Section 18 Entry 0001. Date: 2003 February 25 Tuesday.
  (diary)   (previous)   (top)   (bottom)   (next)  (topics)  (contents)

One of the nice things about being a novelist is that you can invent words. This is particularly handy if you don't know how to spell the ones that already exist. However, when you become an English teacher, the rules change.

And this brings us to today's topic: dictionaries and the English teacher. Fasten your seatbelts, hang onto your hats, and try not to get over-excited!

Well ... a while back, I went to Books Kinokuniya, which is between Yoyogi and Shinjuku stations, near the Takashimaya department store (where this month's Books Kinokuniya clearance sale was held.)

On that visit, a month or so back, I looked at The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language but decided it was too pricy. Yesterday, however, I bought it on sale at 3,000 yen (US $25.42 at today's rate of exchange.)

Before buying, I checked two entries, the first for Kurdistan. The dictionary (fourth edition, 2000) says:-

An extensive plateau region of southwest Asia. Since the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire after World War I, it has been divided among southeast Turkey, northwest Iraq, and northwest Iran, with smaller sections in Syria and Armenia.

That does a very good job of nailing down the subject in a compact space.

My next move was to check "spell" to see if the correct spelling is "spelled" or "spelt" or both. As it happens: both. I'd been troubled by this question for days, but had never gotten round to checking it out.

I was pleased to see that The American Heritage Dictionary gives the pronunciation of even simple words like "spell".

A couple of years ago I bought The New Oxford Dictionary of English. (I'm talking about the 1998 edition, which seems to be the first.) This was not cheap. I bought it in Japan, paying a hefty premium over and above the price of the same product in the West, and was outraged when this product turned out to be ....

And now I'm sitting here pondering a legal question. Can I call this a defective product? Well, probably not. So I won't. In fact, to be on the safe side, I won't run the risk of even thinking of this as a defective product, not even in the privacy of my own head.

Let us pause for a moment here while I adjust my head ....

.... okay. Where was I? Ah, yes, I remember. I was talking about the merits of The New Oxford Dictionary of English. Let me state, clearly and without equivocation, that this is not a defective product. In fact, to be honest, this dictionary is probably just fine and dandy for most of the people who buy it.

However, from my perspective (and I don't think that my perspective is unique) some vital information is missing. I didn't discover this fact until I got home, and when I did discover that some information was missing I was really angry about it. In fact, I was incensed. I was so furious that I seriously considered throwing the book in the garbage.

The thing is, I did check the book in the bookshop. For example, I checked that it had a proper definition for "Euro," one that established that this word denotes the currency of the European unjion. (At the time, the word "Euro" was missing from many dictionaries, or else was defined just as a kind of kangeroo.)

The word "Euro" is definitely in The New Oxford Dictionary of English, complete with all the standard dictionary facts - pronunciation guide, part of speech, definition and origin. And, having checked out a few sample entries like that, I had no reason to suspect that anything was wrong.

When I finally started using this book, however, I found that one of the standard dictionary facts has not been systematically supplied for all words. This has been done deliberately.

The dictionary says (page xvii) that "Generally speaking, native speakers of English do not need information about the pronunciation of ordinary, everyday words". So it leaves out the pronunciation guide for those words, including, for example, "pin" and "pen".

This really infuriated me because, as far as I'm concerned, giving pronunciation guidance for ALL words is one of the standard jobs that a dictionary can reasonably be expected to do. (In fact, as a small child, I was explicitly taught at school that this is one of the things that dictionaries DO do.)

The "generally speaking" statement about native speakers not needing information "about the pronunciation of ordinary, everyday words" may well be generally true, but that doesn't necessarily mean that it's sensible to proceed on the basis of it. For example, it's undoubtedly generally true that most people who drive without bothering to wear a seatbelt get away with it most of the time. However, that doesn't mean that driving without a seatbelt is a smart move.

In my case, it's generally true that I don't need the pronunciation of simple common English words. However, sometimes I do. And then I need a dictionary. One that gives me systematic guidance on pronunciation. And then I find myself asking "Why in the name of hell do I have to go scrabbling around in a Japanese-English dictionary for the pronunciation of a simple English word when I've paid all this money for a massive reference book which could reasonably have been expected to answer my question?"

(If you haven't already guessed, never again in my life am I ever going to buy another dictionary with the Oxford imprint. I'm still angry. This has been eating at me for a long, long time now.)

As an English teacher, there are times when I have a really serious need for a guide to the exact pronunciation of a word in British English (or, at least, to a possible pronunciation in some generally accepted version of English), since my own pronunciation is a mishmash of British sounds, New Zealand sounds and American sounds, and I can't trust it as a reliable guide to anything.

If the student has surfaced a highly detailed question about pronunciation, then you have to come up with the answer. On those occasions, it's sometimes a case of "I'll get back to you on that next week." And then you're committed, and you really do need an authoritative guide to sort things out.

A case in point is the difference between "work" and "walk," a difference which Japanese students have particular difficulty with. So what exactly is the difference? As an ordinary native speaker of English, you don't need to know. But as an English teacher, you do need to know, because if you don't know the exact difference then you can't teach the correct pronunciation. (Of course, you can try "Listen and repeat," but if that doesn't work then what do you do?)

As an English teacher, you often end up in the same situation as the caterpillar which was walking along perfectly happily, with no trouble at all, until someone asked it how it could possibly manage to control all those legs. At which point the caterpillar started thinking about it, and its control over its own mobility disintegrated, and it came to a crunching standstill.

It's at times like these that you need professional help, and to sort out the "work" and "walk" problem I needed a dictionary. I actually nailed this one down a long time ago, but if I needed to solve this problem today then The New Oxford Dictionary of English would be of no help at all, since it does not give pronunciation guides for "war" or "walk" or "were" or "work".

By contrast, if you consult The American Heritage Dictionary you find that the difference between "walk" and "work" is a vowel difference, that the vowel in "walk" is the same as the vowel in "war," and that the vowel in "work" is same as the vowel in "were".

An additional datum: in the classroom, the average Japanese student is generally able to distinguish between "war" and "were".

Once you know those facts, then you can go ahead and teach the pronunciation, using a method which should be fairly obvious. (Right? If not, then think about it ....)

But until you can sit down with the dictionary and nail down exactly what is happening then you can end up like the caterpillar. Effectively paralyzed. And The New Oxford Dictionary of English has distressed me by failing to support me in some of my crippled caterpillar moments.

To give The New Oxford Dictionary of English its due, however, I do still find it useful, and it has answered a certain number of my questions. For example, one day I was team teaching in junior high school, here in Japan, and the teacher asked me to model the pronunciation of the months of the year for the students. We got no further than "February" before we hit a big problem.

In my pronunication of "February," there is no "r," but the teacher was very emphatic about the fact that this word requires an "r". Obligingly, I supplied one. Then, at home, I went to the dictionary. Is dropping the "r" a bizarre quirk of New Zealand English? Or is the Japanese teacher's insertion of an "r" an example of only-in-Japan pronunciation?

Obviously other people have asked this question before, since The New Oxford Dictionary of English has a little paragraph about it, explaining that there are two possible pronunciations.

The implicit attitude of The New Oxford Dictionary of English seems to be that "we know what you will need to do with our tools so we'll set things up so the tools will do what we've decided you will want to do with them. But there are some things, of course, that you won't want to do."

This rather reminds me of the attitude that Microsoft seems to take to designing software. It's great when it works but infuriating when it doesn't. And, in the case of The New Oxford Dictionary of English, for me as a professional English teacher the dictionary has failed me often enough for me to feel the need of a new English dictionary, one that fills in the gaps left by the first ... even though the gaps in question are only pronunciation gaps, they are significant for me.

(I also find myself wondering how these pronunciation gaps might affect someone who spoke English as a second language and who wanted to graduate to a dictionary aimed at native speakers of English. It's possible to speak English at quite a high level and yet still pronounce some words with a distinctly foreign accent ... the case of Henry Kissinger comes to mind.)

So I've got myself a new dictionary, The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language.

Yesterday, at the Books Kinokuniya clearance sale, I also bought a book by Christopher Davies, Divided by a Common Language, a guide to the differences between British English and American English.

Both The New Oxford Dictionary of English and The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language go some way toward catering for those perplexed by the divide between American English and British English. For example, the entry for "diaper" in The New Oxford Dictionary of English tells you that it is "N. Amer." English for "a baby's nappy". Similarly, the entry for "nappy" in The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language tells you that it's a "Chiefly British" alternative for "diaper".

However, it's convenient for me to have the major differences put together in one small and extremely portable book that I can easily carry around, and Divided by a Common Language is that book, a paperback of 200 pages.

Since coming to Japan, I've had to grapple with American English, and in this it has been helpful to have had regular contact with living, breathing Americans, some of who have helped fill in some gaps. The comments of British teachers who have remarked on American English have also helped.

Consequently, before picking up Divided by a Common Language I already knew that a British "pot plant" is an American "potted plant," a "pot plant" being, in America, a marijuana plant. (Christopher Davies recommends that what the British call a "pot plant" should be referred to in America as a "house plant").

I had also learnt that "fanny" means, in American English, the "buttocks" (to quote The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language). In British English, by contrast, the word "fanny" has a catastrophically different meaning. Christopher Davies does not explain this difference, but merely glosses the word as being "vulgar" in Britain, and so to be avoided by the American visitor. The New Oxford Dictionary of English, which is not coy, explains that "fanny" is vulgar slang for "a woman's genitals".

However, while I've learnt quite a bit of American English, there are still gaps, and for me it is professionally important to fill these gaps. Just flicking through Divided by a Common Language, for example, I found that "cordial" can be an alcoholic drink in the States, something I never knew until yesterday.

(As a little kid at elementary school - primary school, to use New Zealand English - I sometimes drank cordial. It had no alcoholic content whatsoever ... although, coincidentally, on the rare occasions on which I have drunk Japanese-made wine I have been uncannily reminded of that cordial I drank in my childhood.)

Once I got my hands on Divided by a Common Language, I very naturally turned to the short section on Australasia (meaning, in this case, Australia and New Zealand), and found that a New Zealand "dairy" is an American "convenience store," which reassures me that the term "convenience store" is a piece of authentic American English. (Here in Japan, people are always talking about "convenience stores," but until now I've never been sure whether this was an authentic English word or an illegitimate Englishing of some artificial Japanese English construct.)

However, the brief space that Christopher Davies gives to Australasian English is just scratching at the surface of a fairly large subject. In particular, I noticed that the word "crook" is present, meaning "sick," but that there is no coverage of the phrasal verb "to go crook at," which is an idiomatic expression sometimes used in New Zealand English. (Whether it's used in Australia I don't know.)

I remember reading about a New Zealand short story which featured a farm dog, and which also featured a farmer called (if memory serves) "Jock". (Memory may be totally wrong here. "Jock" may have been the dog's name, not the farmer's, or the name may not have been "Jock" at all.) Anyway, a Russian translator faced the task of putting into Russian a sentence reading something like the following:-

"The dog misbehaved, and Jock went crook at it."

The literal meaning of the resulting Russian sentence was something like "The dog misbehaved, and Jock bent over." In fact, the required translation is something like "The dog misbehaved, and Jock expressed his anger at it."

While there are a certain number of unique New Zealand expressions, New Zealand English generally follows British English. But not always. In New Zealand, "jelly" is definitely British "jelly" and not American "JELL-O". However, to my ear, the American term "wall to wall carpet" sounds normative, and the British "fitted carpet" sounds alien.

Anyway, to wrap up, I've spent a long time on the subject of dictionaries, because to me this is very interesting. "Write what you know," says the old dictum, and I sure know my dictionaries.

In particular, over the last year or so, I've been heavily involved in editing student assignments, and doing this has seen me have recourse to the dictionary pretty much every day. It's really amazing what Japanese students of English can find in the dictionary. Is the word "asynchronous" a real English word and can you write that "e-mail is asynchronous"? The answers are "yes" and "yes" but both answers came as news to me.

"Asynchronous" is defined by The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language as meaning "Lack of temporal concurrence; absence of synchronism". The New Oxford Dictionary of English gives a more elaborate definition (and, to tell the truth, a better one), part of which reads "not existing or happening at the same time".

After puzzling over this word (with the help of a different set of dictionaries) a group of us (four or five of us, if memory serves) decided that, yes, communicating by e-mail is generally asynchronous because the time at which you send your e-mail message (Friday afternoon, for example) is typically not the time at which I answer it (which may be some time after midnight some two or three days later.)

If you are an English teacher in Japan then you certainly need to use your dictionary, at least if you find yourself checking a lot of written work, because a certain proportion of the students are most definitely using theirs, sometimes with results that serve to further the edification of the teacher (as in the case of "asynchronous") and sometimes with results that quite simply boggle the imagination.

---

(diary)   (previous)   (top)   (bottom)   (next)  (topics)  (contents)

---