Language

Like most British people of my age, I first encountered spaghetti in a tin, in tomato sauce. In our house it was kept in the pantry alongside the tins of baked beans, and we ate it in the same way as the beans: on toast, for breakfast. When I was a child, spaghetti on toast […]

PETER TRUDGILL on the famous names inspired by water courses. Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750) was one of the greatest composers who ever lived, and his sublime music is much loved and still very frequently played today, 270 years after his death. His sons Carl Philipp Emanuel, Johann Christian, Wilhelm Friedemann and Johann Christoph Friedrich Bach […]

The UK’s departure from the EU not only introduced new phrases, but showed how language can be used to shape political debate. ANDREAS BUERKI reports. A number of expressions have entered everyday use since Brexit started. Terms like ‘Article 50’, ‘no deal’, ‘hard border’ may now seem just part of life but they were seldom, if ever, […]

PETER TRUDGILL on how long it took for the accent to appear after English arrived in Australia. In 1788, during the reign of King George III, the English language made a very long journey indeed, penetrating deep into the southern hemisphere. This was on the occasion of the foundation of the British Australian penal colony of […]

English could be ditched as an official language of the European Union as the United Kingdom leaves the bloc following the Brexit trade agreement. European and Scottish affairs correspondent Udo Seiwert-Fauti claims that the language is set to become downgraded to a “working language” after member states opted against using it for translations of documents. […]

PETER TRUDGILL on some seldom used festive terms. When I was at school, some children thought it was very funny, around Christmastime. to ask the trick question: “How many letters are there in the alphabet?” The correct answer, they said, was not twenty-six but “twenty-five, because the angel said Noël!”. Noël barely qualifies as an English word. For […]

PETER TRUDGILL on a cheering Christmas tradition. One of the best-loved spoof Christmas carols recorded by the Norfolk-based parody folk-duo the Kipper Family is called Arrest These Merry Gentlemen! Another song in the same vein (from their album The Ever Decreasing Circle) is the Trunch Wassail Song, a folk tune purportedly native to the North Norfolk […]

Not knowing other languages is one thing. Not knowing about them is quite another, says PETER TRUDGILL. I once happened to be visiting the linguistics department of a well-known university in the American Midwest when a phone call came in from the local police station. An officer enquired: “Do you have anyone there who can […]

Not knowing other languages is one thing. Not knowing about them is quite another, says PETER TRUDGILL. I once happened to be visiting the linguistics department of a well-known university in the American Midwest when a phone call came in from the local police station. An officer enquired: “Do you have anyone there who can speak […]

PETER TRUDGILL on the lost links that gave us surnames like Nelson, Hobson, Hodgson and Dodgson. There are not too many men about nowadays who are called Peter, but those of us who do still bear this name are quite liable to get called Pete, especially by family and friends.  In the same way, women […]

Collins Dictionary has named “lockdown” as its Word of the Year 2020 after a sharp increase in its usage amid the coronavirus pandemic. The dictionary said it added the term because it “encapsulates the shared experience of billions of people who have had to restrict their daily lives in order to contain the virus”. Collins’ […]

PETER TRUDGILL on the likeliest roots of perhaps the world’s most used word. OK is one of the most successful English words of all time. It is a relatively new word – the first recorded usage dates from the mid-1800s – but it has now spread to all varieties of English around the world, and […]

John Kampfner, author of the much discussed Why the Germans Do it Better: Notes from a Grown-Up Country and a regular contributor to The New European, has written in the New Statesman that “monolingualism is one of the enduring motifs of British mediocrity”.  It is hard to query the basic accuracy of his observation, but we should probably […]

A number of high-profile Republicans and Trump supporters have been fooled into thanking Satan for supporting the president’s re-election bid. Fox News commentator Corey Lewandowski, former Trump adviser Sebastian Gorka, Conservative political pundit Tomi Lahren, and outspoken Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio were among people duped into thanking someone called “Iblis” for campaigning on behalf of […]

Peter Trudgill on Antarctica, and its most famous story. Antarctica has been called “the continent without language”. True languages are spoken only by human beings, and although there are many visiting scientists and support workers in Antarctica these days, this is a modern situation: the continent has never had indigenous languages because it has never had […]

The nation-states of Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia are located in Caucasia, the area between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea, no more than 350 miles across at its narrowest point, which is mostly taken up topographically by the Caucasus mountain range. These three countries are widely, but by no means universally, considered to be […]

PETER TRUDGILL on some obvious, and less obvious, origins of place names. On the east coast of the North Island of New Zealand, there is a place called Buffalo Beach. This is something of a surprise, because New Zealand has no indigenous terrestrial mammals, and absolutely zero buffalo. In fact, in order to understand the […]

I must confess that I do not normally read the angling section of my local newspaper, the Eastern Daily Press, but from time to time I do catch sight in its columns of the name wrasse. As many readers will know better than me, this word refers to a particular species of marine fish, some […]

PETER TRUDGILL on the fascinating origins of Fahrenheit and Celsius – and how different things might have been. Many Americans endure a reputation for an apparent lack of regard for the rest of the world. Regardless of whether it is deserved or not, it remains the fact that the USA is the only nation on […]

PETER TRUDGILL on knowing your Baker from your Butcher. The origins of many occupational surnames are really rather obvious. If your family name is Shepherd, this is because one of your male ancestors herded sheep. If his given name was John, this term describing his occupation would have been used as a byname – a subsidiary […]

When I left school in 1963 at the age of 19 after 15 years of full-time education, nothing happened. Nothing at all. We just walked out of the school gates, knowing that we would not be coming back anymore, except as visitors. There were no ceremonies, no dressing up, no handing over of pieces of […]

PETER TRUDGILL on three languages that can give the country’s cricketers an edge over their opponents. During the recent Test Match between England and Pakistan at the Ageas Bowl in Southampton, cricket fans may have seen or heard Aatif Nawaz – actor, writer, comedian, and cricket commentator – presenting a very interesting discussion on the […]

PETER TRUDGILL on the story of Sacajawea. The Louisiana Purchase is the name given to the 1803 deal under which the USA ‘bought’ very large tracts of North American land from France, extending American control over the continent an enormous distance westwards. The area in question covered the whole of modern Iowa, Missouri, Nebraska, Kansas, […]

PETER TRUDGILL on the remarkable way that children learn their native language. The speed, accuracy and apparent ease with which small children learn their native language is a remarkable phenomenon, especially if we consider that they do this without mostly being taught the language by anybody. It is quite true, of course, that there are […]

PETER TRUDGILL explains the language rules that guide how we banter and who we should do it with. We have heard quite a lot about banter in recent times on the sports pages of newspapers. A footballer may complain that an opponent has said something insulting to them. The opponent’s defence is that what was […]

PETER TRUDGILL on the many words which break the rules, If you have ever studied German, you may recall that one of the difficulties for a foreign learner of the language lies in struggling to come up with the correct plural forms of nouns. The word for ‘boy’ is Junge (you will also remember that […]

PETER TRUDGILL on the first meeting of two languages, one of which has since died out – but not without leaving some traces. The first location in which any sizeable group of native speakers of English became successfully established outside the British Isles was the Jamestown settlement, in what was to become the United States […]

PETER TRUDGILL on the sometimes rather rude origins of surnames. Some family names, in spite of having been passed down across the generations for the last 500 years or more, still retain a form which makes it easy to see what they originally meant. In an earlier column, we already noted colour-based names like Browne […]

PETER TRUDGILL tackles a burning issue that has been prompting debate among readers. The word portmanteau refers to a largish travelling bag which opens up into two equal parts. The word was originally borrowed into English from French; and for that reason it was sometimes pluralised as portmanteaux rather than portmanteaus. But it first arrived […]

PETER TRUDGILL on the curious confusions that can arise from the double meaning of quite. Several decades ago, when I first took my American girlfriend home to meet my parents, she was shown some of my father’s paintings – he was a rather well-known local artist. She said that she thought the pictures were ‘quite […]

PETER TRUDGILL on some expansionist chapters in the island’s history It is not usual to think of the Irish as being colonialists. On the contrary, we know a great deal about how the island of Ireland has suffered from the effects of colonialism on the part of the Vikings, the English, the Scots, and the […]

PETER TRUDGILL on the ultimate origins of ‘English’. During the late 300s and early 400s AD, boat-loads of Germanic people started crossing the North Sea to the eastern shores of Britain. Some arrivals had probably come well before that: since the second century AD, the Romans had been employing Germanic mercenaries in their garrisons in […]