Dictionary of dictionaries

[Paul Frank]

I take it that the dialect in American Dialect Society is an English one. Or
several. But since Spanish is also an American dialect as well as a great
American language (damn the English-only zealots) I thought that some
members of this forum would be interested in hearing about a dictionary that
has just been published by Espasa on behalf of the Real Academia Española.
It's not quite Borges' universal library, but to my knowledge it's the
closest any non-Chinese dictionary or encyclopedia has come to it. (The
electronic version of the Siku Quanshu, or Encyclopedia of the Four
Treasures, consisting of 3,500 titles in 36,000 volumes, which was compiled
in the eighteenth century by order of the Qianlong emperor, fits onto 167
CD-ROMs. The even larger fifteenth-century Yongle Dadian, which originally
contained 22,937 titles in 11,095 handwritten folio volumes, was destroyed,
according to Chinese accounts, by European barbarians during the Siege of
Peking in 1900. But I digress.) Where was I? The RAE has just announced the
publication of a "dictionary of dictionaries" on DVD, which contains
sixty-six Spanish dictionaries published since 1495, when the Vocabulario de
Nebrija came out. Unless I'm mistaken, they can all be consulted
simultaneously. El País, a Spanish newspaper, published an article about
this work yesterday. I would quote it here were it not for the possibility
that doing so might offend some sensibilities. I'm told that the sixty-six
works contained in the DVD, which is being sold for 30.000 pesetas, are not
found in any single library in the world.

Paul
--
Paul Frank
Business, financial and legal translation
>From German, French, Chinese, Italian,
Spanish and Portuguese into English
Thollon-les-Memises, France
paulfrank at post.harvard.edu