Elsevier's Russian-English Dictionary (review)

Reviews205 Ehevier's Russian-English Dictionary. 1990. Comp., Paul Macura. Amsterdam and New York: Elsevier. Vol. 1-4. 3208 pp. $307.75 U.S. This huge four-volume dictionary is, to my knowledge, the largest available Russian-English dictionary. The compiler claims that it has approximately 240,000 "key entries." The term "key entries" presumably refers to the entries proper, i.e., to non-inflected words. The size of this publication can perhaps be best appreciated when compared to existing Russian dictionaries . The largest such dictionary, the 17-volume Slovar' sovremennogo russkogo literaturnogo yazyka [A dictionary of contemporary literary Russian] (1950— 1965), is said to have some 120,000 entries (one-half as many as the Elsevier), while the Soviet Russian-English dictionary by A. I. Smirnitsky (Russkoanglijski slovar, revised by O. S. Akhmanova [1985]), has approximately 55,000 entries. To give a more precise indication, the dictionary under review has about 260 entries from sejfto semenovod (2520—25, without inflectional forms and proper nouns), while the Soviet dictionary has 95 entries on one page (573) in this same span. The Oxford Russian-English Dictionary by Wheeler is also shorter than the Elsevier: it is said to have some 70,000 entries. (The compiler ofthe dictionary under review has already published three RussianEnglish dictionaries: two editions ofa dictionary covering electro-technology and allied sciences, in 1971 and 1986, and one of botany in 1982. I have not seen any of these.) The Elsevier is, as Macura says in the preface, the most extensive listing ofvocabulary available to date in the areas of humanities, social sciences, and fine arts. It also contains scientific terminology occurring in such diverse fields as anthropology, biology, botany, chemistry, engineering, geography , geology, medicine, physics, zoology, and various other disciplines . (First page, first paragraph, lines 2—5) (Strange as it may seem, the material in the front matter lacks pagination.) The intended users of the dictionary are students, researchers, translators , and all those who use Russian publications; but the first barrier for many prospective users will be its price, which makes the dictionary more a library reference work than a home-study dictionary. The impression that this is first ofall a library book is strengthened by the layout ofthe dictionary, in which the economy of space is apparently not considered at all. There are wide margins around the text and broad spaces between columns of text. All the entries are in strict alphabetical order. As is customary in Russian lexicography, compounds written as two or more separate words (strictly speaking, lexicalized collocations of adjective + noun are always one word) are run on and can be found within the respective adjectival or nominal entries . One disadvantage of this treatment is that they cannot be distinguished from examples of usage, idioms, etc., which are also run on and printed in exactly the same way. For example, 206Reviews tip . . . vymershyj t. extinct type; t. vida biol holotype; t. doliny valley pattern; t. lesorastílel'nykh uslovij forest site type If I were translating from Russian into English, I would not know whether to treat valley pattern as a model to be followed (mountain/prairie . . . pattern?), or as a set expression that cannot be changed, and so I would have to reach for another publication to check this. It would be helpful to have the items distinguished , perhaps by different fonts. In reviewing this dictionary I can conveniently address the list of problems that I discussed in my earlier review of two dictionaries of English and Russian (Piotrowski 1988). In fact, in some cases I can use the same examples . I will first cover the treatment of grammar and then that of vocabulary. Grammar With Slavic languages a description ofgrammar is traditionally equivalent to a description of inflection. Half jokingly it might be said that any adequate presentation of inflection is so difficult that scholars resist doing anything else after they have dealt with wordforms. There are also other factors as well. Inflection is very important in clause structure, because in languages with relatively free word order, like Russian, often it is inflectional signals alone in clausal elements that show what the structure of the clause is and consequently what its...