Language

BOOK NOTICES 761 Chapter 8 on the transition of verbs for 'to see' into other semantic fields: they may take on the meanings 'understand', 'think about' (so cerno, uideo etc.), 'despise' (< 'look down to': despido), 'admire' (<' look up to': suspicio), 'wait for' (exspecto), 'defend' (< 'look out for': tueor) etc. [Bengt Löfstedt, UCLA.] ? pluralismo lingüístico in Italia fra stato nazionale e autonomie regional!. By Alessandro Pizzorusso. Pisa: Pacini, 1975. Pp. 286. Le lingue tagliate: storia délie minoranze linguistiche in Italia. By Sergio Salvi. Milano: Rizzoli, 1975. Pp. 300. That Italy is like most other European countries in not being strictly monolingual has been known for a very long time—in fact, ever since Dante discussed the Italian dialects and their relation to his ideal literary language in his De vulgari eloquentia (ca. 1295). In addition to the specifically Italo-Romance dialects, there are varieties belonging to other Romance sub-families, such as FrancoProven çal and Provençal in the Alpine valleys of Piedmont; Ladi? in the southern Tyrol, and Friulian in the Tagliamento valley; and Sardinian. Until recently, no major objections have been raised on ideological grounds to the teaching of Tuscan-based standard Italian in the schools, nor to the use of the national language in official matters. On the contrary, a command of standard Italian has been considered to enhance one's opportunities for advancement in all varieties of activity, and the school-system has done its best to afford such a command. The situation has been complicated since 1919 by the annexation of non-Romancespeaking areas, particularly the Germanspeaking southern Tyrol and some Slovene areas in Carnia and Istria. Since Italy became a republic in 1947, a number of semi-autonomous regions have been established, in some of which a non-Italian language is given legal parity with Italian: (standard) French in the VaI d'Aosta, German in the southern Tyrol. In others, however, non-homogeneous groups of Romance dialects are the only competitors of the standard language, e.g. the various Sicilian sub-dialects or those of Sardinian. The last decade has witnessed a great deal of agitation for increased autonomy in these regions, leading to the recognition (in some instances, the creation) of diglossic situations. There are two main approaches to the study ofthe problems involved: the objective and the politicized. Of these two books, Pizzorusso's embodies thefirst approach, Salvi's thesecond. In P's book, Italian 'linguistic pluralism' is discussed chiefly from a juridical view-point, both historical and descriptive. Of his five chapters, the first (15-99) deals with general problems and constitutional principles as established in 1947, especially those of freedom of language choice in education and government. The following four chapters deal with the main non-Italian languages: German (101-213), Ladin-Dolomitic (215-28), Slovene (229-55) and French (257-82). P's treatment is solid, thorough, and calm, devoid of ideological bias or polemic. With S, we are in an entirely different climate. His title, 'The amputated tongues', gives a clue to his approach, which is evident from the first section, ' Chronicle ofa genocide' (7-89). In the second section, eleven chapters treat various non-Italian-speaking groups in detail. Some of these are large speechcommunities in semi-autonomous regions, e.g. French (106-22), Ladin (128-64), Sardinian, (175-204), and German (225-58); others are very small groups with no claim to any kind of political autonomy or even unity, e.g. Albanian (93-101), the Catalan of Alghero in Sardinia (102-5), or the widely separated Greek speech-islands in southern Italy (123-7). S lumps all these varieties together, imposing the same interpretation on them, no matter how divergent their situations. The uninformed reader is led to believe that the speakers of all these varieties have been cruelly oppressed, deprived of their rights by the 'linguistic imperialism' of the dominant classes, and threatened with culturalextinction. Such is, ofcourse, very far from being the case. S's presentation is biased and tendentious, and he projects a strong persecution-complex onto all the groups he discusses. His rhetoric is characterized by what I have elsewhere termed 'semantic wrenching'—e.g. genocide 'the physical extermination of an entire nation, as in Nazi gas-chambers' —* 'cultural or linguistic change'; or imperialism 'oppression , tyrannical rule by outsiders' —»· 'any situation in which one group has more prestige than another'. 762 LANGUAGE, VOLUME 54, NUMBER 3 (1978) These two books typify the two roads open to sociolinguistic study at present. We often hear it asserted that there can be no objectivity or freedom from politico-economic bias, and that all scholarship is, of necessity, politically oriented. Such assertions are false. The world around us exists in and by itself; and it can be studied scientifically, without bias, by methods which give the same results for all investigators. A politicized approach, as exemplified in Salvi's book, degrades objective science into demagogic rabble-rousing, with nothingbut harmresultingfor boththe pseudoscientist and the public whom he deceives. [Robert A. Hall Jr., Cornell University.] The dictionary of the Spanish of Texas (Spanish-English). Compiled by Roberto A. Galván and Richard V. Teschner. Silver Spring, MD: Institute of Modern Languages, 1975. Pp. vii, 102. This book was written as a supplementary dictionary to be used 'alongside' a full length lexicon of Texas Spanish, such as several which are listed in its bibliography (Appendix Q. It contains 7,000 entries, of which several thousand come from other published sources, and several thousand more from extensive field notes on Texas vocabulary and proverbs, collected by the senior compiler. Two types of entries from other sources have been excluded here: (1) those considered part of 'standard' Spanish, according to the criteria of inclusion in monolingual and bilingual dictionaries; and (2) entries already found in a number of widely circulated bilingual dictionaries. In addition, several dozen entries appearing in secondary sources, but unknown to Galván, were discarded after attempts were made to trace them in standard lexicons of Mexican Spanish. While the dictionary does not exclude all entries which might be used elsewhere in the Hispanic world, its strength lies in its authors' effort to verify each entry as Texas Spanish; thus, while this is not, strictly speaking, a dictionary of regionalisms, it is a contribution toward a much-needed description of Texas Spanish. It contains many taboo and slang words, English loans, and toponyms—updating work such as the Vocabulario español de Texas of Gilberto Cerda, Berta Cabaza, and Julieta Farias (1953). A major shortcoming of the present work results from the interaction of the criteria of entry exclusion described above with the attempt to include phonetic variants of Spanish words found in Texas. Phonetic variants are commonly included here without a definition, e.g. 'icir (var. of) decir'. In more than half the cases, no corresponding base entry (one with a definition) is included, presumably because it is 'standard' Spanish or is found in widely circulated bilingual dictionaries. But in some cases, this procedure causes confusion. Note, e.g., the following separate entries (p. 46): 'influencia (var. of) influenza'; 'inflencia (var. of) influencia'. There is no separate entry for influenza, nor are there definitions for influencia or inflencia; thus the user is left wondering whether speakers of Texas Spanish have two coincidentally similar words meaning 'a type offlu' and 'influence' (as do speakers of other dialects of Spanish), or whether inflencia is a further phonetic variant of influencia, and there is some quite different way to say 'influence' in Texas Spanish. A related problem is found in entries on pp. 1 and 43, respectively: 'abuelito -ta (slang) friend'; 'güelito -ta (var. of) abuelito -ta'. In this case, the question is whether the phonetic variant is a variant only of the slang expression, or whether it is also a variant of the standard abuelo and its diminutive, meaning 'grandfather' in Texas Spanish. A solution to such problems might have been an appendix devoted exclusively to phonetic variants in Texas Spanish, in which the rules ofentry selection were relaxed. This procedure would have been comparable to the list of proverbs in Appendix A, where the criterion of inclusion is simply that an entry be found in Texas Spanish. Such an appendix would also have complemented Appendix B, in which -ear and -iar verbs are conjugated in order to show how the e\i distinction is eliminated because of word-internal vowel sandhi, on the one hand, and hyper-correction on the other. [Sandra Pinkerton, Berkeley.] Les débuts de la lexicographie française: Estienne, Nicot et le Thresor de la langue françoyse (1606). By Terence Russon Wooldridge. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977. Pp. xxiii, 340. $35.00. Jean Nicot's Commentaires et Thresor de la ...