Dictionarium septem diversarum linguarum. Prag 1605 By Peter Loderecker. Ed. by Antonin Mestan. (review)

BOOK NOTICES 219 ing (arithmetic) as a practical subject. As a result , reading was taught earüer (at the beginning ofthe 18th century, the abiüty to read was fairly common even in rural districts), but the teaching of writing lagged behind. During the 19th century , however, the need for instruction in writing was recognized, and there was a steady increase in the number of students. In 1837, less than 30% of students were taught to write; but by 1885 nearly aU students received some form of instruction in the art of writing (p. 138). By the end of the 19th century, very few adult Norwegians could not write; e.g., out of a total of 5,824 immigrants to the US from Norway in 1896-97, only 16 over the age of 14 could not write (p. 150). Vs general thesis is that this development was necessitated by the socio-economic development of Norway during the 19th century. There were greater possibüities for involvement in poUtical Ufe on both the national and the local level, and this involvement in many instances required an abUity to write. Economic and technical changes resultedin achanged occupational structure with an increased demand for individuals who could write. UtUizing a wide variety of quantitative data (school and prison records, postal and immigration statistics), V documents the development of writing skiUs. Combining qualitative and quantitative data, he documents the socioeconomic changes which took place in 19th century Norway, and the increase in awareness on the part of educators of the need for instruction in writing. The book has been attractively produced from camera-ready typescript. Although an index of names has been provided, a subject index would also be useful. [Chet Creider, University of Western Ontario.] Dictionarium septem diversarum linguarum . Prag 1605. By Peter Loderecker . Ed. byAntoninMestan. (Monumenta linguae Slavicae dialecti veteris, Fontes et dissertationes , 21.) Freiburg i. Br.: U. W. Weiher, 1984. Pp. xxv, 318. DM 118.00. In 1605, only seven years after the pubUcation of two basic works of Czech lexicography— Daniel Adam of Veleslavín's Nomenclátor quadrilinguis, organized according to concepts, and 5//va quadrilinguis, arranged alphabeticaUy —there appeared in Prague an even more ambitious polyglot dictionary, one that matched weU over 5,000 Latin lexical entries with equivalents from six other languages: Italian, Croatian , Czech, PoUsh, German, and Magyar. Like many other interlingual dictionaries of the period , the work was not fuUy original—despite the assertion on the title page that it was 'singulari studio & industria coUectum' by its author, Pet(e)r Loderecker, a Bohemian Benedictine. L's Dictionarium was apparently derived from another polyglot dictionary, published in 1595 in Venice by the Croatian clergyman Faust Vrancié; and it was fürther expanded by the addition of Czech and PoUsh word Usts. The work was typeset by two different printers in two separate parts. The first part consists of a side-byside Usting oflexical equivalents from the seven languages, arranged alphabetically according to the Latin entries; the second contains six separate alphabetic word lists, one for each of the dictionary's six Uving languages, with the Latin equivalent provided for each entry. Altogether, the dictionary represents a rich storehouse of lexical materials from the end of the 16th century , including as it does terms which one would have expected to be avoided in a work of this kind. The bulk of the present volume consists of a facsimile of the first part of the original work (1-197) and of the Czech-Latin section of its second part (198-262); a transcription of the latter is appended (265-316). Mestan's lengthy introduction(v-xxiv) providesaninformedcommentary on the lexicographic aspects ofthe dictionary , as well as possible or probable sources of and collaborators on a work that could not have been produced by a single author. M is to be commended for making this Dictionarium again available for perusal and study, as weU as for his incisive analysis of its content and origin. [Zdenek Salzmann, University of Massachusetts, Amherst.] Basic Albanian etymologies. By Martin E. Huld. Columbus: Slavica, 1984. Pp. x, 213. $17.95. H's etymologies—'basic' in the sense that they were chosen to represent...