A Walk in the Woods

Friday, September 29, 2006

Writing exercise 8

In the last post I wrote: "a paper edition of dictionary."

Aside from the apparent omission of an article in front of "dictionary," I thought it's almost correct. But just a moment ago it occurred to me that it might be wrong, so I put it on a search engine to see if it's correct, and found no matches. Then I made different combinations of the three words to see in what way I can say what I want to say in English.

On Google:

paper edition : 973,000
(a, the) dictionary of (the, a) paper edition: no matches
(a, the) paper edition of a dictionary: no matches.
dictionary in a paper edition: no matches

Maybe just because no matches are found on search engines with those expressions doesn't prove they don't make sense. But on the other hand, when I want to say the same thing in Japanese, just about every expression I can easily come up with without taking it so seriously yields at least one hundred search results or more. If you are Japanese, you can check out yourselves using any search engine out there. The first one I came up with in Japanese without much thought was "kami-ban no jisho," and it yielded more than six hundred search results, which is much more than expected. In English, the most vexing part of this is that while there are so many search results with "paper edition," an effort on the part of a non-English speaker to try to combine it with the simple word "dictionary" in whatever way it makes sense takes this much time.
Is it that there's no way to combine the three words, "dictionary, paper, edition," add a few words, and find hundreds of search results to prove they make sense?

Maybe I can just say "a printed dictionary," or "a paper dictionary."

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