Sicilian-English, English-Sicilian Hippocrene Concise Dictionary (Paperback)

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Editorial Reviews

Language Notes

Text: English, Italian

Product Details

• Paperback: 148 pages
• Publisher: Hippocrene Books (June 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0781804574
• ISBN-13: 978-0781804578
• Product Dimensions: 6 x 4 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 1.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #2,762,529 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

45 of 46 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars ruined by bad editing, April 28, 2000

By	Sean Burke (Ketchikan, Alaska, United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Surprise surprise, Hippocrene Books comes out with ANOTHER dictionary that looks like it never once was looked at by anyone but the author. How they can honestly come out with a dictionary like this, that has an English entry for "eighteen" but not "eight"?

So, yes, coverage in the lexicon is weak. Moreover, the author's notion of phonetic notation is unintelligible (but could easily have been edited into shape). Gender is not noted for nouns, nor is it noted how they form the plural (as is not always predictable in Sicilian, as the author himself notes), which seriously detracts from the usefulness of the book. The notes on pronounciation (and morphology) are about as linguistically confused as three small pages can be. And the spelling isn't even consistent -- the author has a headword "libbru" (book), and elsewhere spells it "libru". If this reflects two possible pronounciations, then both should have been noted in the entry. The orthography, instead of transcribing Sicilian as a language in and of itself, too often decides to try to mangle the standard Italian writing system (which is rather insufficient to the task!) into conveying Sicilian pronunciation. This seems part of a general pattern of assuming the reader is fluent in standard Italian, which is about as useless as an assumption can be.

I've no doubt that the author put great effort into this book, and it should have fallen to editors at Hippocrene Books to point out where changes should have been made, to make it a fine dictionary. But apparently they did nothing of the sort, and so the final product ends up looking like an unusable mess.