by translations.co.uk | Jan 14, 2017 | Interesting, Language History, Linguistics | 0 Comments
The last flower of latium Although Portugal itself is a tiny country, Portuguese is one of the most influential spoken languages in the world, with native speakers across the South Atlantic in Brazil and across Latin America. Miguel Cervantes called it “the...
by translations.co.uk | Dec 28, 2016 | Interesting, Language, Language History, Linguistics | 0 Comments
With its roots in Ancient Latin, Italian is one of the European Romance languages along with Spanish, Portuguese, French and Romanian. Indeed, its vocabulary remains the second-closest tongue to Latin (behind Sardinian) and at present, it’s the third most spoken first...
by translations.co.uk | Dec 14, 2016 | Interesting, Language, Language History, Linguistics | 0 Comments
Origins Like so many other northern European languages, Dutch originated from the old Frankish dialects of the Indo-European language tree as one of the Germanic languages. It shares a common ancestor with English, the Scandinavian languages and German, among others....
by translations.co.uk | Nov 28, 2016 | Interesting, Language, Language History, Russian | 0 Comments
Russian belongs to the eastern Slavonic family of languages, having more in common with Ukrainian and Belarusian than Polish, Serbian or Czech. However, there are words and phrases that all Slavic languages have in common. All of these languages are members of the...
by translations.co.uk | Nov 4, 2016 | Interesting | 0 Comments
The history of the German language sometimes reads a little like the background to an elaborate fantasy novel. The language has its origins in the Germanic branch of the indo-European language family, which also includes languages spoken all over Scandinavia and...
by translations.co.uk | Oct 14, 2016 | French, Grammar, Interesting, Language | 0 Comments
French as we know it is one of the European Romance Languages, meaning that the modern-day dialect is derived from Latin. Before the Roman conquest began in 58BC, France was mainly inhabited by speakers of Celtic languages like the Gauls and the Belgae, and older...
by translations.co.uk | Sep 28, 2016 | Grammar, Interesting, Language, Linguistics, Universal Grammar | 0 Comments
Linguistics in the news The debate about language is never far away from the news, and the publication this year of The Kingdom of Speech by Tom Wolfe reignited the debate. The author examines the theories of the linguist Daniel Everett and philosopher Noam Chomsky,...
by translations.co.uk | Sep 7, 2016 | Spanish | 0 Comments
In common with the other European Romance languages, modern Spanish evolved from Latin. The history of the Spanish language begins with the expansion of the Roman empire, with Spain becoming part of it in 206 BCE. In fact, Spanish emanated from vulgar Latin, the group...
by translations.co.uk | Jul 20, 2016 | Grammar, Interesting, Language, Linguistics, Universal Grammar | 0 Comments
Universal Grammar (UG) is the controversial idea that language is a universal, evolved and specific capacity for learning and arranging grammatical constructions, hard-wired into our brains. Under UG the ability for human beings to learn language is specific, in that...
by translations.co.uk | Jul 13, 2016 | English, Grammar, Interesting, Language, Linguistics | 0 Comments
As children many of us are taught that speaking ‘correct English’ is something to aspire to. Sometimes this means pronouncing words with clear diction (health and safety rather than ‘elf n’safety), as well as using grammatical constructions considered ‘correct’. I am...
