Batad Ifugao Dictionary with Ethnographic Notes (review)

264Reviews while the door is closed; before air conditioning was invented, old hotels had this device, whose purpose was not so much to get some light but, rather, to keep the air circulating through a hot room. Some cultural information is occasionally missing. Granted, one learns that a mile, in Czech 'mile', is 1.6 km, and the nautical mile 1.85 km. But Fahrenheit, in Czech 'Fahrenheit', is not accompanied by any such information. The next edition of the dictionary could enhance its informative power by including tables of metric equivalences for American measures (granted, we do learn that an ounce = 28.35 g, but what is a fluid ounce}) — even those such as cup because, indeed, all American recipes are elaborated in terms of cups and other similar precisely defined units of measurement. Pronunciation is well indicated in the dictionary by the IPA symbols, moderately modified to be closer to conventional Czech spelling habits. The headwords are printed in blue. The first important dictionary that adopted differentiation by color was, to my knowledge, Le Robert Méthodique, byJosette ReyDebove (Paris: Le Robert, 1982) , which printed the headwords, both of entries and subentries, in red. My subjective feeling is diat color differentiation does not add much to die lucidity of die page, but some empirical inquiries into diis question may be worthwhile. In any case, diis work is bound to become the most widely used desk dictionary ofthe two languages. Its conversion into a Czech-English dictionary would be most welcome. Batad Ifugao Dictionary with Ethnographic Notes. Compiled by Leonard E. Newell widi the assistance of Francis Bon'og Poligon. Foreword by Harold C. Conklin. (Special Monograph Issue, Number 33.) Manila: Linguistic Society of the Philippines, 1993. Pp. xviii + 744. No price available. Batad Ifugao is a Philippine language spoken in the north central area of the island of Luzon, north-northwest of Manila. This is the first comprehensive dictionary of the language, compiled in accordance with the best lexicographical method. Conklin offers a short but useful history of die lexicography of this language in his foreword (xi-xiii) . According to the author, the dictionary is a "tool for those wishing to learn Ifugao." The decision to compile a dictionary of this type was felicitous, because it entailed significant attention to grammatical information and to describing the lexicon within its sociocultural context. Every modern lexicographer, particularly one who compiles a learners ' dictionary, realizes that semantic description is incomplete unless it indicates appropriate syntactic patterns and typical collocations or semantic constraints — in short, the subcategorizations. Thus, recent dictionaries not only provide rich grammatical information in the entries but usually contain thorough grammatical sketches in the front matter as well. Such sketches are particularly necessary if the language described is not well-known: James Kari's Reviews265 Ahtna Athabaskan Dictionary (Fairbanks, AK: Alaska Native Language Center, 1990), James A. Matisoff's The Dictionary of Lahu (Berkeley, CA: UC Press, 1988), and Frances Karttunen's An Analytical Dictionary ofNáhuatl (Austin, TX: UT Press, 1983) all exemplify this principle. The author of the dictionary under review follows in this short but excellent tradition: his grammatical sketch of Batad Ifugao (1-96) is the most complete grammar of that language in existence. Given the author's affiliation with the Summer Institute of Linguistics, one expects a solid structuralist basis to his grammar; for instance, he defines nouns as "words which occur as the head of a phrase following a determiner, widiout the necessity of being further expanded" (11). However, die structure of Batad Ifugao and the autfior's preference are such that the syntactic analysis can be undertaken, with excellent results, in the rarely applied Tesnièrian way, namely with the verb as the central organizing point of the sentence, with various functional elements (apparently inspired by Pike's slots) attached to it. Of prime importance are "roles," e.g., an agent (who acts deliberately and with intent , hence a sentient being), an actor (animate or inanimate), an undergoer (necessarily associated with an action or an instrument), a patient (that either undergoes a change or exists in a particular condition), an instrument, a beneficiary, etc. A typical definition has the following form: ba...