Reviewed by David Elton Gay, Bloomington, IN
Though he is largely unknown outside of Catalan studies, Pompeu Fabra was the most important Catalan grammarian and language standardizer of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In The architect of Modern Catalan, Joan Costa Carreras and his collaborators have teamed up to introduce Fabra to the English-speaking world, and they have created a fine anthology with which to do so.
The anthology opens with a series of appreciations of Fabra and his work by Joan Josep Moresco, Salvador Giner, Joan Martí i Castells, and George Kremnitz that focus largely on biographical matters. These are followed by an introduction to the Catalan language by Carreras and Alan Yates that describes the historical and sociolinguistic situation of Catalan, as well as some of the important intellectual and literary movements in the language. The book concludes with a useful bibliography of materials on the Catalan language in English, Spanish, French, and Catalan and a list of useful websites on Catalan.
Carreras then examines ‘Pompeu Fabra: A life’s work in applied linguistics’ in a long and very detailed chapter that looks at virtually every aspect of Fabra’s life and work as a Catalan scholar. This chapter offers useful bibliographical information about Fabra’s writings in two places: an annotated bibliography of the various grammars Fabra wrote of Catalan, English, Spanish, and French (82–86), and a fuller bibliography of Fabra’s writings and works about Fabra and Catalan more generally (95–101).
A brief chapter on the ‘presentation of the edition’ treats of editorial matters. In the anthology of Fabra’s writings (113–219), the editors have made a concerted effort to show the range of Fabra’s writings, which include work on grammar, lexicography, spelling reform, standardization, and language purification (in the case of Catalan, this meant the removal of Castilianisms from the language).
This is a very useful book about a too little known linguist and grammarian.