Joan Esposito is the afternoon host for WCPT AM 820, Chicago’s progressive talk radio. We talked about, among other things, Barack Obama’s call for progressive unity and condemnation of excessive expectations of purity.

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You’re used to me spouting on here based on

not much more than my own prejudice, but here’s a topic that I am actually

qualified to talk about. I studied linguistics, and I have quite a bit of

experience in language learning.

And anyone who has learnt a second language

will know that the words and phrases in one language often don’t map exactly to

the ones in another. A language is a complete speech convention, it’s not like

Morse code where you transfer words directly. Things work differently from one

language to another. Some languages have several non-interchangeable words

where another language has just one or maybe none, and this can make problems

for a language learner who hasn’t grown up with the experience of knowing when

to use which word.

And this means that people familiar with

language learners will quickly learn to spot what is the native language of the

learner by the mistakes that they make in their target language, the language

they’re learning. There’s even a name for it, it’s called native language interference. Believe it or not, this is useful

when it comes to understanding the comments in the hugely popular online

version of the British newspaper, the Daily

Mail.

The comment was from someone with the

username DMreader and gave their location as Lovely England, it was on an

article about a request from a Russian-backed separatist in Ukraine to Nigel

Farage to support his cause.

Articles, in case you’re not a linguist,

are words like a and the. So, if you want to say ‘I ate the apple’ you’re talking about a

specific apple known to the listener; but if you say ‘I ate an apple’ then you’re not specifying to the listener which

apple, because it’s not important.

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Now, here’s the thing about Russian. The