My French pen-friend's English teacher asked me what the difference was between "a lot" and "lots". I could only say that "lots" seemed to me to imply more than "a lot", but I couldn't really explain the difference.

Russian has weird counting. Any number that ends in 1 (except 11 and numbers ending with 11) uses the singular form of the nount. Any number ending in 2, 3 or 4 (except 12, 13, 14 and numbers ending with those) uses the genetive singular, and everything else uses the genetive plural.

But Welsh is also weird. They don't use the plural at all after numbers - always the singular. And I think the number two is followed by a soft mutation of the first letter of the next word. (But there's probably a small village, somewhere in the wilds of Snowdonia, that has a different idea about how to count.)

Alex

Foreign language grammar rules just don't translate very well - for example we all know that in English a double negative is a positive, but there is no language in the world where a double positive is a negative - AYE, RIGHT!

Michael

Foreign language grammar rules just don't translate very well

If that were true, no one would be able to make any sense of another's language, because the rules for forming valid sentences would be alien. All languages follow some common patterns, which have to do with the way in which the human brain works. Grammars may vary, but they all have some common underlying themes and comparable rules.

Even a language as close to English as French has double negatives. You say, for example, 'il n'y a rien' (there is nothing), because both the 'ne' and the 'rien' are required to make the negative, even though 'rien' means 'nothing'. Russian follows a very similar pattern, when negating a statement.

Alex

Aye,right! Two positives meaning a sarcastic negative.

Bloody languages - whatever happened to Esperanto?

Alex, interesting to hear your girlfriend's reaction to Russian verb pairs! Beautiful language, though - I've let mine get very rusty but I do miss it.

whatever happened to Esperanto?
It was hopeless? (only funny if you know where the name came from).

The serious answer is that it's not a real language. This means that (a) there are no such things as native speakers, and (b) the whole philosophy of it is that it is perfectly logical and regular, which can only happen if you completely ban anything that amounts to evolution of the language. Real languages - even those with highly structured grammar such as Russian - change with time. My wife always tells me that there's no point me trying to read the original Russian versions of authors like Pushkin or Dostoyevski, because it's old Russian and includes a lot of words that aren't used any longer.

In any case, English has long since become the Esperanto of the real world. Of course, it's nothing like as logical as Esperanto, but it has the advantages that it's widely-spoken, and there are plenty of native speakers to learn from.

Alex