Dreamers Rise
An Open Notebook
And for those who choose the twisty road, prefer it to the straight
Let joy beat out old misery, as love will conquer hate.
 Illustration by Henry L. Stephens from The Goblin Snob (ca. 1855) | |||||||
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The following assortment of notes,
musings, proposals for future consideration, lists, and quotations is by
design doubly open: exposed to the reader, but also subject to revision,
expansion, excision in a way that a traditional written journal (or even
a blog) is not.
The Great Languages
This series was published beginning in the 1930s by Faber & Faber under the general editorship of L. R. Palmer. At least some of the volumes were still being reprinted in the late 1960s, but the series as an ongoing project seems to have been abandoned, with a number of the projected titles unissued, probably around 1960. I believe some volumes may still be in print from other publishers. The following titles were definitely published: • B. F. C. Atkinson, The Greek Language 1931The following were listed, at least as early as 1946, as being in preparation, but as far as I have been able to determine none of them were ever completed: • R. A. Crossland, The Anatolian LanguagesIn two cases (English and Scandinavian), different prospective authors are given in successive versions of the list of forthcoming volumes. Neither N. Davis nor Helge Kökeritz apparently ever completed The English Language, but Einer Haugen's Scandinavian Languages did appear, replacing Sommerfelt's. The focus of Kenneth Jackson's volume was apparently shifted, since he is assigned distinct but related topics in different versions of the list, but in any case I can find no record that his contribution was issued. Unpublished titles were still being listed as forthcoming on reprints as late as 1968, presumably because Faber did not go to the trouble of changing the plates. Of the volumes that I have managed to obtain, Elcock's Romance volume is perhaps the most easy to recommend to a non-specialist (like myself); the Spanish volume would certainly be of interest to any devoted student of the language. All of the volumes have a certain amount of abstruse philological jargon in spots, but the historical sections and examples are accessible for anyone who has an interest in the subject matter. (Forrest's Chinese Language is pretty forbidding, though, for anyone without a background in the language or in linguistics.) January 2, 2006
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