Language
A microblog and a blog
December 4, 2012
Recommended reading
Piano de cuisine
November 22, 2010
Piano de cuisine : French translation for "range cooker"
English, French and Arabic
March 30, 2010
The influence of Arabic on English and French: links to Arabic loanwords in French and in English
Margaret Gelling
June 4, 2009
We spent last Saturday walking in Swaledale, in the Yorkshire Dales, starting from Gunnerside. Our walk book pointed out that this name comes from Norse “Gunner’s saetr”, meaning “Gunner’s slope”, which reminded me of the recent death of Margaret Gelling,...
Plain English Campaign
December 12, 2008
A reader asked me whether the Plain English campaign has affected my work as a translator. This campaign is mainly aimed at the literature produced by the government, at all levels, to ensure that crucial information is easily understandable...
Bilingualism in the USA
November 28, 2008
I’m back from the USA. I had a fantastic time (can you see me in the photo?). I won’t talk about the differences between British and American English, as other blogs out there do it much better than I would...
Rwanda drops French as official language
November 1, 2008
It's official. There goes the 60,000 word English report I was meant to spend most of December and January translating into French for an NGO based in Rwanda. Where do I complain? What do you mean, Rwanda has other fish...
Translation and language links
September 3, 2008
Thank you to all the people who sent me interesting links recently. As I will be starting a Spanish course in October at Leeds Metropolitan University, I was particularly interested in palabea, a social network site for practicing and learning...
Alcohol and linguistic abilities
June 30, 2008
When I first arrived in England and I was struggling to understand and speak English, I noticed that my fluency increased noticeably after drinking some of the warm beer that my new friends seemed to like so much. I always...
Language maps
January 10, 2008
Three interesting language maps for you, courtesy of strange maps (via Language Log) and Wikipedia (thanks Xavier!). Click on the images to go to the relevant articles. A recent map of the languages of Europe....
Cymraeg
September 20, 2007
I’m off to Wales for a holiday. As I’ll be the co-pilot on this journey and due to the fact that we’ll be going through places such as Eglwysbach, Llanfairpwllgwyngyll, Abergwy-gregyn and the like (I’ll do my best to...
Being bilingual protects the brain
September 18, 2007
Being fluent in two languages may help to keep the brain sharper for longer, a study suggests. It's interesting how bilingual (able to speak two languages with the facility of a native speaker) and fluent (able to speak or write...
How bilinguals switch between tongues
May 21, 2007
Bilingualism is a topic which interests me, and it's been mentioned on this blog in my entry language and the brain and Caroline and Daniel's second language acquisition and bilingual language processing. Now Xavier has sent me a link to...
The "N word"
March 2, 2007
New York to impose a voluntary ban on the "N word" Some argue that doing so [weaving the term into music and entertainment] is empowering, and that reclaiming a slur and giving it a new meaning takes away its punch....
Stephen Fry & Hugh Laurie: The Subject of Language
January 23, 2007
I'm much too busy to watch Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie ramble on about language. But I did it anyway. "Thanks" Der....
Language and propaganda
January 12, 2007
One of the many, many things I found fascinating in Cuba is the use of language for political ends. Wherever you go, you are bound to end up reading political messages, all of them to the glory of the revolution....
The evolution of the Queen's English
December 12, 2006
As the common tongue continues its inexorable slide towards a new dark age of glottal stops and "innits", news comes that even the Queen is drifting slowly down river towards Estuary English....
Language and familiarity
December 8, 2006
During my first tea-break today, I was saying to a friend that although I have a fairly wide vocabulary, which I rely on heavily in my work, I actually don’t make use of it in everyday speech. I tend to...
Paris Syndrome
October 24, 2006
Around a dozen Japanese tourists a year need psychological treatment after visiting Paris as the reality of unfriendly locals and scruffy streets clashes with their expectations, a newspaper reported on Sunday. "A third of patients get better immediately, a...
Murray's postbox
October 17, 2006
Today is an important day of action in the History Matters campaign, so I thought I would write about a landmark which has a very special place in the history of the English language. This postbox is unique in the...
100 words for 100 years
July 17, 2006
Askoxford.com mentions Susie Dent's Fanboys and Overdogs, in which she selects one word to represent each of the last hundred years. "Not all of them bear heavy historical significance, but each captures something of the cultural vibrancy of the year...
The most common nouns in the English language
June 22, 2006
The most common noun in the English language is "time" "The thing that struck me when I put together this list was that 90% of the top 100 words were one syllable, and that a large proportion were actually from...
Guaraní
June 9, 2006
What do cougar, toucan and jaguar have in common? Not much, apart from all being loanwords from Guaraní, Paraguay's second language (its first language being Spanish). "Paraguay" itself is a Guaraní word that means "place of great water", probably because...
English as the national language of the USA
May 19, 2006
English would be declared the "national language" of the United States under a measure the Senate approved Thursday, a largely symbolic move that supporters said would promote unity and encourage assimilation by immigrants. I don't know what I think about...
The Simpsons, humour and linguistics
March 24, 2006
Margaret links to a post on HeiDeas on The Simpsons, linguistics and humour (extra helping here). Just what I needed to brighten up this dreary Friday morning....
Guest blogger: The languages of Guernsey
September 30, 2005
By Xavier Kreiss My mother is a Guernseywoman, and I've known and loved Guernsey all my life. The Channel Islands have always held a particular attraction for me - I'm a half-British Frenchman, which probably explains the affinity between myself...
The Oxford English Dictionary
September 22, 2005
How are dictionaries created? How do people collect all these words and make sure they don't forget any? These are the types of questions that led me to read Simon Winchester's The Meaning of Everything (also, it was a birthday...
Origins of place names
July 8, 2005
There are lots of place names ending in –dene or –dean around Brighton: Westdene, Rottigdean, Saltdean,Woodingdean, Coldean, Holligdean, Ovingdean, Roedean, Varndean, Withdean. Of course I had to find out what this ending means. This is what the Concise Oxford Dictionary...
Is language just a communication tool?
June 9, 2005
Fancy a little challenge? The title of this entry is the topic of the philosophy exam in this year's Bac. I want your essays on my desk tomorrow morning. Mine, in 1990, was "Is art work or leisure?". I loved...
When the Web lingo was new
April 11, 2005
It's amazing how new words and expressions get assimilated by language in the Internet age, to the point where a word that is new one year is commonly and globally used the next. I found this article called "When the...
The top 10 words of 2004
December 2, 2004
Merriam-Webster has compiled a list of the most researched words on its Web sites, and this is the result: 1. blog 2. incumbent 3. electoral 4. insurgent 5. hurricane 6. cicada 7. peloton 8. partisan 9. sovereignty 10. defenestration Blog...
Langue sauce piquante
November 30, 2004
Thanks to Transblawg and Language Hat for mentioning Langue sauce piquante, a very promising new blog written (in French! Hurrah!) by Le Monde's proofreaders. They talk about language, expressions, words, in fact, everything I like. Their most recent entry on...
EU language barrier "costing lives"
July 28, 2004
This article in the Guardian today tells us that Doctors in some of the world's poorest countries are being denied cheap life-saving drugs for patients because Brussels lacks enough linguists to translate a new patent law into the 20 languages...
The Modern Language Association
June 18, 2004
Thanks to Caroline for sending me the link to a CNN article about The Modern Language Association. It gives a map of the languages spoken in the USA. I did a search on "French" and it appears that some of...
Language and diplomacy
May 7, 2004
A couple of weeks ago on Word of Mouth (Radio 4), there was a very interesting piece about the role of the French and the English languages in diplomacy. French was widely used in international diplomacy for two main reasons:...
A hundred words for snow?
April 23, 2004
Language Hat has debunked one of my favourite linguistic facts, which has been around for ages and that I've often heard quoted by people who seemed to know what they were talking about. I genuinely believed that Eskimos had one...
Eats, Shoots and Leaves
February 5, 2004
I recommend Eats, Shoots and Leaves, by Lynne Truss, to anyone with a vague interest in punctuation but who can’t face an arid textbook on do’s and don’t’s. Or who feels that sitting on a bus or a train reading...
Word of Mouth
January 26, 2004
Thanks Andy for letting me know about Word of Mouth, a half-hour weekly program on Radio 4, “Radio 4's open door on the world of words and the way we speak”. I listened online to the most recent program and...
Understatement
January 21, 2004
“We’re now going to try and land, cabin crew take your seats for landing.” We’d been circling Biarritz for 20 minutes, waiting for the storm raging below us to abate, and “trying to land” wasn’t a prospect that was filling...