New eBook Recommendation: Small Dictionaries and Curiosity

Each week recent purchases are placed on the new book displays inside the library, and eBooks are made immediately available to use. You can view and subscribe to the New Library Books list online. For instructions on how to borrow an eBook by downloading it; check out our eBook LibGuide. Some eBooks require logging in with your JCU username and password; additional software will need to be installed to download books to a digital bookshelf. Most eBooks can be read online without downloading extra software.

 A book title of interest is:

Small Dictionaries and Curiosity: Lexicography and Fieldwork in Post-Medieval Europe by John Considine

An extract from the publisher states:
Small Dictionaries and Curiosity is a contribution to the history of lexicography, which gives an account of the first European dictionaries and wordlists of minority languages and dialects, from the end of the Middle Ages to the early nineteenth century. These wordlists were collected by people who were curious about the unrecorded or little-known languages they heard around them. They come from the whole of Europe, from the British Isles to the Ottoman Empire, and from the Basque country to the eastern parts of European Russia. Between them, they document more than forty language varieties. The book gives an account of about ninety of these dictionaries and wordlists, some of them single-page jottings and some of them full-sized printed books, paying attention to their content and their context alike. Its perspective is not only that of the history of linguistics, but that of the cultural history and the intellectual history of Europe.

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