You can find wild generalisations and blatant national stereotyping anywhere you like on the Internet – a proud tradition which this blog is usually happy to uphold – but today we’re going to dispense with all that and get scientific for a change. Let’s take it as read that there’s a reason why French, Italian and Spanish are known as ‘Romance’ languages (and that reason probably has more to do with Antonio Banderas than with Silvio Berluscone or Gérard Depardieu). I asked my colleague and he said Italy was definitely the most romantic nation, but you’ll never guess where he comes from. No, today we’re going to dig a little deeper and look beyond the usual suspects.

Margaret Atwood once famously wrote, “The Eskimos had fifty-two names for snow because it was important to them: there ought to be as many for love.” She may have been wrong about the first part, but I liked her subtle implication that you can use statistics to settle questions of the heart. My first thought was to take her at her word and try some research into which language has the most words for love, but this didn’t get me very far. (Popular opinion on the Internet seems to favour English and Arabic, if you’re interested, but there’s no consensus, and precious little by way of hard data.). I did discover in the process, however, that statistics conclusively prove the Welsh are the most romantic people in… well, in Britain at least, assuming you can meaningfully correlate romantic sentiment with the sales of flowers and champagne in Tesco stores around Britain on a Friday afternoon. Cardiff tops the table for both products (just don’t ask about the results for my home city of Newport, for which data is also supplied).

"All the world loves a lover"? Apparently not...

Further afield, it would seem that women who equate romance with male willingness to do household chores (if you’re laughing at that thought, let me speculate that you’re probably a single man) could do worse than to choose a Swedish partner, and should probably avoid a Japanese or Austrian mate. Or maybe it’s care over the practical details that floats your boat? In that case, it’s hard not to be won over by the thoughtfulness of an Icelandic website that enables you to research, before you take things too far with your new prospective date, whether he/she is already related to you. Considering that the population of Cardiff (slightly) exceeds that of the whole of Iceland, I can quite see why such a website would seem like a good idea. It also got me hoping, in the apparent absence of a Celtic equivalent, that the denizens of the Welsh capital are taking care over exactly where all the champagne and flowers are going.

Lastly, we come to poll results, which initially led me to one of those publicity-seeking surveys that the media sometimes publish to fill a bit of dead space in their columns/schedules… in this case commissioned by Mills and Boon. It told me that the most romantic nation on Earth is officially France (32% of polled readers), followed by Italy (22%) and Ireland (18%). No big surp… wait, what? Oh, it turns out that the poll was conducted on a group of a thousand or so Irish men and women. In a similar vein, I stumbled upon an online survey into “Which is the most romantic language?“, where French currently leads the field with 55% of all the votes (Italian was in second place with 15%). This looked like a pretty good result even for France, but then I noticed the survey was being hosted by a website about the French language. Huh (or, as they say in French, ‘bof’).

As a history graduate, and one who spent much of his final year studying the peculiarities of the medieval church, my question back to you is this; which St Valentine? Catholic Online lists no fewer than 14 St Valentines on its website, and not much is known about any of them.

However, and despite our protestations, historians aren’t usually the sort to let actual history get in the way of a good story and so I’m happy to reveal that the true St Valentine – the Valentine whose day we celebrate on the 14th February – was in fact a Christian priest in 3rd century Rome. Whilst the Christians suffered persecution from Emperor Claudius, Valentine bravely played matchmaker amongst the scattered Christian populace in Rome and then proceeded to marry couples illegally.

Unfortunately for single Christians, and indeed Valentine, Claudius eventually hunted down the heroic matchmaker and had him beheaded. So, whether you’re playing matchmaker this Valentine’s Day, or you’re out for a romantic evening on the 14th February, spare a thought for St Valentine and the suffering, lonely Christians of 3rd century Rome… or don’t, because frankly the above story could be even more inaccurate than Google Translate.

- Joel.

This is all rather sad, given that history reveals a number of US Republican Presidents with skills in other languages:

JAMES A. GARFIELD, 1881: had excellent Latin and Ancient Greek – and was also ambidextrous. He had a party trick of writing answers to questions in Latin with one hand and in Greek with the other, simultaneously!).

CHESTER A. ARTHUR, 1881-1885: could converse in both Latin and Greek.

THEODORE ROOSEVELT, 1901-1909: read French and German regularly and well; gave a number of speeches in French, although his spoken German wasn’t great.

HERBERT HOOVER, 1929-1933: lived and worked in China as a young man; both he and his wife allegedly spoke Chinese fluently; also devoted several years of his life to translating a treatise on mining from Latin into English.

The list does tend to peter out from the late 20th Century onwards, but I’ll finish with one recent (and perhaps slightly surpising) exception worth mentioning:

GEORGE W. BUSH, 2001-2009: Spanish – not to a very high level, perhaps, but enough to impress my Mexican colleague (linguistically, if not politically) when I played him this speech.

So to any Republican hopeful who is reading this blog: relax, a foreign language may not be the impediment you think it is. Oh, and bonne chance with those campaigns…

An extended sketch in English filmed in 1963 for German TV but possibly dating back to British music halls of the 1920s has since 1972 become a New Year’s Eve tradition in Germany despite being shown generally without any form of translation into German other than an introduction setting the scene.

Little known today in its native Britain, “Dinner for One” has become so firmly entrenched in the German national psyche that asking a German its central question “The same procedure as last year?” will invariably prompt the scripted response of “The same procedure as every year”, probably accompanied by a giggle or two.

The story is that of a lady called Miss Sophie celebrating her 90^th birthday, ostensibly with four male guests, but these have apparently been dead for some years, and her butler, James, takes on the role of each guest, particularly for the drinks accompanying each of four courses. Much of the comedy derives from the butler’s increasing drunkenness and repeated stumbling over the head of a tiger-skin rug.

The broadcasts are not dubbed into German and are seldom provided with subtitles, yet the combination of sight gags and repetitive dialogue (the above-quoted exchange occurs five times in the sketch’s eighteen minutes) has transcended the language barrier to be shown on New Year’s Eve by all the major regional TV channels in Germany and is a fixed ritual for many families much like the British ritual of watching the Queen’s speech at Christmas.

It has also met with considerable success in other non-English speaking countries, most of whom also show it around the New Year, and it has been the subject of a number of spoofs and parodies.

Just recently, a satirical digitally edited version was released on 24^th December 2011 in which the heads of the German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Nicholas Sarkozy have been superimposed over those of Miss Sophie and James as they go through the same procedure as every month in trying to rescue the Euro. Instead of missing friends the butler (Sarkozy) is now impersonating missing European political leaders.

Although the attitude of not bothering with translation may have worked in the case of “Dinner for One”, it should be noted that the sketch is linguistically very simple, and is therefore easily understood by anyone with a little knowledge of English, whilst most of the laughs come from physical comedy. This works therefore in much the same way as Mr Bean’s virtually dialogue-free comedy which has also proved immensely popular on the international market.

For anything more complex it is generally best to go the route of translation by an expert. Could you get away with leaving your documentation in English? Well, the butler may have done it, but that doesn’t necessarily mean the same procedure will work for you…

On its own, this little curio probably wouldn’t have seemed worth writing a blog about – but then last week, I was spending an evening with a friend who has been profoundly deaf since early childhood. My grasp of British Sign Language isn’t great, so we tend to communicate most effectively with one another via pen and paper… and guess what? I noticed that he likes to capitalise his Nouns too. He isn’t in the habit of corresponding with my son in writing, so I don’t suppose either of them picked up the habit from the other.

My question, then, is where did they both independently get this idea from? Neither of them is likely to have been influenced by exposure to German (a Language which is of course famed for systematically capitalising all of its Nouns). I’m well aware that a few hundred years ago the capitalisation of nouns used to be fairly common practice in the English language too, but I can’t see how this would be particularly relevant here. In any case, its implementation in historical English appears always to have been rather spotty; my good friend Wikipedia informs me that “documents from the 18th century show some writers capitalising all nouns and others capitalizing certain nouns based on varying ideas of their importance in the discussion”. (Here’s one for trivia fans: did you know that the nouns towards the end of the US Declaration of Independence are capitalised, but the ones at the beginning aren’t?). We do still see something like this in modern-day English, of course: you have only to look at the headlines of most US-based newspapers (see example here). However, the underlying principle in that context is to make the entire headline stand out from the following body text, so All Words (Nouns or Not) are Capitalized, Except for One or Two Little Ones Which Aren’t – and that isn’t what my son’s doing.

The next logical line of enquiry, therefore, was the possibility that there’s something innate about capitalising nouns. I’m just a layman in this area, but I believe that would fall under the heading of a well-established (but hotly-debated) linguistic theory known as universal grammar, which posits that certain linguistic structures naturally appear in all human languages because the human brain fundamentally works a certain way – so (as the theory goes) you don’t have to teach children the ‘grammar rule’ in question; they automatically do it anyway. However, the immediate flaw in this hypothesis (as well as the fact that I don’t see lots of other kids making the same mistake) is that German and obsolete English don’t exactly constitute “all human languages”. Most other languages – well, at least the ones I know well enough to be able to speculate about, anyway – only capitalise their proper nouns, and of course there are plenty of languages and scripts in the world which don’t distinguish between upper and lower case (e.g. Chinese), and in which capitalisation is therefore a meaningless concept. So much for universality, then.

What does that leave us with? As I mentioned above, most languages which can distinguish between upper- and lower-case letters have a system for capitalising proper nouns, e.g. Richard, Chicago, Microsoft – if you can think of any languages that choose not to (even though they could if they felt like it), I’d be fascinated to hear from you. Apparently we capitalise certain nouns, including proper nouns, because doing so demonstrates “uniqueness within an implicit context; that is, it provides a name to an instance of a general type when the instance is unique within an implicit context.” (no prizes for guessing which online encyclopaedia I found that in). For example, you and I might be able to name a large number of prime ministers (perhaps even of various nationalities) in general, but if I were suddenly to write “the Prime Minister” without any further qualification, my British readers in January 2012 would probably infer that I was referring to David Cameron. However, if this blog post was, say, an historical piece about John Curtin (what do you mean, ‘who?’. The Australian prime minister for most of WW2, of course), the implicit context would have changed and so you’d most likely think of him instead.

Does any of this help to explain what might be going through my son’s mind? Or has he, along with my friend, simply extrapolated from a specific, observable English principle (SOME nouns are capitalised) to create an erroneous general one (ALL nouns are capitalised)? And if so, is he unusual in doing so… or is a tendency to over-capitalise a more common error than I’ve noticed thus far?

Are there any linguists out there willing to chip in with their thoughts?

I have at last decided on travel destinations for the remainder of my gap year: Australia and Brazil. The plan is to travel leisurely up the Gold Coast for three or four months with a friend, then fly to Rio de Janeiro to do volunteer work with children in the favelas (the shanty towns of Brazil). It was all falling into place, until something hit me – I don’t speak Portuguese! Having been working at Robertson Languages, I’ve seen at first hand how much progress people can make  in a quiet environment with a professional teacher and endless supplies of biscuits.  However, I am also aware that teacher-led training does imply a certain cost, so I thought I would have a go at teaching myself.

Using the many books and CD’s from my Dad’s phase of trying to learn Brazilian Portuguese, I got to work the other night. After an hour of revising words, I remembered just three; los lugares = ‘the seats’, infelizmente não = ‘unfortunately not’, and the rather self-explanatory Americano = ‘American’, which will probably not be of much use! I decided to move on, attempting to partake in a role play in a café. I only managed to greet the friend I was meeting before failing to order my drinks! As I continued revising and testing myself, I realized I was getting more and more frustrated, in turn blocking out the new phrases I was learning.

Coming into work the next day I vented my frustration to Ali, our Head of English Language Training, who advised me against learning more than twenty new words in one sitting. This prompted me to work in short bursts which I found more successful. I was however surprised at the time I would need to learn enough to be of use in a standard conversation, and I leave in a month! Because I was annoyed at the lack of progress I was making with self-learning, a vicious cycle formed, and language learning soon got pushed to the bottom of my daily to-do list.

I now realise that language learning doesn’t have to be like this. I could have helped myself by starting to learn sooner to avoid being under so much pressure. I should have had a more realistic expectation of what you can achieve with self-study alone.  Books, CDs and on-line programmes go only so far. It really is easier to learn with a real person than from a non-responsive recording. That’s not to say self-study materials have no place, just that I found they could not replace a teacher.

I may have learned these lessons too late, so don’t follow in my footsteps! It could be the difference between a frustratingly over-used pocket dictionary and the trip of a lifetime.

- Naomi

I’m currently reading about how different languages don’t necessarily mean the same thing when they describe colour, and will write more when I’ve had time to absorb what Mr Deutscher has to say on this subject. For now, may I start you off with this link, by way of whetting your appetite? I originally planned to direct you to this link instead, only today is the day the whole of Wikipedia has been taken down, and all you get is a black page. (Or do I mean a blue page? Classical Greek apparently used the same word for both colours…)

I do sympathise to some extent; there are some areas in life where you just can’t win. As you’ll have noticed at the top of the page you’re currently looking at, my company wisely tried to avoid this entire issue many years ago when it named itself “Robertson Languages”. However, this hasn’t stopped us from having had to register the web address “robertsonslanguages.co.uk” as well: we’ve learned from experience that some people can’t shake the (somewhat understandable) feeling there’s some sort of possession involved in our moniker. Which started me thinking: wouldn’t it be great if my employer actually DID own, say, the whole of the French language? Well, not great for you and everyone else out there, maybe, but I don’t suppose I’d ever be stuck for the odd bit of translation work again.

Anyway, back to Waterstone(‘)s. It’s probably fair to say that there are bigger issues in the world than a single disappearing apostrophe to worry about for those of us who love grammar… but even so, I have to admit that a little bit of me died when I read the news.

(Thanks again to my colleague Ali for tipping me off about this story!)

If you haven’t already tried it, this fun game helps you to improve your vocabulary in English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Polish and Chinese. Check out the link in the bottom right-hand corner of this page!