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A perfect Babelfish in 2026? No way
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...
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A very public rough draft
In the past few weeks, I’ve been on a couple of radio shows, and even on regional TV. I enjoy doing this: it produces a pleasant state of sharpened mental alertness, I am asked questions that I’m...
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Heads up!
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,...
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How come Latin’s dead, but Greek lives?
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...
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My World in Words
Earlier this year, I was interviewed in the comfort of my home by Patrick Cox (see photo), a British-American radio journalist who specialises in language. I’d enjoyed dozens of his World in Words...
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Do you be, that’s another question
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...
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From plural to singular, three times over
Plurals and singulars are not hewn in stone. Plurals, especially those of foreign extraction, are regularly mistaken for singulars, and – sometimes – vice versa. The word stamina, for instance, was...
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The importance of the German praying man
Traduttore traditore, usually translated as ‘the translator is a betrayer’, is probably the only Italian expression in my active vocabulary. And other than dictionaries and suchlike, Umberto Eco’s La...
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⩗⩗⩗⩗⩗⩗⩗⩗⩗⩗⩗⩗⩗⩗⎞
The scribbles on the right are not just doodles, a badly drawn rough sea or an attempt by a 5-year-old to emulate grown-ups’ fascinating handwriting. A real adult has written a real word here: minimum....
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Science update: the articiple
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...
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Dad’s polyglots – a recipe
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,...
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Vietnamese (1): why, and how to begin
Attending the Polyglot Conference in Thessaloniki, late last month, has inspired me to do a bold and daring thing: start learning Vietnamese. While the language may appear small in comparison to its...
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Vietnamese (2): very early discoveries
Over 30 years ago, I studied some Danish from a book. As a result, I understand a lot of the written language, but my idea of what it sounds like is sketchy at best. That was a mistake I didn’t want to...
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Both inspiring and disgusting
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...
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How to be an Anglosplaining jerk
Alison Edwards, the linguist who translated my book Lingo into English, is a columnist and blogger that I much enjoy reading. Here’s her latest blogpost. As it was first published in a Dutch university...
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A gap year on Basque, thanks to Lingo
Guest blog by Lily Finnie (South West London, UK) In my last year of school, I was planning on doing an Extended Project Qualification, which is basically an extra qualification answering a question on...
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Idioms and images
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...
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Vietnamese (3): What’s harder than the language
“How’s your Vietnamese coming along?” people ask me, for it’s the sort of outlandish hobby that gets remembered. The answer is: so-so, could be better. I’m struggling with two problems, and I’m pretty...
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Politically correct spelling
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...
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Hold your mother tongue
It’s impossible to find a language in which the world can communicate across linguistic borders. For the time being, we make do with English, but that was a bad solution even before the two major...
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