Monday | Tuesday | Wednesday | Thursday | Friday


THE language I am fondest of is Russian. It is a bruised sort of affection, like the residue of many years with an intense but difficult lover. No other language has caused me such pain, or given me such pleasure in the discovery of its quirks and beauty.

It starts with the pronunciation. Aside from consonants that don't exist in English and the “soft sign” (represented in this entry by an apostrophe), which softens the consonant before it, the vowels in Russian are big beefy things, requiring facial muscles that never get a workout in English.

For my first few months in Moscow I felt as if I was chewing pebbles. When I moaned about it to a Russian friend, he explained that “English is produced in the back of the mouth, but in Russian”—he puffed out his lips—“we speak from here, from the front. In order to strengthen these muscles,” he concluded seriously, “you should perform oral sex more often.”

 Where do you take your ski holidays?AFP Novosti

Then there's the grammar. Like Arabic and Hebrew, Russian is based around verb roots that are used to form other parts of speech. But unlike Arabic and Hebrew, it is agglutinative, so that each basic verb can swell with an array of prefixes and suffixes.

These are what make life hell. In verbs that denote movement, the prefixes work like prepositions in English—you “go up”, “go down” and so on. However, in English, since the prepositions are separate words, you can always just “go” if you want to keep it simple.

Not in Russian. If a prefix is required it's required, and you need to think about whether you are going in, out, up, down, towards, away from, around, or on the way to somewhere else. In addition, the core verb, the “go” itself, varies depending on whether you are going by foot, land vehicle, air or sea; and then on whether you are going once, several times or there and back, have finished going, or are still engaged in it.

When it comes to other sorts of verbs, the prefixes modify the meaning entirely, turning entire swathes of words into siblings. To command, punish, prove, order, point out, relate and predict are all variants of the word for “say”.

It's enough to make you tear your hair out. Who can remember which is which between prikazat' (to command), nakazat' (to punish), dokazat' (to prove) and so on? One of my teachers said something that was useless to a floundering beginner, but later proved very wise: try to “visualise” the language.

Because they are originally prepositions, each of the prefixes implies a position or motion, or both. Pri is “close to” or “towards”, so to command is to use your word to bring someone towards your wishes. Na is “on” or “on to”; to punish someone is to lay your word on them.

This makes Russians aware of a connectedness between concepts that never occurs to many Westerners. It also makes for a lexical richness that simply doesn't exist in English. Russian has a word for “sleeping too much”, perespat', which doesn't mean oversleeping and missing your appointment—there's a word for that too, prospat'—but actually sleeping more than you should have and feeling groggy in the morning. Beware, though: to perespat' with someone means to have a one-night stand, which is when neither of you sleeps enough.

Some words are also beautifully evocative. There is a verb for the English phrase “to get lost in thought”, which is made from the verb for “to think”, the prefix za meaning behind or beyond, and the reflexive suffix. You could translate it as “to think oneself into the beyond”.

Russians are inordinately proud of their tongue's complexity. Friends have told me in all earnestness that they think Shakespeare might be better in Russian. in Moscow, a taxi driver attempted to prove the point by asking me to consider the words written next to the date on a carton of milk.

In Russian this is an orotund, literary phrase—a direct translation, in fact, of the French à consommer de préférence avant. “Zhelatel'no upotrebit' do”, repeated the driver, rolling his tongue around the words and lifting a hand from the steering wheel to trace their curvaceous cadences. “It is beautiful, cultured. And in your language?” He puckered his mouth sourly. “Best bee-for!”

Finally, Russian is also rich in slang—so rich that it has not one slang, but two. The first, fenya, is a criminal patois similar in style to Cockney rhyming slang, Argentinian lunfardo and the mid-20th-century British gay argot, polari. It uses substitutions, as well as loan-words from other languages, to confuse the unwary: silver is “laundry”, having sex is “frying”, stealing is “buying”, and so on.

Interestingly, fenya contains a lot of Yiddish and Hebrew words: Jews entered the criminal world during tsarist times, when they were barred from owning land and from many professions. A common phrase even today in Russian is na khalyavu, “for free”, from the Hebrew khalav, “milk”, because “milk money” was the name of donations for the Jewish community in Palestine.

The second kind of slang, mat, is like a much more sophisticated version of the Chilean huevón words (see Tuesday)—an entire language derived chiefly from a handful of sexual swear-words. One of my prize possessions is a 560-page dictionary of mat that I found at Grant and Cutler, a specialist languages bookshop in London.

The dictionary, published in Moscow in 1997 by one Professor Tatiana Akhmetova, seems to be an academic lexicon rather than a survey of current usage. Most of my Russian-speaking friends have never heard of much of it. But one particular phrase is so original and colourful that I have been running a small private campaign to bring it back into everyday use. To describe something that has shown up unexpectedly, out of nowhere, you say that it appeared kak iz pizdy na lyzhakh, which translates as “like out of a cunt on skis.”

Back to top >>


ARIEL SHARON'S last act was to stop me learning Arabic. When the then Israeli prime minister suffered the massive brain haemorrhage that threw Israeli politics into disarray two years ago, I cancelled the next morning's lesson and suspended the intensive course for which I had taken time off work. I never found time to restart it. Since then I've been taking lessons in dribs and drabs.

The nice thing is that Palestinians are so impressed with a foreigner who speaks any Arabic at all that I always get compliments. Unfortunately, I speak it better than I understand it, so most conversations start off in a blaze of glory and then sputter to a halt.

You can't just “learn Arabic”, though, any more than you can “learn cookery”. First, you have to decide what kind.

Quranic or literary Arabic, known as fussha, is not much use unless you plan to become a scholar. The media uses what English-speakers call “Modern Standard Arabic” and Arabs call wussta, “halfway”, which as the name suggests is halfway between written and spoken Arabic. I tried learning it once. But since nobody talks like a TV announcer in real life, not only do you sound rather strange speaking it; you also don't catch your own mistakes from how others speak, which is the only way to become fluent.

Spoken Arabic is almost a different language. For a journalist, it's the most useful for talking to people in. But if you think British English varies a lot from place to place, it is absolutely uniform by comparison with spoken Arabic. Within Israel/Palestine alone there are several accents and dialects, sometimes literally a stone's throw apart. People in the refugee camps often keep the accent of where their grandparents came from, even if their camp is within a city where people speak differently.

And your accent, like everything else, is highly political. Since I live in Jerusalem, it would make sense to study Jerusalem Arabic, which is considered high-class. My first teacher here was from Jerusalem. Jerusalemites, however, don't pronounce the letter qawf, so they call their hometown al-Uds rather than al-Quds, and they say things like da'i'a instead of daqiqa (minute). I find this confusing; it's like trying to learn English from a Cockney who says I wan' a bo'le o' wa'er.

I thought of a total immersion option. But in the Palestinian cities near Jerusalem too many people speak English. The more distant ones aren't practical for my job. And in the countryside they pronounce the letter ka as cha, like in “cheese”. Since one of the commonest greetings is keef haalak? (How are you?) I feared that every time I met city types they'd laugh at me for being a bumpkin.

I could study with a Druze. They speak (or claim to speak) a “purer” form of Arabic, pronounced similarly to fussha. I even have a Druze friend to practice with. But Druze Arabic differs from Palestinian in certain words, including quite everyday ones, and even in shades of grammar. And Palestinians view the Druze with suspicion, since they serve in the Israeli army. So talking like a Druze, even if it's clear you aren't one, could make people jump to conclusions about your political sympathies.

In the end, I've found an excellent and highly experienced teacher in Jerusalem whose Arabic is that of the Palestinians from the north of Israel: a clear accent with a nice qawf, no class stigma, not too much political baggage, and I can visit her without crossing any checkpoints. Just one small detail: she's not a Palestinian, but a Uruguayan-born Jew. Well, you can't have everything.

Back to top >>


IN HIS short story “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”, Jorge Luís Borges, an Argentine writer who was also a philologist, posited an imaginary language in which there are no nouns, only verbs. “The moon rose above the river” is rendered as “upwards behind the onstreaming it mooned”.

This is not as bizarre as it sounds. The Semitic and Slavic languages (and no doubt others that I'm unfamiliar with) share one trait: their core, the ur-words of the language, are verbs. Whereas in English most nouns and adjectives are a separate species, in these languages most of them are derived from verb roots.

For instance, the Russian for “warehouse” is sklad, which comes from the verb for “to put” with a prefix meaning “off” or “down”—ie, a place where you put things away. As I mentioned on Monday, a letter in both Hebrew and Arabic is a “written thing”. And an earpiece for a mobile phone, as I learned when I bought one in Bethlehem the other week, is, at least in the local dialect of Arabic, a sama'a—a “hearing”.

 A verb in actionAFP

If you pay close attention to the words in those languages, therefore, you can develop the eerie sensation that the world around you is composed not of things but of actions. Maybe that was what inspired Borges. In English his sentence looks odd, but in poetic forms of Hebrew, Arabic or Russian, it could be just about acceptable.

Hebrew has such a methodical formula for turning verbs into nouns that it can be run in reverse too, allowing you to verbify any word at will. Hebrew-speakers do this with abandon, since the early Zionists, who famously resurrected and built Hebrew into a modern language, couldn't foresee a lot of today's needs.

Hence “to program” a computer has become letakhnet, from tokhnit, which is a plan or programme, though a computer program is tokhna (the kh here is like a German or Scottish ch). “To update” is le'adken, which, much like in English, comes from ad kan, “up to now”. But Israelis freely verbify foreign words too: lenatrel is “to neutralise”, and a graphic designer will offer leratesh, “to retouch”. In the wake of Condoleezza Rice's shuttle diplomacy last year, Israeli officials reportedly coined lecondel, meaning to go back and forth repeatedly to no effect.

Naturally, all this exasperates purists. Israeli state radio seems to have adopted the gatekeeper role that the Real Academia Española plays for Spanish, and fights a losing battle against foreign loan-words. Newsreaders will occasionally slip in the correct but virtually unknown Hebrew word before its more popular equivalent, eg, “yakhda—koalitsiya” (coalition), in a heroic but vain attempt to re-educate the masses.

In its pure form, though, Hebrew is a spartan tongue, with one of the smallest lexicons of any major language. Even the words it does have, it uses sparingly. “In the beginning, God created heaven and earth” has only five words in the original. The press release for the Winograd commission report into the second Lebanon war, which was released in January, took up 3495 words in English and 2547 in Hebrew.

This gives Hebrew a certain stark elegance when spoken well—a style perhaps appropriate to the simple days of kibbutz life, though it is a desert compared with the richness of many other languages. But the shortage of words occasionally forces twists of poetry into everyday speech. You can “love” something in Hebrew, but there is no word for “to like”. Instead, you say “it finds favour in my eyes.”

Back to top >>


LEARNING other languages brings you the realisation—at first disappointing, but ultimately comforting—that 99% of the conversations around you are utterly humdrum. Those young toughs on the street corner flinging words at each other like knives sound much less menacing when you know they're only debating which film to go to, and a passionate tête-a-tête in the supermarket aisle deflates somewhat when it's about tomato sauce.

The way a language sounds to someone who doesn't speak it is something that I'm not sure has a formal name, but which I'll call mood. You can learn grammar, vocabulary, idiom, usage and accent, but nobody will ever teach you mood.

 A mother of a film

Yet you must know mood to speak like a native, and it's something we all recognise. To English-speakers, Italian sounds excitable, Russian sounds annoyed and depressed, Brazilian Portuguese like flirting, and Hebrew like an argument. Newsreaders do their best to eliminate mood, which is why the news sounds the same in all languages. (Try it next time you're channel-hopping in a hotel room.)

Intonation plays a big role in mood; so do facial expressions, gestures and speed. But mood is also subjective: it depends on your perception of the speaker. To Israeli Jews, Arabic sounds sinister and threatening. To Palestinians, Hebrew sounds arrogant and overbearing. However, once you know the language and can evaluate what people are saying, you gradually stop noticing mood.

Except, that is, when different countries speak the same language.

This is what makes Spanish interesting. I learned it in Mexico, and Spanish-speakers from elsewhere laughed at my faint air of officiousness. I came away from a visit to Argentina speaking it with Italianate disdain. In Cuba I noticed that Spanish sounded confrontational, like Hebrew, and concluded that both had something to do with the mix of socialism and hot weather (though the transition to capitalism hasn't improved Israeli manners much). And I wondered whether the Guatemalans' tragically violent history came before or after their sad way of speaking.

Grammatically, Spanish is pretty dull. Like all the Romance languages, it reminds you that English is actually a class-conscious sandwich of two layers: short, pithy Anglo-Saxon, and the more laboured Latinate forms spoken originally by the aristocracy. Spanish has only the latter, which is why any text translated from English comes out about 20% longer.

However, over time the usage of Spanish words has diverged. Sometimes this can be entertaining. When a Mexican says “take the bus”, toma el camión, a Spaniard hears “drink the lorry.” When a Cuban says “take the bus”, coge la guagua, most of the rest of Latin America hears something quite unprintable.

Where Spanish really shows off its diversity is in the slang. When “Amores Perros”, a blockbuster film about the Mexico City underworld, was released a few years back, Spaniards complained about the lack of subtitles.

Argentinian Spanish has its own sub-language, lunfardo, thought to derive principally from the criminal jargon of Italian immigrants, and similar to Cockney rhyming slang.

Chile has an entire mini-language built around one word, huevón. No me huevees con esas hueveadas, huevón would come out in American English as “don't screw me around with that crap, you dumb-ass”. In Mexico similar flexibility is exhibited by the verb chingar, which means “to rape”.

But Mexicans are also extraordinarily inventive with the word for that which is most sacred in Catholic culture: la madre, the mother. To mother (madrear) something is to wreck it; to “give it to someone in the mother” is to beat him up. Things that are annoying or of no consequence are just “mothers” (“don't bother me with those madres”), while “not even mothers” means “no way”, and the exclamation “Mothers!” is similar to “Whoops!”

Something that “has no mother” can be either ultra-cool or absolutely appalling, depending on the context; conversely, something terrific can equally well be either “little mother” or “at full mother”. Something you don't care about is “worth mother” to you. A total mess is a desmadre, or “dismother”. And to be totally fed up is to be “up to the mother”.

Needless to say, the worst insult you can pay a Mexican man is to tell him to chingar his mother. Such is the risk of being misunderstood that, if someone's mother comes up in conversation, it is considered prudent in polite society to refer always to “your lady mother”.

Back to top >>


MOST foreign correspondents become obsessed with something in the end. It might be weapons systems, education statistics or the history of Caucasian hill tribes. In my case it's languages.

Ten years on various continents have given me fluency, more or less, in Spanish, French, Russian and Hebrew (though most of them I didn't start from scratch), plus a working knowledge of spoken Arabic and Portuguese. I confess to enjoying the awed looks on people's faces when I rattle off this list, but I feel a little guilty. A gift for languages is really no different from perfect pitch or long legs, and it usually comes at the expense of something else. I have a terrible memory for names and faces—not good for a journalist.

Besides, Westerners, with their stable countries and solid borders, tend to forget that for much of the world (and indeed for much of Western history) being polyglot has been a necessity for survival. On the Ukrainian-Slovakian border, a region across which the borders of empires have swept back and forth like windscreen wipers, I met office assistants who were fluent in Ukrainian, Slovakian, Hungarian and Russian as well as German or English; nobody found this remarkable. Israel, where I live now, is still home to post-war immigrants from Europe who speak seven or eight languages. Amos Oz, the prominent Israeli novelist, writes in his autobiography of growing up in a house that had books in 16 languages on its shelves.

 The oldest story toldShutterstock

My obsession, on which I'll be expounding this week, is how languages are constructed and the differences in how they express things.

To be honest, it borders on nerdiness. I spend spare moments wondering why a sexy outfit “gets attention” in English but “calls attention” in Spanish, or why a “working assumption” is rendered in Hebrew as an “assumption of work”. Had I stayed in England, I would surely spend weekends on platforms writing down train numbers.

Still, differences in idiom do teach us about culture and history. Where an English-speaker says “the die is cast”, a Mexican says “the rice is cooked”. The proverb “In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king” becomes, in Russian, “When there are no fish, even a crab is a fish,” which reveals a surprising amount about what survival once entailed for the typical Russian peasant. (I admit, though, to being baffled by the cruder popular version of this phrase, “When there are no birds, even an arse is a nightingale.”)

Languages also sometimes contain enigmatic archaeological clues. These come to light especially where languages of the same family diverge. For instance, Hebrew and Arabic share an essentially identical root for the verb “to write”: katav/katab. The verb spawns nouns: a letter (the kind you send by post) is maktuub in Arabic and mikhtav in Hebrew. But while a book in Arabic is kitaab, in Hebrew it is sefer, which comes from the verb for “to tell”; a story is sipur. In other words, in Arabic a book is something you write; in Hebrew it is something you relate.

Why? One explanation suggests itself to me. For the first phase of Jewish history, the Torah, the first five books of the bible, was handed down from generation to generation along with a separate “Oral Torah”, which was essential to interpreting the written version. Not until the destruction of the Second Temple in 70AD and the subsequent dispersal of the Jews was the Oral Torah written down, becoming the Talmud, which enumerates all the Jewish laws. In other words, for the ancient Hebrews, the book—the very first book—was a thing not only written, but also told.

Still, that's just my speculation. And if that seems too cerebral, an entertaining pastime is to hunt for words that are either missing from a language, or unique to it. We've all chuckled over how only Germans could dream up Schadenfreude and how the English can't say bon appetit because their cooking is so bad. However, I can tell you that not one of the languages I have studied has a word for “accountability”.

I went to many conferences in Latin America where, after a long discourse about corruption and bad governance, someone would inevitably declare, “Necesitamos accountability”. Unfortunately, the plea never produced discernible results.