It’s love!

OK, this blog is officially enamoured of Quaderns, which as well as calling Kaleboel un fenomenal poti poti now says we’re indispensable. A brown envelope is on its way to a smoke-filled office in Andorra.

Catalan women are fat and ugly, say the Greeks

Here are a couple of fragments from Antoni RubiĆ³ i Lluch’s L’Expedició catalana a l’Orient vista pels grecs (The Catalan Expedition to the Orient as seen by the Greeks (1883, 2004 edition translated from Spanish into Catalan)). This is RubiĆ³ i Lluch quoting Epaminondas Stamatiades: Is it necessary after all that we have said that…

Moo, moo, two by two

The good news for mourners of dead tongues is that in Northern Ireland they’re inventing new languages, dialects and other officially authenticated and subsidised cultural goods at such a rate that the province will soon be exporting the surplus to the Amazon delta. As Jason Walsh points out: In Northern Ireland during the 1980s the…