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
instance of spelling pronunciation (199). The initial [}] in AH stritt is very likely not a result of the combined influence of the spelling of English street and the phonetic value ([f]) of the letter s in Hungarian. There are varieties of American English in which the initial sound in words like street, strong, straight ; etc. is considerably palatalized into a [jl-like sound with the effect that this variant of /s/ may very easily .have been perceived by Hungarians as a "Hungarian [J]," for which they may have substituted the phonetically closest Hungarian consonant, pronounced in words like strandtáska ('beach bag') . It is often equally difficult to identify the source of an AH word on an intuitive basis. Vázsonyi himself might have suspected that the AH verb faniz meaning "'tréfál vkivel'" (72) may not have been a direct loan of make fun, which has a similar meaning in English. Thus, the query after the model expression in the entry of faniz probably has a different function than in the entry of bréráj. In the latter, it seems to indicate the uncertain origin of the word, but in the former it is very likely an indication of the compiler's uncertainty concerning the way the model word should be given. The expression make fun, given as the model for the AH headword faniz, does have a similar meaning but it quite obviously cannot have been the model for the AH word. As a matter of fact, there was probably no direct model for this word at all, but it may have been derived language internally from the AH word fani, meaning 'funny'. One must also be careful with the semantic characterization of AH words. The meaning of AH diferál is, quite simply, incorrectly given in the dictionary. The examples in the entry clearly show that diferál does not mean '"különbözik"' ('differ', 'be different') but that it means 'makes a difference' ('számít', 'fontos', 'nem mindegy'). Consider these examples in the entry of diferál: Az nem diferál nekem (That makes no difference to me', cf. Standard Hungarian (SH) Az nekem nem számít), Száz dollár, az már diferál ('A hundred dollars —that makes a difference', cf. SH Száz dollár, az már számít) . Similarly, AH diferensz, diferenc also do not only mean '"különbség"' ('difference') as in Ötezer dollár a diferenc (The difference is five thousand dollars', cf. SH Ötezer 181
