Agence France-Presse in Stockholm reports on an exciting development:
The definitive record of the Swedish language has been completed after 140 years, with the dictionary’s final volume sent to the printer’s last week, its editor said on Wednesday. The Swedish Academy Dictionary (SAOB), the Swedish equivalent of the Oxford English Dictionary, is drawn up by the Swedish Academy, which awards the Nobel prize in literature, and contains 33,111 pages across 39 volumes. “It was started in 1883 and now we’re done. Over the years 137 full-time employees have worked on it,” Christian Mattsson told AFP.
Despite reaching the major milestone, their work is not completely done yet: the volumes A to R are now so old they need to be revised to include modern words. “One such word is “allergy” which came into the Swedish language around the 1920s but is not in the A volume because it was published in 1893,” Mattsson said. “Barbie doll”, “app”, and “computer” are among the 10,000 words that will be added to the dictionary over the next seven years.
The SAOB is a historical record of the Swedish language from 1521 to modern day. It is available online and there are only about 200 copies published, used mainly by researchers and linguists. The academy also publishes a regular dictionary of contemporary Swedish.
Assyrian only took 90 years… (Thanks, Trevor!)
Why 200?
This seems like a challenge to find a recent-but-now-ubiquitous Swedish lexeme that the “S” volume went to press too early to include.
Just the other day I looked up the Swedish original of The Hundred Year old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared. I wanted to find out what word was translated to English as “Yuck”. It is usch.
Another exclamation of disgust, tvi, is etymologized in English Wiktionary as “Inherited from Old Swedish tvi, of soundproofing origin.” Surely they meant sound-imitative, but I can’t guess how that mistake came about.
spitting?
Assyrian only took 90 years
A mere 81 years for the first edition of the Geiriadur Prifysgol Cymru.
The Welsh are known for their efficiency.
“And now we’re done”
But you’re not, clearly. No OED-type dictionary should ever be considered done, unless maybe it is a dictionary of a dead language. Even then, research will probably turn up more information that should be added to it.
“Why 200?”
Why any [printed copies]?
Why 200?
Possibly because only somewhat less than 200 institutions/researchers/linguists ordered a copy in advance of the print run. A few additional copies would have been printed just in case. I imagine the cost per copy is very high.
I haven’t found the official price, but I’m guessing it’s in the high thousands (in dollars/euros).
Which reminded me of the slowest-selling book ever, a Latin translation of the Coptic NT, which took two centuries to sell its 500 copies.
Which led me, incidentally, to learn of Champollion’s completed, but never published, Coptic grammar and dictionary.
“Why any?”
Before the Internet printing was the only way…
“Possibly because only somewhat less than 200 institutions/researchers/linguists ordered a copy in advance of the print run.”
Well, maybe.
It is hard to imagine that there are only 200 people who want to own it… But yes, depending on how it is distributed it may simply remain invisible to many potential buyers, and the number of copies affects the price. (they could cover the most expensive part, though, and sell it at the price of binding and paper).
@Y, the third volume of the etymological dictionary of Iranic langauges (in Russian) is $3 and 1000 copies, 2007. The sixth volume is 200 copies and 6$. Only 400-500 pages per a volume.
$4 for the second volume of Kurdish etymological dictionary by someone Tsabolov (and 800 copies, 2010).
But I suspect the paper must not be very good. I know that in the West everything works differently, but I still don’t understand how exactly. I only know prices, and they are systematically higher than this:-/
drasvi, the OED printed edition, which is comparable in size but with a much larger print run (tens of thousands, I’d guess, having been printed in 1989, before everything went online) costs $1215, or about $60/volume. Used copies of the TdLF cost go for $60/volume as well. The Swedish dictionary is 39 volumes, is a newer book, published in a small run (for rich institutions), and is presented as somewhat of a luxury item.
I would guess that the difference in book prices between the West and Russia comes primarily from the difference in the price of labor. Materials (paper, binding) and energy (printing) costs are negligible in comparison.
Assyrian only took 90 years
A mere 81 years for the first edition of the Geiriadur Prifysgol Cymru.
alas, the Groyser Verterbukh fun der Yidisher Shprakh has been stalled after 4 volumes of alef* since 1980 – a 43-year stall after 19 years of work. what has been compiled is available online in several forms, though, and you can probably run down a paper set for under $200 if you want one.
.
* which is more of the lexicon than it may appear, since all vowel-initial words are spelt with a shtumer alef – i’ve seen the 4 completed volumes described as covering 80,000 of a projected 240,000 items in 13 volumes.
But I suspect the paper
Garnik Asatrian’s review of Tsabolov, vol. 1. (or here).
Ouch!
In other words, it is useless for people who can write an etymological dictionary of Kurdish on their own?
In other words, it is useless for people who can write an etymological dictionary of Kurdish on their own?
No. It is useless for a person to write an etymological dictionary of Kurdish which is of no use to others since it contains nothing of that person’s own, but only common knowledge.
@Stu, who “others”?
Knowlege “common” among whom?
As the body of published works about a language grows, opportunities for contrubuting decent original etymologies diminish and the need and difficulty of compilative work increaces.
A lot depends on how well compilative work is done.
I don’t know the situation in Kurdish. It is possible that the situation is so bad, that “common knowlege” covers only a part of its vocabulary or is just bullshit that urgently needs attention of a specialist.
Or else it is possible that there are much better dictionaries.
Space occupied by citations is certainly not a problem for me (or anyone).
@Xerîb, by default I don’t expect much from a random etymological dictionary published in Russian. I suspected this one might be not so good. Though if compiling a dictionary is “an easy task” and a “great temptation”, I do wish more people gave in to temptation:)
____________
I’m surprised by the reviewer’s criticism.
Lane’s Arabic lexicon is just a translation of several well-known Arabic dictionaries.
All right, but was it needed? (yes). For whom? (all european students of Arabic who either don’t have those dictionaries at hand or don’t know Arabic well enough to use them. Arabic speakers clearly don’t need it). Was it done well?
Even if for some reason this dictionary is useless for specialists in Kurdish etymology, specialists in anything else and Kurds in Russia likewise, it is better to say so, without implying that the author is inflating his ego by supplying citations. It is simply not an easy task.
As drasvi indicates, scholarly books in Russian are shockingly affordable. Whenever I a friend or family member goes to Russia, I ask them to bring a whole pile of books back, but I spend less on that pile than I would on many single publications from Routledge or Brill.
Sadly, however, Russian print runs (the тираж, which is typically printed on the last page) are now tiny, with as few as 50–100 copies made of important dictionaries or monographs that scholars will want to consult for decades to come. Occasionally that is combined with poor-quality printing where the ink starts to fade or the paper begins to disintegrate within a few years. That is why I have taken it upon myself to scan a lot of the stuff that I personally use.
The lambasting Hat quotes, “all the wrong things in the dictionary under review have been produced by the author, while all the true things are what is common knowledge” describe well the etymological dictionaries of Mari and Mordvin produced by V.I. Veršinin.
It is possible that … Or else it is possible that …
@drasvi: As far as possibility goes, if anything is possible, its opposite is equally possible. It’s possible that you have not yet noticed that.
Space occupied by citations is certainly not a problem for me (or anyone)
The reviewer says half of the book consists of “unnecessary citations”. A simple counting argument shows that your claim is wrong. Unless you intend to argue that the reviewer is not just anyone.
Apparently drasvi thinks he knows better than the guy who spent a chunk of his life reading through this wretched publication and is aware of all the other, better publications.
As far as possibility goes, if anything is possible, its opposite is equally possible.
Nope. It’s possible that 2 + 3 = 5, but not that 2 + 3 ≠ 5. (I hope that helps.)
It’s possible that 2 + 3 = 5
This equation is neither possible nor impossible. It is a mathematical tautology with lipstick on.
An ought cannot be derived from an is. A can cannot be derived from an is. Nor a cannot either. Is just bees.
It was precisely in order to avoid traditional cod-modal shenanigans that I wrote “if anything is possible”.
“Apparently drasvi thinks he knows better than the guy who spent a chunk of his life reading through this wretched publication and is aware of all the other, better publications.”
@LH, I think if I need to evaluate a work and the reviewer tells me that the author’s dress is too revealing, I still know nothing about the work.
Stu:
This equation is neither possible nor impossible. It is a mathematical tautology with lipstick on.
So is “2 + 3 = 5” neither true nor false?
If it is neither true nor false this must be because, in common with tomatoes and suspension bridges, it is not truth-apt. I prefer a simpler way, in which “2 + 3 = 5” gets to be true (and a fortiori possible) and “2 + 3 ≠ 5” gets to be false: necessarily false (that is, not possible), because from it we can derive any number of contradictions.
On the other hand, if you do hold that “2 + 3 = 5” is true then it would be passing strange for you to claim that it is not a fortiori possible. And if you hold that “2 + 3 ≠ 5” is false, then you’re pretty well obliged to allow that it is necessarily false (no need establish its falseness by empirical means): that is, it is not possible.
It was precisely in order to avoid traditional cod-modal shenanigans that I wrote “if anything is possible”.
¿Qué? “If anything is possible, its opposite is equally possible.” On the face of it this can be construed at least two ways. Using proposition instead of thing for rigour:
Not only do you need to define your terms, or at least situate them in a well-known theory that defines its terms lucidly for us all (settling whether tautologies are propositions, for example), you need to avoid ambiguities of the sort I have just pointed out. If Way 1 was your way, what you gave us was a trivial truth of the sort “If 2 + 3 ≠ 5 then I’m a monkey’s uncle.” If Way 2 was your way, what you said was false.
Is there [*ahem*] a third way?
Works of reference are compiled, not written, and therefore it’s likely that whatever is original to their supposed authors is wrong.
Is there [*ahem*] a third way?
The highway. You guessed it !
Not only do you need to define … you need to avoid…
In the popular idiom, ‘n Scheiß muß ich.
My comment was a little riff on Hume’s dictamina, not a cue for the solemn tuba. “Is just bees” should have made that clear.
Not all things are propositions. Jokes, for example, are not propositions. I’ll leave it at that.
Unlike tomatoes and suspension bridges, cheeseburgers are truth-apt.
I think if I need to evaluate a work and the reviewer tells me that the author’s dress is too revealing, I still know nothing about the work.
Did you read the whole review, or just the summary bits I quoted? Because it’s a pretty damning accumulation of errors and stupidities.
@LH, no, I could not access it yesterday (I tried VPN now, and am reading).
But I still don’t like the part you quoted at all, and it is still at the level of “the dress is too revealing”.
The reviewer ascribes a moral flaw to the author.
Which I think is inacceptable.
He does so based on two observations (presence of illustrations and compilative work), neither of which is a problem.
And It is already a crazy suggestion that compiling a dictionary is an “easy task”.
It is a very difficult task. Orel and Stolbova*’s dictionary can be just Wrong, and?
If he needs moral flaws, we have Medinski.
*for some reason I tend to write Stolobova. Pleophony.
Medinski is the guy who defended a “doctoral” dissertation in history (the next degree after the “candidate” degree (PhD), avarded for significan contribution in science) where he tells that Russians used Russian “church books” while Catholics and Protestants used church books in Latin.
His next contribution is the course taught in Russian schools. Actually, he is not immoral in the aforementioned sense, he just believes that production fo a patriotic myth is what a historican should do (and believe that “the West always hated us!” is a patriotic myth) and does not have time to learn what language is used in Russian church books.
As for Tsabolov: his surname is Ossetian, his doctoral disseration is about Kurdish historical grammar.
I have no idea how good it is.
And he published a concordance and commentary to a poem by Feqiyê Teyran.
Which may explain both the interest to compilation of dictrionaries and illustrations.
“The reviewer ascribes a moral flaw to the author.”
And if not obvious, he even says that directly: “However, scholarly knowlege is regulated by certain moral and ethical…” etc.
“Nonetheless, neither this one nor any other of my works on the history of Kurdish vocabulary is every mentioned…” – Aha, I was expecting this line since the first words of the review:)
But what does he mean by calling davar “Armenian loan-word”?
Speaking of, what are the pragmatics of (ultimately Turkic btw) Russian товарищ? I had the impression that it was used but disapproved of in Communist times. Is it still used in some contexts? Is it old-fashioned?
No, it was a sign of respect for a fellow Party member in Communist times. I don’t think it’s used any more.
Oh, that’s right. Ostap Bender uses товарищ (ironically, of course), doesn’t he? I was thinking of господин.
Don’t go back in time and visit the USSR; you might get into grave trouble.
товарищ is definitely still used in Russian. My own circle of friends is fond of it. However, it is now used in a rather ironical sense among closely acquainted people and not as a respectful address to strangers. It is one of several other Communist-era terms that are still used but with changed shades of meanings. Another example is буржуй “bourgeois” which has lost the notion of class struggle and now just means “posh” or “a luxury purchase when you ought to be sticking to a budget”. Putin did recently use that in a speech with its original anti-Western meaning, though.
In spite of using Russian daily for the last nearly twenty years, I don’t think I have ever heard господин in the wild.
Don’t go back in time and visit the USSR; you might get into grave trouble.
I couldn’t if I wanted to. Time-travelers were subject to equally stringent passport checks.
@Y, that’s funny.
The word – as a form of address – became useless overnight, and this is weird:) You don’t expect a word became useless that fast, you expect yourself to keep using it for some time, until you get accustomed to some new word that replaces it.
Apparently it was marked in Soviet times (you don’t address your colleague so, and when in a movie someone says “comrades!”, then it is some passionate speech), so it was not very useful in the first place.
Nevertheless ti was the only acceptable form of formal address (mister, mistress) and when we ceased to think about ourselves as a communist society, we found that we don’t have any such word now.
The word retains the original meaning, but this usage was mostly expelled by the address.
The word remained in use in the ironical meaning, e.g. “those comrades seriously think that [some idiotic idea]” where “comrades” means “guys” – though now it is not too common.
It is derived from the […formal address] rather than [Communist…] part of [Communist formal address].
I can use gospoda “misters” in the very same sense (though I also can say “this comrade”, but never “this mister”)
@LH, the reviewer still says that mostly the dictionary is good, just compilative and i have no reason not to believe him.
For him “compilative” is a problem. Moreover, a Moral and Ethical issue.
For me it definitely is not a problem. I do not think (as he does) that etymological dictionaries are written for people who can write an etymological dictionary on their own.
I think gathering etymologies scattered in literature in one place is a much needed and difficult task (which can be done well or not so well – and from the review it is not clear if it was done well in this case).
I am grateful to people who do it , either in books or for Wiktionary!
As for the original contribution by the author, I know too little about Iranian languages (partly because it is too huge a field) to evaluate his objections. Perhaps he is right everywhere (but davar from Armenian needs clarification).
His main problem seems to be that this original contribution is found only in a small part of etymologies offered.
Yes, you have a point — I, like the reviewer, was too harsh. That is one of my weaknesses…
@LH, I’m far from insisting that it’s a good dictionary. Perhaps it is absolutely hopeless! I just expect respect to anyone who writes a dictionary.
Stu:
用一个筷子吃饭的人是饿的。
Hat:
I, like the reviewer, was too harsh. That is one of my weaknesses…
So it seems; but don’t be too hard on yourself.
I’m amazed at anyone having the sheer fortitude to compile a non-trivial dictionary at all, even as part of a team, let alone as an individual.
用一个筷子吃饭的人是饿 的。
That’s why I don’t use chopsticks.
I have a wide variety of knives and forks. I just don’t use them all on every occasion.
I’m amazed at anyone having the sheer fortitude to compile a non-trivial dictionary at all
Are you sure that fortitude is always involved ? Perhaps some compilers have no ability to do anything else.
A mathematician once told me he thinks the widespread idea is wrong that mathematicians get weird and obsessive from spending too much time bent over their formulas. He thinks that in many cases they are weird and obsessive first – then, when mathematical ability is present, they have an advantage over the competition in terms of ability to concentrate.
At least it takes a lot of time.
“from spending too much time” – appetite comes with eating, so bite the hand that feeds you!
“I would guess that the difference in book prices between the West and Russia comes primarily from the difference in the price of labor. Materials (paper, binding) and energy (printing) costs are negligible in comparison.”
@Y, the most expensive labour is that of the author…. In Russia it is: salary, grants and you can call it “self-funded” because less qualified work is better paid (because no one will do it for free).
I think it is similar elsewhere.
Printing itself… can be done in India, I think.
I don’t expect any simple answer, likely the answer is the whole system. Which also includes expectations – I suspect our prices from 90s (below the present level: as a student I could afford buying dozens books a month, at the price of beer actually (including textbooks which are getting expensive and are so over the world because the demand is not elastic and the publisher can do whatever she wants: it is not competetive market anymore)) look as some mad unrealistic utopy to Westerners just as prices in the West look just as unbelievable and unrealistic to me.
I understand the purpose differently too. E.g. I think scientific publications must be accessible to everyone curious enough to read them (first because it is your duty to share your knowlege, second because your country will benefit from that anyway: people who want to read scientific journals are not that many:)), young people in particular.
My hostility to copyright in its present form began after my freind and I spent some time discussing prices on Dostoyevsky in Arabic (weirdly very expensive) – actually, we were discussing just book prices in general, but for some reason we picked Dostoyevsky as a working example – and then her sister went to Cairo and bought a pirated Dostoyevsky for 2 Euro. Poor quality, but 2 Euro. And I realised that cheap printing does exist in Arab world.
(which per se did not mean much (except that I seriously considered printing something) but it made me review my thoughts)
@drasvi, the same holds for Farsi. Due to the country’s isolation, it just neglects copyright and sells pirated translations of all manner of 20th and 21st-century world literature. In the early years of Goodreads, young educated Iranian women made up a significant proportion of its user base, and I was amazed at how much they were able to buy and read in their own language. All kinds of European authors that were seldom translated outside their own language, were readily accessible to an Iranian readership.
Well, Dostoyevsky is hardly copyrighted. Maybe the translation itself, the cover etc.
But labour of translators is not very well paid globally (actually, if I want to see something translated to Persian or Arabic or Russian to that matter, be that a novel or a scientific monograph, I don’t see what can prevent me from funding such translations at the rate of two books a month. In the case of a monograph, there is a plenty of talented but jobless university graduates). It clearly does not affect pricing.
Incidentally, Brill and De Gruyter announced a few weeks ago they are going to merge.
I, for one, welcome etc. etc.
Oh, now instead of Encyclopaedia of Islam Online for $28 000 (unlimited) or 3k (annual) it is “full access to Brill Online Reference Works for 30 days $69.95“.
Which I think means they are trying to sell it to people, not just institutions.
Are you sure that fortitude is always involved ? Perhaps some compilers have no ability to do anything else.
“Если в мучительские осужден кто руки,
Ждет бедная голова печали и муки…”
(TIL that this is a translation of an older Latin epigram; here’s the original, with two translations into English.)
Y: Another exclamation of disgust, tvi, is etymologized in English Wiktionary as “Inherited from Old Swedish tvi, of soundproofing origin.” Surely they meant sound-imitative, but I can’t guess how that mistake came about.
Best guess: Sound-imitative is usually ljudhärmande, but it can also be ljudmålande, from måla “paint”. I guess an automated translation to English might be interfered by mål “case (law)”. It seems rare on its own in modern Swedish (but I may be very wrong), but hangs on in derivations and compounds, some of which take the meaning “evidence in court”.
In spite of using Russian daily for the last nearly twenty years, I don’t think I have ever heard господин in the wild
I have, even applied to myself, back in the 90s. It used to be applied to foreigners in formal contexts back then sometimes. Among natives it is sometimes used ironically or mockingly.
This is an etymological dictionary. Every entry is a scientific hypothesis, or a whole chain or tree of such.
Yes – plagiarism, on top of other forms of intellectual laziness.
I’m under the impression it’s used for the military sense of “comrade”, though probably not as an address.
Maybe they want to compete with the big four science publishers now…
“Yes – plagiarism, on top of other forms of intellectual laziness.”
@DM, bullshit.
Do you see references to authors of etymologies in OED?
And do you think ESSJa (Slavic langauges) is all new etymologies? Or that Derksen’s is?
Accents are Derksen’s, and his target audience I think is people working on IE etymologies.
I don’t know who are the readers of the Kurdish dictionary, but I suspect people who are not specialists in Kurdish etymology are majority of them.
And they may include, say, teachers. Such a dictionary does not HAVE to contain anything new at all.
PS I don’t understand “intellectual laziness”. Why are not you working on a dictionary? Not even you personally, all or almost all people here, including specialists in their respective areas?
“I’m too lazy for this, but I am not intellectually lazy, I’m just generally lazy”?
Such works can still be totally useful the way OED is. Maybe not to you, just to some Kurdish guy in Russia. I expect to see an assessment of its quality and not hilarious bullshit about how writing a dictioanry is an “easy task” and even a “tempatation” (which more humble specialists apparently keep resisting bnecause not only they are not “lazy” – they are also Strong Willed).
Do you see entire scientific papers copied without attribution in the OED? Asatrian claims that’s what Tsabolov did to one of his.
Unlike for e.g. Slavic (as a group and for most individual languages), there’s only one prior etymological dictionary of Kurdish (in whole or in part – it has considerable internal diversity), and it’s decades old; it is copied (mostly with attributions), and so are etymological dictionaries of Iranian as a whole. Many entries that are taken from the latter kind of source contain, says Asatrian, lots of material that is irrelevant to Kurdish and only serves to confuse in this context.
So… an etymological dictionary of, specifically, Kurdish in 2010 really ought to contain a much larger number of new etymologies and etymologies that are updated in the light of Iranist research of the last few decades.
Compiling a dictionary in this way is certainly time-consuming, but it’s not difficult. If you have a stable income and enough patience, you can do it; no intellectual effort is required. Not everyone has enough patience, but I do, and I’m clearly not the only one.
@DM, the author and his reviewer aside, accounting for Zazaki and Gorani forms in an etymological dictionary must not be very trivial task:/
Same for Laki and everything.
It seems in USSR it was just “Kurdish language”, and I suspect Gorani-Zazaki was included…
DM: Compiling a dictionary in this way is certainly time-consuming, but it’s not difficult. If you have a stable income and enough patience, you can do it; no intellectual effort is required.
I’m surprised that you would say that. One can do a bad job with little effort, but ideally, a lot of critical thinking is required here. You need to recognize typos and obvious mistakes. You need to know the newer research, but newer etymologies might not be better than older ones, and you need to apply knowledge and judgment there. And, you’re bound to come up with entirely new etymologies as you immerse yourself in the material. It would be at least comparable to preparing a critical edition of a piece of literature. Even a certain retired copy-editor might tell you how non-mechanical and intellectual his craft is, as well.
I do not deny existence of such a thing as intellectual laziness.
But I also consider Briggs’s logarithm tables a difficult and important contribution in science. One of the most important works.
“What seems to be missing from these accounts, however, is any real integration of variation among the Kurdish “dialects” (by now widely thought to comprise at least 2–3 languages).”
@DM (your link), yes.
“Unlike for e.g. Slavic ….there’s only one prior etymological dictionary of Kurdish …. and it’s decades old”
I can see the difference, but I don’t understand what follows from this. I think that gathering existing etymologies is a good thing, not bad. Contributing your own etymologies is a good thing too. Do you mean that in Kurdish it is easier to invent something new? Do it then!
But I repeat that readers are mostly people who are not specialists in Kurdish etymology. If this dictionary is useless to you personally, then it is like a fashion magazine: useless to you personally but useful for some other group of people.
Someone baked an enormous cake and presented it to you and you hate cakes. What do you do? Lecture her about intellectual laziness? Baking it is at worst waste of time.
That’s where “in this way” does heavy lifting: Asatrian says Tsabolov does not know the newer research well, has applied very little judgment, and has come up with a surprisingly small number of new etymologies (…all of which, says Asatrian, are wrong; they do look rather unconvincing as he presents them).
The book is clearly not intended for a general audience. The entries are neither in Arabic script (as used in Iran and Iraq) nor in the extended Atatürk orthography used in Turkey and Syria nowadays; they’re in a scholarly transcription with macrons and other diacritics that have never been in actual Kurdish use outside the ivory tower. I think it is intended mostly for comparative Iranists – like the author and the reviewer.
Sorry, I should have put that into words yesterday.
@DM, there are many Kurds in USSR, I think they are a part of the audience.
It is a scientific edition, which means it must be usable from the perspective of linguists and philologists as well.
Which does not mean that authors do or should not think about other users of etymological dictionaries, who are usually very numerous (whoever Derksen intended his Slavic dictionary for – for me it is not very usable, because it does not contian references – it is now one of main sources of Wiktionary. My school teacher recommened Vasmer to me when I asked her where I can look up etymology of Russian words).
Author can think of anyone, the ‘scientific’ status only sets a lower boundary on its usability by specialists. “Specialists” technically include any linguist who is curious about Kurdish (for a linguist it is enough:-)), any philologist interested in Kurdish literature, and not only all sorts of Iranists, but also adjacent linguists.
But I’m not saying it is good. I’m saying that ascribing moral flaws to the author (because the dictionary is compilative) is inacceptable and I can’t trust the reviewer.
Zazaki and Gorani: it does not seem that people are ready to say something definite about their relative position wrt. to Kurmanji/Sorani/Southern Kurdish., namely (1) what languages also descend form Kurmanji-Gorani-Zazaki MRCA (2) what are retentions and what came with contact (with whom). In other words, to reconstruct a meaningful history of vertical and horisontal relationships
of everything in Iranian;-(.At least I don’t see anything definite in literature.
I have an impression that in Soviet “Kurdology” they were considered dialects of Kurdish (perhaps on sociolinguistical grounds) but without much confidence. I don’t know what are implications for a dictionary: I suppose it does not mean one can simply exclude Gorani material. And it looks like a problem of the field as a whole.
Ambling through Wikipedia I find that Pelle Holm, SAOB editor 1942–57, was youngest of eight siblings; in birth order they were:
Albin Bertrand Carl David,
Evelyn Femi Gotton Henrietta,
Imri Johan Knut Lamuel,
Maria Nanna Othilia Persis,
Quintus Rurik Sten Ture,
Uno Vitus Xerif Yngvar,
Zebi Århild Ädla Ödevi, …. and
Per (Pelle) Uno Gustaf Valentin.
It was destiny. The youngest child, deprived of alphabetization, overcompensates by alphabetizing… The World!