Dictionary of dictionaries

[Dennis R. Preston]

In case some others are also confused about ADS's "language and
dialect" missions, let me quote from the back cover of AS:

"American Speech is concerned principally with the English Language
in the Western Hemisphere, although contributions dealing with
English in other parts of the world, with other languages influencing
English or influenced by it, and with general linguistic theory may
also be submitted for consideration by the Editorial Board."

Please do not hold back interesting information from our membership
and list-participants by assuming that we are infected by
monolingualism, actually or attitudinally.

dInIs
>



>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

--
Dennis R. Preston
Department of Linguistics and Languages
Michigan State University
East Lansing MI 48824-1027 USA
preston at pilot.msu.edu
Office: (517)353-0740
Fax: (517)432-2736