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.
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:
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.
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.
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!
Sometime earlier this year I bought Sharpe’s Eagle, a book by Bernard Cornwell. I’m not exactly sure why, but I then started to buy not only the other books in the series, but also books by Bernard Cornwell that I’d have no interest in, other than the author being the same.
For the last eight months or so the three books which comprise Cornwell’s Grail Quest have sat on the bookshelf. I also have his Warlord saga looking out at me, and I decided I wanted to polish off at least one of his trilogies before 2009 arrived. Owing to the extremely alluring cover of Harlequin, the first in the series, the Grail Quest got the nod to go first.
1) Maths is a fantastic subject. You ought to learn it.
I was never particularly good at maths. I still recall never being able to get my head around adding (or was it multiplying?) fractions, and having to go up to Mrs Moody to have her explain it to me. This was a particularly unusual circumstance for ten- or eleven-year-old me, since I *never* asked for help with anything to do with schoolwork.
Radio needed a hand with something the other day. She’d been battling with it long hand for months. I solved the issue in about ten seconds, so I promised her I’d blog about it so she could see how the solution came so easily.
Her problem was that she had about 11,000 data entries. The problem for her was that she knew that a lot (in fact all) of these were duplicates. What she needed to find out was how many unique entries there were in that list of data.
The Language Show takes place annually at the London Olympia. The Esperanto-Asocio de Britio was there, as was I, for my third visit.
It was the usual hectic week leading up to the event for me, preparing a new copy of Saluton and flyer, and adding subtitles to the excellent documentary Esperanto Estas, viewable in six parts here.
I’m very proud of that issue of Saluton. I think it hit the mark that I was targetting. I wanted something that looked good and was informative to the reader, almost as a series of newspaper articles about Esperanto. Copies are downloadable from here.
As for the event itself …
