My voice is hoarse this week! I am acting in my school’s play and sound raspy. The phrase “my voice is hoarse” is an idiomatic expression but the saying “I have a frog in my throat” is called a calque. A calque is a “loan translation” or literal word-for-word translation from another language. In contrast, […]
Just ask Marvel – everyone loves an origin story! Linguists theorize that all the languages in the world originated from a single, prehistoric protolanguage. As people migrated across the globe, their spoken language changed and split creating new languages or branches. Today, over seven thousand languages are spoken worldwide and organized into about 430 language […]
What do you call a person who speaks many languages? A polyglot. What do you call a person who speaks two languages? A bilingual. What do you call a person who speaks one language? An English speaker. Psycholinguists (not to be confused with psycho linguists) study how language is processed in the mind. They research […]
“Some people say that less is more. But I think more is more.” – Dolly Parton. The Chinese language has been a passion of mine since I started learning it in seventh grade. It is a fascinating language and I want to look at one of its linguistic facets in particular: the Chinese writing system. […]
For Fall 2024, corporate grey is the new black according to the fashion world. This phrase appeared in the 1960s when Gloria Vanderbilt stated that, “pink is the new black” while traveling to India. You probably know this phrase, but you might not know it’s called a snowclone. The term snowclone came from a contest. […]
This Irish phrase means: “More Irish than the Irish themselves.” The saying is attributed to historian John Lynch who described the 12th century Norman invaders that had adopted the Irish language and culture, eventually appearing more Irish than the native-born population. In 2022, the census in Ireland showed that only 72,000 people speak Irish daily […]
“Crawl, Walk, Run” refers to the progression of physical development in children. We first must learn to crawl before we can walk and eventually run. It’s also widely used to describe any form of progression. Take playing chess as an example. You need to learn the game’s basic rules, like what each piece on the […]
Translation: Would you like some cake? Slang is one of the great parts of language because it helps create communities. Even with a shared language like English, there are dozens of terms unique to Brits, Scots, Australians, Americans and more. A recent article reveals that British slang is declining in use. For example, 60% of […]
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? No, because a summer’s day is not going to learn about Shakespeare’s linguistic influence on the English language it’s most famous neologist. Neology is the use of a new word or expression, or of an established word in a new or different sense. I’ll be using some […]
Welcome to New York City! NYC is known as a melting pot for people coming to the United States from different countries, bringing with them their language and culture to share with their new country. In the borough of Queens, more different languages are spoken per square mile than anywhere else in the world. Sadly, […]