Grammatical irregularities in a foreign language can drive you nuts, but grammatical regularities are worse – when you expected them to be irregular, that is.

English is a second language to me, and I dutifully learnt 38 years ago that most verbs are turned into questions require the auxiliary to do: ‘Where do you live?’ rather than the Shakespearean-sounding ‘Where live you?’ But this is not not true for to be: ‘Where are you?’ is fine.

So far, so good. Until the other day, when on the Wait But Why blog (much recommended) I came across this question: ‘How do you be a good person?’

Excuse me?! Continue reading →

In classical antiquity, Europe’s major written languages were Latin and Greek. Why is it that the former is long extinct, while the latter is still spoken?

In point of fact, neither has died, but both have changed. That’s normal, given that natural languages never remain constant very long. Over the centuries, Latin has acquired new names, whereas Greek hasn’t. Continue reading →

In my latest blogpost, I voiced my misgivings about being interviewed on radio and TV. A few days later, Alison Edwards, an Australian linguist, translator and writer living in the Netherlands, reported on some of her own media experiences. My conclusion: I’ve been lucky so far.

(Note: NRC is a major quality newspaper.)

Under the headline ‘The language barrier is about to fall’, Alec Ross in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal makes a strong claim: ‘In 10 years, a small earpiece will whisper what is being said to you in your native language nearly simultaneously as a foreign language is being spoken.’ So the Babelfish will finally spread from the Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy to the real world.

But I think Ross is wrong, for four reasons.

1. The prediction has been around for over half a century without coming true. Machine translation is one of the holy grails of technological development, up there with nuclear fusion (with electricity ‘to cheap to meter’, a promise from 1954) and autonomous cars – I remember how I first heard about those in my 1970s primary school, and the idea wasn’t new even then. Of course, none of this disproves Ross’s claim, but it does justify a certain scepticism. Continue reading →

Geography may not be fate, but Fate certainly knows her geography. And when she wanted to inculcate me with a keen interest in languages, she took great geographical pains to achieve it, starting as far back as the 1930s.

In that decade, my father was born in the Dutch city of Enschede (the red dot marked 1 on the map – click to enlarge), a mere five kilometres from the German border. He grew up speaking not only the national language but also the region’s Low Saxon dialect of the Low German language. He went on to become a French teacher, dabbling in Spanish on the side. Having moved to the south of the country, he then learnt another regional language, Limburgish, about which more in a minute. Finally, he also became fluent, though not grammatically perfect, in German, so much so that later in life, when his other languages were temporarily wiped out by a stroke, he would only speak German. From a linguistic perspective, Fate did an excellent job with him. Continue reading →