In his prefatory remarks, Leonard E. Newell sets three primary provisions as the goal of his Romblomanon dictionary: (1) ‘… an important tool for the translation into Romblomanon of some of the great literature of the world’; (2) ‘… a dictionary that would truly represent the Romblomanon language as it is spoken …’; and (3) ‘some kind of model for Romblomanon speakers who wish to speak and write in English’ (p. x).
Based on the objectives enumerated above, the dictionary claims to cater to both the native and non-native speakers of the language being described. For the users whose native language is not Romblomanon and are speakers of English, this dictionary is an excellent tool for the comprehension of and text composition in Romblomanon, and translation from Romblomanon to English. However, since it is the meaning system, morphosyntax, and culture of Romblomanon that are described, native speakers of Romblomanon would find this dictionary inadequate if they wished to grasp the meaning of, as well as to produce text in, and undertake translation work from English to Romblomanon. Newell has amply given heed to this challenge by supplementing the dictionary with an English index, whose entries are grouped according to the semantic domains that they belong to; although the author has still called for an English–Romblomanon dictionary to balance as ‘the ideal solution’ (L.E. Newell, Handbook on lexicography for Philippine and other languages with illustrations from the Batad Ifugao dictionary, Manila: Linguistic Society of the Philippines, 1995, p. 17).
This Romblomanon dictionary is also notable for its use of a corpus as the basis for the lexical entries. As it is nowadays the demand that dictionaries describe languages as they are spoken and not as they should be used, a corpus-based dictionary would suffice this need. The compiler and his team have remarkably recorded and transcribed a corpus which consisted of 1.2 million words, representing 250 geographic areas of Romblomanon culture. Specialised terms such as those which are used for agriculture, fishing and the marble industry are included, although the author has been modest in saying that the list is not exhaustive and needs further elicitation. Nevertheless, it is only through sociocultural immersion can a linguist or lexicographer take full hold of the language he is working on, and undertaking fieldwork for almost two decades, the author of the Romblomanon dictionary does deserve commendation.
Modern dictionaries avoid framing terms in obscure and/or scientific definitions which do not, in fact, make the terms ‘prior and intelligible’ (C. Goddard, Semantic analysis: A practical introduction, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1928, p. 27).
Glosses in the Romblomanon dictionary are mostly full sentences with the direct English equivalent in boldface — the definition usually corresponds to what is indicated in the illustrative sentence (which is then taken from the corpus) as this supplies much of the meaning of the terms. This is echoed in Weinreich's call for ‘… ways to make the metalanguage [language used to describe the lexical items] less rich, rather than as rich as, or richer than, the object language’ (U. Weinreich, ‘Lexicographic definition in descriptive semantics’, International Journal of American Linguistics, 28.2.4 [1962]: 25–44).
The author is very much aware of the agglutinative nature of Romblomanon, a Malayo-Polynesian language whose verbs typically do not occur in isolation, i.e. without one or more affixes attached to them. As a result, Romblomanon is deemed ‘intractable’, since most of the forms need to be analysed first before being looked up (Mary R. Haas, ‘What belongs in a bilingual dictionary?’, in Problems in Lexicography, ed. Fred W. Housholder and Sol Saporta [Bloomington: Indiana University, 1967]).
Newell has successfully addressed here this important issue quintessentially encountered by any lexicographer dealing with Malayo-Polynesian languages by presenting each entry according to the following order: first with the root as the headword, then the affixed forms as minor entries, and finally the variant forms as run-on entries. Grouping the verbs together this way, Newell has enabled users of this dictionary to glance at all the forms of Romblomanon verbs in different aspects (completion or non-completion of the action), focuses (verbal complement that would serve as the grammatical subject), modes of action (e.g. habitual, serial, etc.) and variants. The author has also provided the users with a guide to properly identify the verbal affixes and roots at the beginning of the dictionary proper.
Aside from the second-language index referred to earlier, the dictionary also comes up with semantically grouped Romblomanon cultural terms in the appendices part so as to further help the users in establishing semantic relationships of the lexemes within the language network. Still more remarkable is the extensive grammar sketch of Romblomanon that serves as the introductory body of the dictionary. Inasmuch as L. E. Newell (1995, p. 335) believes that grammar and lexicon should coexist in order to properly understand one another, he has succeeded in creating a self-contained compilation with the Romblomanon dictionary.
Capitalising from the above-mentioned facts, we can say that this dictionary is actually a recorded product of a linguist's meticulous study of the Romblomanon language, and not just a mere collection of words provided with respective counterparts in the metalanguage (i.e. English), as has always been the case in the lexicographic world — quite meritorious for a preliminary pursuit.
