Side Story- Momo Learns English
Tenth Moon, Fifth Sun, Sixth Year (Wood)
As I was just about to put my logbook away, Momo came up and peered over my shoulder. I thought both she and Matsumoto were asleep.
"What's this?" she asked. "Keeping a dairy?"
"Just a travel account. Nothing incredible," I replied honestly. Anything scandalous contained within its pages Matsumoto and Momo knew about already, anyways, so if they read it I wouldn't have a problem.
Momo peered closer and inspected the pages, flipping between them. "I couldn't read this if I wanted to. What kind of words are these?" she asked pointing to my scrawl. "And these?"
"I write in a shorthand style called division-script. Only for personal documents, though."
"Oh, when you write words in the shortest form, based on the languages you know? I find that too confusing, I just write in plain Japanese. Wait a second… weren't you the one that invented this kind of shorthand? I remember seeing a book on it in the fifth division library."
"So what if I was? That doesn't change anything, now, does it?"
"Tight-ass genius." To this my eye twitched, but I had the common sense to know it was Momo's sideways humor. She quickly went back to my writing. "This I recognize," she said pointing at a character. "It's 'mother.' Why did you use the Chinese character for it? It's more complex than the Japanese one."
"I have trouble writing those characters that look like squashed boxes, like 'mother', 'every', and 'ocean'." (Just writing that last sentence gave me a hernia.)
"You have trouble writing the 'woman' character, too, you know. Yours looks like an upside-down triangle with legs."
"It's not as bad as my 'mother'. Wait, that came out very wrong." Momo chuckled, and I couldn't help but giggle a little myself. Wait, me? Giggle?
"But what's this?"
"Anal."
"Ay-nahl? What language is that?"
"English. It means shibutoi."
Momo laughed. "So whom were you referring to as 'ay-nahl'?"
"Myself."
"Ay-nahl," she repeated, trying to get the word to roll, but it was too thick and sat in her mouth like a lump. "It sounds weird."
"English is a rather guttural language. It is a mix of Germanic and French roots, so it is highly irregular. 'Anal' really isn't the first word you should be learning."
"So what is?"
I had to think about that for a second. Hello? Nah. My name is…? Too bland. I finally figured out the first word I really wanted to teach her.
"Thank you. It means arigatou."
"Thaink yoo…"