Professor van Berkel stepped out of his house in the Berkshire village of West Grafton and turned right: or, as he would have described it, east-north-east. The village street followed the River Shelford downstream for about half a mile until it turned sharply right towards the pub and the main road; while the river meandered on down the valley for a further ten miles before debouching into the River Marl at the market town of Thatchbury.

It was his habit of an early evening to walk to where the street crossed the river before taking a footpath that ran up a hill and then turned west, following the path of the old railway line above the village before dropping back down to his house. This normally took him eighteen minutes and covered one and a quarter statute miles.

It was only with difficulty that Professor van Berkel had adapted his measurement of distances to the bewildering units this country used. The people were aware of the existence of the metric system but, when confronted with it, their brains seemed to stop working and any answer was as a result likely to be wildly inaccurate. He had therefore laboriously studied the imperial system’s inches, feet, yards, links, rods, poles, perches, chains, furlongs, miles and leagues. It was only after he had done this that he realised that most English people didn’t understood most of these either.

Really, he reflected, they were as bad as the Belgians, with two measurement systems – or languages in the Belgians’ case – neither of which they used properly. As a proud European, van Berkel celebrated the diversity of languages in the continent, many of which he spoke with varying levels of fluency. As a proud Dutchman, though, he was unable completely to rise above the mixture of bewilderment, pity and atavistic contempt with which most countries – and most smaller communities, for that matter – generally regarded their immediate neighbours.

Even more so than many Dutch people, he spoke English with greater care and precision than did most of the natives. He was, after all, the Erasmus Professor of Linguistic Philosophy at the University of Rotterdam and, currently, the Visiting Professor of Philosophical Linguistics at the University of Oxford. However, were you to ask him if he spoke the language perfectly, he would, depending on his mood, say that he did his best, that one was always learning or that no one could ever speak any language perfectly.

There were several difficulties English presented, even to an expert like him. The extraordinary spelling, the frequency with which pronunciation rules were ignored and, in particular, the obsession with phrasal verbs were three of which he was constantly aware. “Taking out”, for example, could refer to dealing with rubbish, withdrawing money, deleting an incorrect passage in a document, neutralising an enemy or entertaining a prospective sexual partner.

Then there were ones which looked like opposing terms but which were anything but. To get on with someone was, as he had learned to his cost, not the opposite of getting off with them; while no amount of research or close questioning of native speakers had offered any clue as to the difference between filling in a form and filling it out.

As he walked, slightly more slowly than usual through the hot late-July afternoon, he reflected on these and other perplexities about this language and the people who spoke it. As before – and this irritated him, for his academic mind preferred to come to a different conclusion about any mystery each time he pondered it – he returned to two over-arching challenges.

The first was English’s vast vocabulary: the second was English people’s almost pathological aversion to saying exactly what they meant. Irony, sarcasm, self-deprecation, innuendo and unfinished sentences were commonplace and left him feeling that he was trapped inside a cryptic crossword puzzle.

Van Berkel had a horror of solecisms and misunderstandings. Were he to speak the language less fluently these could be forgiven: but, as he spoke it well, any error might be construed as an insult, a criticism or a sexual advance. Precision in all things was his watchword. Every other language he’d encountered he had eventually been able to tame. English had so far resisted his efforts. And yet here he was, in England, and forced to grapple every day with this vast and slippery creature which the natives seemed to regard as a kind of punchbag rather than a medium for exact communication.

He was about a hundred metres from the footpath when he saw the boy.

He was about twelve and dressed in riding gear with a smart black helmet and shiny black boots. No one else was around and the boy gazed at him with a a slightly wild look.

“Have you seen a horse?” he asked.

“Yes,” van Berkel said.

“Oh, good,” the boy said.

There was quite a long silence. Van Berkel wondered if this was all he had to ask him.

“Where?” the boy said at last.

“In a lot of places,” the Professor replied. “There are many horses around here.”

The boy looked at him, even more wildly than before. “This is a particular horse.”

Van Berkel nodded. “All things are particular, and also general,” he suggested. “It depends on whether you are applying a subjective or an objective assessment.” He hoped this would help the conversation move forward. It didn’t.

“It’s my horse,” the boy explained.

“I see – so, a horse particular to you, though perhaps not to anyone else.”

The boy goggled at him. “It’s a bay horse,” he said.

Van Berkel knew the word “bay”, an inward curve of land in a body of water or a hunted animal being cornered. However, he had never before heard it used as an adjective. “A bay horse?” he repeated slowly, getting a notebook out of his pocket..

“Yes.”

“Please – what is a ‘bay horse’?”

The boy opened his mouth but seemed unable to describe something so obvious.

A woman, also in riding gear, had come out of a nearby house, and had heard the last question. “It’s reddish-brown, with black points.”

“Points?”

“Feet…tail, mane and so on. Why do you ask?”

“I am a philosophical linguist,” the Professor explained.

“I see,” the woman said, clearly not seeing at all.

“It’s my horse,” the boy said again.

“I think the young man wanted to tell me what his horse looked like,” van Berkel said.

“It’s because…” the boy said.

“Bay,” van Berkel said, writing in his book. “How very interesting. Is it an acronym?”

“A what?”

“B-A-Y – ‘black and…yellow’, perhaps. But yellow is not brown, is it? Or do some people call brown horses yellow?”

“No,” the woman said, her expression now very similar to the boy’s.

“It would be admissible” van Berkel suggested reasonably. “White rhinos are not white. And then, of course, there is your red panda.”

“My red panda?”

“Of course, it is not red, not in an objective sense. It is merely a description your language has applied to it: a term of convenience. I say ‘your language’,” he added, his mind racing though the various dictionaries in his head, “but in fairness I must admit that others have fallen into the same looseness. German, French and even my own Dutch use the misnomer. ‘Roter’ in German, for instance. The French employ ‘roux‘, which is perhaps more accurate. I believe that translates as…I think, yes, ‘auburn’ in English, much like the colour of your own hair.”

The woman coloured slightly.

“We Dutch prefer ‘kleine panda,'” van Berkel confided. He paused and frowned. “Although ‘kleine‘, which translates as ‘small’ is, of course, a meaningless description, in isolation.” He made further jottings in his notebook. “It is not sufficiently precise,” he said crossly, half to himself. “Although,” he added, his expression brightening at the thought of other languages sharing this weakness, “we are not alone in using a relative term to describe a specific form. You, for example, have great tits.”

“Look here…” the woman said.

“Of course,” the Professor continued obliviously, “English has other kinds of tits, does it not? Blue tits and azure tits: although” – and here his expression clouded again – “the two words essentially mean the same thing. Another imprecision” He shook his head. “Think of the Côte d’Azur, for example.”

Having given up hope of getting any sense out of the Professor, the boy turned to the woman. “I was riding it out for the first time,” he said quickly. “It’s got a near-side glass eye and it’s about thirteen hands.”

“Please,” van Berkel said, still scribbling in his book and then holding his hand up. “Riding it ‘out’ of where? Or what?” Both looked at him blankly.

“Riding it…out,” the boy explained.

“I begin to see,” he said grimly. “Another of your phrasal verbs, yes? They arrive everywhere. No matter. But, I must also ask – you have a horse with a glass eye? How very interesting.”

“No, no”, the woman said, almost stamping her foot. “That means it has a blue eye. On the near side. But what I…”

“Near to what?”

“I’m sorry?”

“To what is the blue eye near?”

“Well the, er…” she held both hands up for a moment and then made as if to rotate them. “The left.”

“I see. And you call this blue? Like the famous English tits? And, please, the height. This is all most interesting. You say it has thirteen hands. How can this be? A horse, with this many hands?” He gave a rather grim laugh which made him appear slightly unhinged.

The woman blinked a few times. “It’s the height,” she said finally.

“Do you not mean your English feet? Or, that is to say, about – let me see, yes: one fifth of a chain?”

“What?”

“Your English measurements are in chains, yards and so on and also feet, are they not?”

“Not for horses,” the woman said at last. “Horses are in hands.”

“How very interesting. And what is a hand, please?”

The woman and the boy both held up their hands.

“You misunderstand me,” the Professor said with an indulgent smile. “I meant, what is this horse hand in your inches? I presume it cannot be the hand of the rider, each being of a different size. Much like feet,” he said as an aside, making another note. “I wonder now – whose foot was it that first set this standard? One of your kings – perhaps your famous Henry VIII? Do you know how long King Henry VIII’s feet were?”

The boy burst into tears.

“It’s my horse,” he wailed, ignoring the Professor. “I got off when a lorry came past and then had to take a stone out of my boot. When I looked round he’d gone. Actually, he’s my sister’s,” he added, his sobs deepening as the really horrible part of the story emerged. “She didn’t think I could look after him, I said I could – and now he’s gone…” He threw himself towards the woman who gave him a hug of mutual horse-person’s sympathy but which was otherwise clearly embarrassing for both of them.

Professor van Berkel was, not for the first time, struck by how quickly English conversation could change from incomprehensible and evasive discussion to incoherent weeping. He tried to apply some hard lingo-philosophical rigour to a situation which, for the first time, he thought he understood.

“It seems unlikely the horse would have, as you might say, bolted, for you’d have heard it,” he opined. “If it had walked in either direction, you’d have seen it. If it had gone into anyone’s garden on that side it would probably by now have come out.”

The boy and the woman were only half-listening. Undeterred, van Berkel continued expounding his thesis.

“It therefore seems most likely it has taken the only other route, into the river. It is very warm, is it not? You stopped by the river and the horse was probably hot and thirsty. There is a gap just here in the bushes. Let us look to see if our equine friend is there.”

With surprising agility, the Professor leaped onto the slightly raised grass bank that separated the village street from the river which was at this point about four hands deep. “Hohneck, hohneck,” he called out. There was an answering whinny and splashing, followed by the gradual appearance from behind the shade of a thick clump of elder and willow of a slightly guilty-looking brown horse with a black feet, mane and tail and a blue left eye.

“There,” the Professor said. “Is this by any chance your particular glass-eyed, thirteen-hands bay horse?”

The boy goggled with pleasure and led the horse out of the river.

Van Berkel turned to the woman. “Do you not have a saying in England that if you can lead a horse to water you can make it drink?”

“Not exactly,” the woman said slowly.

“I see. How does it go, please?”

But the woman had turned her attention to the boy. After checking that he was safely mounted, she gave van Berkel a vague wave and went back into her house. The boy and the bay horse trotted off in the direction from which van Berkel had come and were soon lost to view round a bend in the road. The Professor was left alone in the shimmering late-afternoon heat.

“Most interesting,” he said to himself as he finished his note-taking and then continued his walk.

“Geert,” his wife said when he finally returned. “Ach, what a long walk today. A new route, perhaps?” She lived in the constant fear that one day he would veer off in an unexpected direction and return a changed man: better or worse being less alarming results for her than merely different.

“No, no,” he said, carefully placing his sun hat in its appointed place. “I fell into a conversation about horses.”

“Ach – what do you know of horses?” she said, mock-scolding.

Professor van Berkel considered this. “More than I did half an hour ago,” he confessed. “But these people, they never say what they really mean. I really could not have been more helpful,” he added, although sensing for the first time that the conversation’s lack of efficiency had perhaps partly been down to him, “but we seemed forever to be talking in circles.”

“They are English,” his wife said. “One has to make allowances.”

Brian Quinn
• For further articles and stories, please click here
• For songs, please click here

Photo credit: Adobe Stock Images