BiblioVault - Books about Dictionaries

The Gallaudet Dictionary of American Sign Language
Clayton Valli
Gallaudet University Press, 2021

Created by an unparalleled board of experts led by renowned ASL linguist and poet Clayton Valli, The Gallaudet Dictionary of American Sign Language contains over 3,000 illustrations. Each sign illustration, including depictions of fingerspelling when appropriate, incorporates a complete list of English synonyms. A full, alphabetized English index enables users to cross-reference words and signs throughout the entire volume.

The comprehensive introduction lays the groundwork for learning ASL by explaining in plain language the workings of ASL syntax and structure. It also offers examples of idioms and describes the antecedents of ASL, its place in the Deaf community, and its meaning in Deaf culture. This extraordinary reference also provides a special section on ASL classifiers and their use. Readers will find complete descriptions of the various classifiers and examples of how to use these integral facets of ASL. The Gallaudet Dictionary of American Sign Language is an outstanding ASL reference for all instructors, students, and users of ASL.

*Please note that this paperback edition does not include the DVD found in the hardcover edition.

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Gallaudet Survival Guide to Signing
Leonard Lane
Gallaudet University Press, 1987
Library of Congress HV2475.L36 1990 | Dewey Decimal 419.03

The Gay and Lesbian Theatrical Legacy: A Biographical Dictionary of Major Figures in American Stage History in the Pre-Stonewall Era
Billy J. Harbin, Kim Marra, and Robert A. Schanke, Editors
University of Michigan Press, 2005
Library of Congress PN2286.5.G38 2005 | Dewey Decimal 792.092273

“A superb tribute to theatrical pioneers—The Gay and Lesbian Theatrical Legacy is required reading for both theatre scholars and gay/lesbian/bisexual history aficionados. A fascinating journey awaits them all in this highly recommended volume.”

—Broadside: Newsletter of the Theatre Library Association

The Gay and Lesbian Theatrical Legacy collects in a single volume biographies of more than one hundred notable figures whose careers flourished in the years before the 1969 Stonewall Riots marked the beginning of the gay and lesbian civil rights movement in the United States. The leading lights in American theater have included innumerable individuals whose sexualities have deviated from prevailing norms, but this history has until recently been largely unwritten and unknown. This book contributessignificantly to the recovery of this history, fashioning a much fuller, more nuanced portrait of American theater as it evolved and shedding light on the influence that sexual desire may have had on professional choices, relationships, and artistic achievements.

The Gay and Lesbian Theatrical Legacy collects biographies and portraits of influential actors, playwrights, composers, directors, designers, dancers, producers, managers, critics, choreographers, and technicians who made their mark on the American theater. Its broad coverage provides an extended glimpse into lives and careers that intersected and into networks of affiliation that made theatrical history and, by extension, social and cultural history.

The late Billy J. Harbin was Professor of Theater, Louisiana State University. Kim Marra is Associate Professor of Theater, University of Iowa. Robert A. Schanke is Professor of Theater Emeritus, Central College, Pella, Iowa.

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The Georgetown Dictionary of Iraqi Arabic: Arabic-English, English-Arabic
Mohamed Maamouri, Editor
Georgetown University Press
Library of Congress PJ6826.M33 2013 | Dewey Decimal 492.770956703

The Georgetown Dictionary of Iraqi Arabic is a modernized, up-to-date dialectal Arabic language resource that promotes successful daily communication with native Arabic speakers. Students, teachers, and scholars of Arabic will welcome this dramatically overhauled edition of one of the only Arabic dialect dictionaries of its kind—establishing a new standard in Arabic reference.

This comprehensive reference focuses on conversation, emphasizing the colloquial speech of educated residents of Baghdad. The dictionary assumes familiarity with the Arabic alphabet, the standard organization of Arabic dictionaries along the triconsonantal root system, and the formation of Arabic verb forms.

• Approximately 17,500 Iraqi Arabic entries• Approximately 10,750 English-to-Iraqi entries• An increase of more than 30 percent in terms that reflect current vocabulary and usage• Provides conventional Arabic script for main entries, and organized by root, as standard for Arabic dictionaries• Employs International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) for all terms to demonstrate correct pronunciation• Offers extensive example sentences to illustrate how the Iraqi words are used• Indicates relevant parts of speech for each Iraqi entry and subentry

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The Georgetown Dictionary of Moroccan Arabic: Arabic-English, English-Arabic
Mohamed Maamouri, Editor
Georgetown University Press
Library of Congress PJ6770.26.M33 2016 | Dewey Decimal 492.77096403

The Georgetown Dictionary of Moroccan Arabic is a modernized language resource for learning and studying Moroccan Arabic that updates the pioneering Arabic dialect dictionary published by Georgetown University Press over fifty years ago. Students, teachers, and scholars of Arabic will welcome this upgraded resource, which includes key Moroccan words, to grow their vocabulary and learn more about Moroccan Arabic language and culture. Created using the latest computational linguistics approaches and tools, this etymological dictionary represents a new generation of Arabic language reference materials designed to help English speakers gain proficiency in colloquial Arabic dialects. Scholars and linguists are certain to find this complex and challenging dialect informative and useful in discussions of Arabic dialectology.

• Features over 13,000 Moroccan Arabic–English entries and 8,000 English–Arabic entries

• Provides entries in Arabic script and organized by root, as is standard in Arabic dictionaries

• Employs International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) for all terms to demonstrate correct pronunciation and allow comparison across dialects

• Includes borrowed words commonly used in Moroccan Arabic, such as those from French, Spanish, and Amazigh

• Contains extensive example sentences and an appendix showing the roots of words with prefixes, both to help learners

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Glossary of Typesetting Terms
Richard Eckersley, Richard Angstadt, Charles M. Ellertson, and Richard Hendel
University of Chicago Press, 1994
Library of Congress Z253.G57 1994 | Dewey Decimal 686.22503

Glossary of Typesetting Terms is an up-to-date reference book on the craft of typography. It organizes a dictionary and a style guide into a single, one-stop resource.

Prepared by a team of leading professionals—a designer, an editor, compositors, and production managers—this glossary will be valuable to anyone who works in publishing or printing for its definitions of typographical terms and concise treatment of typographical style.

The glossary adds important details to discussions of typography that are covered more generally in editorial style guides such as The Chicago Manual of Style. It is indispensable to anyone who prepares text for a living, including those who implement their own typesetting decisions with the aid of word-processing and page-layout software.

This manual furnishes a common technical vocabulary for specialists and nonspecialists alike. More than 900 entries provide up-to-date meanings for traditional terms like kerning,bleed, and thumbnail and definitions of new phrases like global search and replace,H & J (hyphenation and justification), and idiot file that have been developed to describe the role of computer technology in typesetting.

Eight appendixes offer additional guidance. The house style sheets of a major typesetter provide a sample checklist of items that affect the way in which words are composed into professional-quality type. Other appendixes cover families of type, the parts of a book, diagrams of the parts of a letter, coding and marking a manuscript in the precise language of typesetters, writing specifications for tables, proofreaders’ marks, and special characters.

No other reference book makes the vocabulary and practices of contemporary typesetting so accessible.

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A Glossary of Words and Phrases in the Oral Performing and Dramatic Literatures of the Jin, Yuan, and Ming
Dale R. Johnson
University of Michigan Press, 2002
Library of Congress PL2592.5.J64 2000 | Dewey Decimal 792.03

For many years, the oral performing and dramatic literatures of China from 1200 to 1600 CE were considered some of the most difficult texts in the Chinese corpus. They included ballad medleys, comic farces, Yuan music dramas, Ming music dramas, and the novel Shuihu zhuan. The Japanese scholars who first dedicated themselves to study these works in the mid-twentieth century were considered daring. As late as 1981, no comprehensive dictionary or glossary for this literature existed in any language, Asian or Western.

A Glossary of Words and Phrases fills this gap for Western readers, allowing even a relative novice who has resonable command of Chinese to read, translate, and appreciate this great body of literature with an ease undreamed of even two decades ago. The Glossary is organized into approximately 8,000 entries based on the reading notes and glosses found in various dictionaries, thesauruses, glossaries, and editions of works from the period. Main entries are listed alphabetically in the pinyin romanization system. In addition to glosses, entries include symbolic annotations, guides to pronunciation, and text citations. The result is a broadly useful glossary serving the needs of students of this literature as well as scholars researching Jin and Yuan language and its usage.

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A Grammar and Dictionary of the Timucua Language
Julian Granberry
University of Alabama Press, 1993
Library of Congress PM2451.Z5G73 1993 | Dewey Decimal 497.5

Taken from the surviving contemporary documentary sources, Julian Granberry's volume describes the grammar and lexicon for the extinct 17th-century Timucua language of Central and North Florida and traces the origins of the 17th-century Timucua speakers and their language. Originally privately published in 1987, with limited circulation, this is the only available publication on the Timucuan language. It provides full grammatical analysis and complete lexical data, and it synthesizes both linguistic and archaeological data in order to provide a coherent picture of the Timucua peoples. Granberry traces the probable historical origins of Timucua speakers to a central Amazonian homeland at approximately 2,500 B.C. and proposes that Timucua speakers were responsible for introducing ceramic wares into North America.

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A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature
Walter Bauer
University of Chicago Press, 2000
Library of Congress PA881.B38 2000 | Dewey Decimal 487.4

Described as an "invaluable reference work" (Classical Philology) and "a tool indispensable for the study of early Christian literature" (Religious Studies Review) in its previous edition, this new updated American edition of Walter Bauer's Wörterbuch zu den Schriften des Neuen Testaments builds on its predecessor's staggering deposit of extraordinary erudition relating to Greek literature from all periods. Including entries for many more words, the new edition also lists more than 25,000 additional references to classical, intertestamental, Early Christian, and modern literature.

In this edition, Frederick W. Danker's broad knowledge of Greco-Roman literature, as well as papyri and epigraphs, provides a more panoramic view of the world of Jesus and the New Testament. Danker has also introduced a more consistent mode of reference citation, and has provided a composite list of abbreviations to facilitate easy access to this wealth of information.

Perhaps the single most important lexical innovation of Danker's edition is its inclusion of extended definitions for Greek terms. For instance, a key meaning of "episkopos" was defined in the second American edition as overseer; Danker defines it as "one who has the responsibility of safeguarding or seeing to it that something is done in the correct way, guardian." Such extended definitions give a fuller sense of the word in question, which will help avoid both anachronisms and confusion among users of the lexicon who may not be native speakers of English.

Danker's edition of Bauer's Wörterbuch will be an indispensable guide for Biblical and classical scholars, ministers, seminarians, and translators.

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