Arana’s El Catalanismo

It seems to me a perilous sport to quote the father of Basque racism, Sabino Arana, in support of that vulgar ideal, the unity of the Spanish nation.

Die, critics

My front page aggregator removes diacritics, rendering local media tycoon Godó as God, which I doubt would displease.

Book plugging in the digital age

Sounds like LanguageHat also got approached by Grant Barrett’s minder at McGraw-Hill offering “a look at our book” in exchange for a plug. I invited her to send dead tree all the way to Spain and have heard nothing more, which you may wish to attribute to Spain’s splendidly relaxed postal service or to a…

Linguistic policy of Hispano-American language academies

“[Language] academies, oscillating in the disjunction between description and prescription, will have to document prescription taking into account descriptions of use,” says Pilar Chargoñia. Burn em down, I say. (Here via here is news of lobbyists who want the RAE to undescribe various popular uses of terms.)

Tourism@Vic (update 30/6)

Speaking from baldie experience, most council tourism departments here offer an abysmal service, and things gets worse once you go online. I’m pursuing the tourismcrats at Vic, a medium-sized xenophobic town out in the sticks, to see how long and how far I’ll have to go to get any kind of response: 20/6 Mail to…

Listen up, you workers!

The Progressive University, a subsidised summer wankfest for bourgeois Catalan nationalist-socialists, is running a course to explain to the proles, hordes of whom will doubtless attend, What the Catalanist, left-wing government did without anyone being aware of it. (Via David Millán)

Graves in Galician

Carlos Ferrera notes the bizarre preoccupations of Galician nationalist and regional deputy, Bieito Lobeira: If some catastrophe were to occur today that would lead to the partial or total eradication of human life from the part of the planet which it is our fortune to occupy, with all probability future archaelogical studies of funerary remains…

Bar

Near La Guardia in the province of Toledo. Via laboladelmundo and Pixel y Dixel, one of whose commenters says that there actually a bar there and that it is visible from the A4 motorway.

Hidalgo and other Spanish syncopations

Linguistic syncopes are confusing for musicians, who think of syncopation as redistributive rather than reductive. Confusingly, too, many of the syncopated words in Juan de Valdés’ gem of early descriptive linguistics and linguistic politicking, Diálogo de la lengua (late 1530s), are not produced by medial deletions. Here’s the conventional scheme of things (Hartmann & Stork,…