Now, I had no idea what the Jefferson Bible was. I assumed it was just a Bible owned by Thomas Jefferson. But no, Thomas Jefferson was more radical than that. He took passages from the first four books of the New Testament and pasted them together in an assemblage he called “The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth.” So he skipped the bits he considered later additions, like the miracles, and stuck to Jesus’s life and teachings.

Look closely – this is literal cutting and pasting. He actually cut up books in four languages to make it. Each column is a different language. From left to right, that’s Greek, Latin, French, and English.

The two books in the back of this next picture are the two English-language Bibles he cut his passages out of.

Jefferson didn’t intend this for publication, but the Government Printing Office published a facsimile in 1904; that’s one in front. Until the 1950s, when copies ran out, newly elected senators were given a copy like this one.

The museum explains this book as part of Jefferson’s general Enlightenment-era revolutionariness. This is the guy who drafted the Declaration of Independence, after all, and why stop with the monarchy? He was a fan of Jesus, but he questioned the way he’d been portrayed.The book is on display now because the museum finished a big conservation project on it last year. (This was a book for private study, not a book to last through the ages; the 18th-century glue and the many kinds of paper and ink made it a special challenge.)

You can read the book for yourself on the American History website.

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I wrote a chapter about Chris’s and my Bering Sea expedition. Hugh Powell wrote about Adélie penguins in Antarctica, Lonny Lippsett wrote about exploring the Arctic floor from an icebreaker, and Amy Nevala wrote about Greenland’s glaciers. Of course, Chris’s fantastic photos fill the book.

It’s been fun revisiting my memories of the Bering Sea in the last few days, since my copy arrived. I also answered some questions by e-mail for this nice item about it…and went on much too long. I just kept remembering all these lovely details about the trip. It was a great experience.

The book, Unlikely Friendships: 47 Remarkable Stories from the Animal Kingdom, is about animals that are buddies. There’s a monkey that befriends a kitten, a hippo that follows a tortoise around, a snake that hangs out with a hamster – all sorts of good stuff. Sure, it’s not investigative journalism, but who doesn’t want to read about a monkey that adopts a kitten?

Jenny’s a beautiful writer, and I can’t wait to read the book myself – I just added one more sale to those Amazon stats.

Here’s a nice item about the book in today’s issue of Parade.

It doesn’t look like much from the outside. Well, it looks like something. It looks like a hopeless victim of the ’60s.

See? Hopeless. But the story’s different when you go inside. The entrance is on the ground level. From the outside, in the picture above, the ground level looks like a cave, but there’s actually quite a nice glass-enclosed lobby there.

From the lobby you go up a wide staircase and you’re in this:

All those white panels you saw on the outside of the building are actually 1.3-inch-thick slabs of marble. The light filters through them and gives the whole space this sort of warm, wood-panelled-library feel. On the right you can see part of the central column of stacks – six floors of rare books behind glass. It’s like a zoo for books.

I don’t think banging on the glass is a good idea – it’s also not a good idea in zoos, they say – but I did take some pictures through it. Look, old books:

The library had a temporary exhibit on the effect of psychoanalysis on American writers and thinkers. They also have a few treasures on permanent display. This is a page from John James Audubon’s Birds of America:

The book is so big it’s called the Double Elephant Folio. Something I didn’t know about Audubon: He was born in Saint Domingue – you may know it better as Haiti – and raised mostly in Nantes. He emigrated at the age of 18, hung out in Pennsylvania for a while, migrated to the frontier, and eventually set out to paint every bird in America. Read about him here.

They also have a Gutenberg bible.

Oh, you Ivy League types, you think you’re so hot, with your…Gutenberg Bibles. Ok, yeah, I can’t really dispute the coolness of owning a Gutenberg Bible.

Gratuitous arty shot of exterior:

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They first spotted it on Thursday and it was still there as of this blog post Friday. Actually, the Thursday blog post is funnier:

Will you be releasing any other wildlife into the Main Reading Room?

Staff are contemplating that, both to keep themselves alert and on their toes, and also to prevent researchers from taking long naps.

Photo: from the LoC blog

The Killer of Little Shepherds sort of made me feel better about our modern times. People look back at The Past as this time when things were glowy and perfect, but here was this serial killer, roving the countryside, cutting throats, doing horrible things to the bodies, cleaning himself up, and zipping off to another jurisdiction, over and over and over again. Today, his fingerprints/DNA/whatever would have done him in pretty early on, because he’d had a run-in with the law before his whole countryside killing spree, after he tried to murder a woman he was obsessed with.

Even if you weren’t being killed by Joseph Vacher, it was a tough time. In France alone at that time, something like 400,000 “vagabonds” wandered the country looking for work. Mechanization was taking away agricultural jobs; there was little or no social safety net. So they wandered, and got blamed for all the crime and social problems. (Ok, in the case of Vacher, blaming a vagabond for crimes happened to be appropriate.)

I really enjoyed all the stories along the way about how Lacassagne, the doctor, was solving crimes with science – a case in which a body was delivered to the morgue in a trunk, for example, and he looked at the injuries and how the blood had pooled and stuff and figured out that the story being told about how the body got in there was totally not true.

Here’s an episode of the World Science podcast in which Doug Starr talks about the book – you can also watch the video for just a taste of some beliefs about guilt and blood in 19th-century France.

She goes through the whole history, from Hildegard von Bingen, who wrote down about 1,000 words of a language called “Lingua Ignota,” through a 17th-century English guy who thought he could cut away the ambiguity of English by organizing everything, on to the guy who invented Esperanto in the late 19th century and the language fans today who develop their own languages and share them on the internet just for the heck of it. It’s a great read – lots of fun, with human stories and plenty of fun language facts.

Being a language nerd herself, she also decided she had to get her first-level certification in Klingon, which turns out to be a really difficult language. It’s got crazy word order and is agglutinative, which means you glom suffixes and prefixes onto roots to make big long words that can be whole phrases. (“If it’s in your way, knock it down” is two words.) Even the linguist who invented Klingon doesn’t speak it very well. When he introduces new words and phrases, he has to be careful not to make mistakes, because the real Klingon speakers will catch them. He’s gotten good at explaining them away. (Ah, well, see, when Klingons make formal toasts, they’re using an obsolete word order.)

She mentioned, without explaining, “ergativity” as something some languages have. I looked it up and found this blog post. Um…I’m still confused. I mean, Japanese was tough and all, but at least it’s not ergative.

So. Good book. And sooner or later I’ll get back to my own language nerdiness and bring the Dictionary of the Week back from hiatus.

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.

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

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 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.