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~ Posted by Rebecca Willis, May 24th 2012  read more »

~ Posted by Robert Butler, March 21 2012 
 
One language we didn't include in our debate about the best language to learn was Esperanto. That is now number five in the poll—ahead of Latin and Arabic. The ideal of Esperanto, which was devised in the 1870s and 1880s, was that this new language would promote peace and harmony. Its originator Ludwig Zamenhof grew up in Bialystok, where Russians, Poles, Germans and Jews all spoke their own language and treated each other as enemies.

The case for learning Esperanto, which today has an estimated 1,000 native speakers and 100,000 people who use it regularly, has been cogently made by a number of our commenters. It's easy to learn. It's neutral. It's a good first step for learning other languages. But the dream of Esperanto as a second language with none of the cultural baggage of other ones has never gained critical mass, and now there's a fair chance that the dream may be killed off forever, thanks to the computer.  read more »

~ Posted by Robert Butler, March 19th 2012

Several readers, who didn't want to vote for one of the six best languages to learn that had been nominated by our writers, experienced some difficulties when typing in alternative suggestions. The problem seems to have affected readers who tried to vote via iPad or iPhone. We're looking into this. Our experience is that the system is working on Internet Explorer, Firefox and Chrome.

One of those readers, who had wanted to vote for Russian, reminded us very properly of the line attributed to Stalin: "Those who vote decide nothing. Those who count the vote decide everything." Tom Stoppard produced an elegant variation on this thought in his play "Night and Day": "It's not the voting that's democracy, it's the counting."

We're confident, looking at the size of the votes cast, that this hiccup won't have affected the result.  A glance at the poll shows that Brazilian Portuguese is way out in the lead with 28% of the vote, followed by Spanish and French with 19% and 18% respectively. Chinese has 16%, Latin has 6%, and then comes Gaelic, which was not one of the languages originally nominated, which is 1% ahead of Arabic.

Since Wikipedia says there are more than 310m native speakers of Arabic and only an estimated 60,000 native speakers of Scots Gaelic and 60,000 native speakers of Irish Gaelic, the argument in favour of learning Irish or Scots Gaelic is unlikely to be a utilitarian one. It would be good to hear from someone what the reasons are.
 

Robert Butler is online editor of Intelligent Life

~ Posted by Leo Mirani, March 13th 2012

There is, for a foreigner, no immediate usefulness in learning Hindi. As Robert Lane Greene rightly says, when opening the debate on which is the best language to learn, "Hindi does not even unite India". I've spoken Hindi all my life and I can tell you that it doesn't help in Kolkata, where they insist on speaking Bengali. In Bangalore, home to Kannada, it is all but pointless. And it can be downright dangerous to try Hindi on Chennai’s Tamilians, who see it as an imposition from the north. Nor is it much use when currying favour with Indian businessmen—they are likely to be insulted you think they don’t speak English. Even restaurant menus tend to be written in English, while taxi meters use roman numerals. 

My argument for learning Hindi is aimed at language geeks. From the western coast of America through Europe and down into the heartlands of South Asia, nearly 3 billion people speak tongues belonging to the Indo-European family of languages. Hindi is the dominant one at the Indian end of the continuum. According to the 2001 census (which includes dialects) it is the native tongue of 422m Indians.  read more »

~ Posted by Robert Butler, March 8th 2012

Helen Joyce's piece on why Brazilian Portuguese is the best language has attracted a good deal of attention in Brazil where it has been picked up as: "Brazilian Portuguese is the best language to learn, says The Economist". This wasn't quite the point. As visitors to this website will know, the article is one of six, each of which champions a different language to learn.
 
Nevertheless, since Helen's article went online, more than 300 comments have been posted on this site, many of them in Portuguese. We asked Helen, who is The Economist's correspondent in São Paulo, if she could tell the non-Portuguese speakers among us what the commenters were saying. (We summarised the English-language comments yesterday.) Helen emailed back a list of the eight main points that have been made in Portuguese:  read more »

~ Posted by Robert Butler, January 5th 2012
 
A football match kicks off, the New Year celebrations kick off, a new TV series kicks off. That's simple enough. Then the poet Robert Lowell used the phrase in its darker American sense: "The old bitches / live into their hundreds, while I'll kick off/ tomorrow."  read more »

"THE Travelogue of Dr Brain Damages", a show of Kenneth "Tin-Kin" Hung's artwork, opened recently in Manhattan. Mr Hung's garish and busy large paintings feature images of Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping and other Chinese leaders juxtaposed with icons of Western culture, such as Marilyn Monroe and the Mario Brothers (of Nintendo fame). These pieces are arresting, and I wish Mr Hung success, but most Western viewers will fail to understand some of the games the artist is playing. His work depends heavily on Chinese puns about internet censorship.  read more »

A friend of mine was recently told by his boss that his position at work was "unassailable": in British office-speak that is a severe warning which has sent him hastily looking for a new job. It reminded me of a guide I came across a few years ago, which aimed to help plain-speaking Dutch executives make sense of their English colleagues.  Here's an updated and amplified version. Readers are welcome to add their own entries in the comments field, and to ponder the question of what (if anything) an ingrained cult of euphemistic understatement may say about the British (or should that be English?) national character.

What the British say: "I hear what you say"
What the British mean: "I disagree and do not want to discuss it any further"
What is understood:"He accepts my point of view"

What the British say: "This is in no sense a rebuke"
What the British mean: "I am furious with you and letting you know it"
What is understood: "I am not cross with you"

What the British say: "With the greatest respect"
What the British mean: "I think you are wrong (or a fool)"
What is understood: "He is listening to me"

Read more (via Johnson)

Isn't it fun to memorise conjugation tables for verbs in a new language? Well, no, not unless you're Robert Lane Greene, a business correspondent for The Economist and editor of our Johnson blog. My esteemed colleague and self-described office language nerd has written a book, "You Are What You Speak", about "grammar grouches, language laws and the politics of identity". Here he talks to our books & arts editor about the hardest language he has ever tried to learn (Arabic), why English has spread around the world (and how it helped Shakespeare), and why there's no such thing as a truly primitive language.

At least 176 languages are spoken in New York City, though some say as many as 800. New York’s police department is said to have more speakers of Arabic than the FBI has. Still, amid this Babel, one does not hear much Irish, and this in a city that experienced waves of heavy Irish immigration. 

But this morning at St Agnes Church, a small chapel almost hidden on East 43rd Street, St Patrick’s Day mass was said in Irish by Father Aidan O’Driscoll, visiting from Cork. The church was packed with what seemed an equal mix of Irish and Irish-Americans. (Some curious New Yorkers also strolled in, lured perhaps by the piper playing Irish music outside the church door.) Translations were handed out so everyone could follow along. During the “Our Father”, or the “Ár nAthair”, the colleague who accompanied me noticed that part of the translation differed from the usual one used in Catholic churches:

Agus maith dúinn ár bhfiacha
Mar a mhaithimidne ár bhféichiúnaithe féin

The translation read

And forgive us our debts
As we forgive our own debtors  read more »

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