Lingo: A Language Spotter's Guide to Europe

Product Information

This site has an archive of more than one thousand seven hundred interviews, or eight thousand book recommendations. There’s a nice line in Trollope’s The Eustace Diamonds about someone moving from conventional speech to rough, truthful language. A picture, so the saying goes, is worth a thousand words, and dual language books have also been used in recent years to disseminate information on agricultural techniques in Papua New Guinea, for example. Let’s turn to your first book, Jon Camden Hotten’s A Dictionary of Modern Slang, Cant and Vulgar Words.

Classics are still a great way to go with bilingual texts, especially since they tend to be so widely translated and easier to find in bilingual format—just make sure to mix it up a bit. Instead of pausing to look up words in a dictionary, you can also just hover over the subtitles to see the meaning of any word. If you want to find the starting point at which to look at slang, rhyming slang, back slang and a variety of other sub-sets, plus a very good assessment of what was available in terms of slang lexicography in 1859, then Hotten’s your man. The judges of the Royal Society Young People’s Book Prize look for books that explain high quality science in an engaging and accessible way.Since many dual language books are picture books, you might think that they are mainly aimed at children, but that isn’t always the case. Our authors Roger Hurn and Jane West were immediately keen to be on board and support the project further.

Learning a language becomes fun and easy when you learn with movie trailers, music videos, news and inspiring talks. Anyone who’s ever had to learn more than one language knows how much easier it is to remember new words, phrases and syntax when you can relate them to something you already know. The running joke is capped by the one language in which the author can find nothing enviable: “No Gagauz words have been borrowed by English and none that I’ve come upon seem especially desirable.You started your professional life writing for the underground press, and then books on the counterculture in the 1960s. In another mood, Dorren might instead have celebrated Bulgarian for possessing such excellent resources to indicate epistemological states that other languages would need far more words to communicate. These children’s books can be used in a variety of ways with Ukrainian pupils and their English-speaking teachers and peers. His tour of the continent is a richly diverting exercise, organised into sections on languages and their families, history, politics, writing, vocabulary, grammar and state of endangeredness. Featuring text on the left-hand side in English and the right-hand side in Ukrainian, along with a helpful dual language vocabulary list at the front.

The point is that language is not fresh and new, and this is as true for the Oxford English Dictionary or for Dr Johnson as it is for me. Comprehension is supported by appealing illustrations and simple, controlled language that has been carefully levelled. In 1937 he had written the hugely influential Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English and that had gone through a number of editions. Then there are a couple of hundred pages dealing with every instance of the word, be it a derivation like “fuckster”, a compound like “fuckwit” or a phrase such as “get fucked”. If you want to see what has been done in the way of writing of slang lexicography for 500 years, then this is the place to go.Cal Flyn, our deputy editor, takes us through the seven books that are set 60+ years in the past and yet speak to the present.