Content area
Full Text
96/356 Routledge Dictionary of Language and Linguistics
Hadumod Sussman Translated and edited by Gregory Trauth and Kerstin Kazzazi Routledge, London and New York, NY, 1996 xxiv + 530 pp., ISBN 0-41502225-- 8, L65.00, Routledge Reference Series
This dictionary has had a long gestation and a complex evolution. Initially the fruit of ten years' lone effort by Dr Hadumod Bussmann of the University of Munich, the first German edition appeared in 1983. When a second, completely revised edition became necessary in 1990[1], Bussmann and her team of 17 other German scholars revised, corrected and extended the texts of the first edition. This second German edition provided the basis of the present English edition.
The excellent translation and the thorough-going adaptation to British and North American terminological usage and methodological approaches were carried out by 26 translators, authors, advisers, editors, critical readers, and contributors of new linguistic articles. These came mainly from universities in the USA and Canada. Thirty-three colleagues who assisted or contributed to the German and/or English edition are also acknowledged. The Routledge editors and printers have brought all this scholarship together in an attractive, efficient, alphabetically arranged, two-column format, using a Times typeface which I found exceptionally easy and comfortable to read.
The past decade has seen publication of at least four other guides to language and linguistic terminology, all of them of high quality, by Crystal[21, Newmeyer[31, Bright[41 and Asher[5]. The impressive encyclopaedias by Bright and Asher are so compendious as to be hors concours here....