I'm standing in line at my local bakery in Paris, apologising to an incredibly confused shopkeeper. He's just asked how many pastries I would like, and completely inadvertently, I responded in Mandarin instead of French. I'm equally baffled: I'm a dominant English speaker, and haven't used Mandarin properly in years. And yet, here in this most Parisian of settings, it somehow decided to reassert itself.

Multilinguals commonly juggle the languages they know with ease. But sometimes, accidental slip-ups can occur. And the science behind why this happens is revealing surprising insights into how our brains work.

Research into how multilingual people juggle more than one language in their minds is complex and sometimes counterintuitive. It turns out that when a multilingual person wants to speak, the languages they know can be active at the same time, even if only one gets used. These languages can interfere with each other, for example intruding into speech just when you don't expect them. And interference can manifest itself not just in vocabulary slip-ups, but even on the level of grammar or accent.

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220719-how-speaking-other-languages-changes-your-brain

Cognitive scientist Lera Boroditsky, one of the pioneers of research into how language manipulates our thoughts, has shown that English speakers typically view time as a horizontal line. They might move meetings forward or push deadlines back. They also tend to view time as travelling from left to right, most likely in line with how you are reading the text on this page or the way the English language is written.

This relationship to the direction text is written and time appears to apply in other languages too. Hebrew speakers, for example, who read and write from right to left, picture time as following the same path as their text. If you asked a Hebrew speaker to place photos on a timeline, they would most likely start from the right with the oldest images and then locate more recent ones to the left. 

Mandarin speakers, meanwhile, often envision time as a vertical line, where up represents the past and down the future. For example, they use the word xia ("down") when talking about future events, so that "next week" literally becomes "down week". As with English and Hebrew, this is also in line with how Mandarin traditionally was written and read – with lines running vertically, from the top of the page to the bottom.

This association between the way we read language and organise time in our thoughts also impacts our cognition when dealing with time. Speakers of different languages process temporal information faster if it's organised in a way that matches their language. One experiment, for example, showed that monolingual English people were quicker to determine whether a picture was from the past or the future (represented by science fiction-style images) if the button they had to press for the past was to the left of the button for future than if they were positioned the other way around. If the buttons were placed above or below each other, however, it made no difference.

Donald Trump’s discourse zeroes in on ideological words:
 – the backbone of each discourse:

US-Präsident Joe Biden ist ein Mann der ganz großen Worte. Dort, wo sein Vorgänger Donald Trump in staccatohaften Hauptsätzen Wörter wie "great" und "big" in wechselnder Abfolge aneinanderreihte, packt Biden gerne die rhetorische Bazooka aus. "Fürchtet euch nicht", rief er bedeutungsschwanger im März in Warschau den Menschen angesichts der Bedrohung durch den russischen Angriff auf die Ukraine zu. Und dann: "Wir sind aus dem großen Kampf für die Freiheit neu erwachsen: dem Kampf (…) zwischen einer regelbasierten Ordnung und einer Ordnung, die von roher Gewalt beherrscht wird."

:

https://www.zdf.de/nachrichten/panorama/usa-krieg-terrax-mirko-drotschmann-kolumne-100.html

Президент США Джо Байден не скупится на громкие слова. Там, где его предшественник Дональд Трамп в кратких отрывистых фразах попеременно произносил слова типа great и big, Байден прибегает к тяжелой риторической артиллерии. "Не бойтесь!" — восклицал он многозначительно в марте в Варшаве, имея в виду военную кампанию России на Украине. И чуть позже: "Мы переживаем обновление в борьбе за свободу: в борьбе между порядком, основанным на правилах, и порядком, где правит грубая сила".

to process the inevitable = СПРАВИТЬСЯ с неизбежным

The BBC headline:

The most powerful deaths on screen

From Living to Breaking Bad: Film and TV that helps us process the inevitable

CULTURE

Boris Johnson, the man ousted as UK prime minister by his own government just three months ago, has emerged as an early front-runner to be the next prime minister.

His replacement Liz Truss crashed and burned after 45 days in the job, announcing her resignation after being forced to ditch most of her policy programme after it spooked the financial markets.

Mr Johnson won the 2019 general election - and under the British constitution the party in power can change leader without another election.

Ms Truss was elected by Conservative Party members, who may get the final say in this latest contest, if two contenders remain after MPs have voted.

A second Johnson premiership would be an extraordinary turnaround even for a politician who has made miraculous comebacks before.

The last time (WHEN) anyone returned to the office of prime minister after losing the leadership was 140-years-go when William Gladstone returned to lead the Liberal Party.

In the Shona language, zimbabwe translates approximately to "stone house", and because of the site's size and scope, it became known as Great Zimbabwe. Moreover, it was not the only such "Zimbabwe": there are remains of approximately 200 smaller settlements or trading posts spread across the region, from the Kalahari Desert in Namibia to Mozambique. 

According to Munyaradzi Manyanga, a professor of archaeology and cultural heritage at Great Zimbabwe University, the position of Great Zimbabwe among these settlements has been widely debated. Some people have speculated that it was a capital city of a very large state, but to Manyanga, that seems unlikely. "Such a state would have been too large. One wouldn't have been able to manage that kind of extent and size. So most of the interpretations talk of these as having been influenced by Great Zimbabwe." He added that the Kingdom of Zimbabwe is considered to be made up of Great Zimbabwe and the smaller settlements located closer to it.

https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20220925-the-ancient-remains-of-great-zimbabwe

The body language can convey information which the laws of politeness interpret as FACE ATTACK.

The Ukrainian ministry of culture went all wrong when it recommended a three finger salute, because the gesture had established itself as a shocker implying an invitation for sex. The verbalized message is “Two in the pink, one in the stink” that corresponds to the Russian «Два в парадный, один в шоколадный».

outlet ['autlet] - торговая точка; магазин

outlet ['autlet] - a shop or organization which sells the goods made by a particular manufacturer.

 McDonald's has announced plans to reopen outlets in Ukraine, which closed after Russia's invasion in March.

The fast food chain said it hoped the move would help restore a "small but important sense of normalcy".

There will be a phased reopening over the next several months in Kyiv and western Ukraine in areas deemed safe, the burger giant said.

McDonald's had more than 100 restaurants in Ukraine before the conflict started.

The company has continued to pay wages to more than 10,000 staff since then.

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-62508898

https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20220804-the-surprising-benefits-of-gossip

All languages have the same semantic fields, because we live in the same environment and we are endowed with the same instruments of perception and cognition:

“Although language is not universal, languages nevertheless form part of a universal society in which, once some difficulties have been overcome, all people can communicate with and understand each other. And they can do so because in any language men always say the same things. Universality of the spirit was the response to the confusion of Babel: many languages, one substance” [Paz, 1992: 153].

The worst thing that can happen to a student who is learning a foreign language is to get into the hands of people who are bent on studying curious and rare words that are not used in natural conversation:

“Many people share this idea that a language is “sophisticated” to the extent that it has a large vocabulary. In this view language is a store of words – the thicker the dictionary, the better the language. The kind of person who believes this usually delights in etymology or the collection of linguistic curios, rare words that no one ever uses in natural conversation [Greene, 2011: 127].