Says Marwan Issam from his computer games stall in a centre of Sunni terrorism: We have things now we didn’t have before, like the internet, mobile phones and satellite television but the quality is not as good as we expected. And we still don’t have enough electricity. Damn, sounds like Iraq’s caught up with Spain.
Writes Vince Stankay of Florida in response to news of increased penalties for drunk drivers in Slovakia: People must be taught that they will pay the penalty for not being responsible for their actions. That seems to me a worthwhile principle, although I am not sure how it would be applied.
A new study, Fish intake during pregnancy in relation to offspring’s early cognitive development, shows that women who ate fish regularly during pregnancy had children with better language and communication skills by the age of 18 months. Interesting, then, that fishermen seem to be such silent ghits: communicative fisherman 0 uncommunicative fisherman 0 talkative fisherman…
The cultural naivety of Irish political atavism is evident in this placard. NO RED CARPET FOR KILLER BUSH, it says. Smart opponents would have tried to change the meaning of the red from whatever it originally was to reflect the blood which they would have us believe Bush is spilling needlessly.
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…
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…
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 Observer informs us that a new language class being tested by Thomson in Spain could help holidaymakers untie their tongues. Spanish (Out There!) lessons were given to travellers in Tenerife last month. A group of over-50s took five two-hour lessons over the course of their holiday, then put what they’d learnt into practice with…
Sez Roland Piquepaille of Mindjack: An international team of neuropsychologists has improved a device named “Tongue Display Unit” (TDU) pioneered at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. The device consists of a grid of 144 gold-plated electrodes set in the mouth and able to activate the cerebral cortex, the area of brain normally used for…