English is a very nuanced language - just ask its learners

Someone, somewhere, will have an opinion on why their chosen language is harder to learn than another. Often, these debates are kicked off by people who think they're experts but are just seeking to rationalise their own learning experiences.

What language is easy to learn for a German or Swedish speaker will not be the same for someone whose mother tongue is Japanese or Finnish. It really depends on several factors, such as the familiarity of the language you are learning, or the ease at which you can assimilate languages from that group. 

The debate about what languages are difficult and what languages are easy to learn is much more nuanced than just looking at the spelling-to-pronunciation ratio, the size of the vocabulary, and the number of tenses. There are so many other elements to factor in, such as inflections caused by cases, genders, or singulars and plurals; the number of exceptions in the grammar structure, such as irregular verbs, deviations from standard rules, differences between spoken and written forms, etc.; not forgetting the differences in regional usage and dialects. 

If we just take standard English, yes, it is pretty simple to use and people forgive certain mistakes. But then when we see some of the huge differences in meaning after minute changes to the wording, we realise English is actually not as straightforward as all that. Bear with me as I try to demonstrate what I mean...

1. verb + to- vs verb + _ing 

What's the difference between "remember feeding the cat" and "remember to feed the cat"? Or "stop eating" and "stop to eat"? Think about it for a second. 

"I remember feeding the cat" suggests you did it before and now you are recalling the moment, whereas "I remembered to feed the cat" means you didn't forget to do it.

"I stopped eating at 1" implies that you finished your meal then. 

"I stopped to eat at 1" says that you dropped what you were doing in order to eat at 1.

With the verb "like", it gets even more freaky. 

"I like cycling" and "I like to cycle" on their own mean roughly the same thing. But if I add some elements, we see how wildly different they can become:

"I like cycling to the shops" - here, we say that we enjoy it.

"I like to cycle to the shops" - in this one, we imply that it's not necessarily a pleasure for us, but we do it because it's practical or the better option.

It becomes more noticeable in something like household chores:

"I like to vacuum the house every weekend" vs "I like vacuuming the house every weekend" shows a very large gap in meaning. In the first, it's a job we do because otherwise the place would be very messy. In the second, we are demonstrating our utter madness in actually declaring our pleasure in the task.

2. hard vs hardly

"You work hard" or "you hardly work" are worlds apart in meaning. The former means you don't rest or take many holidays, and the latter means you are either a banker or a civil servant. 

Joke.

Well no, it was a dig.

3. opposites

"The alarm went off at 3 in the morning" is completely different to "the lights went off at 3 in the morning." In fact, they are total opposites - we call these contranyms, as they are words or phrases that have opposite meanings. Others include "sanction", "refrain", "dust" or "cleave".

For the clarity, "sanction" can mean either to take away permission or to give permission; "refrain" means either to avoid doing something, or to repeat; "dust" means to add fine particles or to remove them; and "cleave" means to stick to things together, or to separate them. 

4. homonyms everywhere

Let us not forget these beauties... homonyms run throughout the English language, and are only really distinguishable by the context in which they are found. They can be divided into homophones (words that sound the same but are spelled differently or have two meanings) or homographs (words that are spelled the same but mean different things, and may be pronounced differently too). 

Homographs - think about these words and how they can change meaning depending on the context (possible answers below):

right

bark

row

current

record

wound

rock

stick

like

figure

tablet

Homophones - say these words to another person and ask them how to spell them:

ate / eight

fare / fair

their / they're / there

meat / meet

pray / prey

knows / noes / nose

week / weak

tow / toe

to / too / two

made / maid

5. the and other articles

You might not believe this, but such a small word can create an almighty headache for a lot of learners. For example: 

farmers produce crops / the farmers produce crops / the farmers produce the crops / some farmers produce crops

cars were invented in the 19th century / the car was invented in the 19th century / the car is in the garage / some cars are in the garage

In some languages, articles are used everywhere, such as French or Italian, and they can come in various forms, such as masculine/feminine and singular/plural. In others, like Czech or Slovenian, they exist but they have lost their significance, so nobody bothers using them. Then there's English, where they are used sometimes but not everywhere, and change meaning depending on how they are used.

Consider the following:

We should look after the old and infirm 

We are building a shelter for the homeless

This is a place to heal the sick

This is a worrying development for the unemployed

These expressions refer to specific groups of people and their issues. They are used almost like nouns, or at least they allude to nouns, even if they are not. Yet what is most bizarre about this is that we can't say "the fit", "the intelligent", "the happy" or "the independent". Seems a bit discriminatory to me...

But then, what is the difference between:

breakfast / the breakfast

lunch / some lunch

dinner / a dinner

Without the article, we are referring merely to the daily meal:

"We have breakfast / lunch / dinner every day."

But by adding an article, we change the context entirely:

"The breakfast in that hotel is very filling."

"We had some lunch before we carried on working."

"I need to organise a dinner for 40 people next Friday."

We say "the Pacific Ocean", "the Sahara Desert", "the Black Forest", "the River Thames", but "Lake Titicaca", "Mount Olympus", and "Blueberry Hill". 

6. Future

When someone says "I'm going to get some food shortly", rather than "I will get some food shortly", what do they mean? It's all in the context, of course. 

"I'm going to get some food shortly, so let me know what you want" - this implies you have planned this, and your mission to the shop is imminent.

"I see everyone looks a bit tired, so I'll get some food shortly." - in this case, you hadn't planned it, but you're taking the decision now to get some.

And this is just one of many examples of where the future in English relies on what you wish to imply. English is an implied language, meaning that we can often deduce what someone says or writes simply by the words used. Of course, intonation, gesticulations and facial expression help in speech, but that doesn't stop it from being a real minefield.

7. Intonation

In English, people tend to have conversations that heavily rely on the melody for feeling. Let me explain: in yes/no questions, it is common that the last word or syllable will have a rising tone.

"Are you Swedish?" 

"Do you like fish?" 

"Did you have a lovely time?" 

But if you ask an open question, especially a personal one, the last word or syllable will often have a falling tone.

"Where do you live?" 

"What's your name?" 

"How old are you?" 

And the reason is actually quite a practical one... 

By using a rising intonation in yes/no questions, we are asking for confirmation, so just a straightforward yes or no will suffice. 

When we use a falling intonation in open questions, we simply want to ask for facts.

But then, if we swap them around, mad things happen...

By using a falling intonation in yes/no questions, we can seem very rude. We are either demonstrating that we aren't really interested in the answer, or we know the answer but are expected to ask it anyhow.

By using a rising intonation in open questions, we can come across as a little too eager to know the answer. This can either sound like a sleazy move by the questioner, or an intrusive interrogation of the other.

So there you go. These are just a few of the hurdles learners have to clear on their journeys.

It's a strange phenomenon, but learning languages like German and Polish can seem intimidating to learners starting out, but they get easier the more you know. English is the opposite. It all looks pretty straightforward, and then when you get to about B2 level, you start learning finicky little differences where you are confronted with the reality of the daunting task in hand. There is one upside though: it's easy to speak bad English, but most people won't give you a rough time over it!

ANSWERS:

right = your right to remain silent / turn right at the lights / you're right about everything

bark = the dogs bark all night / we put bark on the garden to stop the weeds from growing

row = three trees in a row / I had a row with my neighbours / I got in a boat and learned how to row

current = the current problems are huge / the current took the boat out to sea

record = we must record all the details / she's broken the world record / I have a huge record collection

wound = I wound the rope round the tree / the dog picked up a wound somehow

rock = all boats rock on the sea / I threw a rock into the river / rock music is still very popular

stick = stick the paper to the wall / I threw a stick to the dog / please stick around / stick it in the bin

like = you look like your mother / I like chocolate / we have a policy of like for like

figure = he earned a six-figure sum / there was a strange figure in the forest / figure out this problem

tablet = I took a tablet for my headache / they found an ancient tablet / my tablet has many apps

Words And Meaning: How People Interpret Their Understanding Of The World Through Language

This article is an observation on how people’s interpretation of words may form preconceptions and at the same time how the configuration of a language may cause people to establish preconceptions. To do this, I need to tackle some sensitive subjects which I hope readers will understand is necessary to make my point.

Here goes…

Let’s do something unusual – let’s agree on something before we start: we don’t have enough words to describe and understand everyone’s view of the world we live in, and this is causing tensions between people from different classes, mindsets, political standpoints, and beliefs. This goes not just for English, but for many different languages, and unfortunately, the only remedy is to let time take its course without interference from authorities, religious leaders or politicians.

What do I mean? Well, let us take the notion that left-wingers and right-wingers see and interpret things in different ways, as do religious people and non-religious people, drivers and cyclists or pedestrians, house owners and tenants, teenagers and adults, vegans and meat-eaters, urban and rural inhabitants, cat owners and dog owners, the list goes on. We all see the world differently, and we all react to circumstances through a variety of ways.

A German football fan’s opinion of the World Cup in 2014 will be totally different to a Brazilian’s. The Spanish view of Queen Elizabeth I is that of an evil foreign monster, but in England she is revered as one of the greatest monarchs. The golden, glorious American picture of World War 2 is in dramatic contrast to that of the Poles. And the invaders of government buildings in Washington in 2021 or Baghdad in 2003 can be seen as freedom fighters or desperate revolutionaries, depending where you draw your line.

Some of us look down in contempt at our opposites, some feel pity for them, some really cannot find any part in themselves that would ever allow them to share even a public WiFi signal, let alone a conversation. But something in us has to change, or we are going to end up fighting each other over ideological matters, rather than seeking to find common ground. We all have to share this place, so let’s just try and be kind, and let’s start with tempering our language.

Terminology and nomenclature have become a front line in the battle of ideas that has overtaken our civilisation and forced us to choose sides. If you’re not with them, you’re against them, so to say. For example, take the endless debate over non-heterosexual marriage. Language has played a big part in aiding one cause over another. In the mostly gender-free or gender-light northern European language areas, people of the same sex tying the knot is as common as the lupins that grow along the side of nearly every country road to the north of Flensburg. But in a country like Poland, advocating non-heterosexual marriage is in many places the equivalent of hoisting the hammer and sickle at a Republican Party convention.

I do not want in any way to say straight that this is because Polish people are inherently homophobic; I want to take a deeper look at how language could affect one’s outlook on life, and that requires giving the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis some airtime. Edward Sapir was an émigré from Germany to the US in the late 19^th century, and went on to become a leading linguist of the first half of the 20^th century. One might say he was the precursor to Noam Chomsky. He and his student, Benjamin Whorf, put forward the idea that our perceptions, attitudes and mindset may have been formed by the language we speak.

In other words, could every individual language have words that formulate our understanding, or is it the opposite? Is it ultimately the world around us that gives life to the words we want to use? I personally think it’s both, and it depends on the situation.

It is said that Inuits have many words for types of snow, because they live surrounded by it, and can therefore differentiate between different kinds. There is a grain of truth to it, although there is more than one Inuit language. It’s more to do with the various word combinations that give them their wide range of descriptions of snow, but once one looks at the root words, there are no more variations than in English. They do differentiate a lot more than speakers of Tagalog, Afars or Hausa. Why would a Nigerian have the need for more than one word for something they maybe only see on TV or Internet, and prior to then would only have heard of from passing travellers? The same would apply to Inuits’ need for words to describe the flora and fauna, weather phenomena or clothes relevant to sub-Saharan Western Africa.

In both cases, it does not mean that one language is superior to another. It just means the speakers of those languages are using words that affect them, their surroundings, the traditions they grew up with, and the handing down of knowledge from parent to offspring. Give a Brit an umbrella and he or she will take it out when it’s looking like it will rain. Give it to a Qatari and he or she may use it to shield from the sun.

So let us return to the original question: why would speakers of one language (in this case Polish) be on balance more conservative than those of another (e.g. Danish or Norwegian) in the area of marriage? In Polish there are, among some others, two main ways to say you are married: “żonaty” or “zamężna”. The word “żona” is a wife, and “mężczyzna” is a husband. And in this way, żonaty can only be used to describe a man with a wife (so-to-say “bewifed”) and zamężna only a woman with a husband (so-to-say “bemanned”).

This is a very binary, totally heterosexual characteristic attached to the words used to describe one’s marital status, so it takes quite a leap of the imagination for many to conceive of non-heterosexual wedlock (effectively reversing the gender of the adjectives to żonata and zamężny). There is the alternative “poślubiony” / “poślubiona”, also meaning married*, and the verbal “brać ślub”**, but this feels fabricated to many people. This is the form that Polish uses to describe non-heterosexual marriages (but not exclusively).

(* po- means after, and ślub is wedding, so in plain language to be in a post-wedding status, i.e. married.

** brać means to take, and combined with ślub means something like “to take a vow”.)

This goes some way to helping us understand that maybe language does make us form preconceptions and ideas, however unintentional that is. This doesn’t mean I am an apologist for their opinions; I am simply seeking out how some may use this as a reason to reject the notion of non-heterosexual marriage. There is a big debate in Poland on the subject of modifying the language to remove stereotypical elements like these, and to allow progressive ideas to enter the mainstream. This process has, though, been taken over by too many opinions, and of course the voices of reason are never the loudest.

On a similar note, we should take a look at the Danish/Norwegian word for marriage: bryllup. Herein lies the quandary of all quandaries. Bryllup probably originated in idea as “bridal parade”, but could also be interpreted as “bride’s jump”, literally from her own family to her husband’s family. In any case, there’s not much in there for the bridegrooms; so how does a language like Danish or Norwegian skirt this difficulty? They have several words for the wedding too – vielse being the main one. Vielse is a solidly neutral word used a lot for this purpose by the non-heterosexual community, as for some, bryllup may have certain religious connotations.

It seems to be because Danish and Norwegian have distanced themselves a great deal from the original meaning. They are not seen as defining anything particular within a limited scope of understanding, such as a male-female linkage. The Danish word for “married” is “gift”, more or less meaning “given (to somebody)”, whereas English uses “taken (by somebody)”. Polish has still very much attached itself to the żonaty/zamężna ideal, and it may take a generation or two for poślubiony/poślubiona to reach the mainstream outside of official administration.

But English also has its own difficulties with gender in language: let us take the familiar greeting “ladies and gentlemen”, that we may hear before some information is announced, for example on a plane or in a theatre. We might also hear “ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls”. But by saying this, thinking we are being courteous, we may have unintentionally excluded several people listening who don’t identify as any of the above. Here is where we need to start being careful, because on the other side, we have to recognise that the male-female axis is still the dominant trend, and will probably be so for a long time to come. It would also be wrong to eliminate these words too.

And here is where Polish can help rectify the situation and confirm that it is not a sexist language after all (something I may have not on purpose implied earlier): “szanowni państwo” is how Poles making announcements choose to get the attention of an audience, and it literally means “honourable company”. Although I don’t think we could get away with translating that literally into English, as even though it sounds endearing, it also has an archaic feel, we could find something similar both tasteful and inclusive that would please all. At the moment, the recommended greeting in London Underground is “hello everybody”, and to me that sounds a little too forward, but I guess if it works, keep it. It is important to be a proactive part of the solution, not a reactive part of the problem.

Let us talk about that other very contentious subject: family, nation and nationality. In a language like English, the word “nation” is very broad, encompassing not just the people but also the land, and for some this may even apply to a region or the people therein. For many it includes add-ons like speaking the same language or following the same traditions. In the strictest sense, the people are all from the same ethnic line, and they are arranged inside a particular defined peripheral boundary. The word springs of course from the idea of the place you were born in or the line you were born to (e.g. natio, natus, nasci). But that is not really so much the case these days. At least, not in English.

No English speaker really makes the full semantic connection between birthplace, lineage, ethnic line, or common language any more, except those who have been fully immersed in the purist Kool-Aid, or those with views to the right of Nigel Farage. This allows English more flexibility when it comes to mentioning people with different backgrounds or who were born elsewhere or who have exotic names as being of the same nation.

But we should not gloat: there is of course a lot of covert racism around. Someone who asks a non-white person or someone with an exotic name (like mine) where they’re “from” aren’t asking about the street name or part of town – they want to know where your exotic name or colour comes from. I am often asked where I’m from, and when I say London, I get some sideways glances and the inevitable riposte: “well your name doesn’t sound English” (not even British, but English). So I reply with a short history of my family, even though it should be unnecessary, as these days, anyone could be from anywhere.

Saying that, the vast majority of English speakers would say it’s not the colour, name or religion that makes you a compatriot; it’s the attitude and maybe your accent. And I think it’s the fact that words like “nationality”, “nation” and “compatriot” are so distanced from their original meanings, making it much easier to accept a broader range of people under that umbrella. Of course, history also helps, but this is one element of what is undoubtedly a much broader story.

“Family” is another word that has taken on a broader signification. The pure meaning of “family” is as we know the people who make up your bloodline – your children and their children, your parents and siblings, their parents and siblings, ad nauseam. But it can also apply to other things, such as “a family of nations”, as the Commonwealth likes to call itself, or a range of furniture, such as IKEA’s Ektorp family.

Then let us compare this to Slavic languages, where there is a much stronger bond between the people, the language, the land and the family:

Unlike the English terms “family” and “nation”, the Slavic root word -rod- has a very entangled meaning. It applies to all Slavic languages, but let us use Czech for this purpose:

“Rod” means stock, lineage or bloodline.

“Rod” also means gender in Czech grammar.

“Narodit se” means to be born.

“Rodina” means family, but in some Slavic languages like Russian, it means “people” or “nation”.

“Národ” means nation.

“Národní” means national.

Going further back in history, this word is a distant relation of the English word “root”. This gives you some idea of how ingrained this is in the very deepest emotions, instincts and character of many Slavic people. It is not possible to separate the idea of your birth from the land; the land is your family; from the peaks of the loftiest mountains to the floor of the deepest lakes, from the centre of the busiest cities to the thickest part of the most remote forests, from the chilly shores of the Baltic via the sun-kissed islands of Istria to the windswept beaches of the Black Sea, you are an integral and necessary part of the territory. For this very reason, it is for many inconceivable to even entertain the idea that someone with the surnames Robertson, Chang, Van de Vaart, Villeneuve, Akinfenwa, Singh, or Rossi could ever be truly considered a compatriot. Those with German/Austrian/Hungarian surnames are generally given special status, as the regions share a lot of common cross-over history, but the rest may find it harder to integrate or be integrated.

I believe that this is one of the reasons (note: one of the reasons, not THE reason) why it is very difficult for some Slavic people to accept the incorporation of those from other cultures into theirs.

This does not mean those from countries with greater numbers of immigration are morally better or more altruistic than those in Slavic countries. If anything, Slavic people are the most hospitable people you can ever wish to meet. They are also very attached to their culture, very proud of it, but if one is frank, very protective of it.

Lastly, if one wants to understand a culture, look no further than the language and what it provides to the speakers. Edward Sapir and his Sapir-Whorf hypothesis have hit a very valid point, but it is not the only answer; one size does not fit all. Words manipulate people’s perceptions just as much as people manipulate their meanings.

I have tried to be as objective as possible in this article, but certain elements are hard not to see as more positive or more negative than others. In other words, please don’t shoot the messenger; objectivity is the bedrock of factual information and no amount of trying to paint things in another light can change reality.

It is not without pretext that many Slavic countries have found it difficult to commit to sanctioning or even tolerating non-heterosexual marriage, helping to assimilate refugees, settling the Roma community, even adopting orphaned children from outside the area. It is of course not an exclusively Slavic problem – Hungary and its government have been the motors in the drive for cultural purity, but countries like France and the UK, with centuries of colonialism behind them, are facing their own issues with race, immigration and assimilation from entirely the other direction.

Our languages give us the tools to describe things as we see them, but they may also force us purely by accident to only understand things through the context of the way we phrase them, as we have seen. Nobody has the monopoly on correctness, and everyone has the right to be listened to and respected.

The verb “to marry” means not only in wedlock, but also to match up two disconnected pieces of evidence in a mystery, two songs in a medley, a car with a trailer, a computer with an external drive, or anything that can be coupled to something else. In the end, it combines the idea of “to fit”, “to suit”, and “to join”. And for that reason, it really shouldn’t matter to anyone else except those involved who fits, suits, is joined to and married to whom. We can all learn from other languages how to find ways to take the sting out of meanings.

So my final point is one that I often touch on: if we want to live side-by-side, whether we are advocates or critics of non-heterosexual marriage, immigration, religion or anything else, we need to accept that all generations are different and the younger ones set the tone for the future so we should not build obstacles just to keep things as we know them. We should also respect each other’s standpoints and sensitivities as long as they are not discriminatory or disparaging. We cannot keep slinging names at each other and expect the other to acquiesce gracefully; we need to find our own inner peace, and that means accepting that we are not in control of others’ destinies, hopes, fears, sexualities and beliefs. This is of course not the only thing that needs to be done, but it is a step in the right direction.

 

The Conflicting Similarities Of The Slavic Languages

I have been a learner of languages since my age was in single figures. I learn most in a systematic way that babies and children use to deduce meaning; this helps me to use my instincts rather than memory in part in order to retain words and phrases. This comes in very useful when faced with various false friends, such as the obvious ones: actually (=en effet) and actuellement (=at the moment), or librairie (=bookshop) and library (=bibliothèque). But the staggering differences between similar words in the Slavic languages are enough to make Noam Chomsky consider hitting the bottle.

If you want to learn a language, sometimes those that are similar to yours are not necessarily always the easiest ones. There is a reason why many Asian people speak better English than French or Spanish native speakers, and it’s not just because of national stereotypes – it often has to do with the fact that English is very different from Chinese, Thai, Vietnamese or Hindi. Learning a language that is very different to your own helps in many ways to learn that language better, because you are working from a blank canvas, whereas an English speaker learning French is really adapting a lot of already familiar words into a different accent and sometimes a different part of speech. For that reason, it makes learning close languages quite a hit-and-miss experience.

So it is all the more astonishing to take a look at how tightly-bound the Slavic languages are, yet can have totally different meanings for the exact same words. Take Czech and Polish: they are almost mutually intelligible when written, and if spoken at a reasonable pace using simple vocabulary, a meaningful conversation is not out of the question. Russian is of course the go-to Slavic language, and I would say a good one to start with. But I would also say Czech is probably the best language to begin your Slavic learning adventures, as it has a very logical grammar, is spoken exactly as it is written, and doesn’t lean too heavily on the hard and soft consonant rules of Russian or Polish. This will help you understand then use basic Slovak.

Czech and Slovak are so similar, it can sometimes appear quite puzzling to non-speakers to see multilingual instructions or user guides where both languages appear side-by-side with very tiny differences. To some, it is baffling that a company would go to the trouble of bothering to get two translations done for both languages. But they would be wrong – you see, there are often great chasms of difference between them, where they use wildly different words camouflaged deep in the seemingly identical texts. All will become clearer (or should I say less unclear?) later on…

Once you have got your head round Czech and Slovak, you can tackle the complex alveolar fricatives of Polish. If you have Russian as well, there is now nothing stopping you from venturing into Belarusian, Ukrainian, Bulgarian, then Macedonian, Serbian, Bosnian, Croatian and Slovenian, some of those being almost identical languages. At the fragmentation of Yugoslavia, the Croatian and Serbian delegations at bilateral gatherings often took along their own interpreters in order to appear sovereign. Those languages are so similar, it would be like someone showing up to a party with a mirror and telling everyone the image in there was someone else. Imagine the Austrians and Germans or Americans and Australians doing that.

Now you have opened the Slavic box, you may as well enjoy the fruits of your labour. Knowing a couple of them means, because they are really very similar to an almost incestuous nature, you can understand on a passive level almost all the others: just beware of the utter madness of the Slavic False Friends Network; this is where you need to hold on to something sturdy because things are about to get a little freaky…

Here is an idea of what you face:

The Czech for “girl” is divka but in Polish dziwka is a woman who charges per hour for her affections. It gets worse: the Polish for “I am seeking” is szukam, but šukam in Czech means “I’m having sex”. Whatever you do, try not to confuse the two, or you may end up with your trousers down. Literally.

You may also have some difficulties keeping up with dates: the Czech month of May is květen, but the Polish kwiecien is April. So make sure you don’t show up a month late for an interview in Prague. Then there is the astonishing (but no less magnificent) difference between Czech and Croatian srpen/srpanj. In Czech, srpen is August, but srpanj in Croatian is July. This is one of the more romantic stories of the Slavic languages: the Croatian word for August is kolovoz, as many months are named after what is most prevalent in nature and agriculture at that time, known as the labours of the month. Let me enlighten you: srp in Czech is a sickle, because srpen (August) was the time of the year it was used in the fields, but in Croatia, further south, it was brought out a whole month earlier. The meaning of Kolovoz is even more remarkable: kolo is a wheel, and voz comes from the root voziti, meaning to drive, and together they signify it’s the month when the grain has to be taken in. So August is known as “harvest month”. I love these factoids about languages, and I will touch on the months in a forthcoming post, as they really are worth gushing over.

One of the most extreme examples of this is what the Russians did to the word “red”. The word in Czech for “red” is červený, but in Russian it is красный, pronounced krasniy. However krásný in Czech means “beautiful”, and once upon a time also did in Russian, but the word for “beautiful” was converted into “red”, hence “Red Square” was originally meant to be known as “Beautiful Square”. Some people say it was the Soviets looking for a way to market their ideology, but its meaning had morphed a long time before they came along.

You can appreciate how certain opinions can be formed when it comes to misadventures with words: the Polish zachód refers to the west (logically, it means sunset) Czech záchod is the toilet, which if mixed up could cause irreparable damage to a friendship if you tell someone who invites you to their place that their garden is to the west of their house.

Then there’s pivnice/piwnica and sklep/sklep. In Czech, if you want to go out for some atmosphere and beer, you go to a pivnice. Pivo is the Czech word for beer, and the -nice suffix usually signifies a place, so this is literally a “beer place”. But in Polish, if someone invites you to their piwnica, you should know them very well, as it is the cellar (pivnice in Polish is piwiarnia). Anyone who has passed a sklep polski is probably aware that it means “Polish shop”. However, if a Czech invites you to their sklep, you should be equally well-acquainted with them, as sklep is a Czech cellar.

Once more, if you want čerstvý chléb in Czechia, you are asking for fresh bread. But if you go to dinner at someone’s house in Poland, don’t tell them the bread is czerstwy as you are saying that it is stale.

So as you see, the Slavic languages can be delightful, but at the same time quite a minefield to avoid making semantic mistakes. But I cannot recommend highly enough learning one or more of them, because you get to see a whole new side to life, and this is where you really do develop a new soul. You can’t avoid it, because those languages are so different from Germanic and Latin-based ones, that you need a whole new personality for them.

For this reason, and for the abundance of examples above, it is no good learning just the words in parrot form; it makes no sense to do that, as you lose out on the history, mentality and mindset, feeling, experiences, or the collective memory of everyone who speaks that language. An example of this is in the very words they use to describe the world around them. This goes for all languages, but especially Slavic, as they contain far stronger connections to natural phenomena, emotions, people and animals. But that is for another article.

In Praise Of The German Language

For years, German has been mistakenly perceived as “ugly” or “difficult”. It is not hard to point to words or phrases that bear out this opinion, such as “Knoblauchzehe” (clove of garlic), “Wasserrutsche”, (water slide), “Verdauungskanal” (alimentary canal), “Unabhängigkeitserklärung” (declaration of independence), “Haftpflichtversicherung” (liability insurance), or “Sechstausendachthundertneunundzwanzig” (the number 6,829). To the untrained eye, it looks like someone at the Goethe-Institut forgot to use the space bar when codifying the language, but actually there is a certain unmistakable clarity and purposefulness about it. Before you decide to make some disparaging comments and close this page, let me explain…

English and French are the main working languages in a vast number of international institutions and organisations, such as the European Union, NATO, the EBU, and the African Union. Many linguists point out that it is often to the advantage of those organisations to continue using English and French, because if formulated well, rules, laws, publicity, reports and correspondence can be ambiguous enough to be interpreted in multiple ways. But this is almost impossible in German, as what you read is what you get.

Several translator friends of mine working at the EU have told me that they and many of their colleagues, when translating documents into their own languages, often wait until the German version comes out before they confirm publication, just to check they understood everything correctly. I also know that the German translators in one of the EU institutions know this, and as such they are extremely thorough-going in their execution of their work; living up to the stereotype, one might say. They have such a huge following among other linguistic staff (this is the nearest any translator will ever get to having a fan club), they are frequently on the phone to the English or French department to ask for clarification from the original writers.

German is a language which lays bare the very essence of a thing, either abstract or real, in a way that the Latin-derived languages cannot. Something similar can be said of other Germanic languages, and all this has overlaps in English: at least the Germanic side of that schizophrenic Anglo-Saxon-Norman-Danish-French-Friesian tongue spoken by billions worldwide. To demonstrate this, I will take several words or phrases and break them down.

BARE DEFINITIONS

To define a thing, like a tree that bears apples, English opts for “apple tree”, a very easy and logical compound noun. German settles on “Apfelbaum” in the same way. In both cases, the two words in the construction are nouns; but here’s the clever bit: the words in the first part “apple/Apfel” are treated as adjectives, with the difference that German clumps them together, whereas English divides them into two words. Sometimes. But not always. German is incredibly consistent in closing the gap in their compound nouns, whereas English is rather wishy-washy, often opting for two words, but sometimes joining them together (e.g. toothbrush, sunrise, shopkeeper), or annoyingly adding a hyphen (e.g. fire-fighter, care-giver), just to provide some flamboyant variety and give writers of English vocabulary books an air of indecisiveness.

Because German puts all these words together, not only are they very easy to locate in a search engine, they are also remarkably explanatory in their meanings. So let us take a look at one or two of the words above:

The German word for liability insurance is Haftpflichtversicherung. It may seem like quite a nightmarish thing to find as the title to an official letter from an insurance company, often attached to a bill, but it has a certain descriptive nature about it. There’s Haft, then there’s Pflicht, and finally Versicherung. Haft is the challenging part to explain – it means detention or imprisonment, but can also mean binding responsibility; Pflicht means duty or obligation; together they mean liability. And Versicherung is the insurance. So, breaking it down like this we can determine that this insurance is what you pay to get you out of trouble when you have been a naughty boy or girl.

German does its best to lay everything out bare so that there is very little room for misinterpretation. English and French are full of homophones, homographs and homonyms that can only be determined by looking at the context of the rest of the sentence or paragraph the word is found in.

PREFIXES ARE A GERMAN SPECIALITY

Let us run with this idea a little further: the last word, Versicherung, contains the prefix Ver-. This is a most remarkable and versatile trinity of letters, and can signify quite a lot of things, often negative, such as:

1. how a situation may end up

verarmen = to sink into poverty / verderben = to decay or go to waste

“Arm” means “poor”, so the “ver-“ gives it an element of bad luck. Add “-en” and it becomes a verb. It manifestly means “to end up poor”. The same with “Derb”, meaning “dirt”, so it more or less means “turn to dirt”.

2. doing something you disapprove of

verarschen = make fun of / verschlafen = oversleep / verspielen = gamble something away

“Arsch” means “arse”, and the “ver-“ lets you know it wasn’t a nice thing to do, so it would maybe end up in English as “to arse about with someone”. Therefore, “schlafen” and “spielen” mean “to sleep” and “to play” respectively, and the “ver-“ prefix giving us the idea that you slept or played in a way that ended badly. The explanation is long, but the end result is succinct and very easy to grasp.

But it’s not only negative:

3. to bring to a conclusion

vermelden = to announce something / verbleiben = to remain in place / verknüpfen = to link up

“Melden” means “report” or “notify” and the “ver-” prefix allows us to know it is something that reaches its conclusion, the same with the others.

Another very revealing prefix is Ur-. It appears in a lot of words, like Urwald, Ursprung, Ursache, Urquell. Its origins tell a very instructive tale too. Ur- means, at its most fundamental level “original” or “primary”, as in the very first or the earliest.

1. “Urwald” is what we call rain forest, but German speakers label “primary forest”.

2. “Ursprung” means “origin” or “provenance”, so think about this: in the “-sprung” part of Ursprung, like the English -spring from the word “offspring”, it means exactly that; something like a combination of “transferral”, “separation” or “jump” with a preposition on the beginning, so Ursprung means “source” or “provenance”: literally “original leap”.

3. “Ursache” means “cause” or “reason”. “Sache” means “thing” or “issue”, so “Ursache” says exactly what it’s supposed to: by adding “ur” to “sache”, it literally means “original matter”.

4. “Urquell”, if anyone doesn’t already know, is the second word of one of Czechia’s most famous beers, Pilsner Urquell. The word Quell or Quelle means spring or water source, and adding “Ur” on the beginning turns it into a well. The Czech name for this beer, Prazdroj, means exactly the same thing: pra- is the Slavic equivalent of Ur- and zdroj means “spring” or “water source” too.

COINAGES

German is a language that does exactly what it says in the handbook. The difference between German and the Latin languages, though, is that because of this, nearly no new words can be coined in German unless you take two or three existing words and put them together. So any new coinages tend to be borrowed from other languages, mainly English, French or Latin. What I mean is German has a propensity for recycling already existing words to create new senses. For example, the German word for “glove” is “Handschuh”, literally “hand shoe”. Why invent a new word, when this creation fits like a… uhm… a glove?!

However, German is by no means a poor language: there are a great number of words in German that require explanations in other languages, and here are some of my favourites:

Sollbruchstelle: this is a word every language needs. It means the predetermined point that a machine or device will break or stop working properly. Cynics often believe their fridge or dishwasher is programmed to stop working one day in order to make you buy another one. That’s more or less what this means. Among other significations, “Soll” can be translated as “target”, “Bruch” means “break” or “crash”, and “Stelle” can mean “point”, so put all the words together, and there you have it: “target breaking point” in one word.

Sturmfrei: a great word, literally “storm-free”, used by kids and teens to say “I’m the only one at home; so if you want to come over, we can get up to all kinds of shenanigans”.

Fernweh: another one we should consider using, it means the opposite of “Heimweh”, what English calls “homesickness”. “Heim” means “home” and “Weh” means “pain”, so if we replace it with “Fern”, meaning “far” or “distant”, it means something we nearly all experienced in 2020: the sadness of not being in one of your favourite locations far away.

Verschlimmbessern: such a brilliant word, this takes the prefix “Ver-“ that we saw above, then adds two adjectives before we discover it’s a verb… “schlimm” means bad, and “besser” means “better”, and the “-n” tells us it’s an infinitive. It means that you make something a whole lot worse by foolishly attempting to improve it, like the botched restoration of the Ecce Homo fresco in Spain a few years ago, or when you inexplicably decide that what your carbonara sauce really needs is some cinnamon.

Schadenfreude: this word, like Kindergarten, Wanderlust, Doppelgänger and Weltschmerz, has made it to some other languages, although not everyone knows what it means. Schadenfreude is taken from “Schade”, meaning “shame” or “pity” and “Freude” meaning “joy”. So it means, in plain German, gaining pleasure from someone else’s misery or pain. We borrowed it from German, because no British person ever thought about doing such a thing in the history of the country. Ever. Really…

I lie. Anyhow, some other languages have an equivalent, like Dutch (leedvermaak), Croatian (zluradost), Hungarian (káröröm) and Czech (škodolibost)*, but others just use the German word, including French, Portuguese, and most surprisingly of all, Japanese シャーデンフロイデ – sha-den-fu-roi-de, if you can believe it.

LEARNING THROUGH CULTURE

Finally, it is my opinion that German should be considered as the Latin of the Germanic languages – not because of its age, or being the original Germanic language, neither of which is proven, but because Latin is the basis and foundation for all the other Romance languages, and provides a springboard to better understanding and learning the others. If you know German, it is really not a big leap to learn Danish, Dutch, Luxembourgish, Friesian, Swedish or Norwegian. Despite being a great distance away from Scandinavian languages, on the level of vocabulary there are strong similarities. The same goes for Latin with its descendants, or any of the mightily intertwined Slavic languages.

If you want to learn German or any other language for that matter, the best way to do it is to become familiar with the mindset and mentality of its users. And that is best achieved by learning not only about the history of the country where it is spoken, but also the types of words used by the speakers. And as a very last point, never ever translate word-for-word in your head to try to express or decipher something; because very often when we translate literally what is expressed in one language, it can end up being misconstrued in the target language!

* All of these words are also compounds of other words:

The Dutch “leed” means “suffering” and “vermaak” means “amusement”.

The Croatian word “zlo” means”evil” and “radost” is “happiness”.

The Hungarian “kár” means “damage” and öröm means pleasure.

And the Czech word škoda, yes, that of the car company, means “shame” or “pity” (imagine Czechs saying “I’m off for a drive in my shame”). Oh yes, and “libost” means “pleasure”. 

How English Words Don't Always Have An Opposite

English is a language of opposites - we have so many words that mean the opposite to what people think they do, such as conversely, oversight or inflammable, and lots of words that have no opposite, although we may use them in their negative form but not in their positive or neutral form, for example dishevelled, overwhelmed/underwhelmed, reckless, ruthless, or innocent. We call them unpaired words. Why do we not use opposites for them, and where do these words come from?

In order to give us an idea of why these words exist in one form but not another, we should start with finding their origins, because therein (or herein, but never hereout or thereout!) lies the answer. Way back when English was still being standardised and formed, lots of variations could be found throughout the country in all types of words, and sometimes the original meaning didn't really require there to be an opposite. It will all become clearer when I explain...

Dishevelled:

This word has one of the most underrated journeys of all - it has worked so hard to keep itself relevant in the 21st century, and its meaning becomes clear once we note that its root part - shevel - comes directly from the French for hair, namely cheveux (singular: cheveu). In French, the verb décheveler means to ruffle someone's hair, or render it untidy. So in English, by using the dis- prefix, it has kept its origins intact from the original French descheveler. The opposite in French would be coiffer, or in English the very elegant get your hair done.

The fact that we might say someone has a dishevelled appearance, but we would never say "wow, you look very shevelled today" is obvious when we are presented with the original meaning. 

Overwhelm/Underwhelm:

The origins of these two words are in fact about 600 years apart. Overwhelm started life back in the 14th century from its root whelm, meaning to cover over, or to blanket something. If a traveller was overwhelmed, it meant he or she was knocked over and smothered by something much larger and stronger, like a cow or a band of thieves, rendering the person incapable of moving, and thus we get the figurative meaning we have today of being swamped and unable to cope with something. 

On the other hand, underwhelm, especially the adjective underwhelmed, sprang up in the mid-1950s as a sarcastic way to describe something that did not really amaze you at all. In the less facetious sense, the opposite would be unimpressed.

But the root word whelm never really stuck around. However, helm or helmet, a type of heavy-duty protective hat worn in the army or whilst motorcycling, most probably came from the same root, in that it is there to cover your head.

Reckless:

Anyone who speaks English to a good standard will know this word, but why can we say someone was charged with reckless driving, but not praised for his reckful driving?

Well, bear with me here...

The German root word for "behind" or "back" is -rück. Rücksicht is the German word both for self-regard or consideration for others, so when someone doesn't have any consideration for someone or take heed of a dangerous situation, he/she is rücksichtslos. 

We also need to consider the Dutch roekeloos, meaning the same, and here is where we have another insight into this word: to reckon, as in to consider, is also connected, in that if you do something without reckoning on the consequences, it can be seen as reckless, thus bringing us full circle.

Finally, there is the German word ruchlos, meaning nefarious or wicked, which is related to our word in question, but most likely at a much further distance.

Ruthless: 

We say someone is ruthless in business, but we can't say someone was ruthful or acted with a degree of ruth. We could, but we can't any more.

Again, this requires a little roundabout thinking, but it makes sense in the end: 

The noun of the adjective true is truth, and the noun of the verb rue was ruth, before it died away. So if you rue something, you regret it, right? So ruth died away, but neither rue nor regret did. However, the reason why the verb to rue still exists, is because it means something slightly different to regret.

If you regret something, you feel sorrowful or remorseful for a past action or situation with an undesirable outcome, which you played a part in causing, but not exclusively. If you rue something, you feel sorry for a situation or event that you wish had not happened.

So ruthless behaviour is acting without regret or remorse, and has these days more of an element of cruelty or mercilessness about it, but can also mean clinical performance in sport, showing that you don't get nervous in critical points of a match.

In the German word bereuen, meaning the same, the -reu- part has the same root, as does the Dutch rouwen, also meaning to regret or to rue.

Of course, the word rueful exists to this day, whereas trueful does not and never has, but ruth and truth share the same pattern.

Innocent: 

Again, another word without an opposite. One is not nocent of a crime, one is guilty. But why does it have such a strong connection with purity and absence of immorality, and not so much with ignorance or unawareness? 

Because it actually comes from the Latinate/Greek root for death.

The root -nek- in Greek gives us words like necropolis, and this in turn went in to Latin to give words like nocere, meaning to harm. So noxious gases kill us, obnoxious people have a harmful personality, and even nectar - with its original meaning of a substance overcoming death - was drunk by the gods to give them immortality.

And this is why innocent has no opposite as such, because in its original setting, it means not having committed any harmful act. Take the biblical Holy Innocents, the children killed by Herod after Jesus's birth - these are children who were too young to have sinned or committed any crimes.

So now you know:

In any language, never presume the opposite exists just with a prefix removed; always seek to understand where words come from before complaining of their illogical nature, and when translating, always find a way to accommodate variations in the target language - what may be considered negative in English may be positive in another language!

Why Do English Speakers Eat Their Words?

One of the keys to being a foreign spy working as a double agent is to have an immaculate accent in the language you are pretending to be a native speaker of. You are supposed to be able to use slang expressions, produce idiomatic expressions at will, and possess a full knowledge of cultural, geographical and historical points that only native-born people would know. You are expected to be able to blend in to society like a sugar crystal in hot coffee. You should understand and be able to replicate the inside jokes and indulge in subtleties of nuance that will not arouse the suspicions of even the top military brass.

It is little wonder, then, that countries like the UK and Russia devote a large amount of money towards linguists, for the purposes of translation of course, but mainly for training as spies. This is where both governments then diversify: Russia spends a vast amount of money on converting the information it collects to use against its enemy, and the UK seeks to infiltrate deep into a government's innermost sanctum to gain as much knowledge of the enemy's moves without being noticed until it's too late.

And it is here that we find the spies with balls of tungsten - those that can get the knowledge they need, memorise it, or make replicas of it under the noses of the enemy, and disappear before anyone raises the alarm. Often, these are people who have another skill and can get hired as interns or service providers, such as IT specialists or security guards - in other words, people with access to many physical locations or who can handle sensitive material.

So the real secret to sniffing out a spy is to know the subtlest of signs when you are facing one, and how to call that person out before they get their hands on their target. For that purpose, there are people who are hired specifically to listen out for signs of non-native behaviour: this can be patterns of pronunciation in their speech, a particular way the person writes a specific letter of the alphabet, even how the person gesticulates.

For example, a Czech person is more likely to write a "t" similar to a "d". A Bulgarian will have difficulty pronouncing a full "L" so that it sounds more like a vowel. Spanish, Dutch and Finnish people often can't differentiate between "s" and "sh", "ch" and "dj", or "z" and "s". And one from WW2 was which fingers an operative used to order drinks - did they use their thumb for one or their forefinger for one? And did they use their thumb and forefinger for two, or forefinger and middle finger for two? These are just some of the very subtle differences top spies use to identify and catch double agents. There are plenty more, and some are unnoticeable to monolinguals, but to ninja linguists, they are bread and butter.

Do you remember the case of Robin Van Helsum, known as "Forest Boy" in Germany back in 2012? Some Dutch kid showed up in a forest saying he had no idea what he was doing or where he was from. The Wikipedia page on him says this: "[He] spoke English with a slight accent suggesting to the German Authorities that one or both of his parents were American or British. Police in Berlin believed that he may have been from the Czech Republic having given the indication that he lived in the undergrowth of the Ore Mountains." Well this goes to show that the German authorities really didn't hire any proper linguists, because if they did, I'm sure they would have identified his nationality, even down to the region he was from, in less than half a day. To not even know if he was American or British shows territorial behaviour and a real lack of wanting to involve real experts on the case.

To discover where someone is from in a case like that, one needs to ask the most pertinent questions, and listen to the way he pronounces certain words. I give language training to multinational classes of professionals, and one of the things I enjoy most is, on the first day of a course, guessing the person's name (and therefore his/her nationality) from the entries on the presence list without them telling me directly who they are, just by asking questions like "what's your job?" and "what did you do at the weekend?" Because that's our métier.

So that brings me on to how to catch an English-speaking double agent: and that is the schwa, represented in the IPA by the symbol /ə/. The schwa is a sound made by English speakers that falls in unstressed syllables, for example the "u" in "support", or the "a" in "England". It is a nondescript sound that can appear in many different letter combinations and is really just a filler for the space vacated by the original sound. It is Schrödinger's phoneme - a sound that is both there and not there at the same time. If it were a person, it would be the one who at parties sits in the corner reading a book, sips tap water and never makes eye contact with anyone.

It is always unstressed and never has any set letter combination to identify it. The schwa is so elusive, it sometimes really isn't there even when you think it is. Let me elaborate: how many syllables in the word "separate"? Well, as a verb, three /sɛpərɛɪt/, but as an adjective some pronounce three, some two, so either /sɛprət/ or /sɛpərət/.

For that reason, English speakers are sometimes picked up by foreign spycatchers when attempting to speak their language by the way they pronounce unstressed vowel sounds in the target language. This is not the heaviest feature of English speakers, but it is one that a British double agent might forget when trying to speak another language, and either overcompensate the weak sound or add a schwa where none is found.

The vast majority of European languages pronounce sounds as they are written, and even if they don't, like French, Portuguese or Greek, there are rules as to the letter combination. Two languages even have a dedicated letter of the alphabet to make this schwa sound - Romanian and Bulgarian. English is not like this, and this phoneme, the most prevalent vowel sound in English, can be found in many different places. Below are some words that contain the schwa but with wildly different letter usages. See if you can identify the parts of the words where the schwa is found (sometimes there are more than one):

information
combine
provide
Nottingham
Gorilla
forgive
apology
molecular
anxious
Oxford
doctor
glamorous
photography
Edinburgh
mathematician
maternal
allowance
Portsmouth
harbour
dermatology
comfortable
Scotland

The rise of the schwa was an important step in uniting different dialects to be mutually intelligible. Different people in various parts of the country pronounced words and place names differently, but the one thing they had in common was the way the consonants were pronounced. So in order to be more intelligible to each other, they dropped their local way of pronouncing words. Slowly, those sounds disappeared, but the spelling lived on.

Other things have contributed to the slow process of English standardisation and elimination of dialectal differences, such as the arrival of television, but one constant remains - if you want to speak good English without an accent, especially if you want to be a double agent, you firstly need to perfect the schwa and recognise where to (not) use it!