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,…
One Mangalorean is a betel-nut seller.
Two Mangaloreans can’t stand one another.
Three Mangaloreans is a Udupi restaurant.
Four Mangaloreans is a fanatical Konkani Sabha.
Not surprisingly, translators and interpreters and “personnel of international organisations” (not budget-hungry Eurocrats, surely?) constitute the largest groups of publicly acknowledged signatories of this call to wage war on mounting European institutional mono- and trilingualism (English, French, German) and promote the language of Julio Iglesias. (Via Carlos Ferrero.)
Crocodiles have no tongue; frogs have half, because it’s backwards, attached at the front and free at the back; men have one, the best of all, because with it they speak all languages and imitate every animal, as the philosopher Archidamos said; sea foxes [raposas marinas] have two, as I have said; women have three, because they talk with their mouth and with their fingers and heart, and their tongues are rough and sharp, like those of cats and leopards.
Rodrigo Fernández de Santaella, Vocabulario eclesiástico (1499) says that a bilingual person is one who sings a different song depending on his location or conversational partner, a two-tongued [serpent]: Bilinguis y hoc bilingüe. quien dize vno aqui otro alli o vno a este y otro a aquel. E por esso se dize que tiene dos…