Hessel Visser. Naro Dictionary: Naro?English, English?Naro

Abstract

Although this dictionary was not published by a well-established publishing house, its quality and usefulness rival those of seasoned publishers in the field of Khoesan studies, such as the dictionaries by Dickens (1994), Traill (1994) and Haacke (2002). This fourth edition of Visser's Naro Dictionary is a medium-sized dictionary of 240 pages, including 16 pages of appendices. The work is the result of more than 10 years of lexical compilation which resulted in several editions of the dictionary, each of which was an expanded version of the earlier one. Thus, from a miniature version, it has grown into a sizeable high-quality work, in spite of the compiler's modest observation in his introduction that it is a mere "working document" and that it is still a "preliminary publication".