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Author Archives: Gaston
Twenglish
In quite a few languages, the word for ‘twenty’ is derived from a word meaning ‘person’ or ‘body’. The logic runs like this: 5 is ‘a hand’, 10 is ‘two hands’, 15 is ‘both hands and a foot’, and 20 is ‘all hands and feet’ – in other words, all the digits of our bodies.
Also in quite a few languages, the word used to designate both the language itself and its speakers literally means ‘person’ or ‘people’ or ‘real people’. The Yami of Taiwan, for instance, call themselves Tao or ‘people’, and their language ciriciring no tao, ‘speech of people’.
Continue reading‘Corncob-iron.’ Say what?
A ‘snake-iron’ is a train. I get that. And a ‘vulture-iron’ is a plane. Beautiful. Both words are used in Q’eqchi’, a Mayan language spoken in Guatemala and Belize. Or to be completely accurate, these are the literal bit-by-bit translations of the actual Q’eqchi’ words.
Q’eqchi’ has several other such words for metal objects. ‘Awakening iron’ for alarm clock. Not quite as interesting. ‘Thorn-iron’ for fork or rake. Nice. ‘Transporter-iron’ for car. Um – boring.
And then there’s one that I simply don’t understand. There must be some logic to it, but I can’t see it. I’m talking about the Q’eqchi’ word for bicycle, b’aqlay ch’iich’, which bit-by-bit translates as ‘corncob-iron’. Why the corncob? Why should a bicycle remind the Q’eqchi’-speakers of a metal corncob?
AI, ever the confident fool, has an interpretation ready (see picture), but I, without the A, do not. I remain deeply puzzled. If you have an inkling, and a heart, please share your thoughts down below.
UPDATE: Do yourself a favour and read the beautiful and creative suggestions made by other readers. While I can’t be sure, my money is on billdeef’s idea.
Butter No Parsnips
I think of myself as a language and linguistics writer, not a polyglot. But nor am I ashamed of speaking a few languages – imperfectly, but serviceably. So when the people of the Butter No Parsnips podcast invited me for an interview, I agreed. The result’s just come out. You can hear it on Spotify or Apple Podcasts or Player FM and Web knows where else. The thing here below is just the trailer.
Making a case in three simple steps
Latin has them, Russian has them, and even English has preserved a tiny trace of them. I’m speaking of case endings, those grammatical boobytraps that make second-language speakers hesitant to finish their words. In Latin it’s rosa, rosae and the rest, in Russian it’s the thing that made me give up studying the language and in English it’s the difference between greengrocer and greengrocer’s.
Cases, however annoying, aren’t useless, but nor are they indispensable, and lots of languages do without them. So why haven’t Latin and Russian done away with them? Sorry to correct you, but Latin has: see Spanish, French and the other daughters. With Russian and most other Slavics, the answer is filial piety. Children, even teenagers, even rebellious teenagers, speak largely the way their parents taught them to.
The more interesting question really is: how did cases come about?
Continue readingCapital mistake
A Cypriot reader of Babel drew my attention to what he considered ‘a big mistake’ in the Greek translation: my claim that Turkish is spoken in Northern Cyprus. ‘There is not a country named North Cyprus,’ he countered. ‘The northern part of the island is occupied and only recognised by the occupiers (Turkey).’
That’s true in my world as well. At the same time, it’s also a fact that most people in that unrecognised country speak Turkish. So where’s the big mistake? Could this be just another case of fact-free nationalism?
I was in the process of writing a puzzled reply when a possible explanation dawned on me, and checking the English and Greek editions of the book seemed to corroborate it. At first sight, the translation was immaculate: Northern Cyprus, Vóreios Kúpros. However, while words like Northern and Western are often written with a capital in English, Greek only seems to do so when they’re part of an established name. If the translator had written vóreios Kúpros, this simply would have meant ‘Northern Cyprus’, as in ‘the Northern part of the island called Cyprus.’ However, she committed the infelicity of using a capital V, Vóreios Kúpros, which placed this entity in the same category as Vóreia Koréa and Vóreia Makedonía—countries. Hence the reader’s protest.
Before I could even finish this short blogpost, my correspondent replied to confirm that that was exactly it. He was going to notify the publisher in Athens, he announced.
After John, after jam
When you’re learning a new language, prepositions seem nice and easy at first. But after a while they prove to be pesky little buggers, keen on causing mischief. That’s certainly true for Polish, currently my favourite nuisance. One of its mischievous prepositions is po, followed by the locative case. Its most frequent meaning is ‘after’ – but what an ‘after’ it is sometimes!
In English, John’s wife becomes John’s widow after John’s death. Not so in Polish. Here, after John’s death, John’s wife becomes the ‘widow after John’: wdowa po Janie. One sees the logic: post-John, she’s a widow. But ‘widow after John’ would most definitely raise a lot of eyebrows in English. And not only in English: I don’t know of any Germanic or Romance language where a widow is said to be ‘after’ her dead spouse. Nor a widower – let’s not forget the bereft men.
It doesn’t take dying. Much less tragic events have the same effect of creating an aftertime, so to speak. Eating jam will do. Drinking beer will do. Even unboxing a pair of shoes is enough. I’ll explain.
A Polish ‘jar of jam’, filled with the sweet stuff, is very similar to an English one: słoik dżemu, in which słoik is a jar, dżem is how Polish spells ‘jam’ and the u-ending means ‘of’. But a ‘jam jar’ is a different matter. A jam jar no longer contains jam, it’s beyond jam – it’s after its jam phase. So there’s po again: słoik po dżemie, ‘jar after jam’. The same with beer bottles and shoe boxes: they’re ‘bottles after beer’ and ‘boxes after shoes’. (Just so you can verify: Butelki po piwie, pudełka po butach.) These are just examples, of course.
What I don’t know is how Poles call jars, bottles and boxes that are waiting to be filled with jam, beer and shoes. Jars for jam – słoiki na dżem? Of perhaps they follow the deep-rooted Slavic tendency to create special adjectives: jammy jars – słoiki dżemowe? My impression is that both constructions are not exactly wrong, but neither are they standard. I’m happy to bow to superior wisdom though. And I’m well aware that over 40 million people have such wisdom.
I’m also not sure how far this ‘after’ logic can be stretched. For instance, you’ve nearly reached the end of this blogpost. Does that make you a ‘reader after blog’ (czytelnik po blogu)? Makes sense to me. Not to the Poles, alas.
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(Update) Days after publishing the above, I came across another case where Polish can use its word for ‘after’ in a way that English can’t: with the word ślad, ‘trace’. ‘The dog’s traces’ can be translated quite literally as ślady psa, but it’s also possible to say ślady po psie, ‘the traces after the dog’. I’m not sure if there’s a semantic nuance here; when there are two options, there often is.
Let me mnow your mnemonics!
To memorise new words in foreign languages, I use all kinds of tricks. I look for etymological relationships to more words I know, I stick Post-its to objects, I listen to songs that have the word in their chorus. But my number two favourite (etymology is number one) is the kind of mnemonic device known as ‘bridge for donkeys’ in German and Dutch: an artificial and often tenuous, but helpful connexion between the hard word and something familiar.
I’ll list some examples here, mostly in order to inspire you to remember your own mnemonics and share them with me. How have you memorised those hard words in French, Spanish, German, Russian, Mandarin or indeed English, if that’s your second language?
Continue readingWhat does a language writer do?
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Screenwriters write for the screen, ghostwriters write like (invisible) ghosts and sports writers write about sports. As a language writer, I write in language about language. Or rather: in languages (English and Dutch) about languages (dozens of ’em).
From history and politics to spelling, vocabulary and grammar: no matter how mundane or arcane the linguistic issue, I will deal with it in a way that both enlightens and entertains you – or so readers and reviewers across Europe, North America and Asia persistently maintain.
Lingo, my first bestseller, is about sixty European languages. They all have their own chapters, which are therefore short and sweet. (Here are some reviews.) Lingo has been published in twelve languages.
Babel, which has seen editions in seven scripts representing fifteen languages, is about the twenty most widely-spoken languages in the world. Since these stories are roughly three times as long as those in Lingo, Babel had appealed even more to language enthusiasts. (More reviews.)
Not a book but a board game, The League of the Lexicon was developed and written by Joshua Blackburn of Two Brothers. My contribution is the Global Edition, an expansion set consisting of 500 multiple-choice questions about languages other than English.
And then there’s my song Mother Tongue. Listen to it here.
Reading ‘Western European’ through a Dutch lens
I’ve just published a Dutch-language book titled Seven Languages in Seven Days. It teaches the Dutch-speaking reader how to understand written Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and West Frisian based on the languages they already know: their native Dutch, their (semi-)fluent English and their typically rusty school German and French. For them, I made the below video.
This book could also be written – rather than simply translated, since it will require quite an overhaul – for speakers of German and the Scandinavian languages. To make the video accessible for them, I’ve added English subtitles (machine-translated and lightly edited). But of course, if you’re a native speaker of yet another language, such as English, you’re still cordially invited to have a peek. Be welcome!
By the way, I’m delighted to say that the book has been very successful in the first three weeks of its life. Loads of media attention, extremely positive response from potential readers and even an official bestseller listing – my first ever in the Netherlands. There was even a great blogpost in English about it, written by my Portuguese language friend Marco Neves.
Gaston Dorren, language writer 