John Le Carré on Learning a Foreign Language

By JOHN LE CARRÉ

The Guardian, July 2nd, 2017

...The decision to learn a foreign language is to me an act of friendship. It is indeed a holding out of the hand. It’s not just a route to negotiation. It’s also to get to know you better, to draw closer to you and your culture, your social manners and your way of thinking. And the decision to teach a foreign language is an act of commitment, generosity and mediation.

It’s a promise to educate – yes – and to equip. But also to awaken; to kindle a flame that you hope will never go out; to guide your pupils towards insights, ideas and revelations that they would never have arrived at without your dedication, patience and skill.

To quote Charlemagne: “To have another language is to possess a second soul.” He might have added that to teach another language is to implant a second soul.

Of course, the very business of reconciling these two souls at any serious level requires considerable mental agility. It compels us to be precise, to confront meaning, to think rationally and creatively and never to be satisfied until we’ve hit the equivalent word, or – which also happens – until we’ve recognised that there isn’t one, so hunt for a phrase or circumlocution that does the job.

No wonder then that the most conscientious editors of my novels are not those for whom English is their first language, but the foreign translators who bring their relentless eye to the tautological phrase or factual inaccuracy – of which there are far too many. My German translator is particularly infuriating.

In the extraordinary period we are living through – may it be short-lived – it’s impossible not to marvel at every contradictory or unintelligible utterance issuing from across the Atlantic. And in marvelling, we come face-to-face with the uses and abuses of language itself.

Clear language – lucid, rational language – to a man at war with both truth and reason, is an existential threat. Clear language to such a man is a direct assault on his obfuscations, contradictions and lies. To him, it is the voice of the enemy. To him, it is fake news. Because he knows, if only intuitively, what we know to our cost: that without clear language, there is no standard of truth.

And that’s what language means to a linguist. Those who teach language, those who cherish its accuracy and meaning and beauty, are the custodians of truth in a dangerous age... 

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Ten new words every day

Everyone knows the English language is changing. Every three months, the OED (Oxford English Dictionary) publishes updates to its online dictionary. One recent update contained 900 new words, new expressions, or new meanings for existing words. But where do they all come from?

New words are created in many different ways. We can make a new word by combining two words, like gastropub (gastronomy + pub), vlog (video + blog) or emoticon (emotion + icon). Sometimes we put two words together in a new way, for example road rage or toy boy.

We also find that nouns can change into verbs. Take the word text. Text was always a noun (from about 1369, according to the OED), but it is now very common as a verb, to text somebody. Other new words already existed but with a different meaning. For example, tweet was the noise that a bird makes, but now we use it more often (as a verb or a noun) for a message that people put on the social networking site Twitter.

Another way in which we make new words is by ‘adopting’ words from foreign languages, like barista or latte (imported from Italian when coffee bars became really popular in the UK in the 1990s), or patio or siesta (taken from Spanish).

A lot of new words come from the names of brands or companies, for example we skype each other and we google a word. We also need more general words to describe new technology or new gadgets: wi-fi, ringtone, and smartphone are some recent examples; or new technological ways of behaviour, like cyberbullying, or the most recent twalking (talking + walking) which refers to distracted walking while texting.

The invention of new words is not a new phenomenon. The word brunch (breakfast + lunch) first appeared in 1896, newspaper (news + paper) in 1667, and English speakers started to use the word café (from French) in the late 19th century. The difference now is how quickly new words and expressions enter the language and how rapidly we start to use and understand them.

Source: Adapted from 900 new words in 3 months, Oxford University Press

Related article: New English Words