There are a lot of languages in this world (easy for us Americans to forget, I know) and a good number of the print materials in the library are completely, um, foreign to me for this reason. I do okay with French, Italian and Spanish… German, not so much. (At least I recognize the alphabet.) Then there is a massive collection of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean materials at the library. Also a lot of materials in Slavic languages, and then there’s the stuff in Arabic and Hebrew. The bibliographic records for these non-Roman materials look like a crazy person wrote them, because they’re basically transcribed phonetically and when there’s sounds or accents that can’t be translated, they just throw in some question marks… like this:

Petr Eben ; sedm zamys?leni´ nad z?ivotem a di´lem

When I get a request for one of these crazy quizzical titles, I like to guess what it might be about: Russian basketball players? Recipes for cabbage and pork? Gardening tips? I’m always wrong. I know that I’m wrong because once I pull up the bibliographic record in the catalog, I can look at the subject headings and see what the book is really about. Take this one for instance:

Anatomie der Schagsleber im babylonischen Leberorakel: eine makroskopisch-analytische Studie by Rosmarie Leiderer.

I recognized a few words so I was thinking it was probably a hum-drum anatomy book… Imagine my delight when I saw the subject headings:

Oracles, Babylonian

Liver– Miscellanea

Sheep– Miscellanea

HOly miscellaneous sheep and liver oracle!!! Is this book about animal sacrifice? Ancient Babylonian fortunetelling? This is the greatest book I’ve ever seen!

I wish that I could end this entry by saying how my exposure to the many splendid languages of the world inspires me to sit down and commit a few to memory… but it’s just not true! Not knowing is too much fun!