Dolnoserbsko-němski słownik. Niedersorbisch-deutsches Wörterbuch by Manfred StarostaReview by: Gerald StoneThe Slavonic and East European Review, Vol. 65, No. 2 (Apr., 1987), p. 257Published by: the Modern Humanities Research Association and University College London, School ofSlavonic and East European StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4209479 .

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REVIEWS 257

Starosta, Manfred. Dolnoserbsko-neimski stownik. Niedersorbisch-deutsches Worter- buch. VEB Domowina-Verlag, Bautzen, I985. 336 pp. M. I I.50.

THOUGH it is intended primarly for use in schools in Lower Lusatia, Manfred Starosta's dictionary will also be of great value to Slavonic philologists. It contains approximately I 6,ooo entries and aims to reflect the present-day state of the Lower Sorbian literary vocabulary as used, for example, in the weekly newspaper Nowy Casnik. Anyone using it to read texts printed before 1952 will

need to bear in mind the orthographic changes introduced that year, particularly the replacement in many words of initial h- by w- (e.g. wusoki for older husoki 'high'). The dictionary proper is preceded by thirty-two pages containing a summary of the pronunciation and the inflectional morphology of Lower Sorbian. One might have wished for a little more information on the relationship between phone and graph, in view of the fact that a fair proportion of the users of this dictionary will probably never have heard Lower Sorbian spoken. There is a discrepancy between the treatment of initial orthographic 1- before a consonant (as in t4yca 'spoon'), which we are correctly told is mute, and of orthographic w- in the same position (e.g. wrobel 'sparrow'), on which we are given no instruction, though in fact it is also mute.

The immediate predecessor of Starosta's dictionary is Bogumil Swjela's Dolnoserbsko-nemski stownik (Bautzen, I96I second edition I963). It has been out of print for some time. Only extensive use is likely to show in what respects Starosta supersedes Swjela, but one immediately obvious new facility is the provision in each entry of a reference to one of the paradigms at the beginning of the book. The attitude to Germanisms is not excessively puristic, but advice is sometimes given as to the choice between synonyms. Thus, for example mydlo 'soap' is preferred to zejpa (from Ger. Seife). In many cases, however, both Slavonic and non-Slavonic synonyms are accepted, only a stylistic distinction being made between them. For example, mantel 'coat' (from Ger. Mantel) is described as 'colloquial', while its synonym ptas'c' is noted as 'literary'. Hertford College GERALD STONE Oxford

Stolz, Benjamin A., Titunik, I. R., and Dolezel, Lubomir (eds). Language and Literary Theory. In Honor of Ladislav Matejka. Papers in Slavic Philology, 5. University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, I984. vii + 643 pp. $I 5.00.

THE variety of topics deemed appropriate in this volume in honour of Ladislav Matejka is certainly a tribute to the breadth of that scholar's interests. But, fairly inevitably, a collection containing seventeen essays on language and a further twenty-two on literary theory is going to prove something of a mixed bag, and no more than a proportion of the essays will be of relevance to any one reader.

As well as a number of papers on aspects of Serbo-Croatian dialects, on issues of textual history, and on topics such as the markedness hypothesis of Praguian linguistics, upon the scholarly merit of which the present reviewer is

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