The New College Latin and English Dictionary (review)

Reviews3 1 1 The New College Latin and English Dictionary. John C. Traupman. New York: Amsco School Publications, 1966. This is one of seven dictionaries in a series consisting of six two-way bilingual dictionaries (English plus another language) and one all-English dictionary. The English dictionary has been reviewed in Dictionaries 6, and a review of the Italian and English one (compiled by Robert C. Melzi) has appeared in Lexicographica 2 (1985): 190-93. The Jewish aspects of the French and English dictionary (compiled by Roger J. Steiner), the German and English one (compiled by John C. Traupman), and the Latin and English one (under review here) have been reviewed in volumes 2 and 6 of the Jewish Language Review. Edwin B. Williams edited the series (with the exception of the Hebrew and English dictionary). Many Latin dictionaries (and virtually all of those that are school dictionaries) deal mostly, if not exclusively, with Classical Latin (however defined). The word Latin in their titles should thus be understood in the sense of 'Classical Latin', as in the present dictionary, which only rarely nods toward non-Classical forms. These are mostly Christian usages, which were added presumably in ,recognition of the fact that Latin, at least in anglophone countries, is now being taught mostly at Catholic schools. The English-Latin section of this dictionary therefore lists, for example, bishop, archbishop, Jesus, church, angel, and apostle. Of the eight Latin equivalents offered for these six words (two equivalents are provided for church), only one (ecclesia) appears in the Latin-English section (episcopus, archiepiscopus, Jesus, ángelus, and apostolus are missing; templum is entered but not in the sense of 'church'). And this leads us to a fault of all the bilingual dictionaries in this series: Traupman's Latin and English dictionary, like the five others, actually consists of two less than fully coordinated dictionaries (the degree of noncoordination varies from one to the other). Coordination means that bishop 'episcopus' on one side implies episcopus 'bishop' on the other. Noncoordination is most evident in the Latin and English dictionary, whose Latin-English part takes up 335 pages but whose English-Latin part is only 167 pages long. It could be argued that, because today's students of Latin are interested mostly in 312Reviews understanding the language rather than in writing or speaking it, the Latin material needs to be treated more thoroughly than the English material (or that the English material can be handled with less detail), hence the greater length of the Latin-English part. This consideration is probably what led D. P. Simpson, the compiler of the 1959 edition of Cassell's New Latin-English English-Latin Dictionary (hereinafter Cassell's) to devote 650 pages to Latin but only 233 pages to English; that is, Simpson paid proportionally even less attention to the English-Latin part than Traupman has. However, dictionaries are used not only by students wanting to understand texts in another language: researchers do not always have access to larger dictionaries (or larger dictionaries are not always so up to date as later, though smaller, ones), hence they are often consulted by people who want the allolingual equivalents of English lexemes. Furthermore, anything worth doing is worth doing well. Complete equalization of a two-way bilingual dictionary by reversing all entries is thus a must, and one gets the uneasy feeling that the compilers of the six bilingual works in this series did not finish their jobs. Examples of unreversed entries are canary 'fringilla Canaria' (not even fringilla appears in the Latin-English part), pillowcase 'cervicalis integumentum', acknowledgment (receipt for money) 'apocha', and guidebook 'itinerarium'. One suspects that most "dirty" words were omitted from the English-Latin section because the compiler did not want to pander to "prurient" curiosity or because he thought that no proper schoolchild would want to use them in Latin composition, hence the English-Latin part contains no entries for penis and, female organ. Yet the Latin-English part gives at least six equivalents for penis (fascinum, muto, nervus, penis, vena, verpa, and vomer, all glossed as 'penis') and one for female organ (virginalis, so glossed). All of these Latin words were listed presumably because they...