A Dictionary of South African English (review)

242Reviews New English-Russian Dictionary. Ed. I. R. Galperin. Moscow: Russian Language, 1972. Piotrowski, Tadeusz. "Indication of English Pronunciation in Bilingual Dictionaries." Applied Linguistics 8 (1987): 37-45. Stanislawski, J. The Great English-Polish Dictionary. Warsaw : Wiedza Powszechna, 1964. A Dictionary of South African English. Jean Branford. 3rd ed. revised and enlarged. Cape Town: Oxford UP, 1987. 1. Scope The scope of A Dictionary of South African English could be delimited in several ways. A South Africanism could be defined as [A] a usage which arose in South African English (and not in any other variety of English), with these subcategories : [A.l] it is still used only in this variety of English and in no other (many of the items in this dictionary fall into this category); [A.2] it is now also used in other varieties but only with respect to South Africa (for example, apartheid); [A.3] it is now also used in other varieties of English and not only with respect to South Africa (commando for instance); and [A.4] it is now used only outside South Africa (with the subsubcategories: [A.4.i] only with respect to South Africa; [A.4.Ü] not only with respect to South Africa; and [A.4.iii] now not with respect to South Africa). At least one item may fall into subcategory [A.4]: donga, which is labeled "non S.A.E. Austral. Army World War II" in this dictionary, listed here on the strength of the 1966 edition of Sidney J. Baker's The Australian Language, which has: "donga 'a ravine or watercourse with steep sides', a term from South Africa." The Reviews243 implication, then, is that the word was once used in South African English but is no longer current there. However, it is possible that Branford included it mistakenly, since donga might be an Australian borrowing from Afrikaans (as an Afrikaans word it is attested in Schoonees et al. 2: 240), never having been used in South African English. On the other hand, it is also possible that donga has been used in this variety of English but Branford did not find any citations for it there. The foregoing definitions of South Africanism are diachronic , i.e., the sine qua non is that the usage arose in South Africa. A definition of South Africanism could be synchronic too: regardless of where the usage arose, [B.1] it is now found only in South African English (and in no other variety of English); or [B.2] it is now found chiefly in South African English (and less frequently in other varieties of English). Branford rightly casts her net wide and includes both diachronic and synchronic South Africanisms (those in category [B.2] are labeled "not exclusively SA," etc.). Yet where is the cutoff point in [B.2]? To a speaker of American English, South African and Canadian English serviette, for instance, is a South Africanism and Canadianism because it strikes the American ear as being distinctly non-American (= American English napkin, i.e., piece of cloth or paper used to wipe one's mouth or hands when eating or drinking). Likewise, South African English napkin sounds strange to the American ear because it designates not what Americans call a napkin but what they call a diaper (for an infant) or a sanitary napkin (for a woman). To take a third example, timeous (as in "to give timeous notice of one's resignation") and timeously ("to inform people timeously of the meeting"), still current in South African English, are now rare or literary in other varieties of English (the 1930 edition of the Concise Oxford Dictionary labels them "chiefly Scottish," and Solly Rechtman, who reported these South African usages to me, tells me that 244Reviews the words survive in the special English lect of freemasons in Great Britain; Brook labels timeous as "Scottish, Irish" [99]). Should they be listed in Branford's dictionary? Whatever the answer to this question may be, the call for allolingual and allotopolectal collaborators made in Gold,"Two Desiderata," needs to be modified: just which usages such people would find "odd" depends on their language or topolect. A speaker of British English, for example, would...