Delaware - English / English - Delaware dictionary By John O'Meara (review)

BOOK NOTICES 199 Phonologisches Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache. By Gustav Muthmann. (Reihe Germanistische Linguistik, 163.) Tübingen: Niemeyer. 1996. Pp. vi, 498. Gustav Muthmann, who is known for his previous lexicographic work (Reihe Germanistische Linguistik , 78 and 145), provides another dictionary of German of particular interest for the phonologist. In the reference section (39-480) of this 'phonological dictionary' M lists a large and representative number of lexical entries of Modern Standard German according to phonetic transcnption. Conversely to a pronouncing dictionary, phonetic transcription is provided and systematically ordered m the left hand column, while the corresponding orthographic representation is provided to the right of each entry. In his introduction (1) M points out that this design would be the more consequential way of organizing a common spelling dictionary, since the user would like to proceed from the pronunciation to determine the spelling. However, the public's limited knowledge of phonetic transcription would prevent this approach from reaching a broad general audience. For this reason M intends his dictionary to be primarily a research tool for the linguist. The phonetic transcription found in the list of entries is in accordance with the existing pronouncing dictionaries of German. M' s collection is particularly creative and informative with respect to morphologically complex words. He lists prefixes and initial stems m compounds once, and, instead of giving long lists of the derived words, he provides a summary of morphological and phonological patterns ofwords formed with these prefixes and stems. In particular the detailed information about word stress and the occurrence oflinking morphemes will be appreciated by many phonologists and morphologists. Aside from the reference section, M provides a useful review of previous similarly organized dictionaries , including work on English (2-4), a transparent guide to the conventions and principles of his dictionary (4- 14), tables with phoneme-to-grapheme and grapheme-to-phoneme correspondences for word-initial sounds or letters (15-35), statistics about the type and token frequency of word-initial sounds (35-37), and a discussion oftopics in German phonetics where there is disagreement about the exact pronunciation (481-93). The phonological dictionary justifies its name in at least two aspects. Firstly, the dictionary is an invaluable tool for determining the phonotactics of wordinitial segment sequences m German. While such a task could be achieved indirectly (and has been in the past) by using a common spelling dictionary and taking into account letter-to-sound rules, this approach is in danger of missing certain possibilities, since through extensive borrowing letter-to-sound correspondences in German are far from transparent. For example, M' s dictionary is of help for investigating the (phonotactically uncommon) set of words in German with IsI followed by a vowel, which can be spelled either with (s) as in sandwich, with (c), as in city, or even with (se), as in science fiction (words borrowed from English). Secondly, M's dictionary provides a rich empirical source for the study ofword stress in morphologically complex words. It is hoped that M's work will be used in the future for the linguistic analysis of these two and other aspects of German phonology, morphology, and lexicology. [Michael Jessen, University of Stuttgart.] Delaware - English / English - Delaware dictionary. By John O'Meara. Toronto , Buffalo & London: University of Toronto Press, 1996. Pp. xxiv, 660. Cloth $75.00. Delaware is an Eastern Algonquian language with two major, closely-related dialects. One is Unarm 'which is still spoken by probably no more than five individuals in Oklahoma' (vii). The other, which is also moribund and on which this dictionary is based, has often been called Munsee by linguists, but since its native speakers, who reside in Moraviantown, Ontario , refer to it simply as Delaware, O'Meara has chosen to 'follow the practice of [the] residents and use the term Delaware, or, when more precision is required, Ontario Delaware' (vii). This bilingual dictionary is made up of a 377-page Delaware-to-English section comprising some 7,100 entries followed by a shorter English-to-Delaware section of 276 pages. Each Delaware entry begins with a headword—a noun, verb, or particle—in boldface type. Since Algonquian nouns may either be animate or inanimate, O...