For most of us languages aren't all that easy to use, or learn – whether we have been born into one or several languages, or have to learn one or more ‘alien’ languages, with alien writing systems. This may just be part of the general hurly-burly of life, and is certainly the usual way of things in, say, India, Nigeria and the Philippines, or it may happen in the comparative calm of classroom and library (nowadays widely regarded as the ‘proper’ way to learn languages, even if it is not always the most effective). The first of these is, as it were, the ‘marketplace’ tradition (learning as you go), the second the ‘monastery’ tradition (classrooms, timetables, exams, and accreditation).

Can we learn from what happened to Latin, in terms of its native speakers and foreign users? Comparisons are often made between the role of Latin during and after the Roman Empire and the role of English in the present. These can often be illuminating, particularly for the student of the sociolinguistics of the Late Latin-speaking world, where a generous application of the uniformitarian principle allows us to avoid now some of the misunderstandings that were common in the past: for example, the realization that linguistic change is inevitable and in itself neither good nor bad, and that language-internal variation is not pathological, and need not necessarily in itself lead to fragmentation, has been salutary. As a result, the modern view of the development of Latin into Romance, and of Romance into the separate Romance languages, is almost certainly more plausible now than it used to be. We have a more nuanced account to present, even though there is a great deal we do not and perhaps cannot know, including in particular an inability to be sure about the dating of developments which we can be sure occurred at some point.

A consideration of the place of, and options for, explicitly teaching grammar to learners of English as an international language. A development of the opening address given at a conference on the teaching of grammar at the Regional Language Centre (RELC) in Singapore in November 2003. The key issue of the conference was whether the English-language skills of Singaporean school leavers would be improved through a revival of explicit and formal grammar teaching in the Lion City's 21st-century classrooms. The paper addresses this issue in both current and historical terms, going back indeed, at the end, to the beginnings of Western-style grammar teaching among the Greeks. While doing this, however, it also considers the nature and role of what the Singaporean government takes to be the proper target for its future citizens: speaking and writing an internationally acceptable English.

A survey of terms inherited from Persian, often through intermediate languages. ENGLISH may be considered a typical case of a European language indebted to Persian, often through the intermediary of another language, a point with which this survey seeks to deal. A comprehensive list of such loanwords, direct and indirect, can be found in Cannon and Kaye (2001), to which the reader is referred for the full list of the 811 items, including their etyma. One hundred and thirty three of these are distant loans, as with the word azure (‘a light purplish blue’), which comes into English through Old French, probably through Old Spanish azur ∼ azul, which comes in turn from Arabic lazaward ∼ lazuward, and ultimately from Persian lajuvard (‘azure; cobalt blue’). This thematically-organized article provides a general review of the field.

Three linguistical tales from New York.

A interview conducted by William P. Ancker. The interview took place at the Intercultural Center at Georgetown University in Washington DC, 9 October 2003, and appeared in the April 2004 issue of the journal English Teaching Forum (edited by Max Koller and published by the U.S. Department of State, for teachers of English world-wide). We reproduce it here with thanks.

Alliteration, assonance, and other literary tics.

Some notes and comments on the English usage of Trinidad and Tobago. The paper argues that for Trinidadians to think in terms of speaking and owning ‘only’ their distinctive Creole, setting aside their long-established indigenous variety of Standard English as if not really their own, is a complex distortion of social and linguistic reality. The reality has emerged from social, cultural, and psychological factors present in the Anglophone Caribbean at large, includes both conventional English and the Creole with which it inter-operates on a daily basis, and is an issue that stands in need of a positive revision that acknowledges the islands' dual inheritance.

The fruits of the plant family Cucurbitaceae – variously called the gourd family, the pumpkin family, the melon family, or the cucumber family – offer rich pickings for charting the distribution of English dialectal variations and the curious ways in which they get fixed. The cucurbits are a medium-sized plant family, with representatives native to both the Old and New Worlds. They are what taxonomists call a monophyletic family, or a clade: all representatives of the family known today have a single ancestor, which presumably sprouted up somewhere on Pangaea. This paper explores this linguistic phenomenon.

A discussion of both the selection and significance of sub-varieties of English in Malaysia. Malaysia is a multi-racial country, with a diversity of languages that includes Bahasa Malaysia (the national language), English (introduced during the colonial period from the late-eighteenth to mid-twentieth centuries), and a number of Chinese dialects, Indian languages, and other minority languages. Despite this complex linguistic tapestry, English continues to command considerable respect and prestige, and demonstrates an impressive range of intra- and international uses. It is a vehicle of communication within and across diverse linguistic and cultural groups at many levels of interaction, but clusters mainly around particular domains of use. It is important to the educational endeavours of the people and the technological, economic, and political aspirations of the nation.

The writer discusses possible pairings of consonants at the beginnings of English words. (A revision of the article that first appeared in ET79.)

‘Proverbs and idioms are never used by people of education,’ Mrs Gaskell makes Molly Gibson's genteel stepmother say towards the end of Wives and Daughters (1866), in shocked response to Molly's description of the Squire's son as ‘the apple of his eye’. Nonetheless, proverbs abound in the pages of 19th-century literature (including Mrs Gaskell herself), providing a convenient way of identifying characters' attitudes and feelings concisely and colourfully.