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Itzaj Maya-Spanish-English Dictionary. By Charles Andrew Hofling with Felix Fernando Tesucun. (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1997. 928 pp., introduction, 1 map, bibliography, 3 indexes. $75.00 paper.)
Christel Stolz, University of Bielefeld
The book under review is the first (and probably last) comprehensive dictionary dedicated to the documentation of Itzaj, a moribund Mayan language of the Yucatecan branch. Itzaj is spoken by a few dozen people in the Peten area in northern Guatemala. In the present situation, documenting the language before its utter extinction is a top priority. Charles Andrew Hofling has been working toward this goal together with Felix Tesucun and other native counselors since I988. The present dictionary appears second in a tripartite series, following a text collection published in 1991.
Hofling makes high demands on his dictionary: it is supposed to be of sufficient breadth and depth and to be trilingual (with Itzaj as the object language and Spanish and English as descriptive languages). Furthermore, the volume is meant to satisfy both the native speakers' need of a dictionary and the requirements of researchers interested in the language. Thus, Hofling aims quite high with his project, and I have the pleasure to report that he...