Language

Peter Trudgill recounts the story of what happened to one of Britain’s ancient languages, Old Norse During the first millennium AD, Britain was home to four major languages, each of which had arrived from a different point of the compass. The first was Britonnic Celtic, the ancestor of Breton and Cornish, which had come to […]

PETER TRUDGILL follows a thread through the centuries, via various connected words related to the telling of time. In English, when we speak about the approximately twice-a-day rising and falling of the seas along our shores, we talk of high tides and low tides. Norwegian uses similar terminology: høgvatn, ‘high water’, and lågvatn, ‘low water’, […]

The very spot where accents change can often be pinpointed and it’s often a case of geography, as PETER TRUDGILL explains My late mother-in-law came from the American Midwest, a predominantly flat land of enormously fertile and productive soils. She was not very impressed by the Rocky Mountains, observing that you couldn’t grow much there. […]

PETER TRUDGILL explains why some old childhood favourites no longer seem to rhyme. Many of us remember from our childhood the well-known nursery rhyme which goes: “Jack and Jill/Went up the hill/To fetch a pail of water. Jack fell down/And broke his crown/ And Jill came tumbling after.” Jill rhymes with hill, and down rhymes […]

PETER TRUDGILL on an island language which vanished after the Europeans arrived The Canary Islands are a long way from mainland Europe, but the Romans knew they were there. Pliny the Elder (23-79AD) referred to them as the Canaria, supposedly because of the large numbers of big dogs (Latin canes) which were reported to live […]

PETER TRUDGILL examines the etymological roots of this beautiful plant. It is not a totally straightforward matter to explain how the flower we call the foxglove got its name. We can, though, at least figure out where the glove part comes from: the flowers look like the fingers of gloves; and small fingers, as children […]

When it comes to this aspect of language, it’s not as straightforward as a, e, i, o, u, says PETER TRUDGILL If you ask English-speaking people how many vowels there are in their language, many of them will tell you that there are five: a, e, i, o and u. If you ask Greek speakers […]

Why we have the Ancient Greeks to thank for almost all our misfortunes. In English we don’t really have a true equivalent of the French expression bon appétit, wishing people who are about to start a meal a ‘good appetite’. But most other European languages seem to have some kind of bon appétit-type formula: German […]

PETER TRUDGILL tells the story of Norn, now vanished from the British Isles, though some of its sounds still linger. Philologists generally divide the Scandinavian languages into two historical branches: eastern and western. Swedish and Danish fall into the Eastern Scandinavian division, while Norwegian, Faroese and Icelandic form the Western Scandinavian languages, the Faroe Islands […]

These days we hear the word like, meaning ‘similar to’, quite a lot. In fact, in the speech of many younger people today it seems to occur, like, all the time. But it is a word with an extraordinarily interesting and complex history, and one which is not completely understood. One fascinating aspect of its […]

As the Premier League draws to a close, PETER TRUDGILL explores the meanings behind some of its biggest names. As is well known to most English football fans – and to the entire population of Norway over the age of three – the manager of Manchester United is called Ole Gunnar Solskjær. Like very many […]

The story of how a little corner of Wales retains a very English flavour. If you look at a map of Wales, you will see that the majority of the places in the country bear unmistakably Welsh-language names: Aberystwyth, Caernarfon, Ffestiniog, Llanelli, Machynlleth, Pwllheli, Ystradgynlais. Certainly no one would ever suppose that Llanrhaeadr-ym-Mochnant was somewhere […]

PETER TRUDGILL explains the processes by which phrases can contract to just a shadow of their former selves. It is often the fate of words and phrases, over the millennia, to get shorter and shorter. The Latin phrase hoc die, ‘this day’, famously became so shortened in French – as hui, ‘today’ – that French […]

It has its diehard fans, but do we really need this punctuation mark, asks PETER TRUDGILL The English word apostrophe comes from a Greek term meaning ‘turning away’: in Modern Greek apó means ‘from’ and strophí is ‘turn’. As used in English, apostrophe refers to the usage of the punctuation mark ‘ to indicate the […]

PETER TRUDGILL on what lies behind our irregular everyday phrases. The most usual way to make past-tense verb forms in English is to add -ed to the basic form of the verb: want–wanted, love–loved; play–played. So why is the past tense of go not goed but went? Even with verbs which are irregular and do […]

PETER TRUDGILL on how some unlikely connections between European languages emerged after 2,000 years The Albanian word for king is mbret. You might think that this has got nothing to do with any word in any language that you have ever come across before. But it would be slightly surprising if you were right. Albanian […]

PETER TRUDGILL suggests a time and a place for when and where the English language came into being English is a language which certainly came into existence rather gradually. If we want to know how old it is, the only sensible way of answering that question is to determine when English started breaking away from […]

It provided the inspiration – and name – for the race, but Greece’s Marathón also has a fascinating linguistic history. PETER TRUDGILL reports. The men’s race at the Athens marathon (marathónios in Greek) was won this year by the Kenyan athlete Misoi Brimin Kipkorir of Kenya, in two hours 10 minutes and 56 seconds; the […]

Back to the farmstead, PETER TRUDGILL reveals the etymology of Paris Hilton’s name but he’s not going to France for the answer. Travellers crossing from England to France via the Channel Tunnel emerge into French daylight in the vicinity of a place called Fréthun, southwest of Calais. In the Pas-de-Calais and the neighbouring le Nord […]

PETER TRUDGILL on some familiar celebratory Balkan phrases, and how they reflect the region’s complex linguistic history Macedonia is a geographical term which refers to an area of the southern Balkans. For some centuries, the region was part of the Ottoman Empire, ruled by the Turks from Constantinople. It contained a mixed and varied population […]

PETER TRUDGILL on a grammar ‘rule’ ripe for debunking There seem to be quite lot of self-appointed experts on the English language around who like to invent grammatical rules. One of these ‘rules’, which Americans in particular seem to be very worried about, concerns among­ and between, and states that writers should only use between […]

The very term used to describe the prejudice is itself born of prejudice. One of the most anti-Jewish words in the English language is anti-Semitic. In terms of the history of our language it’s a rather new word – no one used it until about 140 years ago. The term, as is well known, is […]

​Insecurity over the ‘correct’ use of pronouns has led language in an unusual direction, says PETER TRUDGILL In normal native English, the personal pronouns I, he, she, we, they are only used when they appear as the subject of a verb: I am leaving now; he likes coffee; she would like some; we are coming; […]

PETER TRUDGILL on the unlikely origin of the name of a stretch of water off the Scottish coast The sea between the northern Outer Hebrides and the Scottish mainland is called the Minch, while the more southerly strait between the Outer Hebrides and the Isle of Skye is known as the Little Minch. The word […]

Peter Trudgill on a perfectly good word which may find its days numbered The Dutch word for ‘to buy’ is kopen. The corresponding word in German is kaufen; and the West Frisian equivalent is keapje. All the Scandinavian languages also have a related form: Norwegian kjøpe, Danish købe, Swedish köpa, Icelandic kaupa, and Faroese keypa. […]

Logic- and despots – might favour other systems, but, as Peter Trudgill explains, traditional units of measurements still endure. Of the approximately 80 countries in the world which drive on the left-hand side of the road, only four are European: Ireland, Malta, Cyprus, and the UK (plus the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands). […]

PETER TRUDGILL finds much in common between European languages and the English spoken by African Americans. One of the African American comedian Reginald D. Hunter’s best jokes comes from a television appearance here in Britain. It was a linguistic gag. Hunter related a story that went something like this: He was in a bar, somewhere […]

PETER TRUDGILL divides up the continent according to word different languages use to describe the smelly stuff The distribution of words meaning ‘cheese’ in different European languages has an interesting geographical pattern. These words fall into four rather clearly separate zones. In the northern zone, the North Germanic languages have a word for cheese which […]