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A very public rough draft
In the past few weeks, I’ve been on a couple of radio shows, and even on regional TV. I enjoy doing this: it produces a pleasant state of sharpened mental alertness, I am asked questions that I’m...
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Heads up!
In my latest blogpost, I voiced my misgivings about being interviewed on radio and TV. A few days later, Alison Edwards, an Australian linguist, translator and writer living in the Netherlands,...
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How come Latin’s dead, but Greek lives?
In classical antiquity, Europe’s major written languages were Latin and Greek. Why is it that the former is long extinct, while the latter is still spoken? In point of fact, neither has died, but both...
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My World in Words
Earlier this year, I was interviewed in the comfort of my home by Patrick Cox (see photo), a British-American radio journalist who specialises in language. I’d enjoyed dozens of his World in Words...
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Do you be, that’s another question
Grammatical irregularities in a foreign language can drive you nuts, but grammatical regularities are worse – when you expected them to be irregular, that is. English is a second language to me, and I...
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From plural to singular, three times over
Plurals and singulars are not hewn in stone. Plurals, especially those of foreign extraction, are regularly mistaken for singulars, and – sometimes – vice versa. The word stamina, for instance, was...
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The importance of the German praying man
Traduttore traditore, usually translated as ‘the translator is a betrayer’, is probably the only Italian expression in my active vocabulary. And other than dictionaries and suchlike, Umberto Eco’s La...
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⩗⩗⩗⩗⩗⩗⩗⩗⩗⩗⩗⩗⩗⩗⎞
The scribbles on the right are not just doodles, a badly drawn rough sea or an attempt by a 5-year-old to emulate grown-ups’ fascinating handwriting. A real adult has written a real word here: minimum....
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Science update: the articiple
In a surprise turn of events, the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva has generated a new part of speech that does not fit into the Standard Model of Grammar. After smashing participles and articles into...
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Dad’s polyglots – a recipe
A father recently sought my advice about the linguistic education of his two young children. Among the many friendly and interesting emails I get from readers of Lingo, this one really stood out,...
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