Wörterbücher. Dictionaries. Dictionnaires (review)

Reviews165 Wörterbücher. Dictionaries. Dictionnaires. (International Encyclopedia of Lexicography.) Ed. Franz Josef Hausmann, Oskar Reichmann, Herbert Ernst Wiegand, and Ladislav Zgusta. Berlin/New York: Walter de Gruyter. Vol. 3 (1991) xxvi + 1017. $159.00 approx. This third volume in the series completes the most ambitious handbook devoted to lexicography ever published (see my review of the first two volumes in Dictionaries 13). The volume under review comprises the greatest diversity of topics. First, the account of lexicography of individual languages is continued (following chapter 20 at the close of volume 2) with descriptions of the minor European language groups: Celtic in articles 220—21; Baltic 222-23, Albanie 224, Armenian 225, Basque 226, Uralic 227-30, Turkic 231—32 and Caucasian 233—35, all in chapter 21. Summaries of the lexicography of the other languages around the world follow in chapters 22—32, arranged partly by genetic relation and partly by geographic proximity: articles on Hamito-Semitic (236-41), Iranian (242-45), Indian (246-50), TibetoBurman (251-53), Austronesian (254-59), South-East Asian (260-62), East Asian (263-66), Arctic/Pacific (267-70), Subsaharan African (271-73) and American Indian (274—84). Ideally, these treatments of individual languages and their lexicographic traditions should include maps showing the distribution of the languages, discussions of problems deriving from the writing systems , pronunciation, morphology (especially allomorphic stem variation), collocations and semantics, and material culture—and should contain some discussion of functional/stylistic range, archaisms and neologisms, and the degree of homogeneity/standardization versus regional/social variation (and the resulting labeling problems), and finally, an evaluation of how these criteria apply to existing dictionaries possibly illustrated by facsimiles of specimen entries or pages. However, only a few articles live up to these expectations, or they do so only partially: articles 221 (contemporary Celtic languages), 224 (Albanian), 237 (Arabic), 245 (other modern Iranian languages) and 249 (Dravidian) strike me as noteworthy examples of vital information succinctly presented. Whereas the number of languages treated in the European articles remains easy to survey, the task rises to huge dimensions elsewhere so that a selection is necessary. Articles normally include a discussion of the most important languages, living and dead, and a critical review of what lexicographical works exist for them. However, for the "minor" languages articles are extremely short, possibly a consequence of space restrictions imposed by editors who did not wish to see the volume grow to unmanageable proportions . Thus, the information given is sometimes highly selective without explicit reasons being provided. To cite a single example: of the 1000 + Polynesian and Melanesien languages, few have dictionaries or word-lists, soJohn U. Wolff's remark is in order: Most of the Oceanic languages have minority status, and for most of them it is unlikely that any sort of extensive lexicographic treatment will ever appear. (2574) 166Reviews But is it right to deal with all of these on less than two pages (2573—75), including only 15 references, and most of these to 19th-century publications? Papua, New Guinea, though having the greatest number ofAustronesian languages , is not mentioned here, and there is no cross-reference to Stephen Wurm's (equally short) article 269 devoted to the island state; the index has the country mentioned only in the article on "Transplanted Englishes". A gap ofa different kind is illustrated by the coverage of North American Indian languages. For the period before 1800, only the lexicography of Central and South American languages is treated. Because the early tradition ofNorth American lexicography is omitted, nojudgment ofthe time depth of the discipline is possible. However, it is only fair to admit that generally the range of information provided for the linguist not specialized in the respective areas is impressive. Put together, the chapters provide, in spite of gaps and methodological diversity caused by typological differences between the languages and authors' divergent theoretical persuasions, an unparalleled survey of useful information. Second, the central and most weighty section of the volume, chapters 33—36, is devoted to bilingual and multilingual lexicography, starting with general problems (articles 285—307) and continuing with articles involving individual languages or language pairs (mostly European, articles 308—28). Many of the articles resume discussions already...