Helen FieldsScience Writer

This well-worn Langenscheidt’s Pocket Japanese Dictionary is one of my favorite dictionaries. After more than 10 years on various shelves, it’s recently started hitching rides in my purse again. Hello, adorable yellow Dictionary of the Week!

This is different from my other four Japanese dictionaries because it’s all in romaji, or roman letters. So you can use this dictionary to look up Japanese words even if you can’t read any Japanese at all.

You need this kind of thing when you’re starting out, because real Japanese writing is really complicated. The three writing systems are intermingled in sentences and even within words.

First: 漢字 (Kanji.) Kanji are borrowed from Chinese, and they almost always have at least two pronunciations.

Take this character, 食, which means “food.” In the verb 食べる (to eat), it’s pronounced “ta.” But in the verb 食う (to eat, but less formally) it’s pronounced “ku.” In combinations like 食事 (meal) it’s pronounced “shoku.” And that’s not even all the pronunciations for this one character.

Next: ひらがな (Hiragana.) The 46 hiragana characters make up one of the two phonetic alphabets in Japanese. In most written sentences, the kanji hold the meaning and the hiragana do all the grammatical heavy lifting. If you try to read Japanese and you don’t know kanji, you spend a lot of time reading verb endings. For example, in the verb 食べる, the る – “ru” – tells you it’s the infinitive.

In theory you could write everything in Japanese in hiragana, and that’s how children’s books are written; kanji are introduced gradually, as kids learn more and more of them in school. But it would be a huge pain reading a regular book written all in hiragana. A lot of Japanese words are pronounced the same, so you have to see the kanji to know if しんぷ means “bride” or “Christian priest.” If you’ve learned the characters, it’s much faster to read one or two characters that give a word’s meaning rather than a bunch of characters that only tell you what it sounds like.

Finally: カタカナ (Katakana). Katakana covers the same 46 sounds as hiragana but is used mostly for borrowed words, like スープ (”su-pu” – soup) and コヾプ (koppu – cup). Of course, Japanese didn’t just borrow words from English. パン (pan) is “bread,” from the portuguese word pão. アルバイト (arubaito) is “part-time work,” from the German word Arbeit.

Katakana is also used for foreign names. My name is ヘレン・フィールズ. The sounds in “Helen” (he re n) all exist in Japanese, but “Fields” is kind of a mess. Sounds that aren’t in the phonetic alphabet, like “fi,” are usually really hard for Japanese people to pronounce. I just go by ヘレン.

So, really – when you’re starting out, you want a dictionary like this one that converts everything into roman letters for you. I graduated from this dictionary within a year or so. Eventually it just gets too annoying that “ga” does not immediately follow “ka,” the way it does in Japanese. The dictionary is back into circulation now because I’ve joined a Japanese choir and didn’t think I’d be able to find things in my hiragana-based pocket dictionary fast enough…but actually I’m muddling along with no dictionary at all and doing fine so far.

Dictionary Stats: Langenscheidt’s Pocket Japanese Dictionary

date: 1998 (hey – this was brand-new when I moved to Japan!)
publisher: Langenscheidt Publishers, Inc., New York
by: Seigo Nakao
length: 666 pp (oh my)
useful advice: “A general guideline for the Japanese accent is to avoid putting a heavy stress on any syllable.”
guide words on p. 129: kiyasume, n. 気休め insincere reassurance or consolation; kodoku, n. 孤独 solitude; isolation
obscenities: くそ! They aren’t there! Well, you can’t look them up in English. くそ is in the Japanese section, but I’m not telling you what it means.

I know, this is my work blog about science and dictionaries (and travel and music and whatnot), but I’m too excited and must blog about the knitting project I just started:

Doesn’t it look cool on the needle? Oh, what is it? I can’t tell! It’s a secret! I can tell you that the yellow is “Comfy,” a blend of pima cotton and acrylic, and the blue is some Cascade 220 wool left over from a sweater that I’ve finished knitting but haven’t sewn together yet. Because this is the time of year when the Christmas knitting gets serious and everything else must be dropped.

I was inspired to start writing about dictionaries when I needed my Italian dictionary to check a word in something I was editing. So that little green paperback gets to kick things off as the inaugural Dictionary of the Week. I apparently bought the Collins English/Italian Italian/English Dictionary for $2 at a used bookstore, but don’t ask me when or where. Probably sometime in the last few years, when I decided you could never have too many dictionaries for random foreign languages, especially random foreign languages that you speak a little.

“Speak” is a strong term for what I do with Italian. More like “Could form a sentence…more than a decade ago.” When I was living in Norway, I made plans to travel through Europe with friends after I finished my year in Trondheim. Our itinerary included a few weeks in Italy, but none of us spoke Italian. So I thought, what the heck, I’ll take an Italian class. I already knew a little from singing, and I’d had classes in French and Spanish, so I figured it wouldn’t be too hard.

Taking a foreign language class that is taught in a different foreign language is pretty trippy. I don’t know if you’ve ever taken a foreign language class populated mostly by adults, but you’re pretty much guaranteed to get at least one student who is there for the purpose of rattling on in English about the last time he was in the country where the language is spoken and carrying on protracted discussions on unimportant points of grammar. This class had that, except the guy was Norwegian and talked fast. And just to make things harder, I think the teacher might have been Swedish or something.

I arrived a bit early before the last session and sat on a bench in the sun – spring had finally come after the long, dark winter. A guy from my class with a giant moustache (a Trondheim specialty) joined me. We chatted a bit and he was totally impressed when he realized I was American – he was like, but I never even noticed your accent in class! Your Norwegian must be amazing! I explained that he’d actually just never heard me speak Norwegian – rather than trying to handle multiple languages at once, I ditched the one I’d learned first and turned my brain over to Italian. Which means I turned my brain over to sentences like, “What is your name?” and “I’m a student, and you?”

I discovered when I got to Italy that my Italian was surprisingly serviceable. My great triumph was when I ordered a taxi by phone one night and it showed up in the morning at the time we wanted it. Crazy!

The word I needed the dictionary for last week was lira. I figured it meant “lyre” (it was being used in an early music context) but I thought I should check. You might also recognize it as the word “lira.” You know, the currency. Hey, they don’t have lira anymore! That’s a funny thought. No more paying 4,000 currency units for a cup of coffee!

I was reading about lyres in Italian because I was editing the program for the Christmas Revels, which has an Italian Renaissance theme this year. Buy your tickets now! I’m pretty sure the program alone is worth the ticket prices, which are as low as $18 adult and $12 youth. But if the outstanding program notes aren’t enough for you, there will also be singing, dancing, some kind of Italian musical instrument I’ve never heard of (dictionary says: zampogna sf instrument similar to bagpipes), and really all kinds of wonderful entertainment and happiness. It’s set in Leonardo da Vinci’s workshop, so hey – there are inventions, too.

Dictionary Stats: Collins English/Italian Italian/English Dictionary

date: 1983 (the pages are quite yellow)
publisher: A Berkley Book, published by arrangement with Collins publishers
length: 407 pp
letter quirks: WXY are all combined in the Italian listings, with only seven words: watt, whisky, xeres, xerocopia, xilofono, yacht, and yoghurt, which is translated as the excessively voweled but, according to one of my English dictionaries, technically correct “yoghourt.”
guide words on p. 173: spettinare (vt: ~ qb to ruffle sb’s hair); spogliare (vt to undress)
obscenities: Heck no! Geez, not even “heck” is in there. (Also not listed: “geez.”)

Nerdy excitement downtown: two instruments that used to be on the Hubble Space Telescope are at the National Air and Space Museum! And they’re not just any instruments, they’re instruments that made news. Remember when the Hubble first launched, and it was a giant national joke? These are the instruments that fixed it in 1993.

COSTAR, the space telescope equivalent of a pair of glasses, is a set of mirrors that were ground to reverse the error in the telescope’s big mirror. The astronauts on the first Hubble servicing mission also installed WFPC2, a new camera. NASA had planned to replace the original one anyway, because they knew digital camera technology would keep changing fast; the new one just had special adjustments for the messed-up mirror.

I went to the press conference this morning to check out these instruments for myself. COSTAR is shaped like a refrigerator, but much bigger, and with a set of little mirrors sticking out of one corner.

John Grunsfeld, an astronaut who’s been on three Hubble servicing missions, pulled the COSTAR out of the telescope six months ago. “It was easy,” he says. They thought it might stick, but it popped right out. He was much more excited about the glorified fuse box sitting next to COSTAR:

It’s the power control unit for the whole telescope. He pulled it out during a servicing mission in 2002. The people controlling the telescope at Goddard had to turn Hubble’s power off while he worked on it. That meant he had to work fast; otherwise, with the heaters off, the telescope might freeze. So he spent three years training on how to disconnect the unit.

You think I’m nerdily excited about these instruments, you should’ve seen him with the wrench he used to disconnect the wires. An engineer from the Goddard Space Flight Center brought it down this morning in a briefcase, and he was all happy to see it. (”This is my favorite Hubble tool!”) I don’t think the briefcase was handcuffed to the engineer’s wrist, but maybe it should’ve been. The curators were looking covetous, and there was some doubt about whether Grunsfeld would want to part with it.

In Bangladesh, millions of people drink contaminated water that’s contaminated with arsenic. This isn’t like in a mystery novel when someone gets poisoned with arsenic. You don’t keel over dead. Water with arsenic in it is lovely and clean and doesn’t need to be boiled – and in the long term, it increases cancer risk as much as smoking.

Today I wrote for ScienceNOW about a new study on arsenic in Bangladesh. Some researchers from MIT think they’ve figured out why some water has more arsenic than other water. Special microbes dissolve the arsenic from the sediment into the water, and they need a carbon source – so the scientists who study arsenic in Southeast Asia are arguing over where that carbon comes from. The new study gives one answer to that question. Read my story here.

In the meantime, people in Bangladesh need low-arsenic water. Filters work, but they’re expensive and need maintenance. Deeper wells tap into deeper aquifers with less arsenic, but they’re also expensive, and as water is sucked out of the deep aquifer, higher-arsenic water could sink down from above.

I thought it was fascinating that the people of Bangladesh have traded deaths from water-borne disease for long-term cancer risks, but I talked to an epidemiologist, Allan Smith at Berkeley, who figures it’s not worth arguing over which was worse. “For me, it’s not something I’ve ever cared to try to quantify. Clearly we want to reduce the deaths from gastroenteritis and clearly we want to reduce the deaths from arsenic. We should just move forward.”

I don’t honestly know anything about the New Oxford American Dictionary or why I should care what they think – they’re not one of *my* 31 dictionaries – but I do like their word of the year, “unfriend.” As in, “Once a former colleague unfriended me because of  a comment I wrote on her Facebook status.” (She sheepishly refriended me a few weeks later – I’d never even noticed.)

Last night I needed the Italian-English dictionary off the shelf of language dictionaries on the other side of the living room. Not coincidentally, I also needed to do a little procrastinating, so I decided to find out how many dictionaries I own. The current count is 31, although I wouldn’t be surprised if there are some more lurking in my apartment somewhere.

Some people have a drinking problem or a porcelain figurine problem; I have a dictionary problem. I just like them, and once they make it in the door, they never leave. They all seem like reasonable purchases at the time. I got one Norwegian dictionary when I first started learning Norwegian, then a better one the last time I was in Norway (the best place to buy Norwegian dictionaries), and yeah, if I came across another one in a used book store, I’d probably buy it.

So I posted my total on Facebook – remember, I was procrastinating – and asked for friends’ numbers. Carley, a translator, owns 60, mostly Russian and German. Debbie used to study Old Norse, of all things, so that’s on the shelf in her daughter’s bedroom. Holli, a grad student, makes up for a relative paucity of dictionaries at home with online access to the OED (jealous). Lots of friends chimed in, listing their collections and discussing whether usage guides and phrasebooks count. (No.)

All this dictionary talk got me thinking about the stories behind my collection. So, with all that in mind, I introduce a new blog feature: Dictionary of the Week.

From left, on the shelf above my desk: book I never look at; 1974 Webster’s; medical; book I never look at; Japanese-English; Fowler’s 1st ed.; French-English; Norwegian-English; 1991 Webster’s; German-English; Fowler’s 2nd ed. No, I didn’t count Fowler’s in the 31, even if it does have “dictionary” in the title, because that would be breaking the anti-usage-guide rule. I will probably break that rule to blog about Fowler’s, though, because I love Fowler’s.

I keep having this problem with foreign languages. I learned Norwegian – a little in Minnesota, a little in Oslo. Then I moved to Trondheim and discovered that nobody outside of Oslo speaks the nice standard Norwegian that you learn in class. Some of the people I worked with might as well have been speaking Icelandic, for all I understood.

Then I moved to Japan. I learned Japanese. And I rapidly discovered that there was a local dialect in Kumamoto, too, and the farther I got out of the city, the more incomprehensible it got. My Japanese is pretty good, but with an old person in the countryside? Forget about it.

Today for ScienceNOW I wrote about how we adapt to unfamiliar pronunciations and dialects. The way to do it, or at least the way they did it in this study: Watch movies with subtitles in the foreign language.

It’s always kind of annoyed me that when you buy a foreign movie on DVD in the U.S., it doesn’t come with subtitles in the language of the movie. (Unless the movie is in English, French, or Spanish.) And now I have scientific backing for my annoyance! Because I don’t think watching “The Lives of Others” with Spanish subtitles is going to help me improve my German. The German subtitles exist – they have to be written for closed-captioning – and it must cost basically nothing to include another set of subtitles on a DVD. Somebody should start a campaign.

Another thing that would be helpful: subtitles in real life. It sure would be handy if I could walk up to someone in, say, Bergen and have the words the person is saying appear in the air.

Newborn babies might seem like they don’t do anything but cry, sleep, eat, and excrete – but there’s really a lot going on as that tiny human adjusts to a whole new world. Today for ScienceNOW I wrote about a clever study in which the scientists recorded German and French newborns crying and found a difference in their cry melodies that corresponds to the differences between the languages. French babies’ cries tended to go up like French, and German babies’ cries tended to go down like German.

This is pretty crazy. These are seriously tiny babies – 2 to 5 days old. People knew that newborn babies could hear the difference between languages, and they knew that by four months or so, they’re babbling in language-appropriate ways, but to find that they’re actually producing language-appropriate sounds a few days after birth is totally new. The other scientists I showed it to were super impressed.

Here’s my story about baby cries.

Special bonus link – you must see the seriously hilarious picture on the project webpage. We would have used it with the story, but the baby is way too old. Look how happy he is – he’s all, hey! I’m a German baby! Doing science! What up!

Oh, man. I can’t believe it took me until now to think to look for sumo videos on youtube. Yeah, that’s right, sumo. I lived in Japan for two years in the late 1990s and spent a substantial part of that two years watching sumo tournaments – they’re on TV six times a year for two weeks each time, and I was right there watching them in their commercial-free glory.

I don’t feel the highlight reels (two big guys smash into each other! one of them falls over! two more guys smash into each other! etc!) remotely capture the experience – yes, the bouts are very short, but there’s several minutes of buildup before each one. The guys throw salt in the air to purify the ring, smack themselves, line up at the starting line, stare down the other guy, go back and get more salt, repeat, repeat – here, this shows a whole bout from the time they’re announced to the time the winner gets his prize:

(Fun fact: Both of these wrestlers are Mongolian.) A bout is lost when one of the competitors steps outside the ring or touches the ground with anything but bottom of his feet. It’s a tiny ring, and they’re big guys, so momentum is a problem. The shortest bouts are when one wrestler just steps out of the way and his opponent runs out of the ring. (Shortest and also funniest.) If a bout goes over a minute, it’s really, really long. If it goes four minutes, they get to take a break.

Why was I so obsessed with sumo? Well, all the preparation is kind of hypnotic, that’s one thing. The bouts can go a lot of different ways. The ring is really high, and 300-pound men routinely fall off of it into the front row of spectators – you don’t get with other sports. And it’s just so odd. I mean, the referee is dressed like a priest.

Ah, I miss Japan.