English language

The Dog Days of Summer

Niall O'Donnell 19 Comments

Look at Daisy up there, simply enjoying the warmth of the sun, as only a dog really can. What a life of simple joys a dog lives, one we can all be envious of. Seeing her like that yesterday made me think of the phrase the dog days of summer. A lot of people assume that it refers to the hottest period of the summer, in which dogs are too tired to do anything else but lie in the afternoon heat. I can see the logic in that, but as I’d never looked into the origin of the phrase, I thought now was as good a time as any to do so.

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The Most Beautiful Language in the World?

Niall O'Donnell 95 Comments

I read this article recently, suggesting that Italian is the most beautiful language in the world. I was intrigued, thinking that obviously the idea of beauty in any terms is going to be subjective, but I could also see why many people would choose Italian, so I read on.

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He’s Much Smarter than I

Niall O'Donnell 12 Comments

Not a sentence I have occasion to use very often, obviously. It’s a fairly straightforward one, an example of a comparative form. I’m comparing myself with another person. Simple. Not the sort of thing we ever have to really think about it. Like much of the basics of grammar in your native tongue, it’s something you know and use correctly automatically. Well, you know it now, because you had to pick up how to use comparative forms correctly during your childhood.

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The Power of Prepositions

Niall O'Donnell 13 Comments

 No teacher likes to be observed. I still remember my first teaching practices when I was training to be a teacher. It was terrifying, because I’d never done anything remotely like teaching beforehand, and then suddenly had to stand up in front of a group of strangers and help them understand a list of words. This was made even worse by having an experienced teacher observe me, along with three fellow trainees. Being in that position really makes you doubt yourself. Whenever you see them make a note, you think about what you must have just done wrong, and hesitate about what to do next.

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A Tale of Three Translations

Niall O'Donnell 21 Comments

I was watching the news yesterday, and there was a story about the stone in the image above, which features the lyrics of the song “Galway Bay” in English, Latin, Irish, and French. It was erected, appropriately enough, in my hometown of Galway last year, overlooking Galway Bay, as part of a poetry trail featuring similar plaques with translations of works by different Irish writers. Funnily, I wasn’t really aware of the content of the plaque until yesterday, even though for most of last year I lived very close to it, and in fact passed it practically every day. I had seen it alright, but in my defence, I was usually cycling, driving, or running, so never really stopped to look at it, and there are many little cultural markers like that around the city, so you do kind of get used to them.

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The offending plaque, as it is now, in storage

Anyway, the issue with the plaque was with the Irish-language translation. A few months after it was erected, An Coimisinéir Teanga (the Language Commissioner) received a complaint about the quality of the Irish translation, which suggested that it didn’t capture the spirit of the original English-language lyrics. In a report, An Coimisinéir stated that there were approximately 40 errors in the 20 lines of the Irish version. I found this quite shocking, so had a look at the lyrics myself.

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“They were trying to pull the sheep over our head, and something got lost in translation.”

Niall O'Donnell 3 Comments

It certainly did! This was overheard in passing recently, and I couldn’t help but smile. I don’t mean to mock, because I believe the individual who said this was under stress and therefore liable to make a slip. But it was funny. Ah, but I could see where they were coming from.

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Happy Fourth of July!

Niall O'Donnell 1 Comment

Happy Fourth of July to all of my American readers (about 50% of all my lovely readers)! I hope you’re enjoying celebrating your independence, and I certainly hope that you appreciate that I’m publishing a second article today just for you. You see, I’ve got into a habit of writing articles in the evening (it’s currently 8PM GMT summertime), but scheduling them to be published the following morning, so I don’t have the pressure of having to finish it quickly that evening. That’s why I published an article about Wimbledon on the second day of the tournament. But I thought I couldn’t possibly publish an article about the Fourth of July on the fifth, so here we are.

I originally thought about writing about some uniquely American words, or American English more generally, but I’ve already written about that, and there’s not much to be said there that you don’t already know about. But then at some point this afternoon, I was struck by a thought: why do Americans call it the Fourth of July, when normally they use the other format to refer to dates? Why not July Fourth?

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