Wild swings in meaning between seemingly similar verbs is what trips up learners.
When I taught English in the Greek port of
Piraeus, a colleague and I used to spend idle time in the staff room
speculating on what the hardest language in the world might look like. Perhaps
there would be different verb endings for each day of the week. Or possibly the
form of address might vary according to the height of the person you were
talking to. The idea of a hardest language is, of course, nonsense. How
difficult a language is depends on your starting point. As Guy Deutscher wrote
in his stimulating book Through the Language Glass: “Swedish is a doddle — if
you happen to be Norwegian, and so is Spanish if you are Italian.”
