Heads or Tails? Is the Order of Word Pairs the Same Across Languages?

This listener had a great question about last week’s segment on binomials:

"Hi, Grammar Girl. I have a question about binomials. I was just wondering if the common ‘salt and pepper,’ ‘ham and eggs,’ etc. are the same in other languages. Do they also put ‘salt’ before ‘pepper,’ and ‘ham’ before ‘eggs,’ and so on and so forth? Or are binomials unique in different languages? Thank you."

This was a brilliant question! And I knew from my reading last week that linguists who speak other languages have studied binomials, but I didn’t know the answer to this question, so I asked my Twitter followers, who gave me a bunch of interesting answers! 

I threw out four examples, and this is what I got:

Salt and pepper 

These appear in the same order in Arabic, Finnish ("suola ja pippuri"), German, Hindi, Japanese, Russian, Spanish ("sal y pimienta"), Swedish, and Vietnamese.

But they’re reversed in Dutch ("peper en zout"), and French is really interesting because apparently it goes different ways for different things. Someone told me it’s "salt and pepper" when talking about food ("du sel et du poivre"), but "pepper and salt" ("poivre et sel") when talking about the color of someone’s hair.

As you would expect, culture plays a role in this too because not everyone uses salt and pepper in lots of dishes. A follower from southern India says they don’t use a lot of pepper and instead talk about "salt and red chili powder." A Chinese follower said you don’t typically find salt and pepper on kitchen tables in China, but they do have a condiment called "pepper salt" ("椒盐") that is a mixture of pepper and salt. 

Ham and cheese

I also asked about “ham and cheese” and in retrospect, of course this is heavily influenced by culture because it’s not a meal that’s eaten everywhere, and sometimes it just has the English name because it’s an import. For example, it’s called “ham and cheese” in Japanese, but only because that’s what it’s called in English.

People told me it’s called "ham and cheese" in Arabic, French, German ("Schinkenbrot mit Käse"), and Spanish ("jamón y queso,"), but it’s reversed to "cheese and ham" in Swedish ("ost och skinka"), and Dutch ("kaas en hesp"), and it appears it can go either way...

Keep reading on Quick and Dirty Tips