Helen FieldsScience Writer

When I was in Kansas last weekend, we skipped over the border to Missouri to see a nice exhibit of rare books from the History of Science Collection at the Linda Hall Library. This library is kind of a surprise – when we were there, I assumed it was part of a university, but it’s actually an independent public library of science, engineering and technology. Herbert and Linda Hall had a lot of money, and this is what they left it to: a public library.

The exhibit shows the tradition of natural history that Darwin came from. His theory of natural selection was based on years of careful study of different kinds of animals – he knew more than anyone about barnacles, for example, and of course there were his famous Galápagos finches. Natural history is a darn good way to learn about nature.

Most of the displays were illustrations from books back to the 15th century. Back then, people were sort of conflicted between relying on classical texts – it was the Renaissance, they were really into that stuff – and observing plants and animals in nature.Some of the pictures had clearly been done by people who had never seen the animal in question, and the texts often came from the ancient Greeks. But eventually they started figuring out that they should actually be observing the animals they were writing about. (Whoa! Crazy talk!)

This adorable hedgehog was in a 1551 book, Historia Animalium:

Isn’t it spunky? (The label says “bristling with charm.”)

Here are some copepods from a book published in 1820 in Geneva. Copepods are teeny crustaceans – relatives of crabs and shrimp.

I was excited to see these guys because I saw a lot of copepods in the Bering Sea last spring. I wrote stories about copepods on at least four days, but see this day for some really nice copepod portraits. (My fingers got really, really cold while Chris was taking the pictures of the glow-in-the-dark copepods, so be sure to go appreciate the beauty.)

This Portuguese Man O’ War was collected in the deep sea in the 1820s.

That is one pretty jellyfish.

From a book published around 1860, a gorilla:

The gorilla was only scientifically described in 1847. Doesn’t that seem late? I mean, gorillas are really big! And that scientific description was just based on bones; apparently no Westerner saw a live gorilla until the 1850s. Chimps and orangutans were already pretty well known by then. (You can read a little gorilla history in this 1988 newsletter – it’s the first story.)

The library had a copy of On the Origin of Species on display, but I failed to take a picture of it because, um, it was just words, see. There were no pretty pictures of animals. Oops.

So, instead, I will leave you with a picture of my best Scrabble play ever, that night at my aunt and uncle’s house:

I played “EQUINELY” for 239 points. This was made possible by two factors: (1) my uncle doesn’t play defensively, so he put that Q right up there by that triple word score, and (2) in our rules, you can look up words before you play them. I wouldn’t have taken a chance on “equinely” if this had been a challenge game, but I thought it might be a word, and I checked the scrabble dictionary, and it was. Woo. Hoo.

photos: me, and they aren’t that good, are they? books behind glass. kind of a rough subject.

Now for a language I really, really don’t speak: the Dictionary of the Week is a Finnish-English English-Finnish Dictionary from 1967.

In 2005, the Christmas Revels had a Scandinavian theme. Since I speak Norwegian, I could understand most of what I was singing in Norwegian, Danish, and Swedish, but Finnish is totally unrelated. It’s not even Indo-European. I thought it might help me memorize the songs in Finnish if I looked up some of the words, so I picked up this dictionary at a used bookstore.

I quickly learned that a dictionary is very little use if you don’t speak any Finnish. It’s often tricky looking up foreign words, because they can be conjugated or whatever, but usually I can figure something out. In this dictionary, I couldn’t find words anywhere near where I expected them. Yesterday morning I called up Sirpa Tuomainen, who teaches Finnish at the University of California – Berkeley, to ask her what the heck is up with her native tongue.

She gave me an example: the word for store is kauppa. But if you want to say something is “in a store,” you have to put an ending on it (sort of like the preposition). So you take the weak form of the noun, kaupa – notice it lost a p – and stick an n on to get kaupan. Ok, now go try to look up kaupan in a Finnish dictionary. No, never mind, I’ll do it for you. Hey – it’s not there. And it doesn’t stop with the letter P. Tyttö (girl) becomes tytö. Helsinki becomes Helsingi. Kylpy (bath) becomes kylyvy. And so forth.

Or take the sentence Minä pidän Sibeliuksesta. Minä is in the dictionary, but if you want to find it, you have to work out that ä does not come after a, as in German, but at the end of the alphabet between y and ö. Minä means “I.” Pidän is the first person singular form of pitää, “to like.” And Sibeliuksesta is the composer Sibelius, who gets a new stem, -kse, and an ending: -sta. Which means we mere mortals can’t even look up the sentence “I like Sibelius.”

I’m not the only one to have noticed this dictionary problem. Sirpa said she worked with a grad student at Stanford who was getting her PhD in Namibian history. Finland has had close ties to Namibia since missionaries started going there in the 19th century, so this student had to be able to read Finnish, which meant sorting out all these noun stem changes. That long connection means there are lots of Namibian children running around with Finnish names – a lot of Marttis, for example, after Martti Ahtisaari, who won the Nobel Peace Prize last year in part for helping to get Namibia’s independence from South Africa. “He’s like a folk hero there,” says Sirpa. The very pretty Namibian first name Menette is the second person plural form of the verb “to go.” And there are lots of old-fashioned names that came from the missionaries.

Another limitation of my dictionary: it was published in 1967, so it’s not going to have words like “e-mail” in it. Fortunately, the Finns have invented the verbs mailata, faxata, and chatata. (This is the land of Nokia. They know their technology.)

“We always laugh – at our department, we get these oddballs,” says Sirpa. “The, quote, normal people will take French, Spanish, Italian, Russian, and German.” (Then there’s the people like me.) For more of her thoughts on Finnish and Finland, see the blog she wrote on her sabbatical year there – this post about the ubiquity of English is interesting. And this about -kone, which means “machine” and has been used to make up all kinds of words. And I loved reading about Kaamos, the time in winter when the sun never rises.

I kind of wish I had another Finnish dictionary so I could write more about it. It’s a beautiful language – I loved singing in Finnish, even if it was insanely difficult to memorize.

Dictionary Stats: Finnish-English English-Finnish Dictionary

date: 1967
publisher: P. Shalom Pub. Inc., Brooklyn (See publisher’s credit page, at right, with a chart of Hebrew, Arabic, Nyriac, and Sumerian alphabets.)
by: Aino Wuolle
length: 356 pp
letter quirks: There are no words on the Finnish side starting with C, Q, W, X, or Z. These letters have really short sections, all loan words: B (banaani, biologia), D (demokratia, diftongi - diphthong), F (filmi, flyygeli - grand piano), G (galvanoida, gondoli), and Ö (öljy - oil).
guide words on p. 105: poikapuoli stepson; poro reindeer
introduction: Entirely in Finnish.
obscenities: Ha. No. And I don’t even know any to look up on the Finnish side. I swear I own some dictionaries with bad words. This category won’t be completely wasted.

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 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.”)

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.

The most annoying thing about Europe is the trouble it takes to get here. My flying experience, I must say, was really not that nice. The first flight, from Dulles to Newark, was in a turboprop, and it started out just fine – I fell asleep, which is my measure of a good flight, and was dozing peacefully when suddenly the plane started jumping up and down. We hit three patches in a row of serious unexpected turbulence. A coke went flying (and not onto the person who’d ordered it) and there was some minor shrieking. Also, the temperature inside the plane was about 300 degrees. I think we were all pretty happy to make it out alive.

I had a much worse moment on the second flight, though, the one from Newark to Berlin. We had to sit for two hours on the runway in Newark because of a storm, but that wasn’t the bad part – they turned on the entertainment system and brought around water and snacks, and the time went very fast. No, the problem was Atul Gawande’s book Complications, about learning to be a surgeon. When I bought this book at the airport, I forgot that I am totally squeamish. After I woke up Monday morning, I opened it up and got to about the fifth page, where he describes his first attempt to put in a central line. (It didn’t go well.) By the time I had the sense to close the book, I had broken into a full-fledged cold sweat and I thought I was going to throw up. Whoops. I really want to read this book, though – maybe I can get through if I take it a few pages at a time, and also avoid reading it in the window seat of a 757 after two hours of bad sleep.

Despite the moments of misery, I would recommend Continental – it wasn’t their fault I made a bad choice of reading material, and the pilot on the second flight was really good about keeping us updated and informed during the two hours of waiting.