Given the interesting record of Basque philology, I wouldn’t be surprised if the early Basque fragments found at Iruña-Veleia (near Vitoria-Gasteiz) turned out to be fakes. The inscription urdin isar, blue/greyish star, certainly leaves me curious. Off-hand I can think of no pre-C18th texts in any Western European language that refer to stars by their…
Ephiphany may, of course, be a play on FIFA; alternatively, it may be telling us something about the state of Sean Ingle’s expenses in Stuttgart, where, according to the Guardian’s man on the spot, the streets are strained yellow.
Kate Alcock (via Lingformant): children who were poor at moving their mouths were particularly weak at language skills, while those who were good at these movements had a range of language abilities.
This kind of thing is ridiculous. If someone doesn’t want to play for the national team, fine. Individual liberties shouldn’t just be available to people with whom we happen to agree.
Definition: A tendency to express banal and obvious concepts pompously and loudly. Example: The practice of freedom, as for example on La Stampa, constitutes nothing more than the blasts of shareholder trombonism, by now reduced to a state of pure nostalgia, but hoisted as a club against dangerous and sulphurous revisionism. (Il Foglio; either my…
Someone just quoted me a bit of Clément Marot I didn’t know (OK, let’s be honest: I’d didn’t even know Marot): En tant qu’Ouy et Nenny se dira, Par l’univers le monde me lira. Which Leigh Hunt (The Companion, 1828) translates as: As long as Love says Yes and No, The universe shall read Marot.…