Introduction

Personal names could be used to trace a person’s socio-historical background, including ethnic identity. Traditionally the Javanese people named their children using the Javanese language. Later, the phenomenon showed there was a new trend in naming. Arabic began to massively adopted as the elements in the personal name. This paper aimed to describe the trend of the naming system on Javanese people which beginning to switch from the Javanese to Arabic. This article used corpus data method. Data obtained from the Javanese people name corpus of data Administration System (SIAK) administered by the Civil Registry Service Office in Klaten, Jawa Tengah. The Arabic name then compared with the Javanese to determine the differences in naming system and it’s reference. The results show there is a huge number of Arab intergenerational name. Modern parents tend to name their children using Arabic words. These efforts are deployed in actualizing self-identify as a Muslim. The Javanese people now prefer to highlight their identity as part of Moslems than the Javanese.

<p>In the present report we will focus on the analysis of microtoponyms of Bobrovniki (Babrowniki) village and its surroundings. The village is in Ostrovets (Astravets) district (Republic of Belarus, Grodno (Hrodna) region), north-western part of which borders on the Republic of Lithuania. This area is dominated by flat terrain, which, of course, influenced the system of names of geographical objects.</p><p>Microtoponyms are divided into 2 groups:</p><p>1) names of onomastic origin, which amounted to 53 % of the total number of microtoponymic units;</p><p>2) names of apellative origin, which amounted to 47 % of the total number of microtoponymic units collected by us.</p><p>In the first group of names we have distinguished the units, formed from the stems of official personal proper names, their spoken varieties and place names. Microtoponyms motivated by personal names are especially well represented.</p><p>In the second group of names we have found the names, formed from common nouns. The study of the structural organization of the names of small geographical objects of the village Bobrovniki and its environment showed, that names simple in their structure are more common than composite ones.</p><p>Origin of microtoponyms is characterized by heterogeneity. Of course, most of the names come from the ancestral Belarusian stems and roots – lexemes used in the Belarusian language from the times of Proto-Slavic, East Slavic period, id-est Belarusian own words. But there are detected microtoponymic units, formed by borrowed names as well. Among these microtoponyms the names of the Polish and Lithuanian descent have been recorded.</p><p>Microtoponymic units in the structure of which the suffixes that are typical of the Lithuanian language have been found:-uny- (-un-), rising to the Lithuanian -ūnai;- ishki- dating back to the Lithuanian -iški, -iškė, -iškis, -iška;-oyti (from Lithuanian -aičiai and -aitis).</p><p>In the study of this area there were also recorded microtoponymic units in the structure of which an element of Lithuanian stems has been detected.</p><p>Our material collected 24 % of the total number of names of units, that were formed under the influence of Polish and Lithuanian languages. Thus, it is safe to continue to study MICROTOPONYMY of Ostrovets area, and in particular Bobrovniki village and its surroundings. In this area, common names of small geographical objects that appeared in the Belarusian dialects under the influence of neighbouring languages are wide spread.</p>

У раду се истражује херојско грчко име Трасимед (Θρασυμήδης) и његова дистрибуција као личног имена у хеленском свету. На богатом антропонимијском материјалу из различитих делова грчког света анализирају се могући разлози за давање овог херојског имена смртним људима. Име Трасимед је као нелеидско (име једног од Несторових синова) било прихватљиво нарочито Јоњанима, одакле се може тумачити и његова популарност у Атици, али и у другим јонским крајевима: на острвима у Егејском мору и у малоазијској Јонији. Херојско име Трасимед је, дакле, као лично име могло да буде давано потомству са јасном свешћу да је херојско и нелеидско, али се његова популарност у Атини, одакле долази далеко највише потврда у класичном периоду (V–IV в ек п ре н . е.), може најпре објаснити самим његовим значењем и очекивањима од носиоца имена, јер се као и остала именска образовања изведена од придева ϑρασύς (у значењу „храбар, одважан, дрзак, неустрашив“) односи на особине које треба да красе успешног ратника и државника. Управо имена типа Θρασυ- као да веома добро одговарају атинском духу класичне епохе, јер одражавају оне особине грађана које су у демократском друштву биле нарочито на цени – одлучно и енергично поступање и спремност на жртву за опште добро. С друге стране, изузимајући Атику, херојско име Трасимед је као лично име највише заступљено у антропонимији острва Родоса. То не треба да чуди, јер је реч о имену које има панхеленски карактер, а Родос је као богати трговачки полис, нарочито у хеленистичком периоду, одржавао живе економске и политичке везе са готово свим хеленским и хеленизованим заједницама на широком простору Медитерана. Разлози за популарност имена можда стоје у вези и са „проналажењем сродства“ (συγγένεια) Рођана са оним Хеленима који су, по стандардима и укусима хеленистичке епохе, могли бити сматрани Нелејевим и Несторовим потомцима, а то су у периоду од IV века пре н. е. били, пре свих, Месењани. Овим претпостављеним историјским и псеудоисторијским везама између Рођана и Месењана би се најпре могле објаснити честе потврде имена Трасимед, па и других нелеидских имена (Нестор, Антилох, Пејсистрат) као личних имена на острву Родосу, посебно у хеленистичком периоду.

The chapter deals with the link between names and three notions in the social world: Self, identity, and conflict. Dealing with three categories of names: personal names, toponyms or place names, and code-names, this study starts from the assumption that it is the symbolic meanings of names, rather than their indexicality, that make them suitable to investigate from a sociolinguistic perspective. In identifying and analysing these meanings, the chapter uses a variety of data, including name pools, web-based materials, self-report data and literary compositions. Two modes of analysis will be applied in this chapter. Marco-level analyses will be provided to outline the major themes in names and naming from the twin perspectives of identity and conflict. These analyses will be augmented with the micro-level deconstruction of selected data to show the multi-layered nature of these perspectives.

INTERACTION OF LITHUANIAN PERSONAL NAMES Summary The article examines the three layers of the origin of Lithuanian personal names, i. e. the layer of the old national onomastics, the layer of personal names brought by Christianity and the layer of nicknames, and the interplay between these layers. The intrusion of Christian names into the old system of two-stem personal names and the impact of the latter on Christian names is highlighted, as well as the interaction between the Christian onomastics and that of the origin of nickname. Hybrid forms are also discussed.

Snöfrid aus dem WiesentalDaoist Themes in a German Children's Book Timo Dittrich (bio) The German writer Andreas Schmachtl, well known for his children's books starring small animals—notably a little white mouse called Tilda Appleseed, whose stories are now an animated TV series—recently published a new series, Snöfrid aus dem Wiesental (Snöfrid of Meadow Valley) (2015; 2016; 2017).1 Click for larger view View full resolution The books feature a furry creature that resembles a marmot and is about knee high. Its name Snöfrid designates the species, but because Snöfrids are so rare, it also serves as his personal name. The creature lives in the far north of the planet, in an area called Meadow Valley on the slopes of a mountain under a rock. Snöfrid spends his days enjoying life, eating oats, and foraging for berries. Occasionally he helps himself to some milk in the nearest human village. [End Page 199] Many aspects of this creature resemble Daoist themes, especially those related to immortals or transcendents (xian 仙). Many stories in ancient China, notably collected by Ge Hong 葛洪 (283-343) in his Shenxian zhuan 神仙傳 (Traditions of Divine Transcendents; trl. Campany 2002), tell about their endeavors: they usually lived as hermits removed from society, were immune to heat and cold, exercised magical powers far beyond those of mere mortals, and interacted in often rather eccentric ways with ordinary society. These characteristics also apply to Snöfrid. He lives on a remote mountain, withstands the cold, displays power over animals and the elements, and interacts with others without any status constraints. In addition, he also embodies various other Daoist themes, such as a closeness to nature, free and easy wandering, sitting in forgetfulness, and more. It is not entirely surprising that Daoist themes are essential in a children's book. After all, in the Daoist classics, children are as close to the natural state as is humanly possible, able to be active for long hours without tiring and open to free and clear perception, quite free from societal constraints. A case in point in a modern context is the experiment run by the Washington Post: one of the world's top violinists played at 7:51 a.m. on a Friday morning in the arcade of a Metro Station in Washington, DC while dressed as a street performer. Of the 1,097 passers-by, only seven listened for more than a minute, two appreciated the skill and stayed as long as they could, while one person recognized the performer and stayed for the rest of the performance. No one stayed for more than nine minutes. And yet, each and every child who walked past wanted to stay on and listen. While the adults were too busy, the children exhibited an unperturbed curiosity, open to the wonders of life (Cline 2015, 180). The Hermit Life Snöfrid, too, has this quality. He is a little furry animal, about a foot tall who lives as a hermit under a boulder on a mountainside, a good distance from the nearest human village. He enjoys nothing more than to be left alone and rarely encounters anyone, not even another Snöfrid, who are generally quite rare (Schmachtl 2015, ch. 1). The hermit life echoes the proto-Daoist tradition of the masters of methods (fangshi 方士), forerunners of the school of Numinous Treasure [End Page 200] (Lingbao 靈寶) who stayed away from society to pursue the path of immortality. Living far away from society, they were "unlike any other class of being" (Campany 2009, 49), quite like the Snöfrids. However, as Robert Campany points out, if they really had nothing to do at all with society, how come we know about them? In ancient China, stories about them circulated in society and were collected by people who were either practitioners of the arts of transcendence or had seekers in their family. In his preface to the hagiographies about immortals, Ge Hong mentions that he, too, collected existing works (Campany 2002, 99). In that sense, a historical claim is made, namely that these aren't simply his inventions. The same holds true for the older Liexian zhuan 列仙傳 (Arrayed Biographies...

The article mainly traces the etymology of Welsh personal names. Welsh derives from Brittonic, the native Celtic language of Britain at the time of the Roman Empire. It has emerged in a recognizable form almost in the VI century, though until the XII century – just like its sister languages Breton, Cornish and Cumbric it can be also considered a Brittonic dialect. The personal name systems of all these sister languages were so similar in the Low Middle Ages that they could be considered more as Brittonic personal names, rather than simply a Welsh phenomenon. Welsh personal names have surely fallen under the influence of political changes. Starting with a mixture of original Celtic and adopted Roman personal names, the Welsh increasingly adopted English names after the conquest. A significant return to native personal names only took place in the XIX century after the Welsh cultural revival.

Editor's Note John A. Erickson It is with great sadness that I report that Anthropological Linguistics has lost two valued members of our publishing team at Indiana University over the past year–first, Raymond J. DeMallie, an associate board member, emeritus professor in the Department of Anthropology, and former co-director of the American Indian Studies Research Institute, who passed away in April 2021, and then, shortly afterwards, our editor, Douglas R. Parks, also emeritus professor in the Department of Anthropology and former co-director of the Institute, who passed away in May 2021. While not unexpected, their deaths have been a profound loss to their fields of research and to the publication of studies on Native American languages and cultures. Having taken on the editorship of Anthropological Linguistics in the early 1990s, Doug was committed to reinvigorating the mission of the journal originally established by Florence ("Flo") Voegelin in 1959, by publishing studies of endangered and poorly documented languages from around the world, and especially research on Native American languages and cultures. It was shortly thereafter that he hired me to work on his own Native American language projects after I had returned from a year and half of fieldwork overseas as a graduate student in Central Asia. Before long, Doug then hired me as managing editor of the journal, a role in which I have continued to this day, while also finishing my Ph.D. and pursuing my own research interests at Indiana University. It is thus with mixed feelings of sadness and renewed commitment that I have agreed to take on the role of acting editor-in-chief at Anthropological Linguistics pending the appointment of a new editor. Hence, the mission continues, while the memories that remain will be shared in obituaries for both Doug and Ray in forthcoming issues. [End Page 1] John A. Erickson Acting Editor-in-Chief Copyright © 2021 Trustees of Indiana University

This paper explores the tripartite relationship of names, languages and cultures focusing on the Botswana society of Southern Africa. Naming is a universal process, but its basic details are unique as they reflect on the cultures and traditions of specific societies. Most African societies, including the Botswana one, have rich cultures that yield largely lexically transparent and communicative names. This paper explores how Botswana’s culture and traditions influence its naming system and how consequently the system preserves Setswana cultural practices and the Setswana language. The study uses qualitative data from questionnaires and oral interviews carried out in the villages of Molepolole and Mahahalapye in Botswana. The paper is situated within the fields of socio-onomastics and social semiotics which reveal how names are crafted from the relationships that societies have with their cultures and languages. The paper concludes that Setswana personal names are archives and semiotic resources of Botswana’s political, economic, and social practices such as chieftainship, farming and marriage.

The notion of sexist language, or sexism in language, is, as far as I know, relatively recent. It appears to have been elaborated within the feminist movement in the last few decades.2 The proponents of this notion sometimes place it within a more general philosophical context consisting of assumptions derived from Nietzsche, Freud, Heidegger, Lacan, Althusser, etc., and sometimes invoke, from a more specifically linguistic viewpoint, what is known as the 'Sapir-Whorf hypothesis'. This label refers to ideas about the relation between language and thought which belong to a tradition going back at least to Humboldt, have been discussed by one of the most acute linguists of our century, Edward Sapir, and have found a more extreme expression in the work of B. L. Whorf, an original and eccentric thinker, who was not a professional linguist (he trained as a chemical engineer, and worked for an insurance firm). Studying American Indian languages, and contrasting them with what he called Standard Average European, Whorf came to the conclusion that languages may embody different views of reality, and that, for instance, Einstein's theory of relativity would be more easily formulated in Hopi (an American Indian language, of the Uto-Aztecan group, spoken in Arizona) than in German. The fact that the theory of relativity was actually expressed in German and not in Hopi does not make Whorf's points less stimulating.

Reviewed by: Rearranging the Landscape of the Gods: The Politics of a Pilgrimage Site in Japan, 1573-1912 Nathalie Kouamé Rearranging the Landscape of the Gods: The Politics of a Pilgrimage Site in Japan, 1573-1912. By Sarah Thal. The University of Chicago Press, 2005. 409 pages. Hardcover $56.00/£39.50; softcover $22.50/£16.00. After having, as she believed, left the isle of Shikoku for good some years ago, this reviewer finds herself returning there unexpectedly. The occasion is the publication of Sarah Thal's fine study of the political and religious history of the Konpira-Kotohira shrine (Mt. Zōzu, Kagawa prefecture). Thal's study is notable in more ways than one. The author establishes her problematic with convincing logic and clarity and supports her thesis with solid evidence. Her aim is to present "a general pattern in the transformation of gods not just in Shikoku, but throughout Japan, indeed, the world" (p. 5), in other words, a model that can account for the manner in which the interests and actions of religious professionals, politicians, intellectuals, and ordinary believers influence the evolution of religious cults. The history of Mt. Zōzu, Thal holds, shows how its gods were literally shaped over the centuries by the priests and monks who lived on the site, by the local leaders who exercised authority over Sanuki province, and by representatives of national-level institutions (e.g., Mt. Kōya, the imperial court, the shogunate), as well as by intellectuals and ordinary believers from various corners of Japan. All contributed to the ideological construction, deconstruction, and reconstruction of the [End Page 120] deities of Mt. Zōzu that took place under the influence of a variety of economic, political, and religious interests. In short, the history of Mt. Zōzu, for several centuries the home of Konpira, a deity originally from India, is a rather tortuous one! Rearranging the Landscape of the Gods guides the reader through eight centuries of the labyrinthine history of this religious site and the various beliefs and schematizations connected with it. Starting out in the thirteenth century as a modest hermitage and a small temple devoted to Kannon, Mt. Zōzu grew eventually to become in the Tokugawa period a magnificent and opulent complex devoted to the worship of the divinity Konpira, and then, from the Meiji Restoration onwards, a place enshrining the kami Ōmononushi. For each period under consideration, the author, drawing from a variety of sources, presents a range of competing religious interpretations of Mt. Zōzu. These divergent interpretations at times became a source of conflict, with each party seeking to make the most of the advantages at its disposal. Thal divides her study into twelve chapters, each focusing on a decisive stage in this centuries-long process. Greater availability of documentary sources for more recent periods probably explains why more than half the study is devoted to developments between 1868 and 1912. Making excellent use of primary and other sources and paying due attention to the particularities of the political, intellectual, and spiritual context, Thal weaves together a rich tapestry of the history of Mt. Zōzu. We certainly cannot fault the author's accuracy concerning the names of persons and biographical details, dates, or the titles and content of historical records. This depth of scholarship is what gives the work its value. It will be a useful reference not only for specialists in Japanese studies but for historians, sociologists, and anthropologists in general. In this book review, it would be pointless to run through the entire, ultimately quite human, history of the gods of Mt. Zōzu. I will limit my remarks to the period of which I am the least ignorant, namely that from the end of the sixteenth century to the middle of the nineteenth century. My initial remark concerns the early stages of the rise of the various cults associated with Mt. Zōzu, which grew until they occupied an important place in not only the religious landscape of Shikoku but also that of Japan as a whole. I was surprised to note that in her treatment of this phenomenon Thal makes no mention of the contemporaneous development...

The Upper Necaxa Totonac Dictionary represents to-date the most extensive collection of lexical material for any member of the Totonac-Tepehua family and the only such record for this previously-undescribedpolysynthetic language, currently spoken in two principal dialects by some 3,400 people, mainly adults, in the Sierra Norte of Puebla State, Mexico. As well as a short grammatical sketch, the dictionary comprises 9,000 lexical entries, including numerous fixed expressions, idioms, and ideophones; each lexical entry is accompanied by part-of-speech information and phonetic transcriptions as well as, where appropriate, dialectal information, grammatical notes (including plurals and classifiers for nouns), literal morpheme-by-morpheme glosses, example sentences, and cross-references to derived forms and semantically-related words. The accompanying DVD includes additional illustrative sentences, audio recordings of headwords and examples, and interlinear glosses for many of the sentences included in lexical entries. This book is the first Totonacan dictionary to be structured for the academic linguist, with special attention paid to the morphological structure of words and the organization of the Totonacan lexicon. Glosses are constructed so as to reflect the underlying complement-structure of words, with careful indication of the number of arguments required by particular lexical items, and all verbs are classified by dynamicity and valency. This dictionary is of interest to linguists working on American indigenous languages, as well as those concerned with the structure of morphologically complex words and the role of derivation in the lexicon of polysynthetic languages. It isalsoof use to historical linguists and Mesoamericanists interested in the reconstruction of the pre-Columbian history and ethnogeography of Mexico.

Benjamin Lee Whorf died on July 26, 1941, at his home in Wethersfield, Connecticut, after an illness of several months; he was 44 years old. Whorf was trained as an engineer, having graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1918; at the time of his death he was an assistant secretary of the Hartford Fire Insurance Company. His work in linguistics began about 1928, with an interest in the decipherment of Maya; this led to his studying modern Mayan and Aztec, and thence to a deep penetration of the field of American Indian and general linguistics. In 1930 Whorf held a Social Science Research Council grant, under which he recorded the Aztec dialect of Milpa Alta, Mexico. In 1936 and 1937 he was a research fellow at Yale, and the association with Edward Sapir during those years was, in his own opinion, the most important influence on his linguistic thinking.

Reviewed by: Die Personennamen in der Ṛgveda-Samhitā: Sicheres und Zweifelhaftes by Manfred Mayrhofer Brian D. Joseph Die Personennamen in der Ṛgveda-Samhitā: Sicheres und Zweifelhaftes. By Manfred Mayrhofer. (Philosophisch-Historisiche Klasse, Sitzungsberichte 2002, 3.) Munich: Verlag der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaft, 2003. Pp. 165. ISBN 3769616219. €19. The Rigveda (RV) is a special corpus, to be sure—at once both of great antiquity (the conventional date of composition is 1200 bc and parts are far older than that) and of great importance religiously (to Hinduism) and linguistically (to Indo-European historical linguistics), its every word has been the object of study and scholarly scrutiny over centuries. Mayrhofer’s excellent book is an important contribution to this tradition of Vedic lexical studies. The title to this work says it all: M collects and discusses all of the certain and doubtful cases of personal names in the RV. This study continues M’s lifelong investigation of the lexicon of Sanskrit, and especially Vedic Sanskrit (note his Kurzgefasstes etymologisches Wörterbuch des Altindischen (Heidelberg: Carl Winter Universitätsverlag, 1953 –1978) and his updating and reworking of that as Etymologisches Wörterbuch des Altindoarischen (Heidelberg: Carl Winter Universitätsverlag, 1978 –2001)), as he tackles here some of the most difficult lexical items in the RV. There are three main parts to the book. Part 1 lists 600 items, covering all of the secure or conjectured names in the RV. Part 2 lists 543 items, covering all of the names of Vedic rishis (‘seer poets’) mentioned in the anukramaṇī (ancient notes on each hymn of the RV with information on rishis, meter, etc.), some of which overlap with those in Part 1. Part 3 has [End Page 897] M’s summary evaluation of the material, giving his assessment as to which forms are indeed names, which derive from ordinary nouns, which are of foreign origin, and so on. In each lemma in Parts 1 and 2, following the alphabetical order of the devanāgarī writing system, M lists a presumed name, its place of occurrence in the RV, and references to it in the literature, adding his own keen judgment where he feels some confidence about the form in question. Each entry is meticulously documented with copious citations to previous literature and cross-references between Part 1 and Part 2. What makes this task of cataloguing so difficult is that the very identification of names is often problematic (note that there is nothing parallel to capital letters in devanāgarī, for instance). Some forms that have been called personal names probably are not (e.g. kuṣávā- is better taken as a river name). Moreover, many of the putative names listed by M are hapax legomena, of unique occurrence, and thus often not obviously analyzable or interpretable. Even with forms that occur more than once, the meaning and segmentation are often uncertain and etymologizing these forms in general involves far more guesswork than is usual in such investigations. Indeed, the problematic nature of the material is reflected in M’s frequent use of such designations as fraglich ‘questionable’, schwerlich ‘difficult’, nicht klar ‘not clear’, and the like. Still, some forms are clear and are explainable as transferred epithets (e.g. áśna-, a demon’s name, from the adjective for ‘hungry’) or exocentric derivatives (e.g. áśvamedha-, a king’s name, literally ‘one associated with the aśvamedhá- (the horse-sacrifice)’); some are certain Indo-European inheritances (e.g. arjuna-, cognate with Latin argentum ‘silver’, among other forms) while others are obviously of foreign origin (e.g. ilībiśa-, where the -l-, the -b-, and the polysyllabicity are suggestive of non-Sanskritic provenance). I noticed no typos in this most interesting book, but pp. 145–52 were upside-down and backwards in my copy. Brian D. Joseph The Ohio State University Copyright © 2004 Linguistic Society of America

Reviewed by: Discours. Livres XXXIV, XXXV & XXXVI by Libanios, and: Libanius: Ten Mythological and Historical Declamations by Libanius Fabrizio Petorella (bio) Libanios, Discours. Livres XXXIV, XXXV & XXXVI, texte établi et traduit par Catherine Bry, Collection des universités de France Série grecque—Collection Budé 550. Paris, FR: Les Belles Lettres, 2020. 278 pp. EAN: 978-2-251-00637-6. Libanius, Libanius: Ten Mythological and Historical Declamations, ed., intro., trans. and notes, Robert J. Penella. Cambridge, GB: Cambridge University Press, 2020. 420 pp. ISBN: 978-1-108-48137-3. Our knowledge of Late Antique rhetorical school practice has been recently enriched by several studies focused on Libanius' works: in the last decades, the Antiochean rhetor has been the subject of key monographs and academic articles on upper-class education in the Later Empire and [End Page 104] many of his writings have been edited and translated into modern languages.1 The two volumes discussed here are part of this upsurge of interest in Libanius's teaching activity. Furthermore, they are meant to lay the foundations for future studies aimed at contributing to the debate on Late Antique paideia. Antiochean school life is at the core of the orations edited and translated by Catherine Bry. Her volume, which is the result of her doctoral research at the École Pratique des Hautes Études of Paris, opens with a brief introduction clarifying why the three Libanian speeches she takes up deserve to be analyzed together: composed in the second half of the 380s, they all stem from problems related to Libanius's role as a teacher. Thus, Orations 34, 35, and 36 provide a vivid testimony about the teaching of Greek rhetoric in the Eastern Empire and the issues that even a renowned sophist might face. These initial remarks are followed by an extremely accurate section devoted to philological aspects. Even though Bry acknowledges the importance of the last edition of the three speeches (published by Richard Foerster in 1906), she considers that work too distant from modern philological conventions.2 As a result of a rigorous re-examination of the whole manuscript tradition, she integrates the descriptions of the sources given by Foerster, Jean Martin, and Pierre-Louis Malosse with her personal observations, thus offering a detailed presentation of all witnesses and a stemma codicum for each of the three orations.3 In this well-ordered preliminary phase, Bry demonstrates a scrupulously honest approach, enabling the reader to access and—if (s)he wishes—to question her philological work. After a list of abbreviations and a bibliography (significantly divided into a section specifically devoted to the edition of the three speeches and a general bibliography), comes the core of the volume. Every oration is preceded by a brief and clear introduction, where the reader finds information on the date and circumstances in which Libanius originally delivered his speech and on the audience he intended to address, as well as a rhetorical analysis of the following text and a list of its previous editions and translations. [End Page 105] In contrast to Foerster, Bry opts for positive apparatuses and avoids mentioning orthographical variants, unless they have some morphological (and, consequently, semantic) value. This approach (which does not prevent her from quoting the conjectures of previous editors when necessary) has the merit of making her edition a very practical tool for the study of the three orations and their textual history. The translation heads in the same direction. It is clear and original and allows the reader to easily grasp the main aspects of Libanius' oratorical performances, accurately transposed into a modern language. In these respects, the volume shows clearly how scholarly accuracy and readability can be combined, thus producing an edition that can be appreciated on several levels. To complete this picture, Bry's commentary is agile, but exhaustive. Her explanatory notes reveal once more a strong interest in the context in which the orations were originally performed and in their rhetorical features. Libanius' words are analyzed in relation to Late Antique rhetorical theories and to their application at school (see, for example, the entry concerning the role of memorization in the learning process at pp. 43–44, n. 55). Particular attention is...