In chapter 32 of Lingo, I describe – and poke fun at – the way Latvians and Lithuanians write foreign names. Basically, they spell every name as phonetically as possible and then tag on a case ending for good measure. The first US president is known as Džordžas Vašingtonas in Lithuanian, Džordžs Vašingtons in Latvian; the capital and state named after him are written as Vašingtonas in Lithuanian, Vašingtona in Latvian. In Lingo, I trace the history of this habit, once widespread across Europe, in a very general sort of way.  But at the time, I had no specific information as to why the Lithuanians and Latvians have maintained it, whereas most other language communities using the Latin script dropped it long ago.

Which is why I am grateful to a Lithuanian-American reader of Lingo, Joe Yčas, who recently sent me exactly that. Continue reading →

Some idioms are puzzling

As chance would have it, I was holidaying in Spain just when I had to read the galley proofs of the Spanish edition of Lingo, so I spent part of the time hearing and speaking one of my favourite languages and another part reading and writing it. It was while reading that I came across a translation that made me pause. The original says that Basque and the Indo-European languages are ‘worlds apart’. The translator, José C. Vales, rendered this as mundos independientes, ‘independent worlds’. Perfectly fine, I think: Basque is one world, Indo-European another, and they’re independent, separate – apart. Continue reading →

I love Lexicon Valley, the podcast on linguistics. In a show from June, titled The tragedy of English spelling, John McWhorter (upper picture) interviewed Anatoly Liberman (lower picture). Let that line-up sink in for a second: both of them are not only highly regarded professionals, they’re also great popularisers of the science of language. As an admirer of both men, I was listening breathlessly.

And then, along comes this adorable passage. Continue reading →

A father recently sought my advice about the linguistic education of his two young children. Among the many friendly and interesting emails I get from readers of Lingo, this one really stood out, because his was a question I’d never given much thought to before. Our brief correspondence is reproduced below, anonymised, very lightly edited and, of course, with the father’s permission.

Gaston,

I just finished reading Lingo and wanted to extend my compliments. I’m recommending it to all my friends interested in languages. (I’m American, so unfortunately I can count all these folks on one hand).

I’d like to put a question to you. I have two children under the age of 5, and am interested in giving them the gift of a portfolio of languages while they’re still young enough to learn them very easily. But I want to choose wisely. Continue reading →

In a surprise turn of events, the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva has generated a new part of speech that does not fit into the Standard Model of Grammar. After smashing participles and articles into each other, experimental linguists found not only particles, as expected, but also words of a hitherto unknown category, provisionally labelled as articiples.

A collision between the article the and the participle gone produced the particle to (which in nature only ever exists in infinitives such as to be) accompanied by the novel word ghene. Now that the experimenters know what to look for, they expect to find other articiples. Until then, it’s hard to ascertain the meaning, function or even pronunciation of ghene.

The discovery has already led to frenzied speculation among theoretical linguists. ‘I believe that smashing articles into any part of speech may yield an “art of speech”, given the right conditions’, said Oene Daasma, a theoretical linguist at the University of Franeker, the Netherlands. ‘And in the privacy of our coffee corner, I’ve heard my Harderwijk colleague Fetze Alsvanouds think out loud that verbs might be turned into adverbs by adding no matter what, preferably nothing or even less. These are exciting times for theoretical linguistics.’