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Dictionary Review DICTIONARIES OF REPTILES
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Author: Murray Wrobel ISBN: 0-444-51499-6 Publisher: Elsevier B.V.Europe, Middle East & Africa:Linacre House, Jordan Hill Oxford OX2 8DP, Regno Unito UK US & Canada: 11830 Westline Industrial Drive St. Louis, MO 63146, USA Publication date: 2004 Price: €150.00 / US$ 165.00 Languages: Latin, English, French, German and Italian Number of pages: 758 Elsevier’s Dictionary of Herpetological and Related Terminology Author: David C. Wareham ISBN: 0-444-51863-0 Publisher: Elsevier B.V. Publication date: 2005 Price: €85.00 / US$ 93.50 Languages: English Number of pages: 240
Let's not mince words:
within a few months of each other, Elsevier has published two impressive
volumes, further enhancing its primacy. First,
Murray Wrobel's latest. Quoting www.elsevier.com
and the leaflet, it covers the "names of orders, families, genera
and species of reptiles of the world". Considering
that there are 8,240 species of reptiles, from worm lizards to turtles1,
Wrobel's 8,826 lemmata seem to translate into a really exhaustive
recueil. As a substance test, I turned to an old quest and went
hunting for dragons. Not the mythical ones, but the family Agamidae,
subfamily Agaminae, genus Draco, the insectivore flying dragons of SE
Asia,.The most up-to-date listing, compiled by McGuire and Heang in
2001, included 33 species. Wrobel achieves a sound 20/33 (60%).
D. quadrasi, palawanensis and mindanensis may be absent, but
every flying dragon of consequence is listed from D. maximus, the great
flying dragon (8 inches long!), to D. taeniopterus, or Thai flying dragon,
a most refined mini-glider with 2-inch wingspan. Taking advantage of
a great zoological site, www.omne-vivum.com, and its extensive
English database, I obtained the following table:
Looking at the pairing choices for dragons, not all languages were created equal. Wrobel offers 9 German translations out of 20 Latin headwords, 10 French renditions, but not one drago volante. This distribution is extreme, but with less than 800 pairings, Italian is somewhat underrepresented, compared to about 2800 names in German and about 2500 in French. Before decrying the neglect of the only language capable of producing the immortal "La liscia biscia sull'erba striscia ed indi poscia essendo moscia alza la coscia e piscia2", we must recognize that one of the best Italian sites in the field, www.serpenti.it, doesn't do much better. It offers 543 names of species in both Latin and English and only 7 Italian equivalents. Specifically:
If we verify the most common Italian snakes, Wrobel does even better:
Here and elsewhere relevance is the key. There isn't one major poisonous and non-venomous snake, lizard, croc or turtle that doesn't have its Italian (often multiple) appellations. With a perfect Zen shift, this strength is also the dictionary's only minor weakness. As I had suspected in reviewing Wrobel's previous work, the Dictionary of Amphibians again by Elsevier, no distinction is made between Italian language and Italian koiné. I cannot say why the Sicialian Vèpra is offered together with the Calabrese Vipre as Italian names of the vipera comune, the shy Viper aspis.In order to properly follow the dialectal approach, the entries should be labeled according to the region and/or the linguistic group [exactly as Wrobel does for English and French variants] and the assemblage should be methodical. While I enjoyed finding Bergamo's bèssa as one variant of the feisty Natrix natrix or European grass snake, I cannot justify the exclusion of the Venetian bixa, the Milanese bissòn and the Campidanese tzerpi.This minor methodological flaw is typified by three of the many Italian names of the once common swamp turtle: galana d'acqua, tartuca stizziata and tartuca do sciumi. The first, although not Italian, is of unknown and perhaps unknowable origin, and the latter two seem to belong to the Central-Western Sicilian group ("sciume" means river in and around Enna and "stizziato" means spotted there, in Trapani and elsewhere). Alas, if this is the case, then the partitive must be "du" instead of "do". Still, this is the only typo I found in the whole book, and even the Italian issue is a mere peccadillo. In reality and by all accounts, Wrobel has produced another finely crafted opera mirabilis. *** While a long search for Murray Wrobel's background has only produced a waif-like fashion model, the title of Compiler and a well-known association with Dr. Geoffrey Creber, editor and University of London paleobotanist, we know from the start that David C. Wareham, the former Curator of the Cannon Aquarium and Vivarium at the Manchester University Museum is the quintessential breeder. This Elsevier's monolingual gem, based on a previous work, Reptile and Amphibian Keepers Dictionary (Blandford Press: 1993), roams the whole field of herpetology. Please ignore the leaflet and its gloomy audience of "amateur hobbyists faced with … intimidating scientific terms" and "trained zoologists who may sometimes have doubts over the exact meaning of a particular term" (short of politicians, do you know any other professional hobbyists? How well trained is a zoologist who does not know his/her own jargon?). Go straight to the book instead, and marvel. It covers external features of reptiles and amphibians, herpetological families, selected bibliographies, biological processes, herpetological jargon and acronyms, and a bevy of anatomical, ecological, toxicological, veterinarian and animal behavioral terms, with a grand total of over 3100 headwords and definitions, all carefully cross-referenced. Pending the reprint of Harvey B. Lillywhite's Dictionary of Herpetology, expected from Krieger Publishing Company in early 2006, and deprived of the 1964 seminal work with the same title by James A. Peters, I tried to put in context Wareham's true achievement using the following references: S. Brandolin Caraffa's (ed.) Dizionario di Zoologia, published in Milan by Rizzoli in 1987, and the equally trusted R.S. Hine /M.C. Fontana's (ed.) Enciclopedia Oxford di Veterinaria, the 1992 Muzzio's Italian version of Oxford's Concise Veterinary Dictionary; plus a few relevant Web sites such as www.kingsnake.com/toxinology, www.embl-heidelberg.de, www.arbec.com, www.uromastix.it and www.cortland.edu. Randomly skipping along:
3 misses out of 22 lemmata equal 86% overlap. If this weren't remarkable enough, consider page after page of surprises, some delightful, some sinister: froggery, a gathering of frogs; rhumba, a gathering of rattlesnakes; meristic, of or relating to countable structures of an organism; quincunx, a group of five objects arranged in a rectangle or square, with one object at each of the four corners and a fifth in the center; jubal or the scales behind the head of the Eumece skink; jugal, or the scales below the crocodile's eyes; fuzzy, a new born mouse or rat that has just started to grow its fur; and pinky, a new born mouse or rat that has yet to grow its fur. 51 entries are dedicated to practitioners of note. It is a true herpetological Ghota, covering a span of three centuries, from Linnaeus to Albert and Anna Wright. The very best and brightest in the field is introduced with a touch so genteel it borders on reverence. I had to smile reading the entry about George Jan, a relatively famous Italian zoologist, who co-founded in 1838 and was the first director of the Natural History Museum of Milan. Giorgio, born Georg some two centuries ago, wouldn't have minded the French twist. On the contrary, he would have been the first to herald this dictionary and its author. 1 I am not entering into the diatribe over Elapidae and Hydrophiidae currently raging among herpetologists. I do not care whether death adders and sea snakes are in the same family or not. I am just glad to live on the opposite side of the planet from both clades. 2 The smooth snake slithers on the grass and thereafter, being floppy, lifts its haunch and pees [sic!]. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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