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Louis van Gaal’s exemplary English
Originally posted on ALISON EDWARDS: Observant, Maastricht Louis van Gaal is a genius. Inspired. Visionary. And I don’t mean just as a football manager, although he seems to be quite good at that too....
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Esperanto whispers (2)
In January, an Australian Esperantist, Jonathan Cooper, wrote me a thoughtful and interesting open letter, which he put up on his blog. Unfortunately, a technical problem prevented me from posting a...
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Surprise benefit
The chapter in Lingo that deals with the Sami languages spoken in the northernmost part of Continental Europe is about their numerous words for snow. No hoax here: the fact has been confirmed by...
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Retweets (1)
In the right-hand column of this blog, there appeared a tweet about this blogpost about previous tweets. Twitter is the most ephemeral of media. You throw your deep thoughts, attempted jokes and mood...
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Öh-oh…
Words crossing linguistic boundaries sometimes get mangled pretty badly. I’ve long known this, but I couldn’t help yelping ‘what?!’ the other day, when I heard a university lecturer, Craig Benjamin...
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Retweets (2)
As I announced a couple of weeks ago, I will occasionally repost some of my tweets on this blog. So here’s the second batch. 24 March (see picture) RT @ciklopea: Some useful statistics from...
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Five reasons to vote (for me)
The goddess of gorgeous victory My language blog has been included in this year’s Top 100 Language Professional blogs, which is the kick-off for the annual competition organised by the international...
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Edinburgh and Audible
Two pieces of exciting good news. Well, I’m excited. The one thing is that, at long last, I’m allowed to spread the word that I’ll be participating in the Edinburgh Book Festival. On Monday 24 August,...
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Feline lingerie (2)
In December, I wrote a post on the etymology of the word panties, tracing it back to a 3rd-century Greek saint, Pantaleon, whose name I translated as ‘all lion’. The tiniest of discoveries, of course,...
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My (or rather Ann’s) time in Edinburgh
Gaston:I’ve just returned from a five-day visit to the Edinburgh Book Festival. Worth a report, of course – except that in the meantime other things have piled up, all clamouring for my time. So I’m...
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Thir house teen
Here’s something I would have added to chapter 35 of Lingo if only I had known it at the time. According to Swedish linguist Mikael Parkvall, several Celtic languages have discontinous numerals. The...
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The first scribbler of Western Europe
Throw your mind back to the very first time you tried your little hand at writing. With the unfamiliar pen between your fingers and your tongue between your lips, you gave of your best, but unless you...
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Open-air dictionary
The tiny Swiss village of Vnà got an entry in my app Language lover’s guide to Europe after its inhabitants – all 70 of them – turned the place into an open-air dictionary of the local Romansh...
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Etymologising through my hat?
Business deals that seem too good to be true usually are, and the same is true for etymologies. This morning, I came across the Turkish word şapka, pronounced /shapka/, for ‘hat’. It reminded me of the...
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The Small Dictator
It had to happen sometime, and it’s happened now: a journalist has told the world they don’t like Lingo all that much. Ever since the publication of the book, just over a year ago, I’ve been spoiled...
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Ptime in ptranslation
Both minute and second owe their existence as words to one famous book from Classical Antiquity. Yet their etymologies are a surprising mix, with not only Greek and Latin but also Arabic ingredients....
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‘We’ve went aw Scots’
On page 90 of Lingo, I predict that ‘(s)hould Scotland become independent (…) then Scots may well set course for full and undisputed languagehood.’ To some, that sounded far-fetched. But see what...
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Getting high on status
Words changing their meanings are like plants growing: we never catch them at it, and afterwards we’re not even sure what they used to be like. Take ‘High German’, or Hochdeutsch as the language calls...
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I notice that I’d rather you didn’t
Alison Edwards, the Amsterdam-based translator of Lingo and one of the world’s funniest writers with a PhD in linguistics, recently read a Dutch book about language that was a run-away best-seller a...
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Bowing to the inevitable
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...
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