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
equally clear that the syntax of AH was not left intact by English. Thus, the syntactic phenomena of AH are often hard to characterize specifically either as Hungarian or as English. Indeed, AH often exhibits syntactic properties of both languages, which is evident from data recorded in the dictionary, such as, for example, Csak akrosz a striten voltak tőlem (They were across the street from me') (s.v. akrosé) . This is like English and unlike Hungarian in that it contains a prepositional phrase (akrosz a striten), and it is like Hungarian and unlike English in that the noun phrase complement of the preposition is inflected for case. The principles of determining which language a particular idiom is a dialect of and the principles of determining whether a particular idiom is to be regarded as a dialect of some language or a separate language are far from clear-cut. Language boundaries tend to be determined partly on arbitrary grounds and, only too often, the linguistic principles are "supplemented" with political, geographic, cultural, and perhaps other linguistically irrelevant considerations. We must, in this respect, give credit to Andrew Vazsonyi for admitting that the selection was carried out on the basis of rather "subjective" criteria and assumptions. It may not have been the best decision on Andrew Vázsonyi's part to let Gyula Décsi dissuade him from employing phonetic representations in the dictionary entries. Vázsonyi admits that the pronunciation of words was a consideration in deciding what should and what should not be included in the dictionary. He had decided, for instance, to ignore "English words which were pronounced correctly, without Hungarian suffixes by a fluent speaker of English whose English was perhaps even better than his or her Hungarian" (197). It goes, again, to Andrew Vázsonyi's credit that at least he honestly admits that "the selection [was] to a certain extent subjective. You simply feel whether [a particular word] was used as an element of Pidgin-Hungarian or in quotation marks, so to speak" (197). Intuitive speculation about AH pronunciation is dodgy. A more careful analysis of the pronunciation of AH words and their English models might have revealed, for example, that stritt is probably not an 180
