Words, words, words

I love language and words, fascinated by their origin and original meaning and their metamorphosis into something else. Even though I am always correcting my children’s grammar, I love the way new styles of language come in, text-speak can be so original and creative, for example.

Other languages also interest me and part of the joy of learning them (or trying to in my case) is their variety and differences from English. I’m learning Gaelic, to translate I’m happy you have to say ‘I have happiness on me’ tá áthas orm,  a fox is madra rua – red dog… and there are lots of other lovely things I’ve come across. In Gaelic there is no yes/no word which is why you might notice Irish people sometimes don’t often use yes/no even in English. “Will you have a cup of tea?” “I will.” “Isn’t it lovely weather?” “It is!”

Some languages have no concept of tenses, Chinese doesn’t which is maybe why my students at my voluntary conversational English class find it so difficult sometimes! Nor does the Hopi language, but I don’t teach any Hopi people!

Some languages (I’m sure it is true of English if I could only think of an example  have words which are untranslatable as a single word – for example ‘glaznost’ and ‘perestroika’ – those words first introduced to the west by Mikhail Gorbachev, are now used in English because they need a whole phrase to translate them otherwise.

What was the original British native language, spoken in these islands? I’m sure some professors know and I’m sure the answer is that there were many different tribal languages, some unique to the tribe which died when the last speaker died.

I was reading an article by C.J.Moore on language and untranslatable and concepts “if only” he says “it were as easy to get across the idea of ‘cool’. Cool is universally just cool, man.”