Mark Liberman points to an article by Laura Durnford on the Radio Netherlands World Service site which describes how the C17th Fort Oranje on the Hudson River and the town that sprang up around it, Beverwijck, was part of just one settlement within the Dutch colony of New Netherland. The other and more famous was…
Condescending southerner David Green (he’s Manchester-based) has a piece on the Beeb listing the delights that await Rivaldo when he finally signs for Bolton Wanderers. What many people this morning find difficult to understand is why Rivaldo can’t be arsed to travel those extra 10 miles up the A666 to the Anchor Ground, home of…
Here, taken on this walk, is a shot of Mexican multinational Cemex‘s Sanson cement factory at Sant Feliu, where the Llobregat cuts through the coastal range: Sanson and the Molins factory were major suppliers of concrete as the region industrialised, and this particular works has continued to play a major role in recent years. The…
There’s a good article in LaVa this morning by their man over the pond, Xavier Sala i Martín, in which he deplores the general tendency here to call one’s political opponents murderers. He goes on to point out that the attacks aren’t about Iraq but about a general hatred of the West and ends by…
The difficulty of interpreting intent in materials published in a different language and cultural context was one of the interesting facets of the case of the Fuengirola imam, convicted of publishing with malicious intent a manual on how to beat women without leaving scars. It’s not going to get any easier here once radio and…
The sports stars interviewed here by Pennsylvania’s Patriot-News confirm what every Dutch child knows already: watch television in your target tongue and you can skip those expensive and boring language classes. Different alphabets are another kettle of fish, however: “I was reading a book that Artukhin had on the bus,” Richardson said. “It was Russian.…
NRC Handelsblad, Holland’s most respected rag, says that the French commission that advocated banning the headscarf was strongly influenced by what it was told during a fact-finding trip to Holland in November. The two out of three members of the delegation contacted by the paper said they were shocked by the situation and in particular…
I suggested to Mark Liberman the other day that the word Frank turns up in western Arabic in the C8th. A provisional apology is due because the first reference I’ve found in a hitherto brief search is not until the first half of the C9th, when ʻAbd al-Malik b Habīb (display problems?) of Granada uses…