There is – as usual – an interesting discussion over at Transblawg. This time it’s about creaky-sounding (legal) phrases in which the noun precedes the adjective, some of which may be inverted: court martial/martial court, secretary general/general secretary, law merchant/merchant law etc. I assume the post-positives to be Norman-isms, since it was the Normans who…
From a lovely bit of work, Formatting the Word of God: The Charles Caldwell Ryrie Collection, produced by the Bridwell Library at SMU in Dallas: This [a 1551 Estienne bible, published in Calvin’s Geneva] is the book to which we are indebted for our custom of quoting the Bible by chapter and verse. It is…
There’s a mini-discussion over at Transblawg re the first use of the term “mobbing” in an institutional context. Matt Bulow says that a Swede coined this usage, although the author he quotes, Heinz Leymann, says he borrowed it from another Swede, Heinemann, who used it in education and had it from Konrad “Gooseman” Lorenz. In…
Here’s a brief list of words and phrases used by Spanish-speaking sexists to praise men to the skies and to remind women that their place is in the gutter. I haven’t yet encountered a language so permeated by hate that I couldn’t contemplate using it (with the possible exception of VB), but Ludwig Kabanow is…
Localisation – like most developments in publishing – has benefited greatly from the needs of the porn industry. “I speak Spanish to God, Italian to women, French to men and German to my horse,” said Charles V of Spain, without, alas, going into detail. I assume, however, that his Italian will not have been the…
Apparently I’ve been signed up for the local chess tournament for the next few Saturdays, otherwise this is where I’d really like to be on Saturday 15th: PHILADELPHIA, May 6 /PRNewswire/ — The Klingon Language Institute (KLI) invites Star Trek fans and anyone curious about Klingon language and culture to a small qep le’ (a…
The good news for mourners of dead tongues is that in Northern Ireland they’re inventing new languages, dialects and other officially authenticated and subsidised cultural goods at such a rate that the province will soon be exporting the surplus to the Amazon delta. As Jason Walsh points out: In Northern Ireland during the 1980s the…
Sheesh! Someone called Luistxo has invented a complicated spec–read and shiver!–with which you have to comply in order to have a proper bilingual blog. Kaleboel has dropped its forked-tongue strategy, having discovered that people get much more excited when you are rude about them in English rather than their own obscure dialect. But that, of…