Steiner considered himself "at home in three and a half languages" (the half for American English as contrasted with British English).
All he needs is a pencil and eraser, with a piano nearby.At lunches in the Wissenschaftskolleg, Mr Ligeti has been a star, engaging voraciously in conversation with all comers on almost any subject in one of six and a half languages (Romanian, Hungarian, German, French, English, Swedish, with a musician's Italian counting as half).
She and he communicate in a half-and-half language — half her teaching and half his invention.
Research suggests that at least one-third to one-half of language is composed of formulaic sequences (Conklin & Schmitt, 2008; Conklin & Schmitt, 2012).
Half our language and culture, generally, in Anglo-Saxon terms, is German.
"It was half a language course," she explains, "and half history, literature and philosophy.
And in a world that is losing languages faster than ever – at the current rate of one a fortnight, half our languages will be extinct by the end of the century – what will happen if the current rich diversity of languages disappears and most of us end up speaking only one?
Valley of Love was last night's big screening, a half-English language two-hander starring the actors as a divorced couple.
Queens is truly cosmopolitan: a third of its residents are from outside the United States; nearly half speak languages other than English.
It is thought that half the languages of the planet, some 3,000 in all, are unlikely to survive to the end of the present century.
Of the 1.6 billion Internet users worldwide, more than half use languages that have scripts that are not based on the Latin alphabet.
