Old man in coffee bar: “All this stuff from Ciutadans about encouraging bilingualism is a load of bollocks. I speak five languages, yeah, honest: Spanish, Ecuadorian, Peruvian, Argentinian and Mexican.” (This uses the same basic material as the one about the prostitute advertising her knowledge of modern languages: Cuban, Greek, French etc)
Pleasingly, Bable is used as a synonym for Astur-Leonese, aka Leonese etc. The name was apparently popularised by someone called Xovellanos in the C18th and taken from someone else I’ve never heard of called González Posada. Its origin is (still apparently) unknown but its use is widespread and it appears in the inevitable references to…
I continue to think “mystifications” is a better translation than “hoaxes” of mixtificaciones. Gerald Howson in The flamencos of Cadiz Bay writes of a 1950s carnaval pregonero preaching against the use of “mixtifications, modernisms and orfeonic banalities” in carnival songs. He wouldn’t have liked Silvester Paradox either.
In Spain it’s a cubana, a Cuban, the Uruguayans call it una paja rusa, a Russian wank (not to be confused with a Russian mountain, una montaña rusa, which is a big dipper in the nicest of senses), while José João Dias Almeida’s excellent dictionary of Portuguese argot (calaõ) and idiom informs us that his…
Has a pretty comprehensive list of online dictionaries and the like. It’s a French site, and that’s what I was looking for. I wonder about the interpretations of some of the proverbs in Randle Cotgrave’s 1611 French-English. “Ce qui est venu par la fleute s’en retourne avec le Tabourin/What the pipe hath gathered the Taber…
Check out Godzjumenas’ Antwerp dialect or language or whatever blog, Aentwaereps. The spelling system is of his own invention and he writes occasionally on grammar, which, as he says, is currently undocumented–most writers claim it has none ;-) (I love Antwerp. The harbour has some of the finest mafia bars in Europe; lose your heart…
On this Amazigh Dutch site, it’s argued that the Moroccan government made a crucial error in the dispute with Spain by using a spurious Arabic name, Laila, instead of the older Berber word, Tura, being prepared to weaken their claim rather than acknowledge Berber language rights. However, there are further views to be considered.
“Narcisista-leninista” is what Andrés Oppenheimer calls our dear friend Hugo Chávez. I’d better call Ken Livingstone one too–he hates being left out of this kind of thing. (PS: Chávez’s shrink, Edmundo Chirinos, says the paramilitary pres isn’t clinically unstable. Second opinion?)