Isn’t that just the classic signifier or a stupid, or at least uneducated, person? How could they possibly confuse these two antonyms? And of course this mistake is especially ironic as it’s related to education and learning. However, if you’re the type of person who likes to make themselves feel smarter by noting how people make this mistake but you don’t, perhaps you need to rethink how wrong these people actually are.
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.
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.
Make and do. To make and to do. Two very simple verbs that you probably never think about (if you’re a native speaker). You probably literally use them every day. Nothing interesting about them really. Just common words that do their job without any fuss, without drawing attention to themselves. Nothing interesting about them at all, is there? Well, you might be amazed to find that actually, I find both words quite interesting indeed.
When is good English a disadvantage?
When you’re in business.
Well, it’s not so simple obviously, but I was intrigued by an article on the BBC Capital website entitled Why Foreigners Hate English Speakers (well, the title is actually Native English Speakers are the World’s Worst Communicators, but the former was the carrot to entice me to click on it). Now I knew that the BBC were indulging in a little clickbaiting with such a provocative title, and that the actual content would be a lot milder than it promised, but still, I was curious.
And it was an interesting read. The basic gist of it is that non-native English speakers often have trouble understanding native speakers in business situations. This isn’t too surprising, as a native speaker is going to speak more quickly than a non-native speaker, and use more idioms (which may even be quite localised) which can be hard to understand. This can be particularly problematic for English speakers, as we often don’t have as much experience of learning a language to a reasonable level compared to those who’ve had to learn English, so we don’t usually realise how to adapt our speech to make ourselves fully understood. I see this cause problems all the time, but usually nothing serious. In business, however, it’s a different matter. Continue reading
English-Language Thoughts 