Here, with a flurry of thanks to the hermeneuticists of Bavaria, is the odd one out amongst tales of late nineteenth and early twentieth century German commercial activities in Iberia and the Maghreb: One of the first German missions was that of Colonel von Conring to Marrakesh in about 1878 to present to Mulai Hassan…
Arthur Kenyon in Letters from Spain (GBS), in an otherwise standard mid-19th century account of the sherry trade in Jerez (“Zeres”), writes: A good deal of the wine makes a voyage to India and back before it is mixed in the way I have described and sent to England. Maybe the guys over Catavino will…
I guess Esterella is a play on Esther, as in Lambrechts, and the Spanish estrella, star. The obvious connection is in the Sephardi community, but it would be interesting to know why Russian immigrant Charly Schleimovitz thought this stage name would work for his client and wife, the Antwerp nightingale, the Belgian Zarah Leander. Godzjumenas…
Cool post by Carlos Ferrero on linguistic maps of Spain and Portugal that appear arbitrary or ideologically driven. Power, preference and politics in the linguistic mapping of the Romania: representations of reality or the reality of geolinguistic representation?, Erin M Halm’s UPenn dissertation, looks like a really interesting followup. Unfortunately the download is USD37.
Lots of sites promise, but I still haven’t found one that delivers serious historical weather data outside of the US, the UK and other dominions of Anglocabronia. I’ll roast a baby lamb for the winning respondent.
I hope they’re working hard on the bar-call module, but the second sentence could revolutionise my social life: A robot blob that dances “soulfully” to different tunes could pave the way for machines that interact more naturally with human beings, researchers claim… It can also track the rhythmic motion of a person or another object…
Interesting bit in a NYT review of David Crystal’s The Fight For English: How Language Pundits Ate, Shot, and Left (via Conversational Reading): Crystal is … especially good on the Middle Ages. When printing came to Britain in 1400, English was a merry old mess. Choices had to be made, he says, and typesetters were…
Juan Pedro Quiñonero links to an IHT story suggesting the beginnings of a crash in Spanish second home valuations. I’ve seen how they’re built and I think there’s a fair chance the buildings will fall before prices do.