[Introduction: A Dutch society for language lovers called Onze Taal publishes a page-a-day calendar about (you guessed it) language. This year, the Thursday is my playground, and I use it to frolic around with European languages. Not coincidentally, they are also the subject of my book-to-be ‘Lingo’ – not that the information on the calendar overlaps with the book. Below, I will reproduce some of the items that appeared on the calendar in recent months. I use the term ‘reproduce’ loosely; not being a translator, I will just try to render approximately the same information in English. After all, this is my work, so I feel it’s mine to corrupt, too.]

In what language does a sentence consisting of the words ‘she’ ‘goes’ and ‘eat’ not refer to the future (as in ‘she’s going to eat’) but to a past event (as in ‘she has eaten’)? Is this in a. Basque, b. Catalan, c. Portuguese or d. Spanish?

In many European languages, including English, ‘go’ can be used as an auxiliary verb to express the near future. ‘Elle va manger’ in French and ‘Ella va a comer’ in Spanish both mean ‘She’s going to eat’.

But in Catalan, the language of eastern Spain, ‘go’ fulfils a very different role. In ‘Ella va menjar’, though the words translate literally as ‘she’, ‘goes’ and ‘eat’, their meaning is ‘she has eaten’. How the Catalans have come to attach this meaning to ‘go’ is hard to tell. Worldwide (or cross-linguistically, as scholars would have it, or from a comparative perspective – ugh), the use of ‘go’ to imply past tense is rare. The same phenomenon does occur, though, in some dialects of Spanish and Occitan. This can’t be a coincidence, since these dialects are spoken just next door to Catalan and are closely related to it.

Incidentally, informal Catalan also has a Spanish-style construction with an added preposition a: ‘Ella va a menjar’, which is future tense all right. What one letter can do.

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