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A stream of Cape Week’s End videos, and more to come
I’ve recently been posting a lot of Cape Week’s End videos, on a wide variety of language-related subjects. And while they’re mostly in Dutch, I add English subtitles whenever I believe the subject to...
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English – a public health hazard?
Might the incidence of Covid-19 in this place or that depend to some degree on the main language spoken there? A reader from Italy asked me this a few days ago. Being a polyglot, he had first come up...
View ArticleA love song to languages
Two years ago, at a camping site in the French Morvan region, I wrote a song. In English, which was actually a first for me – I’d just written a whole book in English, but all my lyrics had been in...
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Koran dankon, tradukistoj!
Saint Jerome as painted by Jan van Eyck. Note the lion, a typical translators’ pet. Today is not only the feast of Saint Jerome, the Church Father who around 400 CE translated most of the Bible into...
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Stumbling on crappiness
Adam Smith The philosopher and economist Adam Smith was ahead of his time in many ways I’m sure, but the following quote from his Theory of Moral Sentiments surprised me nonetheless: … the beggar, who...
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The Intimate Stranger: Why I’m learning Polish – and liking it
A Polish metaphor, made in Denmark. This article was written for, and first published at, culture.pl, a website about Polish culture. I love family reunions. Most of my aunts, nephews and cousins are...
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Something sharp in that sock
Etymology is like chocolate: dispensable but irresistible. Words hopping from one language to the next, shape-shifting, gaining new meanings… Take our sharp. Or rather skarpo, the word used by the...
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An emperor, a painter and a gigolo walk into a bar…
… called L’Anglophonie.‘Aren’t you Genghis Khan, love?’ the barmaid asks the first man.‘I am’, he replies. ‘Except Genghis begins with a soft g. Jenghis rather than Ghenghis. Think of JU-lius Caesar,...
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Chinese writing’s near death experience
“If the Chinese script is not abolished, China will certainly perish!” So said the literary author Lu Xun in the 1930s, and many in China agreed. History has proved him wrong, of course. How the...
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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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