El lenguaje de Lucas Fernández. Estudio del dialecto sayagués (review)

manship of Guillen de Castro. Of particular interest are his studies of Castro's use of stylistic penchants, the gracioso, the social scene, local settings, and science. Here indeed are the results of deep familiarity with Castro's art over many decades of Wilson's scholarly activities , revealing his perspicacity and insight. The final chapter, "Castro's Influence ," is for the most part a series of very brief highlights of studies by other scholars of Castro's works. Together with the ten pages of notes that follow it and the bibliography previously alluded to, these summarize very well the scholarship produced about Castro and his works to date. It is a pity that the author cautiously avoids any opinion of his own on the various (and often contrasting ) analyses, leaving his own pages as a valuable but sterile compilation of bibliographical notations. To sum up: at last we have a book devoted to Guillen de Castro, the first such study ever. Most of it serves as an accurate summary of matters already known to scholars in the field, with the exception of the important chapter on Castro's technique. Morever, the chapter on honor is an important one for those who are indeed perplexed by the honor code of the Comedia. Hopefully this volume will inspire more in-depth scholarly efforts in the area of Castro and his dramatic art, and it deserves attention by all those entering upon the study of world drama in general or the Comedia in particular. University of Vermont John G. Weigee ^HL j^$ LIHANI, JOHN. El lenguaje de Lucas Fernández. Estudio del dialecto sayagu és. Bogotá: Inst. Caro y Cuervo, 1973. Paper. 653 pp. $10.00. Professor Lihani is the acknowledged expert on Lucas Fernández. Complementing his critical edition of the Farsas y églogas and most recent general assessment in the Twayne Series, this formidably long volume focuses on the language of L.F., whose plays are re- Îjlete with pastoral dialogues in a coloquial Leonese dialect. An enlightening, thoroughly documented semantic history of the term sayagués opens the first part ( "Estudio lingüístico" ) of this work. EtimologicalIy , sayagués refers to the dialect of Sayago , in the southwest of Zamora province , but the term was very early applied to the rustic speech of the Salamanca region, which strictly speaking should be labeled charro. Thus, in the theater of L.F. and Juan del Encina, sayagués is actually "charro de SaL·manca " (p.45). Torres Naharro, Lope de Rueda, Gil Vicente, and even Lope and Tirso spiced the speech of their shepherds with sayagués, but Lucas Fernández, a native of Salamanca, used is most often and with the greatest degree of authenticity. The central part of this book is an analysis of L.F.'s sayagués: spanning over 250 pages and divided into the classical categories of phonology, morphology , and syntax, the dissection is unquestionably thorough. The author has compiled an historical grammar (apparently modeled on Menéndez Pidal 's epoch-making Gramática of the Cantar de Mio Cid) which derives the linguistic features of sayagués directly from Vulgar Latin. This neo-grammarian approach is of doubtful validity for several reasons. It assumes that L.F.'s language is an accurate reflection of a spoken dialect. A. Morel-Fatio noted long ago ("Notes sur la langue des Farsas y Églogas," Romania, 10 [1881], 84 239-44) that L.F. was not entirely successful in having his shepherds speak in local dialect, because his own Hterary education, as well as his desire for acceptance by a wide public, forced him to compromise with a mélange of Salamanca dialect and Hterary Castillan . Thus, by selecting only the sayagu és elements for study, Professor Lihani does not show how they function in a complex interweaving of speech patterns which characterizes the plays. Another infelicity in this method is the concomitant duplication of much of Menéndez Pidal's Manual de gramática histórica española, in order to contrast divergent developments in sayagués and CastiHan. The result is a generally accurate, but for the most part redundant , summary of Spanish historical grammar. A descriptive presentation...