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Giacomo Devoto--Gian Carlo Oli, Il Devoto-Oli 2008. Vocabolario della lingua italiana con CD-Rom.

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Giacomo Devoto--Gian Carlo Oli, Il Devoto-Oli 2008. Vocabolario della lingua italiana con CD-Rom, a cura di Luca Serianni e Maurizio Trifone. Florence, Le Monnier 2007. Pp.xii+3204, with Charts in the Appendix.

The recent years have been very fruitful for Italian lexicography. Among the large-scale projects Salvatore Battaglia's Grande Dizionario della lingua italiana was completed in 2002 with volume XXI, while the Tesoro della Lingua Italiana delle Origini (TLIO) (dell'Opera del Vocabolario Italiano) is making excellent progress. A decade ago the Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana Treccani published the second edition of the Vocabolario della lingua italiana, and shortly thereafter Tullio De Mauro's Grande dizionario della lingua italiana dell'uso appeared in print with rive volumes and a CD-Rom. (1) Simultaneously, the illustrious Vocabolario degli Accademici della Crusca is now available online, and other works, among them Max Pfister's Lessico etimologico italiano, are making steady progress. Within the glorious tradition of Italian lexicography one also notes a flourishing of comprehensive one-volume monolingual Italian dictionaries, suffice it to mention the Vocabolari authored and edited by Zingarelli, Sabatini-Coletti, De Mauro, Simone, and the Garzanti dictionary as the most representative. (2)

Among the large-size monolingual dictionaries, Giacomo Devoto and Gian Carlo Oli's Vocabolario della lingua italiana has been a pioneering enterprise, boasting an illustrious history that spans almost four decades. The Fiorentine publishing house Le Monnier, known for its strong commitment to Italian linguistics and lexicography, launched a one-volume edition in 1971. Its authors Giacomo Devoto, the renowned linguist and Indoeuropeanist, and Gian Carlo Oli, an expert in stylistics and semantics, composed their dictionary with the schools in mind. Their aim was broadly to engage students, teachers, and families in a dialogue with the language, an interaction that would further an awareness of the balance between tradition and innovation and keep the language alive among the young generations that continue to redefine it. Based on the previous two-volume Vocabolario illustrato della lingua italiana, (3) the new one-volume edition was to educate the mass population at a time when Italy underwent a process of strong linguistic unification. This Dizionario d'autore, with entries chosen and defined by the two authors and by specialists in various disciplines, challenged traditional lexicography with its encyclopedic orientation that included illustrations, with its emphasis on stylistic density ("spessore"), its concern for the use of the language and its purpose to unify, by accepting only few dialect words (such as Genoese mugugno, Milanese teppista, Neapolitan scippo). In their judicious selections of entries and concise definitions Devoto and Oli tried to balance the old with the new, the literature-based tradition with linguistic variety, and to present new terminologies for the education of a civil society. In his review of the first edition Gianfranco Folena spoke of a "razionale speculum della lingua d'oggi", of its non-purist nature and openness to modern society. Folena also noted Devoto's passion...

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