Helen FieldsScience Writer

The Dictionary of the Week is a new acquisition. Yesterday I was killing time (and seeking heat) in Harvard Square, so I ducked into a used bookstore. Then I realized that they specialize in scholarly used books, so I was ready to duck right back out into the 20-degree-F outdoors when I stumbled across the dictionary section. Of course I couldn’t resist The Australian Pocket Oxford Dictionary for $7.95.

It’s not for translating between Australian and English; it’s a dictionary of English, as it is used in Australia. You know, like a Webster’s dictionary of American English, but with more marsupials.

First: pronunciation. The pronunciation guide in the front defines the sound “ah” thus: “as in calm, path, arm.” Er…those are three totally different sounds. In college, I studied abroad in Australia and New Zealand with a friend named Becca who has been known as “Beaker” (to a lucky few) ever since – because that’s just how everyone pronounced her name.

Australian English also has lots of words I don’t use in my daily life. Take the phrase “mad as a gum tree full of galahs.” A galah (guh-lah) is a kind of Australian cockatoo – the word comes, says the dictionary, from the word “gilaa” in the Yuwaalaraay language. Australian English has no shortage of words for different cockatoos and wallabies and shrubs, but the differences go beyond that: the preposition “longa,” in Aboriginal English, means “belonging to; near; about; with.” And a “furphy” is a “false report or rumour,” which comes from a kind of cart that was a center of gossip during the second world war.

I love the diversity of English. Down there on the other side of the world, people are going about their lives speaking something that doesn’t just have a different accent from what I speak; it’s got a vocabulary all its own. And over there in England, “pants” has a different meaning. And yet we’re all speaking something descended from the language of this guy.

This dictionary does, however, lead me to wonder if “pocket” means something different in other English dialects. The book is the weight of one of the larger Harry Potters, and while it does fit in one of the bigger pockets on my raincoat, it pulls that whole side down, and I think I would prefer to wing it, dictionary-free, on the mean streets of Melbourne. In the same used bookstore I saw a Kodansha “pocket” Japanese dictionary – also published by Oxford – that was almost as big as a toaster.

Dictionary Stats: The Australian Pocket Oxford Dictionary, 5th ed.

date: 2002
publisher: Oxford University Press
editor: Bruce Moore
length: 1298 pages (I said it was big)
guide words on p. 1010: shake-a-leg n. Aust. style of traditional Aboriginal dancing; shamefaced adj. 1. showing shame. 2. bashful, shy.
useful extras: A map on the back endpaper shows where more than 90 Australian Aboriginal languages are spoken, from Adnyamathanha (central South Australia) to Yuwaaliyaay (northern New South Wales).
obscenities: Nope. Hm. That seems a little unrealistic. This is Australia we’re talking about. Also, “tranny” is defined as “transistor radio.”

One of my favorite online dictionaries, Leo, is this week’s Dictionary of the Week. Actually, it’s kind of last week’s Dictionary of the Week. Hey. I was busy.

Yep, the online dictionary gets an unattractive picture of my computer screen. Sorry, Leo.

One of the many problems with having a job is that you don’t always have your dictionaries with you. In my last two office jobs, I usually had a red English dictionary, a medical dictionary, and a few usage guides at my desk. So if I had to look something up in a foreign language, I was stuck with the internet. (Yes, I could have visited the library, but this is the internet age, my friend.)

My general verdict on online dictionaries: I don’t like ‘em. Take Norwegian, for example. This one gives the impression that it exists solely as a vehicle for ads and this one doesn’t have the word “funky.” Actually, neither has the word “funky.”

Now look what happens when you type “funky” into Leo. Not only do you get five possible ways to say “funky” in German, you also get “to dance the funky chicken” (den Ententanz tanzen) (literally: to dance the duck dance). Then farther down on the page there’s a list of links to forums, with discussion topics like “Deutsche Übersetzung gesucht ‘Funky cold Medina’” (“looking for a German translation of ‘Funky Cold Medina’”).

One of my classmates told me about Leo when I was taking a brush-up German class at the Goethe-Institut Washington early last year. He worked for a German architecture firm, so he had a somewhat more urgent need to look up German words than I did. It’s only useful when you’re sitting at a computer, and I always did my homework for that class on the metro.

But when I went to Germany this fall to do a journalism fellowship, boy was I happy to have Leo. I always had it open on my computer – to help me read the morning paper, to translate words into German when I was writing, for looking up words I heard people say or whatever. My colleagues all used it, too. They were covering science, which meant they had to read a ton of journal articles and press releases and websites in English.

The main problem with Leo is that there are so many entries, sometimes you can’t figure out which is the most important. Take “finish.” It has several senses – the finish line, the finish on a piece of furniture; finishing a glass of water is different from finishing a project. When you look it up on Leo, they’re split up by part of speech, but other than that, they’re all listed in alphabetical order.

The advantage of a dictionary on paper: it prioritizes. But you can’t beat Leo for speed.

Dictionary Stats: LEO Deutsch-Englisches Wörterbuch

date: constantly updating
publisher: LEO GmbH
length: 586,592 entries
special feature: Advent calendar. Of German poetry. Enjoy.
other languages: Leo also has Deutsch-Französisch, Deutsch-Spanisch, Deutsch-Italienisch, and Deutsch-Chinesisch editions.
news: Leo has added a new set of economic terms. “We hope that definitions of terms such as Gläubigerausschuss or Steuerausweichung will prove valuable for many of our users – including native German speakers.”
obscenities: Wow. Yes. So many obscenities. In so many combinations and forms.

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.”)

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.

Before leaving for six weeks in the Bering Sea this spring, I blogged kind of a lot about my preparations. I mean, I had to take steel-toed boots and a survival suit and stuff.

Preparing for 10 weeks in Germany is a lot easier. For example, the chances of falling into subzero water are somewhat lower. And if I forget something, I can buy it or have it mailed to me. This was difficult when I was on a boat in the middle of nowhere.

So I’ll take the good dictionary and my knitting needles and work clothes and a lot of shoes and…I dunno, we’ll see what else ends up in the pile. Any ideas?