Other languages
What sound does a French duck make? (Or onomatopoeia in different languages)
Hearing is important for humans to understand the world around them and it lies in our nature to want to describe what we hear. To do this, we frequently make use of onomatopoeias. But what exactly is an onomatopoeia? It is ‘the formation of a word from a sound associated with what is named’. Examples [...]
From cherub to jubilee: Hebrew’s influence on today’s English
If you’ve ever noshed on a bagel with your schnoz stuck in a schmaltzy novel, or schlepped to a party to schmooze with the mavens and machers, you know all about the influence of Yiddish on modern English. But what about Hebrew? Thanks to English translations of the Bible, Hebrew-derived words have been playing their [...]
Leap years around the world: from freak weather patterns to good fortune and baby whales
What have Italian composer Rossini and American rapper Ja Rule got in common? A number of possible answers may leap to mind here, but the one I’m looking for is that the two musicians were both born on a date that is mysteriously elusive: 29 February. Except that 2012 is a leap year, and so [...]
This blog is a he
Cast your mind back to your twelve-year-old self stuck in the classroom on a Friday afternoon in the middle of a French lesson. (Or German, or Spanish, for that matter.) If you grew up as a native monolingual English speaker, what was the thing you struggled with the most when learning a foreign language? Was [...]
Creating a textbook: my first year as a Modern Foreign Languages Editor
Harriette Newcombe provides an insight into the life of an Oxford University Press editor. This article was first published in the Independent Schools’ Languages Association magazine. At school I was far too busy trying to distinguish my relative pronouns from my infinitives to give any thought to the work that goes into breathing life into [...]
How difficult is it to learn Chinese?
When other English speakers find out that I’m learning Chinese, they often admit that they are too daunted to even try. But just how difficult is it for the average English speaker to learn Chinese? The answer is, surprisingly, that it’s not that difficult if you’re willing to commit to learning a new language. As [...]
A Word a Day keeps the cobwebs away
Did you know that the Oxford Language Dictionaries Online Words of the Day are handpicked by teams of editors who scour the dictionaries looking for a little quirkiness to brighten up your day? Or that you can easily sign up to receive these Words of the Day by email in French, German, Italian, Spanish, Russian, [...]
More than just moccasins: American Indian words in English
A menagerie of words Most English speakers could easily identify words like tomahawk, moccasin, or tepee as having Amerindian origins (from Virginia Algonquian, Powhatan, and Sioux, respectively), but indigenous American languages have given English many other words which have now become so fully naturalized that their roots often go unrecognized. In fact, fully half of [...]
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