Synopsis: Language Posts
I occasionally write about languages, compare them, and muse about how all this works. Calling it “linguistics” would be overblown.
My background is that I am a native speaker of German. In school, I also learned Latin, English, French, and Italian. I have forgotten most of my Latin, my French is incomplete, my Italian was okayish, but is now rusty, and as for English: you be the judge. Since I grew up close to the border with the Netherlands, I watched a lot of Dutch TV and listened to Dutch radio when I was young. In this way, I picked up some Dutch, which is rather similar to German. But it is mostly passive. With these languages in the background, it is easy to get the hang also of Spanish, Portuguese, Danish, Norwegian, or Swedish, but mostly only in writing.
I have also looked into other languages like Japanese, Persian, Turkish or various Slavic languages (which are so similar that it is easy to get them all mixed up). However, my knowledge is very limited. I can perhaps recognize a few words, or sometimes understand a sentence, but no more. I have also looked through books on many other languages where I have a very rough idea how they work, anything from Vietnamese, Hindi, Chinese, Bengali, Finnish to Arabic. However, I can claim no real knowledge here.
All in all, I would say that I only know German, and perhaps English. The rest is only me dabbling. So don’t be impressed by the long list.
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Here is now an overview of my posts so far that turn around languages. My writing is not too serious, often tongue-in-cheek, and can be somewhat sprawling. I will keep the list updated as I go along:
- Why is There No Simple Word for German “an” in English?: The German preposition “an” means that something is so close to something else that it touches it. An equivalent in English might be “next to,” but it stresses the point while “an” does not.
- My Job as the Inofficial “Capitalization Adviser to the President”: Donald Trump has a penchant for capitalizing words in English for no reason. Some have wondered whether he tries to emulate German orthography. I explain the broad rules here. But Trump has so far not listened to me. (Or is it “advisor?” I am unsure.)
- What’s the Use of Grammatical Gender?: Many languages, like German, Latin, the Slavic languages, Arabic, French or Hindi have grammatical gender, sometimes with two, sometimes with three genders. For people with a background in English, this does not make sense and can lead to misconceptions. I explain how grammatical gender can have some uses although you can also do without them.
- Words Sorely Needed in English: In general, English is very good with pithy expressions for complicated concepts. But sometimes also other languages have an edge. Here are a few words that I always find hard to translate from German to English. But I will also write about the cool words in English that have no good equivalent in German, promised.
- No People Has a “Pure Culture”: The English language has taken in many words from other languages, but so has also the German language and any other. I look into how this works and also how funny it can sometimes be. Language purists have tried to “cleanse” languages from foreign influences, which is a futile and silly endeavor that goes against what languages actually do: they are the outcome of human action and not of human design.
- Words Sorely Needed in German: In all fairness, English is better at short words for tricky concepts than is German. Here are a few examples where I find it hard to come up with a good German equivalent. It is possible to express the same idea, but often more awkward. And something is lost in translation. As a bonus I also explain how to impeach a German president.
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My writing on languages is also loosely related with two other topics. You can find overviews here:
