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.

Oops. I meant to write "was destroyed by European barbarians..." If anybody
knows of an online bookstore that sells this Spanish dictionary, please let
me know about it. 30,000 pesetas (I cut and pasted the price from the
Spanish newspaper article, which is why I made the mistake you see above) is
about US$ 165. A bargain.

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