There’s already been plenty of comment on the determined attempt by Jacques Chirac and other European nationalists to kick themselves once again in the goolies, this time over Google Print’s fiendish plot to Anglicise the world. One of the many fine non-English texts available through GP and so far undiscovered by Mr Chirac is Otto…
There’s a curious note in the part of Alfonso X’s General estoria (ca 1280s) where he’s listing the languages spoken by Japheth’s descendants, sensibly identified early on as Europeans by European bible scholars:
Well it seems that way to me: Now that Saddam-era censorship of movies has lessened, movies with sex scenes and nudity are getting particularly popular in Iraq. Men between the ages of 17-45 are the keenest cinema-goers, although many Iraqis are not happy about these canges. One Baghdad resident complained, “Families can not go to…
I love it when dog owners go on about racial purity: Gammel Dansk Honselhund The origin of this race goes back to around 1710 when for eight generations a man called Morten Bak (who lived in the district of Glenstrup near the cities of Randers and Hobro) crossed gypsy dogs with local farm dogs. So…
Few people know that the 7-storey building (Comte Borrell 223) that fell down this morning housed the local Harley Davidson club. Maybe the workmen weren’t to blame after all.
I had a re-run of the old Iraq drunken brawl the other night with a left-wing journalist, who said basically that democracy would never work there and (after a couple more beers) did not work anywhere else, particularly not in Britain, because it’s just not the kind of thing humans are good at. This peculiarly…
The Italians sem to take a more practical attitude to the trombone than do the Spanish: “Rossini’s father played trombone in a company of travelling comedians, in which his mother sang. At 10 Rossini deputised for his father; later he sang in the choruses until he lost his voice; and at 21 he was the…
Sorry to hear news of the demise of my favourite hair salon, Gifty Collins‘ It Will Grow Back, which I used to cycle past every day on my way down the Kingsland Road to a hard day’s lunch.
This is cool, but I’m holding back till I’ve read Jan van Bakel’s study of Nuenen dialect. I used to have a one-man business selling used cultural goods throughout rural Holland and, having become accustomed to a very different bunch of dialects, I had the greatest of difficulty in understanding one of my earliest clients,…