Word-indices and word-lists to the Gothic Bible and minor fragments By Félicien de Tollenaere and Randall L. Jones, in cooperation with Frans van Coetsem, Philip H. Smith Jr., and Hon Tom Wong. Leiden (review)

REVIEWS431 Word-indices and word-lists to the Gothic Bible and minor fragments. By Félicien de Tollenaere and Randall L. Jones, in cooperation with Frans van Coetsem, Philip H. Smith Jr., and Hon Tom Wong. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1976. Pp. xvi, 583. /245.00. Reviewed by William H. Bennett, Decatur, GA This book is intended 'to provide a complete and up-to-date alphabetical wordindex , as well as several shorter word-indices and word-lists, to Streitberg's Gotische Bibel [1965]' (xi). The need for such a detailed, complete work is clear. Schulze 1848, though used for many years as the standard reference text, harks back to the Castiglione-Massman era; it contains no entries from the Giessen, Veronese, or Speyer records. In the early years ofthis century, Streitberg envisioned a complete Gothic dictionary, to which a Greek-Gothic glossary and a list of documented forms would be added; but this project did not materialize. Within the last few years, two computerized texts of Gothic have been prepared : a word index with a reverse word list, by William Estabrook, and a grammatical concordance by James Marchand. Both would be welcome, but to date neither has been published.1 For practical purposes, Streitberg's Bibel provides a convenient tool for locating word forms within the corpus. Whatever its faults, the Streitberg text is readily accessible and nearly complete, lacking only the Speyer leaf—and purposely excluding de Busbecq's transcriptions (ca. 1560), which IL also omits. The Speyer fragment, which is clearly the 188th extant leaf of the Codex Argenteus (and originally its 336th), directly continues and completes the last chapter of Mark, concluding with an explicit. This leafwas discovered in October 1970 by the archivist of the Speyer diocese, Dr. Franz Haffner. Of the two pages, the recto was in better condition , the verso being more difficult to photograph and decipher.2 For IL, T&J have adopted the readings of Dr. Elfriede Stutz (1971 and 1973, the latter in a prepublication draft). The decipherment of the Skeireins in Bennett 1960 is also included in the corpus, wherever it is not identical with Streitberg's version. All decipherments of the Skeireins are cited in accord with the numbering of lines in Streitberg's printed text. Because IL has a broad scope of reference, and yet must impart a great amount of factual information, it requires a fairly large number of abbreviations, symbols, and markers. The text abbreviations and codex symbols (xv) are in most instances familiar and often self-explana1 For the sake of brevity, the indices and lists under consideration here will be designated by the symbol IL. They have been typeset through photo-composition involving a Siemens Digiset 40 T2 in combination with a Philips P 1400 computer at the typesetting office of Lumo-zet in Eindhofen. 2 When discovered, the leaf was wrapped about a round wooden stick and so was badly curled. Accordingly, Haffnerkept it between two sheets ofglass, one transparent and covering the recto, the other opaque and facing the verso, which is bleached and therefore in greater need of protection. As a result, the recto was relatively easy to photograph and caused no delay. But it was considerably more difficult to photograph the verso, which was not only less legible but was also hidden by the opaque glass. Thus it was first necessary to reverse the positions of the two glass sheets without causing further damage to the leaf—a delicate, slow, and potentially worrisome operation. (For details I am indebted to Stutz 1971, 1973.) The circumstances under which the leaf was found have been widely reported and will not be repeated here; for bibliography , see IL 583. 432LANGUAGE, VOLUME 53, NUMBER 2 (1977) tory, but a few are new and must be learned ; thus A refers to Cod. Ambrosianus A (including the Taurinensis), A to the Argenteus, and 21 to the Arezzo Deed. The textual markers (xvi), which are ten in number, are all arbitrary signs and so demand careful attention. For the purpose of illustration, the first four will suffice here. As in Streitberg, editorial deletions and interpolations are enclosed in brackets : — Word in text is partially within square brackets, e.g...