I was asked about a Hebrew variant to "when pigs fly" recently, and I thought: what a great idea for an article! I could gather various language versions of this phrase!

Of course, Wikipedia beat me to it. Damn it.

But their foreign list is still fairly sparse. For example, Amharic has የህልም እንጀራ, yähləm ənjära, "injera in a dream". Japanese seems ( Read more... )

One of the hardest things about learning the Spanish language all those years ago, is the use of the subjunctive. Because English's subjunctive is sporadic (to put it mildly), the initial concept that a whole VERB conjugation existed for something that didn't seem so separate a concept in English was, intially, a confusing one. The slow demise of ( Read more... )

Today we're looking at one of a series of non-indicative verb forms. Most verb conjugations cover a "tense," but in languages outside of English you start to get into moods or themes of verbs. Only the use of the indicative (something DID in fact or IS in fact happening), the subjunctive ("If I were a millionaire", or "I'm asking that he be shown ( Read more... )