A tale from the streets of New York. In the main story I focus on two people in particular as an example of the ways in which a writer's workshop helped awaken me to the lives outside the workshop of the participants.

Some adjectival links across the Channel. Of the countless delights and complexities to be discovered in the relationships among the Indo-European languages, particularly fascinating are the connections between English and French. The two languages start together in proto-Indo-European (if there ever was such a thing), diverge into the Germanic and Latinate branches of the family, come together (north of the channel only) with the merging of French and English after the invasion of William of Normandy in 1066, and have been glued together even more by the influence of the classical languages, particularly Latin, in and after the Renaissance.

teaching and learning english as a foreign language: an adverse perspective. in china english is viewed as the ‘gatekeeper’ to higher education, employment, economic prosperity and social status. is chinese, as a result, drowning in the sea of english?

An adapted and extended version of ‘The Big Three’, a paper presented to the Kongres Bahasa Utama Dunia (‘Congress of the World's Major Languages’), organized in October 2004 by the Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka (‘Institute of Language and Literature’), Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. The Dewan, established in 1956, is committed to both linguistic and literary planning with regard to Bahasa Malaysia (Malay as used in Malaysia) and the recognition of Malay as a major Asian and world language.

Well, I have been called some things in my time, but never, never a ‘purist’! I have spent my life attacking language purists, and purists have spent their lives attacking me. So to see myself introduced thus at the end of Aysha Viswamohan's interesting paper on ‘Code-mixing with a difference’ (ET79: Jul 04) was quite a shock. ‘Many purists like David Crystal believe…’

Puzzled by Michael Bulley's ‘Consonantal beginnings’, in ET80 (Oct 04) who does admit to some difficulty in discussing initial consonant clusters in English, when he says: ‘The conventions of writing can mislead us about speech.’ While the restoration of the phonetic symbols in the ‘full and proper form’ of the article (ET80) now elucidates some of the puzzles in the previous version (ET79), difficulties remain in maintaining a clear distinction between the sound systems of English and the writing system.

there are, as it were, three levels in the title of the discussion, each going further ‘out’ from hong kong, although the direction and perspective could as easily have been reversed, moving ‘inwards’ from the world to china to hong kong, one of history's most successful social, cultural, political, and economic anomalies. there could equally easily have been four levels: hong kong, china, asia, and the world, a framework that would even then have been simpler than, say, ‘london, england, the united kingdom, the european union, europe at large, and the world’, but much the same as ‘lagos, nigeria, africa, and the world’ or ‘los angeles, california, the united states, and the world’.

Reflections on the Oxford Advanced Learner's English-Chinese Dictionary and its mother book, the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary.

David Crystal begins his article ‘The future of Englishes’ (ET58, Apr 99) with a plea for clarity in theoretical thinking and in observing the facts of language change. He sees intelligibility and identity/attitude as two key parameters for the existence of one or more languages, but his examples from Scandinavia and Yugoslavia are simply incorrect.