Teaching English as a Foreign Language, Second Edition

parts of it. English can indicate different parts of the
continuum, as follows:
I used to go swimming, when I was little.
I had been swimming before I went there.
I went there yesterday.
I am here now.
I will have my lunch at 1 o’clock.
After I have had my lunch I will go on working.
By 8 o’clock I will have been working for two hours.
There are many such continua which language treats as
distinct units for communication purposes. They range
through (i) aspects of the world around us, e.g. time, place,
quantity; (ii) activities we are involved in, e.g. action,
assertion, commitment and (iii) our own moods, emotions
and attitudes, e.g. belief, anger, concession. On any of these
dimensions there is in fact a gradient, but language imposes
divisions in it. Thus, the gradient of anger is divided, in
English: irritation…annoyance…anger…exasperation…
rage…fury…blind fury…
Translatability
There is nothing necessarily \universal about these divisions
in reality, though to the native speaker of any one language

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his own categories are so familiar that he finds them the only
logically possible ones and can hardly imagine that other
languages segment reality in different ways. But a naive view
of languages as all conveying basically the same meanings
overlooks fundamental differences and is vitiated by
learners’ errors; witness ‘I am here since 5 o’clock’ (from a
French speaker whose language has a different cut-off point
between near past and present).
Not only do different languages cut up the same
continuum in different ways, but, perhaps even more
significant, different languages emphasise different kinds of
continua. Hopi, a North American Indian language, has a
view of time that concentrates on the aspect of duration.
Events of short duration which can be nouns in English, e.g.
‘flash’, ‘wave’, ‘wind’, must be verbs in Hopi. Hopi verb
forms express different relations in time, also. They do not
refer to the position of the events along a time-line as in
English, but rather to their relation to the observer.
This is not to say that either language cannot express the
meanings of the other, but rather that there is a distinction
between the meanings built-in, and the meanings that must
be thought about and expressed. In this sense, different
languages predispose their speakers to ‘think’ differently, i.e.
to direct their attention to different aspects of the
environment. Translation is therefore not simply a matter of
seeking other words with similar meaning, but of finding
appropriate ways of saying things in another language. Very
often, the segments of reality which are structurally built-in
to one language may have to be ignored in another language.
Thus, dual number, though it can be expressed (‘both’,
‘couple’, etc.) has no place in the grammatical structure of
English. But there are many languages (e.g. Arabic) in which
the form of words (of the nouns, pronouns, or verbs) has to
be appropriate to singular, dual or plural number and
speakers are unable to avoid observing the distinctions.
Therefore, a speaker of English learning a language with dual
number built in will have to learn to pay attention to it.
Different languages, then, may categorise reality
differently or may express similar categories by different
linguistic forms. But the forms are only one aspect of the
difference between two language systems. The second major

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aspect pertains to the ways in which language is used as part
of behaviour in the numerous contexts of everyday life. In
order to communicate effectively, a speaker must be able to
express himself in the right ways on the right occasions. It is
not enough to be able to use the linguistic forms correctly.
One must also know how to use them appropriately.