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Reviews175 verb agreement errors ("A comparison of the actual words show that 4 words have been added ..."). Stylistic infelicities ("the Kersey-Phillips is an expensive large folio with opposite the title page engravings . . . ") are far too numerous. The book, in short, should have been better edited. These censures should not, however, be taken as a condemnation of Kerling 's study as a whole; his work is a valuable contribution to the history of English lexicography. Roy R. Barkley Middle English Dictionary The University of Michigan Papers On Lexicography in Honor of Warren N. Cordell, edited by J. E. Congleton, J. Edward Gates, and Donald Hobar. Terre Haute: The Dictionary Society of North America, 1979. 185 pp. This volume, the first publication of the Dictionary Society of North America , emphasizes the history of (especially English) lexicography and lexicographical technique. M. Sue Hetherington writes on "Old English Lexicography : The First Eleven Decades, 1550-1659" (pp. 125-139) and Robert T. Meyer on "The Relation of the Medulla to the Earlier English Glossaries" (pp. 141-150). The Medulla is the pre-1400 Latin-English glossary known as the Medulla Grammatica, extant in sixteen 14th-15th century manuscripts. Also concerned with older English is William J. Cameron's "The Lexicon Technicum of John Harris" (pp. 93-108); this lexicon is the earliest alphabetical English encyclopedia. In "Attitudes Towards English Lexicography in the Seventeenth Century" (pp. 83-91), James A. Riddell is concerned with the inclusion of inkhorn terms: the source-language items in a Latin-English dictionary were often anglicized mechanically (their target-language definitions remaining more or less intact) and there were other ways in which words were created too. The main point in J. E. Congleton's "Pronunciation in Johnson's Dictionary " (pp. 59-81) is that "Johnson was the first English lexicographer to give sustained attention to the treatment of pronunciation" (p. 65), although his system was "rudimentary and ineffective" (p. 78). Allen Walker Read's "The War of the Dictionaries in the Middle West" (pp. 3-15) focusses on the Webster-Worcester controversy (1834-») in the Ohio and Mississippi Valleys and H. Rocke Robertson's Antoine Furetière: The Development of a Dictionary " (pp. 109-123) tells of a member of the French Academy accused (c. 1662—») of secretly writing a dictionary with material allegedly stolen from the Academy, of which Furetière was a member and which was then preparing a dictionary of its own. This volume has a section on dictionary collecting (pp. 153-177). Gene Freeman notes that "people who illustrate dictionaries seem to be able to remove all redundancy from the illustrations. Redundancy, of course, in concept formation, is really a sticky thing. So dictionary illustrations seem to me to be a rich source of material to use for research" (p. 162). I do not agree that redundancy is always removed or that it always can be. One may, it is true, depict a circle or a triangle without redundancy, but there is no canonical 176David L. Gold chair, cup, horse, locomotive, etc. Illustrations may or may not show typical habitat or background (for animals), which is redundant. It may not be true that "today . . . , as word coining is going on, the distribution of words that are coined is still the same as in the early dictionaries" (p. 162), that is, the percentage of words beginning with the same letter (phoneme or phoneme combination?) is stable over time. This percentage is a function of a language's inherited phonotactics (e.g., word-initial U- does not occur in Latin and the number of Latin-origin words beginning with yi- is therefore zero in Spanish) and of any possible other influences on the language (e.g., the few Spanish words beginning with yi- are all of non-Latin origin; see my "The Spanish, Portuguese and Hebrew Names for Yiddish and the Yiddish Names for Hebrew ," International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 24 [1980], 29-42). Freeman makes the interesting remark that "libraries are buying encyclopedias now because they consider these mirrors to a particular age. I think the dictionary is a more intensive mirror. ... In Webster's Third New International Dictionary, the emphasis is on science...

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