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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 [...]
The future of language: South African English in Zoo City
Earlier this year South African author Lauren Beukes won the prestigious Arthur C. Clarke Award for science fiction for her second novel Zoo City. It was a big moment for the author as it puts her in the company of illustrious recent winners such as, among others, China Miéville (who has won it three times [...]
Invented languages: from Na’vi and Elvish to Standard English?
When you hear the term ‘invented language’, you probably think first of the famous imaginary languages of fiction, for instance, the mind-numbing Newspeak of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, or the Russian-based criminal argot Nadsat in Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange, or Elvish and other languages in J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. [...]
How Latin outlived the Romans
Latin was of course spoken by the Romans – a people who dominated the planet for much of the classical period. Classical Latin has survived through the literary works of scholarly Romans such as Virgil and Cicero and subsequently today you may find yourself casually using a Latin word or phrase without even realising its [...]
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