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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I love old maps, and the sense of history, of knowledge still left to uncover, that they contain within them.  I adore sitting there thinking “You got this right, but you shouldn’t have connected Australia to China.”

I notice that in this blog entry I wrote:

69. DO YOU LIKE MAPS?
Sure, especially ones from centuries ago. I’d love to have one on a wall.

I’m happy to say that I now have one to put on the wall.  Or, more specifically, twelve.

When Radio and I were scouring bookshops in Birmingham as penance for losing her bet about the non-existence of the word onimous we visited Borders, and paid a quick visit to their bargain boxes.

I didn’t find any books that particularly interested me, but I did spot something that was most unexpected:

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For some reason I have the date remembered as the 22nd and have to constantly try not to look caught out when Radio reminds me “It’s our x-month anniversary today!” if I happen to be be with her on the 21st.

Well I didn’t forget today, the occasion of our second anniversary.  I even bought Radio some anniversary presents well in advance and presented them to her on Saturday.  Of course, I neglected to think of getting her a card to open to mark the day, but I think she ought to be used to me and her consequent reduced expectations by now

As if by pure coincidence I walked into my office today to see a photo of the two of us stuck to my monitor.  It turns out that a recently retired carer had taken some photos at a wedding reception and went out of her way to drop me off a copy.  I had every intention of scanning it and posting it, but failed miserably because the jabroni scanner is broken.

I’m not really one for soppy statements or any of the lovey-dovey nonsense, and I won’t change my spots here either, so I’ll just finish by saying that I feel very fortunate to have chanced upon someone as sweet and kind as The Radio, and am very humbled that she has offered so much to me over the course of our relationship.

She’s a nosey bugger, so I know that she’ll read this within seconds of me posting it.  I love you very much; let’s get on with getting a house, you soppy git

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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I’ve been crook for a few days. People will know that it’s legit because I don’t get paid to be off sick. Unfortunately, deadlines don’t change, especially when people want to print t-shirts for this year’s Internacia Seminario.

Well, this was news to me. You see, keep it hush, but there won’t be an IS after this one, because the event is merging with the Ago-Semajno. The result is JES, the Junulara E-Semajno.

Well, I had already been approached by Rolf to brand it, as I had the IS. I knew that they would need the logo ready for display, so I was prepared to work to that deadline.

Rolf threw a spanner in the works, though, when he said the other side wanted to have some t-shirts printed. Suddenly my deadline shrank, since I have to work to the timeframes of the printers.

Well, I’ve just got the two different logos finished. One is for the t-shirt and low-resolution thinking, the other is my preferred one, which will go on the website.

Let me know what you think:

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I was never the world’s most natural mathematician. I wish I’d been taught the tricks used to solve multiplication problems by the Egyptians and Russian peasants.

Consider the sum 58 x 93. That would take me a while to work out normally. I don’t even know where to start, truth be told.

However, if I were an Egyptian this problem would resolve itself fairly easily.

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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

On a language forum that I browse, someone has just started a thread about agreement with past participles in French.  I’ve posted a reply later in the thread, because one person is getting confused about an elementary part of the equation.  What I thought I would do is speak about the past tense here, before giving the answer that I gave to her in another post.

Here are the basics:

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On a language forum that I frequent a Romanian girl has asked whether the sentence “I haven’t a car” is correct English, since she had read it in a book but was expecting to read “I don’t have a car” or “I haven’t got a car”.

There are the usual responses that are less than ideal, including one where a chap who was against the usage adjusted his position to say that actually it is permissible.

I don’t want to say that I would never use “haven’t”…

For example I would use the following in everyday speech:
- I haven’t eaten all day.
- Did you take the garbage out.?
No…no I haven’t.

Well, that was enough for me. He’d given a misleading answer in a thread that was all rather amateurish and riddled with inaccuracy. I felt the urge to inject some facts into it, and I think that this makes for a nice blog post, so I’ve copied it here.

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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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