And if you have no word for blue, how can you see it?

Since then a more sober explanation has taken hold as the orthodoxy. Analysis of the way in which languages produce words for different colours has revealed that the process is surprisingly consistent, throughout the world and throughout history. In 1969, linguist Paul Kay and anthropologist Brent Berlin published Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution. It offered, among others, one pertinent hypothesis. If a language had only three basic colour categories, they were almost always words for black/dark, white/light and red. If it had four or five categories, then the additional words tended to refer to green or yellow. Only once a language had six or more basic colour categories did you begin to see more complex colours given their own word. Among those was the colour that we would call blue. In the view of Kay and Berlin, Homer’s Greek didn’t have a word for blue. Colour exists on a spectrum; what isn’t obvious is how you break that spectrum down into different categories. Where does one colour stop, if you don’t have words to describe the two colours either side of the barrier? And if you have no word for blue, how can you see it?

N. Leamon & B. Jones, Hitting Against the Spin: How Cricket Really Works (2021), loc.4,454

We took a Germanic language and enfolded it with Norman French and a bunch of Latin and ever since we keep building out

I miss being at home in a culture. Using English with other native speakers is what I might miss most. For nuance and verve, English wins. We took a Germanic language and enfolded it with Norman French and a bunch of Latin and ever since we keep building out. Our words, our expanse of idioms, are expressive and creative and precise, like our music and our subcultures and our street style, our passion for violence, stupidity, and freedom. The French might have better novels (Balzac, Zola, and Flaubert) and they have better cheeses (Comté, Roquefort, Cabécou). But in the grand scheme that’s basically nothing.

R. Kushner, Creation lake (2024). loc 2,808

Having a good accent is nothing. It’s a consolation prize for people who aren’t fluent

I started working in Europe, in the private sector, taking advantage of the fact I speak French, Italian, Spanish, and German. I’m fluent in all those languages, although I speak them with a strong American accent. (People think fluency is about having a good accent. It isn’t. Fluency is about how well you understand the language, and how well you are able to speak it. Having a good accent is nothing. It’s a consolation prize for people who aren’t fluent.)

R. Kushner, Creation lake (2024). loc 699

They wield their language like a club against their enemies

Though his surname is Afrikaans, though his father is more Afrikaans than English, though he himself speaks Afrikaans without any English accent, he could not pass for a moment as an Afrikaner. The range of Afrikaans he commands is thin and bodiless; there is a whole dense world of slang and allusion commanded by real Afrikaans boys—of which obscenity is only a part—to which he has no access. There is a manner that Afrikaners have in common too—a surliness, an intransigence, and, not far behind it, a threat of physical force (he thinks of them as rhinoceroses, huge, lumbering, strong-sinewed, thudding against each other as they pass)—that he does not share and in fact shrinks from. They wield their language like a club against their enemies.

J.M. Coetzee, Boyhood (1997), 124

Greek accents—another doubtful boon—were also invented in the Mouseion

Hitherto the Greek language had developed unnoticed. Now it was consciously examined, and the result of the examination was the first Greek Grammar (about 100 B.C.). Grammar is a valuable subject but also a dangerous one, for it naturally attracts pedants and schoolmasters and all who think that Literature is an affair of rules. And the Grammarians of Alexandria forgot that they were merely codifying the usages of the past, and presumed to dictate to the present, and to posterity; they set a bad example that has been followed for nearly 2000 years. Greek accents—another doubtful boon—were also invented in the Mouseion. Indeed the whole of literary scholarship, as we know it, sprang up, including that curious by-product the Scholarly Joke.

E.M. Forester, Alexandria (1922), 22

He introduced around 600 words in Hamlet that he had never used before, two-thirds of which he would never use again

The roughly 4,000 lines in the play [Hamlet] ended up requiring nearly the same number of different words (for comparison’s sake, Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus and The Jew of Malta each use only about half that number). Even the 14,000 or so different words or compounds that Shakespeare had already employed in his plays (by the end of his career that figure would reach about 18,000) proved insufficient. According to Alfred Hart, who painstakingly counted when and how Shakespeare introduced each word into his work, he introduced around 600 words in Hamlet that he had never used before, two-thirds of which he would never use again. This is an extraordinary number (King Lear, with 350, is the only one that comes close; in the spare Julius Caesar only seventy words appear that Shakespeare had not previously used).

J. Shapiro, 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare (2005), 320

It was, furthermore, a shaggy and outlandish kind of Chinese

It was, furthermore, a shaggy and outlandish kind of Chinese. In the extreme north-west of China they speak what I take to be a variant of the Shansi dialect. it is not as incomprehensible as the southern dialects, being based closely on mandarin; but it was disconcerting to find (for instance) that 'water' was fi instead of shui, that she-me (meaning 'what') had contracted to sa, and that normen, not wormen, meant 'we'. I found myself, mutatis mutandis, in roughly the position of a Chinese who, after cursorily studying the first chapters of a modern English primer, is turned loose in the remoter parts of eighteenth century Yorkshire.

P. Fleming, News from Tartary (1936), 167

Not one person in a thousand realises that rabbit (no Old English source) are in any way historical way distinct from mice or weasels

Rabbits are immigrants. They appeared in England only around the thirteenth century, as imports bred for fur, but escaped to the wild like mink or coypu. Yet they have been assimilated. The point is this: not one person in a thousand realises that rabbit (no Old English source) are in any way historical way distinct from mice (O.E. mys) or weasels (O.E. weselas), while the word is accepted by all as familiar, native, English.

T. Shippey, The road to Middle-Earth (3rd edition. 2005), 78

Anyone worthy of admission to the university would already be fluent in French

But ever since the decline of Latin, French had been the language of cultivated cosmopolitan elites – and thus the European language par excellence. When, in the early years of the twentieth century, it was first proposed to introduce the teaching of French as part of the modern languages syllabus at Oxford University, more than one don opposed the idea on the plausible grounds that anyone worthy of admission to the university would already be fluent in French.

T. Judt, Postwar (2005), 760

It was the efforts of the humanitarian and progress-orientated liberals that struck a significant blow at Mexico's indigenous people

Arguably, only in the wake of the War of Independence (1810-1821) did indigenous identity truly suffer. In one of the greatest ironies of history, it was the efforts of the humanitarian and progress-orientated liberals that struck a significant blow at Mexico's indigenous peoples. With all people suddenly equal in the eyes of the law, it seemed counterproductive  to persist in encouraging indigenous peoples to speak in their own language. No longer could a native person go to court and find a translator: that person would need to speak Spanish.

C. Townsend, Fifth Sun (2019), 207

There is no subjunctive perfect in Chinese

There was something of a tussle within the family over who would translate Dr Chao's prose into English. Her daughter did much of the work, only for Chao's linguist husband to step in and pepper the account with hectoring qualifications - 'There is no subjunctive perfect in Chinese,' he harrumphs, in an entirely unnecessary footnote to a paragraph about what to say when someone serves you Shark's Fin Soup. But at the end of the family feuding a firm text remained, often in quaintly off-kilter English, and with a few translation decisions that would endure.

J. Clements, The Emperor's feast (2021), 162

A foreign language can signify a total separation. It can represent, even today, the ferocity of our ignorance.

And yet this Italian project of mine makes me acutely aware of the immense distances between languages. A foreign language can signify a total separation. It can represent, even today, the ferocity of our ignorance. To write in a new language, to penetrate its heart, no technology helps. You can't accelerate the process, you can't abbreviate it. The pace is slow, hesitant, there are no shortcuts. The better I understand the language, the more confusing it is. The closer I get, the farther away. Even today the disconnect between me and Italian remains insuperable. It's taken almost half my life to advance barely a few steps. Just to get this far. 

J. Lahiri, In other words (2014) 91

The problem is that while it's true that "Gospel" has lost its original sense and, in fact, now has now meaning at all, writing "good news" in its place is a cure that's worse than the disease

Most people today think that "Gospel" designates a literary genre, the story of Jesus' life, and that Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John wrote Gospels the way that Racine wrote tragedies or Ronsard sonnets. But that meaning only established itself about the second century. The word that Mark wrote at the start of his narrative meant "good news." When Paul wrote to the Galatians and Corinthians thirty years earlier about "my Gospel," it meant: what I preached to you, my personal version of this good news. The problem is that while it's true that "Gospel" has lost its original sense and, in fact, now has now meaning at all, writing "good news" in its place is a cure that's worse than the disease: it has a "nice Catholic" ring to it, you instantly imagine the priest's syrupy smile and voice.

E. Carrere, The Kingdom (2014), tr. J, Lambert, 333

Since French was a foreign language for the Russian reader, it is arguable that every translation should keep those sentences in French. Yet none does.

To take a famous example, the opening lines of War and Peace in the original are: 'Eh bien, mon prince' followed by long passages in French spoken by Russians as if it were their normal everyday language. the characters in question are aristocrats who converse with one another in French for reasons of fashion and snobbery - something the linking text (in Russia) makes clear   Ironically the discussion is about the possible invasion of Russia by Napoleon and 'toutes les atrocites de cet Antichrist.'  Since French was a foreign language for the Russian reader, it is arguable that every translation  should keep those sentences in French. Yet none does.

 J. Erdal, Ghosting: a double life (2004), 85-6

A cliché is not a cliché if you have never heard it before

And his column, ‘String Along with Reggie Okong’, soon became very popular indeed. No one pretended that he dispensed any spectacular insights, wisdom or originality but his ability to turn a phrase in a way to delight our ordinary readers was remarkable. He was full of cliché, but then a cliché is not a cliché if you have never heard it before; and our ordinary reader clearly had not and so was ready to greet each one with the same ecstasy it must have produced when it was first coined. For Cliché is but pauperized Ecstasy. Think of the very first time someone got up and said: ‘We must not be lulled into a false sense of security.’ He must have got his audience humming. It was like that with Okong; he was a smash hit!

C. Achebe, Anthills of the Savannah (1987), 10

Fortunately he had not understood, owing to the Berkshire accent they already affected, that what they were calling him was bugger-shit.

The house, Crux Easton, was exactly right and I bought it on the spot. We got our Wootton furniture from store and moved in at once. We bought a cow, Max named her Wellson; from then on we lived well and she gave us butter and milk and cream in abundance. In the yard there was a gardener’s cottage with a crowd of children; they became bosom friends with Alexander and Max and in a matter of days had taught them every swear word in the calendar. They quickly discovered the electric effect these words had upon Nanny and they used them freely. Our new detective, Mr. Buswell, a nice and helpful man, told us one day: ‘The boys always say here comes that battleship Buswell when they see me.’ Fortunately he had not understood, owing to the Berkshire accent they already affected, that what they were calling him was bugger-shit.

D. Mosley, A life of contrasts (1978), loc. 3,219

The English, he said, were so spoilt and awed and besotted with writing that they saw the plastic arts as secondary

I once interviewed a very short-tempered Howard Hodgkin, and he erupted with a paean to the inability of the English to see, or make, good artists. The fault, the insurmountable fault, was apparently Shakespeare's ... him and the Book of Common Prayer ... and the dictionary. It was the English language itself, so voluminous, logorrheic, sinewy, subtle, pugnacious and duplicitous (my words, not his). Only English could describe the gallimaufry and the cornucopia of itself. The English, he said, were so spoilt and awed and besotted with writing that they saw the plastic arts as secondary, a charming craft or self-expression. the best those not blessed by the word could hope for would by to become licensed illustrators of poetic insight. 

A.A. Gill, Pour me (2015), 73