Lo Vecchio, Nicholas (2020): Dictionnaire historique du lexique de l’homosexualité. Transferts linguistiques et culturels entre français, italien, espagnol, anglais et allemand. Strasbourg: Éditions de Linguistique et de Philologie (ELiPhi), 515 p.

Eleanor Rosch would probably say that dictionaries are like birds: just as some birds are more birdlike than others—think robins versus emus—some dictionaries are more dictionarylike than others. The general language dictionary might be the prototypical robin for English speakers or sparrow for French. The dictionary we have here is perhaps closer to a penguin, if we have been listening to Juliette Gréco: it swims rather than flies, being highly adapted to its environment and what it does, it does very well. Most dictionaries have lots of words. This one only has twelve. But they are keywords. They are the words that designate the concept of homosexuality, starting from Biblical sodomy through to contemporary queer. In fact there are twelve pairs of keywords, one for homosexuality, the other for the homosexual person. And in five languages. This means there are 143 different keywords, but if you look at the index, there are nearly two thousand words which are analysed. Most dictionaries are alphabetical. This one does supply an alphabetical index, but the progression is chronological and thematic. So after Old Testament sodomy we have mediaeval buggery and progress through the centuries via bardash, tribade, pederasty, saphism, lesbianism, nineteenth century uranism, inversion and homosexuality to present-day gay and queer. Most dictionaries are meant for looking up in rather than enticing the user in for a good read. The chronological/onomasiological presentation however invites the reader to explore how the concept has been constructed over the centuries in the different language communities, each new term building on the older… or calling it into question. Most dictionaries, indeed all correctly functioning dictionaries, have fields, that is a structured series of slots which are systematically filled with the same class of information: headword, pronunciation, number, gender, etc. This dictionary certainly has its fields, which differ from the conventional format, but which are just as strict. Firstly, for each major term there is an introduction explaining how the concept arose and how it spread—generally through translation—to the other language communities studied. Then come fields accounting for the development of the term in each of the languages, followed by an extremely detailed series of fields devoted to the lexical classes identified for each term: morphological precursors, adaptations from other languages by various means, shortenings, etc., and a field for follow-up discussion. Most bilingual dictionaries… and multilingual dictionaries even more so—have the primary function of providing an equivalent. Here the issue is not so much the search for an equivalent, since one of the originalities of this word field is that the concepts are to a large extent common to most European languages, as to explain how this happened. This, in general terms, is a real exception when it comes to taboo words, as the author quite rightly points out. What the dictionary does do particularly well is to highlight the many specificities typical of each language community covered. For example, it gives a very neat account of the largely complementary distribution of gay and schwul in German, a distribution which has no equivalent in the four other languages of the dictionary, though this is probably a coïncidence: Anglicism-prone Danish uses gay and bøsse in a way that is comparable with though not identical to German. Most dictionaries nowadays—the most reliable ones at any rate rely on corpora—indeed are based on corpora, and this is certainly the case for the dictionary in hand. There are in fact two main sets of corpora, primary and secondary. The latter is made up of dictionaries, historical and contemporary, and other reference works. What …