Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 1996. [Vol. 3.] Eger Journal of American Studies. (Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 23)

BOOK REVIEWS - Csaba Czeglédi: Endre Vázsonyi: Túl a Kacegárdán, Culmet-vidéki amerikai magyar szótár [Beyond Castle Garden: An American Hungarian Dictionary of the Calumet Region]. Edited and introduction by Miklós Kontra. A Magyarország-kutatás könyv-tára XV. Budapest: Teleki László Alapítvány, 1995. 242 pp

completing, many of us might never even have heard of this variety of American Hungarian. Interestingly, the motivation for Linda Dégh, the initiator of the project, to go and study the language of Hungarian immigrants in America derived from field work she had conducted among peasant communities in Hungary, collecting folk stories in Szabolcs and Szatmár. She says there was practically no family without some American connection there (127—28). This may explain why research focused on peasant immigrants who had settled in America between 1900 and 1928 and their descendants. Andrew Vázsonyi was a writer and journalist by profession. He had received training in law, philosophy, aesthetics, and psychology, and was attracted to the idea of research into the life and language of Hungarians in America through the interest he shared with his wife in folk stories (128). His broad education in the humanities and lack of that in linguistics might explain his prescriptive approach to language use and some rather unorthodox decisions he occasionally took on matters of language and lexicography. His prescriptive attitude often reveals itself in characterizations of AH as a "corrupt language" with a "distorted pronunciation" and "twisted words" (198). Any lexicographer faces the difficult task of deciding what to include and what not to include in his or her dictionary. Some arbitrariness in making such decisions is often inevitable. In Vázsonyi's case, the difficulty was aggravated by having to decide what was and what was not AH in the speech of Hungarian-Americans. Vázsonyi adopted the following principle in selecting his material: He required of words-to-be-recorded in the dictionary that they "occur in Hungarian syntax with Hungarian suffixation, etc.," but "a distortion of words as dictated by the rules of Hungarian" was not a condition of inclusion (198). There are two problems with the requirement that AH lexical items occur in Hungarian syntax. The first concerns the very notion of Hungarian syntax. Although it is obvious that English was the lexifier for AH, with the substrate language retaining much of its syntax, it is 179