Great Lord Bus SL, from Cerdanyola del Vallès. Great lords may travel by palanquin, phaeton or Pullman, as well as on occasion by tumbril, but they don’t do buses, even when visiting casinos.
Wikipedia currently notes the disappearance of the d from the tail of past participles in Spanish (estoy cansado → toy cansao) and corresponding hypercorrections in which a redundant d is inserted into -ao endings. The following passage dealing with syncopes is from Avelino Herrero Mayor’s 1967 Diálogo argentino de la lengua (source: Corde) Profesor. –…
Found whilst hunting help for a tiny bit of Judæo-Spanish/Sefardi/Dzhudezmo/Judezmo/Spanyol/Spanyolit/Ladino-English translation I did for someone. The book is The Lives of the Right Hon. Francis North …, The Hon. Sir Dudley North …, and The Hon. and Rev. Dr. John North (Roger North, 1826, available on GBS), the year is 1680, and the great English…
RAE 2.0 is a cool little gadget if you’re sick of the Diccionario de la Real Academia Española’s clunky interface: append the word you’re after to the URL and http://rae2.es/abracadabra or http://rae2.es/abraxas or whatever. (Via JPQ)
The guys Geoff Pullum is looking for are http://www.translationgold.com/–just google the phrase and check the source of the result pages. The priority audience for their translations seems to be machines rather than humans and their primary aim is to boost Google rankings for pages written in the original language. Since you can achieve the same…
MMcM at Polyglot Vegetarian (via Transblawg) is rightly surprised that the latest OED update only manages to take portobello mushrooms back to 1990. They appear in 1989 in Bruno Ellmer’s Classical and Contemporary Italian Cooking for Professionals and in the 1942 edition of Agriculture Decisions, a publication by the US Dept of Agriculture, which is…
Thinking about the origins of exclusivity, various biblical suggestions as to how to deal with idolaters spring to mind like a gazelle in wellington boots: Exodus 34 12 Take heed to thyself, lest thou make a covenant with the inhabitants of the land whither thou goest, lest it be for a snare in the midst…
Via GBS, from Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal for January to June 1844, where the original is attributed to the Emperor Trajan: Let Dick one summer’s day expose Before the sun his monstrous nose, And stretch his giant mouth, to cause Its shade to fall upon his jaws, With nose so long and mouth so wide, And…
Nick Lloyd enters 2007 a feedless and no doubt unrepentant Luddite, but he’s got an excellent story over at Iberianature (13/12/2006) about José Sideburns and his lynx waistcoat, re which: Francesc Candel‘s Han matado un hombre, han roto el paisaje (Antonio Rabinad recently sold me a copy at Sant Antoni) derives its dramatic strength in…