men, “and also for tillage tools. In a plow, each part has its name. And there are also many names for the flowers. I like the one that refers to the Narcissus, which is Gritsanda.”