Off the Cuff: Learning a language is a slip of the tongue

Napoleon Bonaparte's attempts at learning English have gone on display at an exhibition in London this week.

They reveal that the former French emperor was not exactly an A-student when it came to mastering the illogical turns and twists of the Queen's English. In fact he appears to have been quite a dunce.

But it would be foolish of any of us to undermine him for this.

In this confusing but fascinating multi-cultural society of the UAE, we have all of us at some time run slap bang into the language barrier. It can be infuriating, it can be funny.

In linguistics, there are more accidents waiting to happen than on a Thursday night on Shaikh Zayed Road.

It produces some hilarious street signs, such as English Eaten Here, outside a Croatian restaurant. I once bought a Japanese-made radio whose instructions urged: "Implore not to put device direct into electric hole or she will be occasioned severe loss of face …"

In fact, there is a school of thought that maintains the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor came about partly because of a mistranslation of a Japanese word that turned out to be untranslatable in the end.

We all laugh at each other's feeble attempts at our respective languages. But it is a compassionate laughter, laughing with you rather than at you.

That's because we've all been there, all run headfirst into that brick wall of misunderstanding.

One of my most memorable clangers was when I was learning Greek. The words for "ticket" and "restaurant" are rather similar.

So there I was at the ferry booking office demanding a return restaurant to Athens, unable to understand why the staff were rolling around with laughter. Still, it wasn't as bad as the French exchange student thanking his hostess …

"I'm so sorry to have cockroached on your hospitality."

"You mean en-croached."

"Ah yes, I am forgetting you are feminine."

So it is comforting to know that the great and the good like Napoleon are in the same boat as the rest of us when it comes to struggling with somebody else's tongue.

Like the late US President John F Kennedy's classic gaffe when he announced to the German nation in Berlin: Ich bin ein Berliner. Which translates as: " I'm a jelly doughnut."

The defeated Napoleon was anxious to learn English to discover what the British press was saying about him during his exile on St Helena.

Count Emanuel del las Cases gave Napoleon his first English lesson on

St Helena in January 1816. Probably something along the lines of: "Repeat after me: My aunt's pen is on the table."

One of the former emperor's exercises reads: "When I shall land in France I shall be very content. My wife shall come near to me, my son shall be great and strong of he will be able to trink a bottle of wine. The women believe they ever prety."

So just remember you are in exalted company next time you make a linguistic faux pas (Fr. faux false + pas step. A false step; a slip; a trip)

In fact, it is a pity Napoleon was not a more diligent student of languages.

If he'd had to spend time trying to make sense of the Cyrillic alphabet, maybe he would have given up all notions of invading Russia in the first place, and thereby changed the course of world history.