/'lingwa/

A resource for teachers and learners of English...and, well, pretty much anyone interested in language

[lingwa]

700 reasons to study languages!

https://www.llas.ac.uk/700Reasons

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"Sono Italiano di Gerrard's Cross..."

[braindeadmegaphone]

[worldofpayne]

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The pitfalls of English spelling.

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Click on the cake for a fantastic article from the Guardian about food idioms!

Before you do, can you guess what these ones mean?

German: das ist kein Honiglecken [it's not like licking honey] 

Hindi: thali ka baingan [like an aubergine on a plate]

Russian: Не вешай мне лапшу на уши [don't hang noodles on my ears]

[lingwa]

Visit Original Link

Dogs go "woof-woof"....("bau-bau", "vov-vov", "wan-wan" and even "gav-gav") 

Before moving into the business of serving up obesity and heart disease to North America and beyond, we all know that Old McDonald owned a humble small-holding where youngsters went to learn about animal noises.

We learnt that cows go “moo”, sheep go “baa”, pigs go “oink”, dogs go “woof” and so on. Look them up in any good dictionary and you’ll find that the majority of them are, in fact, listed as bona fide verbs.

Being onomatopoeias, you'd expect them to be more or less the same in all languages. After all, a dog in England sounds much like a dog in Italy, doesn't it?...

Well, apparently not. In English the noise has been reconstructed as woof woof, yet the in Italian a dog goes bau bau!

Fortunately, The University of Adelaide have gone to the effort of collating a comparative list of animal noises for 17 different languages, from Dutch to Urdu (click on table below).

While for some animal noises there seems to be broad agreement (e.g. snakes invariably go sss), some are just bizarre. Cows go baeh in Urdu, parsk in Finnish and bees go boon boon  in Japanese!!

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Happy Valentine's Day (for yesterday)!!

In how many languages can you say "I love you"?

Start learning

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Multilingual Manchester - more on urban linguistic diversity.

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BBC article on documenting endangered languages in New York.

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Two years in Italy and what have I learnt?...

It's ok to dress small dogs.

He may have been in power for two decades, but nobody actually voted for Berlusconi, or at least I haven't met anyone who will admit to having done so.

'To be with Tim' is not a lifestyle choice, nor is 'to have Wind' a digestive complaint; stick with Vodafone to avoid confusion.

Food matters*

It's possible for men to have 'cervical' problems, but it's nothing a couple of pain-killers and a microwaveable cushion won't relieve.

Blasphemy is considered an art form and the best ones start with 'Porco'(!)

If you graduate by the time you're 25 you're deemed a genius.

Boing is about as informative as Italian TV gets.

It's funny to get an Italian to translate 'Sky long'.

'to lemon' is more pleasant than it sounds.

There are real plumbers out there called Mario and Luigi

Wasps have two wheels and bees have three.

...to be continued

*and if you're ever invited to lunch with a family with Calabrian origins (from the 'toe'), fast for 72hrs in preparation.

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How many words would you need to use in English to fully convey the meaning of déjà vu? 

- "Wierd, I just had a really strong feeling of....you know, the feeling that you have already experienced a present situation"

Despite having an estimated quarter of a million words, there are many concepts which the English language really struggles to express.

This by no means exhaustive list contains some delightful terms from around the world for which we, English-speakers, have no one-word equivalent. 

Perhaps these lexical fillers can tell us something about the cultures in which the languages are spoken. For example, who knew that Turkish-speakers were such poetic lot, needing a single word to describe the effect of moonlight shining on water (gumusservi)?!

If you liked those, here are another 14 - http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/102722#ixzz1ZrA3KjR3

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Feed your brain and help feed others at the same time!

Test and improve your English vocabulary on Free Rice and the World Food Programme will donate 10 grains of rice for every correct answer.

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F*ck, sh*t and other analgesics

What's your obscenity or profanity of choice when:

a) you stub your toe?   b) you catch your head on the corner of the cupboard door?  c) you burn your hand getting something out of the oven?

Let me guess - drat, sugar and fiddlesticks don't feature on your list.

So why is it that when we really hurt ourselves we reach so instinctively for the very 'worst' words in our repertoire?...

...well, according to Dr Richard Stephens's research at Keele University, under certain conditions*, swearing can actually have pain-relieving qualities. 

*See video for a loose reproduction of the experiment.

How does it work?

Stephens, who first became aware of link through accounts of childbirth, suggests that swearing triggers an emotional response in us, causing our heart rate to increase and for adrenalin to be released. This said, the study also highlights that, in habitual swearers, this emotion response is weakened due to overuse.

The moral of the story: swear away, do your worst, but save them up for when you really need them (especially if you're accident-prone or expecting!)

Click on the link for a comprehensive list of foreign swearwords...just in case you're ever in need of pain relief when abroad.

[fuckyeahmoleskines]

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A taste of Shakespeare's immense influence on Modern English. What's most remarkable, perhaps, is that none of the above phrases sound old-fashioned; how is it possible that these 400 year old phrases look so bizarrely at home, scribbled in a 20 year old's Moleskine notebook in 2011?

We're always told at school about the impact Shakespeare had both on literature and on the English language, but he really was 'the man'! According to the OED 1,600 words were used for the first time by Shakespeare and he is said to have had an active vocabulary of between 17,000-30,000 words. 

More on Shakespeare:

A test to see how Shakespearean your language is

More phrases invented (or coined) by Shakespeare

A superb resource on Shakespeare by David Crystal

David Crystal (bloody genius, as his beard suggests)

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How words are created...

Have a look at this nice, little summary of the various mechanisms by which new words are formed. 

Just a few of the etymological gems from Take Our Word For It...

alone comes from 'all' + 'one'

'felt', which once was used for draining water, became 'felter' and later changed again to give us the word filter

elbow is a composition of 'ell' (the length of your forearm) and 'bow' (as in to bend)

Take Our Word For It is a great blog - or 'Webzine', as they prefer to call it - for anyone interested in the origins of words and the logic behind their structure.

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6 minutes of eloquent offerings on language by Stephen Fry

Go to his site for a more in-depth podgram on language.

...I've also just come across a five-part series he made for the BBC called Planet Word - available to buy (...or stream).

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200 years of 'give' and 'take'

I've just discovered the Ngram-viewer on Google books. This tool allows you to search Google’s 500 billion word corpus to see how frequently a word (or set of words) is used over time. Endless corpus-linguistic fun!!

Here's the data for 'give' and 'take...