Month: March 2016

Elephant flies

By Simon

An interesting Dutch idiom I came across today is van een vlieg een olifant maken or “to make an elephant out of a fly”, which is the Dutch equivalent of the English idiom to make a mountain out of a molehill.

This comes from a post on the blog Stuff Dutch People Like.

Other idioms from this post include:

– Nu komt de aap uit de mouw (Now the monkey comes out of the sleeve) = To let the cat out of the bag, i.e. to reveal the hidden motive or the truth behind something.

– Ben je van de trap gevallen? (Did you fall down the stairs?) = Did you have a fight with a lawn mower? – said to people who’ve had a rather drastic haircut.

– Wie boter op zijn hoofd heeft, moet uit de zon blijven (Those with butter on their heads should stay out of the sun) = People in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones, i.e. do not criticize others unless you are without fault.

Are there equivalents of these idioms in other languages?

The future of language learning

By Simon

A new article on Omniglot discusses the future of language learning. The writer (not me) suggests that improvements in technology will soon make it possible to use machine translation in everyday situations and as a result, learning languages will become unnecessary and something people do for mainly as a hobby.

I don’t really agree with the article. Improved machine translation will be very useful for tourists and other short-term visitors to foreign parts, but for people who live abroad or spend a lot of time in foreign lands, learning the local language and about the local culture will always be useful and worthwhile.

Translation, no matter how good, adds an extra step between the speaker and the listener. For those of us who prefer direct interaction with people, and who like to fully understand what other people are talking about, including their idioms, jokes and slang, there’s no substitute for learning their language.

Even if a babel fish or similar device existed, i.e. something that translates whatever language you hear into your own language, and that translate what you say into your conversation partner’s language, it would still be worth learning about other and languages cultures. Or would it?

Llongrats!

By Simon

In the comments on an article about Welsh literature I read today, I came across the word llongrats!, which appears to be a Welsh-English hybrid combining the Welsh word llongyfarchiadau and it’s English equivalent, congratulations.

While it’s common for bilingual people to switch languages, often in mid-sentence, this is the first example I’ve seen of a mid-word switch in Welsh/English.

Have you come across anything like this?

Actually, when I come to think about it some words in English do have bilingual roots, particularly those borrowed from Latin and Greek, such as television, from the Greek τῆλε ‎(têle – at a distance, far off/away/from) and from the Latin vīsiō ‎(vision, seeing), via Anglo-Norman and Old French.