I was prompted to write this entry after answering a question about the subject in a language forum.

What it comes down to is what I call half-truth teaching, where something is presented to the student which is true a fair bit of the time but should, nevertheless, not be taken literally. With a bit of elaboration or better phrasing things would be better.

You know the kind of thing I’m thinking about. “You should never start a sentence with ‘and’ or ‘but’.”

But for this example, they might have had a point. And that’s not all.

The subject I have in mind today is the indefinite article.

Hands up who was taught that a becomes an before a vowel.

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Radio has been making me laugh over the last six months.  In the middle of conversations she’ll drop in the line “Sounds onimous.”

I initially pointed out to her that she’d mispronounced the word, only to get back “That’s what I said: Onimous.”

“Yes, but the word is ‘ominous’.”

“‘Onimous.’  That’s what I said.  ‘Onimous.’”

Well this went on for months, every time Radio brought up the word.

She argued that if she had it wrong, a teacher would’ve corrected her.  They hadn’t, ergo she was correct.  It seemed to escape her notice that my teachers, by that logic, would also have corrected my long-time use of ‘ominous’ in that case, and that these are the same teachers who never corrected her use of ‘could of’.

Six months later things came to a head when we were walking through Biedenkopf in Germany.  The regular discussion arose when she again said that something ‘sounds onimous’.

I happened to have an English-Esperanto dictionary back at the base, so I proposed that we bet over the result.  The loser was to buy a book for the winner.

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This was a question put to me by my friend, Camel, a few years back. He thought it preposterous that the indefinite article and the number shared the same form in that language, and wondered how the French didn’t get confused.

Camel’s not a language person, so I did my best to explain in simple terms. I think that I likened it to homonyms in English, such as comparing “I gave him his bag” with “I gave her her bag”, and letting him acknowledge that the presence of two different hers each with different meanings has never led him to confusion in English.

Of the languages that I know all follow this French example of having the same words for the number one and the indefinite article. Admittedly, I only know Germanic and Romance languages so my resource base is limited, but I’m now reassured by a passage I’ve just read in, of all things, a book on the history of mathematics.

It turns out that English did use to have the same word for the indefinite article and the number one. This word was ane. Somewhere between 1100 and 1500 the word ane took on two different pronunciations, depending on how it was being used.

So there you have it: English is perhaps unique in making this distinction, but it’s a relatively recent phenomenon. It wasn’t always the case

The have + past participle formula is widespread in the Latin and Germanic languages, which is strange when you think about it.  Why use the word have, which has its own meaning, as an auxiliary?  After all, the proper meaning of have has no special property.  Why not use hear, offer, compute, or any other seemingly random choice of word?

The answer, as one might expect, lies with Latin.  At the time that the formula have + past participle came into being, it was used only sporadically.

The best example I can think of involves finding a key.

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My friend Orry has just come back from a year’s travelling in the Antipodes. Having taught English very briefly in Thailand and enjoyed the experience, he’s returned under the rain with a sense of vigour and the desire to spend the next few years of his life working as an English teacher abroad. To this end, he’s enrolled himself on a course.

Anyway, he must be thinking about the subject a fair bit because he texted me the following message at the hour of 07:36 the other day:

English trivia for you — did you know that you say “didn’t we use to” instead of “used to” but you say “she used to”? Had no idea about that rule!

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I can’t sing in any language.  That would make for the shortest blog ever were I to leave it at that, so I think I’ll seize the opportunity to elaborate a little.

“Artificial” sounds like such a negative word.  I often try to avoid using it when answering the inevitable question about “what is Esperanto?”

It shouldn’t be an issue, of course, as you there reading this on your artificial computer, wearing your artificial clothing, and being used to your artificial modes of transport well know.

When I consider other constructed languages I become dubious about whether they could actually have a spoken dimension to them, whether they could be used for singing.

I fully understand others’ scepticism about Zamenhof’s project, since I harbour those same apprehensions about any other constructed language that you might suggest to me. (Well, except Solresol, for obvious reasons. ) (more…)

By David Crystal

I’m a language fan. I speak a few to relatively high levels.

If you factor in that I’m not a native, you could call my French near fluent and my Esperanto advanced. My Italian, though rusty, is not so bad that I can’t pick up a magazine and read it. My understanding of Spanish, relatively untried and certainly untaught, is passive enough that I used documentation from the Comisión Económica para América Latina y el Caribe in my MSc dissertation, and I successfully translated an excerpt from a novel to Radio the other day.

I have knowledge of other languages that is functional for tourism reasons but not for conversation. I’m thinking of German and Swedish here, both of which I have used to limited degrees on my travels, and the grammars of which I have read.

You can factor in the historical aspect of language too. I’m very well versed on the history of English and its progression over last 1500 years, and was just this morning reading a grammar of Old and Middle English.

I’ve also read a few books on linguistics over the years, including breakdowns of a couple hundred diverse languages from all over the world. I’ll be doing it again soon after purchasing Nicholas Ostler’s Empires Of The Word, nearly 700 pages dedicated to language from the first moment that they were written down.

Add all these factors together and you’ll likely reach a seemingly obvious conclusion:

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What is it with people throwing around words unnecessarily, superfluously, redundantly?

There’s a grammatical concept called tautology, which is when one uses a word redundantly, since another word in the phrase carries the same meaning.

Examples would be such things as current incumbent (the latter word means “the current occupant”), bad headache (are there any other kinds?), and adequate enough.

I also have a disdain for corporate-speak.

So when tautology and corporate-speak meet, I find myself wanting to murder people to death.

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By Kenneth Katzner

Some sources cite 6809 languages in the world, a figure that I have quoted myself in presentations. This book, of course, only covers a fraction of them, going into any sort of detail in only about 200 cases.

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Poetry is a lost artform on me. The only time I ever feel even slightly impressed by it is when the meter runs perfectly and the endings rhyme. Then I consider it creativity. Otherwise, I cannot stand it.

Radio (and many others who know me) might suggest that I lack a certain … emotion and so can’t invest myself in it.

This post, however, is about poetry. It’s in Moldovan and was written by Mihai Eminescu. (Actually, I should say Romanian, since they’re the same language and Moldova came into being as an independent country a century after his death.)

Here’s the poem as he wrote it: (more…)