25
The Oxford English Dictionary puts out regular memos when they update; in March 2011, they announce that OMG and LOL are among the new “initialisms.” Of course, being the OED, they’ve done thorough research on when these abbreviations first appear; they’ve got OMG in a personal letter from 1917.
(Link pointed out by Wray Herbert on Facebook.)
20
This weekend the AAAS meeting is in town. Hordes of scientists and science writers have descended on D.C. for a weekend of general science. It’s good times – lots of interesting ideas flying around and tons of colleagues to hang out with.
Friday I wrote about bilingual babies. The idea of someone being bilingual at eight months may seem a bit nutty, but apparently it’s true – babies are born with a basic sense of the language or languages they heard in utero, and they keep developing their knowledge from there. I wrote before about a study that found that babies cry differently depending on the language they’re growing up with – read about that here.
06
Happy 100th episode, Rhitu!
My friend Rhitu Chatterjee hosts the science podcast for The World, an international news show produced by the BBC and PRI, and she’s celebrating the 100th episode of the podcast. Listen to it here. In particular, keep your ear out for the listener who sings the Norwegian birthday song over the phone. Ok, yeah, it’s me. It’s right near the beginning of the podcast.
If you actually speak Norwegian, I apologize for my accent and for one possible wrong preposition. (I sing “fra hjertet” and I think it might actually be “av hjertet.”)
UPDATE, 1/10: To clarify – I’m not in the video clip posted on that page, I’m in the podcast. To listen to the podcast, click the play button or “Download MP3″ near the top of the post.
07
When I lived in Japan, in the late 90’s, the internet was still a relatively new thing. I actually had a kind of proto-blog, on Geocities, and I did something Skype-like to call home for free…but my dictionaries were on paper. These days, though, the unpoetically named Jim Breen’s WWWJDIC is rocking my world. And that’s why it’s the Dictionary of the Week.
Jim Breen’s WWWJDIC has got everything. You can look up characters by counting the number of strokes in them. You can type out a Japanese word phonetically, with roman letters, or in Japanese, if you happen to know how to make your computer write in Japanese. You can look words up in the general Japanese-English dictionary, or one of many other dictionaries – including automotive, Japanese-Slovenian, and river & water systems.
I use this dictionary for reading e-mails from my Japanese choir. I’ve been singing for a few months with the Japanese Choral Society of Washington (oh hey, I’m in the picture that’s on the homepage right now). During rehearsal, I’m ok – I can mostly follow what’s being said. It helps that I do a lot of choral singing and have a good idea of the kinds of things that conductors say. But a lot of important information gets transmitted by e-mail. It is so handy to be able to just cut and paste the words I don’t know into the dictionary.
I got a whole string of e-mails today from the group. One, about a potluck after rehearsal next week,contained the lovely word 帰国. The first character means “return” and the second means “country,” so together it means “go back to your country” – part of the occasion for the potluck is that a choir member is going back to Japan. It’s pronounced “kikoku.”
If you cut and paste that into the dictionary, you get a whole list of definitions. The first one is the word you looked up. Then there’s also compound words it appears in, like 帰国セール, kikokuseiru (sale), to sell your belongings before returning to your country, or 帰国子女枠, kikokushijowaku, special consideration for students who have lived abroad. Each entry has the word, the pronunciation, definition, a recording of someone saying it, and a string of links. Here are the ones for 帰国:
Each of those looks up 帰国 in a different database – V takes you to all the ways you can conjugate 帰国 as a verb (I didn’t know I knew the hortative, but apparently I do), Ex is a list of sentences using 帰国, G is google, GI is google images, S is an online Japanese-Japanese dictionary, A is a Japanese-English online dictionary (for Japanese people), W is Japanese Wikipedia, and JW is some kind of Japanese word database.
The WWWJDIC doesn’t have the most beautiful interface, but it sure does a lot of stuff. I’m pretty sure I’ve only discovered a tiny corner of it, but I am very grateful to it for helping me read my e-mails.
Oh wow, yeah, I just came across this, for example: an interface that lets you handwrite a kanji with the mouse while the computer guesses what you’re going for.
Dictionary Stats: Jim Breen’s WWWJDIC
date: predates the world wide web; constantly updating
publisher: Jim Breen seems to be the guy; Monash University in Australia hosts the dictionary (he’s retired from the Electronic Dictionary Research Group)
other languages: Japanese – German, French, Russian, Swedish, Hungarian, Dutch, Spanish, Slovenian
amusing entry from FAQ: “[Q] I can’t read the kana readings. Will you add romaji display as an option.
[A] No. Better to learn kana. It will only take a week or two.”
insight from FAQ: “Remember that it is really a Japanese-English dictionary, and you have to take your chances with English-Japanese.”
obscenities: Yup. I can only remember one rude word in Japanese (糞), but it’s in there.
P.S. I know, I know, the Dictionary of the Week is now more like the Dictionary of the Quarter. It took a little hiatus. I don’t know if it’s back for good now or just dropping in.
19
I just finished a thoroughly entertaining book about made-up languages: In the Land of Invented Languages. It’s by Arika Okrent, a linguist who’s interested in people’s attempts to create languages, mostly perfect languages that will eliminate ambiguity, be easier to learn, and/or bring about world peace. Yes, that all worked out really well.
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.
21
Yesterday I went to a session at the AAAS meeting about the links between music, language, and the brain. I was particularly impressed by a study on Musical Intonation Therapy. Sometimes people who have had their speech knocked out by a stroke can still sing; this therapy is based on that idea. Patients are trained to speak by singing.
I wrote a blog post for ScienceNOW about a study on whether (and how) this therapy works. I was amazed by the video I describe in the beginning of the story. Unfortunately, the researcher doesn’t have permission from patients to spread video widely, just to show it in presentations.
The researcher said a stumbling block for using this therapy is that people are embarrassed to sing. I think that’s sad – not just because it seems to be a useful therapy, but also because I wish singing was more routine in our culture. Once the therapists – and patients – get over that, the therapy seems to work well.
There was lots of neat stuff in the session. Here’s someone else’s story about how learning an instrument helps with language skills, and here’s a BBC story about the stroke research – be sure to listen to the audio file. (It’s linked a few lines below the picture.)
03
This is fun – an article from the New York Times about “crash blossoms.” Those are headlines that don’t make sense because they’ve dropped too many of the little words that help make English understandable. Most of them hinge on the fact that a lot of English words can be both nouns and verbs, and the third person singular of the verb is the same as the plural of the noun. Thus: “British Left Waffles on Falklands.” Heh-heh. Waffles.
02
The new Dictionary of the Week is one I’ve had longer than most of my other dictionaries: Lingua Engelsk-norsk norsk-engelsk Ordbok for videregående skole. If you don’t read Norwegian, and hardly anyone does, let me help you: Lingua English-Norwegian Norwegian-English Dictionary for Upper Secondary School.
The stickers say “Allowed to use on the exam!” and “Help with problem words” and “Mini-grammar.” Perhaps you can tell – this Norwegian dictionary is intended for use by Norwegians. I bought it in the university bookstore at the University of Oslo a few weeks after I graduated from college. I believe it was even shrink-wrapped, so I couldn’t look inside, but I needed a Norwegian dictionary, and Norway is a good place to buy them. It was 198 kroner, which is in the $30-$35 range.
I went to college in Minnesota, so when I found out I was going to Norway on a Fulbright, it wasn’t that hard to find a Norwegian class. The other college in town has a Scandinavian languages department, and a professor agreed to let me audit her intro class. It was pretty easy – I’d heard that Norwegian was what you took there if you needed to get the language requirement but couldn’t hack Spanish, and that seemed to be true.
My language education continued that summer at the University of Oslo’s lovely International Summer School. Many of the classes are international relations-y type topics and are taught in English, but you can also take Norwegian language and literature classes. By the end of my six-week intensive course, I could hold my own in a very, very simple conversation with a patient person, like the author of our textbook, who did the oral portion of our exam. (It’s a small country.)
Of course, then I went to Trondheim, where people speak nothing that resembles the standard Norwegian I’d learned in classes. And, just to make it harder, I was working in an academic environment with people who’d come from all over the country and brought their dialects with them. I mostly spoke English at work.
But I continued taking language classes, and with the help of my choir friends, I got pretty good at it by the end of the year. Choir friend Ann-Kristin, who I often saw at the bus stop on the way to work, refused on principle to speak English with foreigners. She was right, of course, and I appreciated her patience and her relatively easy dialect. (When I wasn’t around, she secretly spoke English with a visiting researcher from Spain; short-time visitors got a pass.) Another choir friend, Veronica, spent her summers guiding busloads of British tourists around her home islands, but eventually decided my Norwegian was good enough and switched. I never switched with another friend, Anna Bergitte – she’d lived in the U.S. in high school and spoke perfect idiomatic American.
The vast majority of Norwegians still speak much better English than I will ever speak Norwegian, but I’m still glad I learned it. I mean, obviously. I know how to pronounce æ, ø, å, and kj. I was able to read the Norwegian subtitles when I watched Scottish movies. And I’ve found it’s very useful with the older folks I’ve met through Norwegian folk dancing. (A hobby that came along much later.)
Fascinating fact I’ve just discovered while poking through the dictionary’s introduction: It was based on an English-Danish/Danish-English dictionary that came out in 1991. Norwegian and Danish are really, really close, particularly in written form. I can read Danish, but I have no hope of understanding it when it’s spoken.
Dictionary Stats: Lingua Engelsk-norsk norsk-engelsk Ordbok for videregående skole
date: 1996
publisher: Universitetsforlaget AS
length: 831 pages
guide words on p. 714: skjold et shield; (våpen~) coat of arms; (flekk) blotch; skredder en tailor; (dame~) dressmaker.
introduction: Includes a history of English-Danish dictionaries. The first one came out in 1678 and had a title along the lines of “English Dictionary of which can be learned the English Speech, containing the Words which do not have a known affinity with Latin or Danish.” The first Danish-English dictionary appeared in 1779. These were both actually written by Norwegians, the introduction proudly points out.
useful extras: As with so many foreign language dictionaries, the extras – a guide to English grammar, tips on writing letters in English, a box listing the ways to translate fabrikk into English – would be much more useful if I were coming at the dictionary from the other side of the English/Foreign Language divide.
obscenities: Yup! I guess upper secondary students in Norway can handle rude words.
31
The Economist had a story last month about which languages are the most difficult. It’s kind of a silly quest. For one thing, it depends what language you’re starting in. If you’re a native speaker of Korean, Japanese is probably going to be easier for you than Spanish. But, for English speakers, the Economist settles on Tuyuca, a language of the eastern Amazon. Japanese was hard enough for me – I have no plans to start on the Amazonian languages. Although I suppose if someone wanted to pay me to go there, I would give the language a try.
One of the interesting things the writer points out is that English isn’t as hard as people like to say it is. The spelling makes absolutely no sense, but other than that, we don’t conjugate verbs much, our nouns don’t have gender, and making plurals is pretty easy for most words. This makes me feel a little less guilty about being a native speaker of the language everyone else in the world has to learn.
19
When I first got to Japan and started learning Japanese, I used a dictionary that wrote out all the Japanese words in roman letters. Loyal readers of Dictionary of the Week may remember it as one of the first dictionaries to be featured: Langenscheidt Japanese. It was a great dictionary for a beginner, but, as I said in that entry, eventually I got sick of having to look things up in our alphabetical order. So that led me to my tiniest, and most-used, Japanese dictionary: Sanseido’s Daily Concise English Dictionary.
When you’re looking Japanese words up in dictionaries, you really need “ga” to come right after “ka” and “do” right after “to.” You know, the natural order of things. What? This order is not intuitive to you? Well, let me explain.
The sounds in Japanese are syllables made up of a consonant (usually) and a vowel. Within each set of syllables, the order is a i u e o (“ah ee oo eh oh”), and then each set starts with a different consonant sound. The sets are ordered a, ka, sa, ta, na, ha, ma, ya, ra, and wa.
But then some of those consonant sounds can be altered. So か makes the sound ka, but if you put two little marks on it, it makes が, which is ga. Same for き ki and ぎ gi, こ ko and ご go, etc. If you put the little marks on the た ta-characters, they become the だ da-characters. The さ sa family becomes ざ za, and the は ha family has two alterations – the little marks make ば ba, and a little circle makes ぱ pa.
A lot of those are pairs of related sounds, which I didn’t realize until I studied Japanese and noticed that I couldn’t always hear the difference between k and g. If you don’t know which you heard, it’s much easier to look up both “kakkou” and “gakkou” if they’re right next to each other than if one of them is in the G’s and one is in the K’s.
So, once you have the alphabetical order down, you can use this dictionary. Of course, most Japanese words are actually written in Chinese characters, but you look them up in the dictionary by sound. The Chinese characters are given first in the entry, like this, for “tenshuu”: “てんしゅ 天主 the Lord.” You need the characters to distinguish it from “てんしゅ 店主a shopkeeper.” (One is the master of heaven; the other is the master of a store.)
This dictionary is a lot less useful for going from English to Japanese. Say you look up the word “dictionary.” Here’s what it will tell you: 辞典. Good luck figuring out how to pronounce that. Better to wing it: “You know, the book? And it has words? Many words? Japanese, and English, too? Both?” Sometimes I would look a word up, then show the entry to the person I was trying to talk to, but this only works if they have their reading glasses on them.
As with so many of my dictionaries, I have no idea where this one came from. I suspect a used book store or a friend…it was published in 1990, and I think it was probably well-loved before I got it. Oh, hey – it has the price “6.75″ written on the inside front cover, which means I got it at a used bookstore in the U.S. on one of my trips back for grad school interviews. Nice.
This dictionary’s service didn’t end when I left Japan. I’d relied on it for so long, and I wasn’t ready to let go of my Japanese life yet. I carried it in my bag for months after I moved back to the U.S. in 2000.
So one day that fall I was sitting with a new grad school friend in front of the campus bookstore at Stanford. Some guy came by and gave us t-shirts advertising bigwords.com, a textbook seller that apparently still exists – wow, what are the chances? Anyway, the t-shirts all had big words on them. Mine said “coruscant.” Neither of us knew what that meant, but I pulled out my Japanese dictionary, and it came through! It defined “coruscate” as ピカッと光る, which is a totally cute definition. The Webster’s on my shelf gives the accurate but boring “to give off flashes of light; glitter; sparkle.” Sanseido’s definition translates as “light up, like, ‘peekah’!”
Japanese is adorable – onomatopeia for everything. More on that later.
Dictionary Stats: Sanseido’s Daily Concise English Dictionary
date: 1990
publisher: Sanseido
editor: 宮内秀雄 (I’m not going to put money on it, but I think his name is Miyanaka Hideo or, in Western order, Hideo Miyanaka)
length: 1264 tissue-thin pages
guide words on p. 381: でんきうなぎ 電気鰻 an electric eel. てんじゅ 天授の sacred; gifted by nature.
up-to-date-ness: The map of Europe on the inside front has one Germany (thumbs up) but also one Yugoslavia (uh-oh) and one Soviet Union (oh dear).
useful extras: Many appendices for the Japanese person who wants to excel in English, such as translations of the names of Japan’s government agencies (原子力安全 Nuclear Safety Bureau), metric conversion tables, instructions for writing letters in English, and a chart converting Japanese dates to regular dates. (Showa 1 was 1926 and so on.) Gosh, I’d forgotten about that. I used to know what year it was in Heisei.
obscenities: Yup! And they do not hold back. The really rude ones are in here.