(Best American Short Plays). Scripts for 16 short plays complete with bios on each author. Titles include: Aryan Birth * Bondage * A Couple with a Cat * The Cowboy, the Indian and the Fervent Feminist * Dreamers * The Drowning of Manhattan * It's Our Town, Too * Jolly * Little Red Riding Hood * Night Baseball * Pitching to the Star * The Sausage Eaters * Show * The Tack Room * The Valentine Fairy * Watermelon Rinds.

Osage, a language of the Dhegiha branch of the Siouan family, was spoken until recently by tribal members in northeastern Oklahoma. No longer in daily use, it was in danger of extinction. Carolyn Quintero, a linguist raised in Osage County, worked with the last few fluent speakers of the language to preserve the sounds and textures of their complex speech. Compiled after painstaking work with these tribal elders, her Osage Dictionary is the definitive lexicon for that tongue, enhanced with thousands of phrases and sentences that illustrate fine points of usage.

Drawing on a collaboration with the late Robert Bristow, an amateur linguist who had compiled copious notes toward an Osage dictionary, Quintero interviewed more than a dozen Osage speakers to explore crucial aspects of their language. She has also integrated into the dictionary explications of relevant material from Francis La Flesche's 1932 dictionary of Osage and from James Owen Dorsey's nineteenth-century research.

The dictionary includes over three thousand main entries, each of which gives full grammatical information and notes variant pronunciations. The entries also provide English translations of copious examples of usage. The book's introductory sections provide a description of syntax, morphology, and phonology. Employing a simple Siouan adaptation of the International Phonetic Alphabet, Quintero's transcription of Osage sounds is more precise and accurate than that in any previous work on the language. An index provides Osage equivalents for more than five thousand English words and expressions, facilitating quick reference.

As the most comprehensive lexical record of the Osage language--the only one that will ever be possible, given the loss of fluent speakers--Quintero's dictionary is indispensable not only for linguists but also for Osage students seeking to relearn their language. It is a living monument to the elegance and complexity of a language nearly lost to time and stands as a major contribution to the study of North American Indians.

The common names of plants often cause difficulties for translators or those engaged in international studies. Although used because they are easier for non-scientists to remember than Latin or Linnean names, one species may have several common names or one common name may be used for several species. The problem is greater for weed scientists because the confusion over common names can lead to misunderstandings over control measures or the importance of weed species. The proposal to list the common names of weeds in the European languages was made in 1972 by the Joint Panel of the Evaluation of Herbicides of the European Plant Protection Organisation, and the work continued by the Working Group on Education and Training of the European Weed Research Society. The result of their labours appears in two volumes. The first is Elsevier's Dictionary of Weeds of Western Europe which was published in 1982, since when it has been a valuable source of information on the common names and importance of weed species in the countries of Western Europe. Its companion volume is this new Dictionary of Weeds of Eastern Europe. Although several books exist which give common names of plants, there are none which have the range of languages covered in these two volumes or provide information on the importance of weed species. The new dictionary will undoubtedly prove to be as welcome and as useful as its predecessor to translators, weed/crop protection scientists, botanists, ecologists, and others.

The obvious audience for this book is professionals, scholars, and students in the recreation field. However, many of these entries relate to other fields of interest. . . . [T]his work should find a place in academic libraries supporting curricula in recreation and related leisure studies. Reference Books Bulletin The vocabulary and major concepts of the new field of recreation and leisure studies are just developing and this dictionary is the first major attempt to describe and systematize those concepts. Although university departments devoted to the study of recreation and leisure have been in existence for over half a century, there has never been a comprehensive dictionary written for the field. The concepts included in the dictionary may be grouped into four general categories. The first of these include elemental concepts--those ideas that form the intellectual bedrock of the field. Then there are theoretical concepts- scholarly models or interpretations of the patterns and processes seen in recreation and leisure. Research and methodological concepts make up the third category. while the fourth include professional concepts representing some of the basic ideas inherent in the service side of the field. Each definition is organized chronologically, emphasizing the evolution of the term and its interpretation or application. Definitions also point to links between concepts listed in the dictionary. Numerous references and suggestions for further reading are included for readers wishing to pursue a topic in more detail. Faculty and graduate students in recreation and leisure studies will welcome this first comprehensive dictionary of the field, as will the libraries of universities and colleges with a recreation and leisure studies department. The historical material and the critical review of conflicting definitions is a special feature and one that makes this book not only useful as a dictionary, but also as a reference work on state of the art ideas and concepts in the field.

This volume examines some of the ways in which dictionary use has been studied, considers the problems encountered by researchers in this field, and presents a series of experiments which explore fundamental questions concerning the use of dictionaries by learners of English as a foreign language. - Are dictionaries helpful in examinations? Does defining style affect consultation success? Do dictionaries benefit some kinds of learners more than others? How useful are illustrative examples? The author concludes with an analysis of current trends in the design of dictionaries for learners of English, and considers the possible impact of new elctronic formats on dictionary use.

Alexander Harkavy (1863-1939) is credited with almost single-handedly creating an intellectual environment conducive to Yiddish, and his trilingual dictionary is an indispensable tool for research in Yiddish language and literature. This dictionary has been a classic since it originally appeared in New York in 1925.