Mark Liberman notes that Nuer is considerably more irregular than English, which leaves me wondering how to measure linguistic irregularity. For example, Can we include orthography as one of our criteria? Nuer orthography looks pretty rational, and certainly has none of the ghoti-ness of English. What about actual use? I’ll bet Nuer isn’t as rich…
It will be of particular interest to the deranged conspiracy theorists who make up roughly half of Barcelona’s population that there is a shop called Goma 2 (Goma 2 was the explosive used in the Madrid massacre) just a couple of blocks up from a beer factory called Sadamm (or however you spell it):
One way of passing evenings when a talking pig looks like being the highlight of the televisual entertainment is to improvise stories on the basis of collections of found words. Here is a short Chinuk-wawa glossary, taken from an article by Nancy Bartley on the language revival which appeared in the Seattle Times: chinuk-wawa english…
Where boring old Ulster farmers just used to store A for horses, Dutch farmers would park that shiny new Mercedes where the tax inspector couldn’t see it. Catalan farmers however are undisputed champions when it comes to the creative use of their barns: This type of soil has no market value, so the only explanation…
One of the principal flaws in the Vatican’s claims that the Inquisition was not really all that bad is the supposition that the distance that now exists in Spain between church and state was also present when torturing and burning women was the norm. It’s possible that the Spanish state tortured and burnt more than…
I know more Catalan geology than most trombonists, but this paper, Stratigraphy and petrology of the Miocene Montjuïc delta, was an absolute revelation (and I’m not just trying to demonstrate to you what a smart git I am). The graphics and tables are lousy quality, but from now on the text is kind of compulsory…
Mad Andy has a good old laugh at The Guardian for writing that The home secretary, David Blunkett, warned today that police will come down ‘like a tonne of bricks’ on football fans who misbehave at home during the Euro 2004 tournament. Sez Mr Lostinspacesky: Given that they’re in Europe, it seems only fair to…
The mini-site called Barcelona Chronicle – which someone presumably gets paid to produce – is an example of just how bad non-native translation can get. If you were to generate the page automatically then you’d probably have a similar percentage of incorrect words but the spelling would be better.
There was a sad report on the Beeb last week about the Woodwards from Guernsey who were robbed by a gang on the A7 near Tarragona after having a tyre shot out: The incident is the third of its type in the area in the last month. Spanish authorities believe the shooting of car tyres…
Shop deliveries free on foot in Leeds LS1-8 & LS13. Dismiss