Re: OT: Dictionaries: why two sections??

On Sun, Sep 24, 2006 at 03:41:18AM +0200, Henrik Theiling wrote:
> Hi!
>
> Do you often open a dictionary, try to find a word and when you reach
> the corresponding page and line, you notice that all words around are
> in the wrong language?  And then you notice that you started in the
> wrong one of the two sections of the dictionary, namely exactly the
> wrong direction of translation?  And have to do the lookup again in
> the other direction?
Yep, happens to me all the time. I open the dictionary looking for an
English word, and wonder why there's Cyrillic all over the page. And
then it clicks. Or I try to look up a word in Russian, glancing at the
page headers to find the letter I want, and wonder why my memory of
Cyrillic alphabetic order is so bad. And then I realize that the letters
are in Latin. D'oh.


[...]
> Why are there two sections??  It is unnatural!  Let all the words be
> in one list, no matter what language they are in!
Hmm, that would be extremely evil in my case (Russian/English). Now not
only I'd have trouble mixing up lookalike glyphs in either alphabet, I'm
gonna totally confuse homographs.


> Did anyone encounter this problem before?  Did anyone have the same
> solution? :-)
[...]

The solution? I don't know... enjoy laughing at yourself, perhaps? :-) I
know I do.


T

--
Those who have not appreciated the beauty of language are not qualified
to bemoan its flaws.