This is a question that has long bothered me, but not enough to research the answer ( Read more... )

Well, I followed Covid, after a two-week gap, with a flu chaser. Apart from a bout of heatstroke in Japan in 2017, and a weird series of nosebleeds in Japan in 2018 (see a pattern here?), these are my first illnesses for goodness knows how long. I assume that Covid lowered my resistance generally ( Read more... )

I'm currently in Antwerp - the first time I've set foot on the continent since 2019, and that was only to change planes. I'm in a hotel near city's impressive basilica of a railway station, with an anchovy-laden pizza decocting quietly in my stomach. It's only a brief visit, though, to give a lecture; tomorrow, back to Birmingham and thence Bristol ( Read more... )

I find the kanji 株 (pron. 'kabu', though sometimes 'shu', 'kuize' or 'kabuta') very interesting. It has numerous meanings, including 'share' (as in company shares), 'strain' (as in a strain of bacteria), and 'stump' (as in tree stump ( Read more... )

In one of my early German lessons, aged 11, I was charmed to make the discovery that meanings and words don't map neatly onto each other between languages. The trigger was learning that 'aber' and 'sondern' both meant 'but', in different senses. (For anyone unfamiliar with German, 'aber' is the 'I meant to come but the bus was late' sort of 'but', ( Read more... )

This is another insomnia post, but its origins go back to 1974, when I first took classes in German. Then, I noticed that the word "ganz" sometimes meant "fairly" or "moderately", and sometimes "very" or "absolutely." It's usually translated as "quite," which has the same characteristic. I thought that an interesting coincidence at the time ( Read more... )

Because my comprehensive school had (until the year before I went there) been a Secondary Modern, it didn't teach Latin, preferring to specialise in woodwork and cross country running. This made me really cross, aged 11 ( Read more... )

Things are sometimes lost in translation - I understand that. Cultural references can't always easily be preserved. Quite a lot of anime titles in English are not exact translations of the Japanese original, and that's fineBut there are some cases where they seem to have gone out of their way to shoot themselves in the foot before sticking it in ( Read more... )

Not long ago I discovered to my surprise that the dialect phrase, "More X than ever the parson preached about," meaning "a lot of X," was unknown to any of my Facebook friends. It was much used by my mother and grandmother, and I've been known to say it myself: it is after all the kind of phrase you can roll round your mouth like a gobstopper. Not ( Read more... )

I dreamt last night that I was speaking a language without ostension (would that be the right word?). What I mean is that, to refer to a plate, for example, you actually had to hold the plate up for inspection ( Read more... )