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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...
View ArticleWhat does a language writer do?
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...
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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...
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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,...
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Capital 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...
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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...
View ArticleButter 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...
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‘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...
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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...
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