Language

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 […]

PETER TRUDGILL revisits a traumatic day in English football history to track down some etymological roots On June 22, 1986, in a World Cup quarter-final football match played between England and Argentina in Mexico City, the Argentinian player Diego Maradona knocked the ball into the England net with his hand and claimed a goal – […]

PETER TRUDGILL on how languages come up with the words their culture requires and uses snow as an example. My German-English dictionary says that the German word keltern is to be translated into English as ‘to press (of grapes)’ (for the purpose of making wine). The word comes originally from Latin calcatura, ‘stamping’, which is […]

PETER TRUDGILL explains the journey along which we arrived at our use of the negative If you have learnt even a little bit of French, you will probably know that the word pas in that language means ‘not’. Pas mal! is ‘not bad’. Pas encore means ‘not yet’. Pas moi! is the equivalent of ‘not […]

One hundred years on, PETER TRUDGILL tells the story of another referendum, one which hinged on language On May 11, 1919, a Volksabstimmung took place in the mountainous region that is now the Austrian province of Vorarlberg. Vorarlberg means ‘before Arlberg’, the Arlberg being the mountain massif which contains the steep pass which separates the […]

Broad and wide mean pretty much the same thing – they are very close to being synonyms. The Oxford English Dictionary defines broad as “extended in the direction measured from side to side; wide”; and wide is also defined as “having great extent from side to side”. Both broad and wide are also said by […]

The singer Sam Smith’s desire to be referred to as ‘they/them’ throws up language challenges, says linguistics expert PETER TRUDGILL. Sam Smith has expressed the wish to be referred to as they rather than he or she. Many people already operate this pronoun system when requested to do so, and are happy to use it. […]

For our most commonly-used words, brevity is an obvious advantage, says PETER TRUDGILL. But that doesn’t mean it always applies. On the train the other day, I was wondering why the people across the aisle from me kept saying “again”, until I realised that they were Hungarian and were in fact saying igen, the Hungarian […]

Germany’s complex history has left it with some fascinating features, not least its pockets of Slavic speakers. PETER TRUDGILL reports. The boundary in northern Europe between the areas where Germanic languages are spoken and those which are occupied by Slavic-language speakers has been shifting backwards and forwards on an east­-west axis for at least a […]

Peter Trudgill recounts the story of what happened to one of Britain’s ancient languages, Old Norse During the first millennium AD, Britain was home to four major languages, each of which had arrived from a different point of the compass. The first was Britonnic Celtic, the ancestor of Breton and Cornish, which had come to […]

PETER TRUDGILL follows a thread through the centuries, via various connected words related to the telling of time. In English, when we speak about the approximately twice-a-day rising and falling of the seas along our shores, we talk of high tides and low tides. Norwegian uses similar terminology: høgvatn, ‘high water’, and lågvatn, ‘low water’, […]

The very spot where accents change can often be pinpointed and it’s often a case of geography, as PETER TRUDGILL explains My late mother-in-law came from the American Midwest, a predominantly flat land of enormously fertile and productive soils. She was not very impressed by the Rocky Mountains, observing that you couldn’t grow much there. […]

PETER TRUDGILL explains why some old childhood favourites no longer seem to rhyme. Many of us remember from our childhood the well-known nursery rhyme which goes: “Jack and Jill/Went up the hill/To fetch a pail of water. Jack fell down/And broke his crown/ And Jill came tumbling after.” Jill rhymes with hill, and down rhymes […]

PETER TRUDGILL on an island language which vanished after the Europeans arrived The Canary Islands are a long way from mainland Europe, but the Romans knew they were there. Pliny the Elder (23-79AD) referred to them as the Canaria, supposedly because of the large numbers of big dogs (Latin canes) which were reported to live […]

PETER TRUDGILL examines the etymological roots of this beautiful plant. It is not a totally straightforward matter to explain how the flower we call the foxglove got its name. We can, though, at least figure out where the glove part comes from: the flowers look like the fingers of gloves; and small fingers, as children […]

When it comes to this aspect of language, it’s not as straightforward as a, e, i, o, u, says PETER TRUDGILL If you ask English-speaking people how many vowels there are in their language, many of them will tell you that there are five: a, e, i, o and u. If you ask Greek speakers […]

Why we have the Ancient Greeks to thank for almost all our misfortunes. In English we don’t really have a true equivalent of the French expression bon appétit, wishing people who are about to start a meal a ‘good appetite’. But most other European languages seem to have some kind of bon appétit-type formula: German […]

PETER TRUDGILL tells the story of Norn, now vanished from the British Isles, though some of its sounds still linger. Philologists generally divide the Scandinavian languages into two historical branches: eastern and western. Swedish and Danish fall into the Eastern Scandinavian division, while Norwegian, Faroese and Icelandic form the Western Scandinavian languages, the Faroe Islands […]

These days we hear the word like, meaning ‘similar to’, quite a lot. In fact, in the speech of many younger people today it seems to occur, like, all the time. But it is a word with an extraordinarily interesting and complex history, and one which is not completely understood. One fascinating aspect of its […]

As the Premier League draws to a close, PETER TRUDGILL explores the meanings behind some of its biggest names. As is well known to most English football fans – and to the entire population of Norway over the age of three – the manager of Manchester United is called Ole Gunnar Solskjær. Like very many […]

The story of how a little corner of Wales retains a very English flavour. If you look at a map of Wales, you will see that the majority of the places in the country bear unmistakably Welsh-language names: Aberystwyth, Caernarfon, Ffestiniog, Llanelli, Machynlleth, Pwllheli, Ystradgynlais. Certainly no one would ever suppose that Llanrhaeadr-ym-Mochnant was somewhere […]

PETER TRUDGILL explains the processes by which phrases can contract to just a shadow of their former selves. It is often the fate of words and phrases, over the millennia, to get shorter and shorter. The Latin phrase hoc die, ‘this day’, famously became so shortened in French – as hui, ‘today’ – that French […]

It has its diehard fans, but do we really need this punctuation mark, asks PETER TRUDGILL The English word apostrophe comes from a Greek term meaning ‘turning away’: in Modern Greek apó means ‘from’ and strophí is ‘turn’. As used in English, apostrophe refers to the usage of the punctuation mark ‘ to indicate the […]

PETER TRUDGILL on what lies behind our irregular everyday phrases. The most usual way to make past-tense verb forms in English is to add -ed to the basic form of the verb: want–wanted, love–loved; play–played. So why is the past tense of go not goed but went? Even with verbs which are irregular and do […]

PETER TRUDGILL on how some unlikely connections between European languages emerged after 2,000 years The Albanian word for king is mbret. You might think that this has got nothing to do with any word in any language that you have ever come across before. But it would be slightly surprising if you were right. Albanian […]