February 21, 2006
Oh, yes, another War Department language guide, this one Japanese-English
Yesterday, I scanned the cover of a pocket WWII English-Chinese dictionary published by the U.S. War Department in 1943, at the height of the war. Today, I've scanned the cover of another from my collection, published shortly after V-J Day, in September 1945: TM 30-481, "The Supplementary Japanese-English Dictionary", this one a very large hardcover which I just barely fit on my scanner's flatbed:
From the Preface:
This dictionary of 43,000 terms is supplementary to the following six standard Japanese-English dictionaries with which it forms a complete set of seven:
...which I will paraphrase thus:
- a technical manual of about 100,000 terms which was in "final editorial stage" at the time;
- another technical manual of about 4,000 terms which was claimed in a similar state;
- Kenkyusha's New Japanese-English Dictionary, Harvard Univ. Press;
- Kato's Medical dictionary, 1944, German language edition (!);
- "Ozaki's Sea Terms";
- "Creswell's Military [Dictionary];
I'd love to see a copy of the 100,000 word technical manual... anyone know if this was ever actually published?
Posted by Russell Whitaker at February 21, 2006 05:53 PM | TrackBackI suspect the technical manual of about 100,000 terms in "final editorial stage" is Stanley Gerr's card index dictionary, described briefly at:
www.usace.army.mil/inet/usace-docs/misc/un21/c-19.pdf
The dictionary consisted of four cabinets full of filing cards in kanji radical order, which Gerr later donated to the University of Sheffield in the UK, where the University Library library microfilmed it to provide a backup and make the information a bit more accessible. Used by Jiri Jelinek's dictionary research team and known in Sheffield as "The Gerr Files", the dictionary had a lot of military terms - IJN colloquialisms for torpedo boats, and that sort of thing. Ideas of getting it into machine-readable form were effectively ruled out by problems such as the cards all being hand-written, the use of old kanji/old kana, and the undifferentiated mix of Japanese and Chinese. Apparently Gerr once prevented it from being sequestered by the military by removing all the indexing cards, making it useless to anyone who couldn't already read the stuff in the first place.
Yes, the name is the same; Stanley Gerr was my father. I am very curious about the nature of your research and wonder if I might help in some way. Please be forewarned, though, while I have only the fondest memories of the man, the scholarly S. Gerr remains miles beyond my comprehension. Still, I would very much like to hear from you.
Anne Gerr
