Language

PETER TRUDGILL on the story of Sacajawea. The Louisiana Purchase is the name given to the 1803 deal under which the USA ‘bought’ very large tracts of North American land from France, extending American control over the continent an enormous distance westwards. The area in question covered the whole of modern Iowa, Missouri, Nebraska, Kansas, […]

PETER TRUDGILL on the remarkable way that children learn their native language. The speed, accuracy and apparent ease with which small children learn their native language is a remarkable phenomenon, especially if we consider that they do this without mostly being taught the language by anybody. It is quite true, of course, that there are […]

PETER TRUDGILL explains the language rules that guide how we banter and who we should do it with. We have heard quite a lot about banter in recent times on the sports pages of newspapers. A footballer may complain that an opponent has said something insulting to them. The opponent’s defence is that what was […]

PETER TRUDGILL on the many words which break the rules, If you have ever studied German, you may recall that one of the difficulties for a foreign learner of the language lies in struggling to come up with the correct plural forms of nouns. The word for ‘boy’ is Junge (you will also remember that […]

PETER TRUDGILL on the first meeting of two languages, one of which has since died out – but not without leaving some traces. The first location in which any sizeable group of native speakers of English became successfully established outside the British Isles was the Jamestown settlement, in what was to become the United States […]

PETER TRUDGILL on the sometimes rather rude origins of surnames. Some family names, in spite of having been passed down across the generations for the last 500 years or more, still retain a form which makes it easy to see what they originally meant. In an earlier column, we already noted colour-based names like Browne […]

PETER TRUDGILL tackles a burning issue that has been prompting debate among readers. The word portmanteau refers to a largish travelling bag which opens up into two equal parts. The word was originally borrowed into English from French; and for that reason it was sometimes pluralised as portmanteaux rather than portmanteaus. But it first arrived […]

PETER TRUDGILL on the curious confusions that can arise from the double meaning of quite. Several decades ago, when I first took my American girlfriend home to meet my parents, she was shown some of my father’s paintings – he was a rather well-known local artist. She said that she thought the pictures were ‘quite […]

PETER TRUDGILL on some expansionist chapters in the island’s history It is not usual to think of the Irish as being colonialists. On the contrary, we know a great deal about how the island of Ireland has suffered from the effects of colonialism on the part of the Vikings, the English, the Scots, and the […]

PETER TRUDGILL on the ultimate origins of ‘English’. During the late 300s and early 400s AD, boat-loads of Germanic people started crossing the North Sea to the eastern shores of Britain. Some arrivals had probably come well before that: since the second century AD, the Romans had been employing Germanic mercenaries in their garrisons in […]

It might seem like a modern complaint, but, says PETER TRUDGILL, this practice has been going on since the Ancient Greeks The sound represented by our Latin-alphabet letter H has had a sorry history in the languages of Europe over the last 2,000 years or so. Perhaps the decline started in Greek. The Ancient Greek […]

PETER TRUDGILL on how a chapter from its past has left the South American country swimming against a global tide One of the most appallingly bloody wars ever fought was the War of the Triple Alliance (in Spanish La Guerra de la Triple Alianza, Portuguese A Guerra da Tríplice Aliança). Also called the Paraguayan War, […]

PETER TRUDGILL boldly goes on about one of the most controversial grammatical issues of all. English forms like to sleep, to run, and to read are technically called infinitives. In the sentence ‘I want to go’, to go is an infinitive. When we want to talk about a particular English verb, we normally cite the […]

PETER TRUDGILL on the gradual spread of a language, the echoes of which are still heard in English today. Four and a half thousand years ago there was no such language as English. There would be no such language for another 3,000 years. But a language did exist which eventually became English, though you would […]

PETER TRUDGILL on a remarkable language made up equally from two others From time to time we hear about ‘mixed languages’. Maltese, for example, is sometimes said to be a mixture of the European language, Italian, and the North African variety of Arabic. But it isn’t really. Its grammatical structures show that it is basically […]

PETER TRUDGILL on a fading linguistic practice for describing numbers For the first twenty or so years of my life, when I was telling the time I always said five-and-twenty past two rather than twenty-five past two, and I continued to use that type of formulation on at least some occasions for many years after […]

PETER TRUDGILL on the sometimes surprising languages spoken by some our greatest composers. Music is sometimes said to be the universal language; and it is certainly true that the music of the great classical composers is as well known these days in China, South Korea and Japan as it is in its original European homeland. […]

PETER TRUDGILL on some of the ways Welsh and English have stayed apart. The name of the village of Betws-y-Coed in North Wales means ‘prayer-house (in) the trees’. Coed, ‘trees’, is the plural of coeden, ‘tree’. This is an intriguing grammatical fact. In the languages of the world generally, plural forms of nouns are normally […]

PETER TRUDGILL on the names of English counties and US states. It makes perfectly good sense that the names of many of the counties of England should have their origins in the dominant language of the country, English. Rather obviously, Norfolk was originally two English words, north folk, and similarly Suffolk derives from south folk. […]

PETER TRUDGILL on how some ‘antiquated’ words drop out of use In George Borrow’s 1843 book The Bible in Spain, he reports one of his interlocutors, a servant, as saying to him: ‘Though I have been turned out of so many families, I was never turned out of that one; and though I left it […]

PETER TRUDGILL on the sometimes confusing way in which surnames seem to indicate nationality People with the surname Inglis are usually Scottish. That might seem rather strange, because the name is the Scots-language word for ‘English’ – and why would Scottish people have been called Inglis? But actually of course there would be no point […]

PETER TRUDGILL assesses just how (il)logical certain languages are. Over the years there have been plenty of people who have not hesitated to assert that French is a “very logical language”, the implication being that other languages are less so. But it is actually rather easy to point to aspects of French which do not […]

The complex history of the eastern Mediterranean means there are individuals who have defied their ‘national identities’. PETER TRUDGILL reports. Many people in southeastern Europe would agree that it is correct to say that Turks are a Muslim people who speak Turkish and that Greeks are a Christian people who speak Greek. That is certainly […]

PETER TRUDGILL on the surprisingly wide array of surnames derived from colours. Football fans will know that Kevin De Bruyne is the brilliant midfielder who plays for Manchester City as well as for the Belgian national team. They may not all be quite so familiar with other foreign soccer stars such as the Spanish international […]

PETER TRUDGILL on the correct use of ‘best’ – a grammar ‘rule’ it is safe to ignore. After a football match it is often said by those talking about the event that “the best team won” – or in the case of a losing team managed by Jose Mourinho, that the best team did not […]

The meaning of the word have has changed over the centuries to denote more dynamic activities, says PETER TRUDGILL At Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport, passengers are often urged – in announcements made by Dutch people speaking English – to keep their boarding-passes ready. At British airports, passengers are generally asked to have their boarding-passes ready. American […]

PETER TRUDGILL on a rural region of Ireland where a dialect took root and remained for centuries The English language came into being in Britain, and spent its first 700 years on this island. When it did then start spreading beyond these shores, this was to the neighbouring island of Ireland. This first expansion of […]

PETER TRUDGILL on the archipelago which helped develop the language now spoken in Greece. Great Britain started decolonising its imperial possessions in a significant way in 1947, when British India became the two independent states of India and Pakistan. But there is a very interesting example of British decolonisation which comes from well before that […]

In English, the word can be frustratingly imprecise. As PETER TRUDGILL reports, other languages have gone to greater lengths to ensure exactitude. A few years ago, the Greek translator of a book I had written got in touch to ask if a “cousin” I had referred to in the text was a man or a […]

PETER TRUDGILL on the languages of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania – and how they interact. The Baltic States are, from north to south along the eastern shores of the Baltic Sea, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. We often refer to them by this collective name as if they formed some kind of unity – and in […]

PETER TRUDGILL on the origins of many of our most common surnames… and much more besides There are quite a lot of people in Great Britain, and in other English-speaking parts of the world, who have surnames ending in -kins or -kinson: Atkins, Dickinson, Jenkins, Parkinson, Simkins, Tomkinson, Watkins, Wilkinson – and plenty more. If […]

We have borrowed plenty of words from Greek – but they haven’t always kept quite the same meaning, says PETER TRUDGILL If you are on holiday in Greece or Cyprus, you may be unlucky enough to come across a sign hanging on the door of your hotel lift saying Ektós liturgías. Ektós is not necessarily […]