The cultural naivety of Irish political atavism is evident in this placard. NO RED CARPET FOR KILLER BUSH, it says. Smart opponents would have tried to change the meaning of the red from whatever it originally was to reflect the blood which they would have us believe Bush is spilling needlessly.
Mark Liberman notes that Nuer is considerably more irregular than English, which leaves me wondering how to measure linguistic irregularity. For example, Can we include orthography as one of our criteria? Nuer orthography looks pretty rational, and certainly has none of the ghoti-ness of English. What about actual use? I’ll bet Nuer isn’t as rich…
One way of passing evenings when a talking pig looks like being the highlight of the televisual entertainment is to improvise stories on the basis of collections of found words. Here is a short Chinuk-wawa glossary, taken from an article by Nancy Bartley on the language revival which appeared in the Seattle Times: chinuk-wawa english…
Mad Andy has a good old laugh at The Guardian for writing that The home secretary, David Blunkett, warned today that police will come down ‘like a tonne of bricks’ on football fans who misbehave at home during the Euro 2004 tournament. Sez Mr Lostinspacesky: Given that they’re in Europe, it seems only fair to…
The Observer informs us that a new language class being tested by Thomson in Spain could help holidaymakers untie their tongues. Spanish (Out There!) lessons were given to travellers in Tenerife last month. A group of over-50s took five two-hour lessons over the course of their holiday, then put what they’d learnt into practice with…
Sez Roland Piquepaille of Mindjack: An international team of neuropsychologists has improved a device named “Tongue Display Unit” (TDU) pioneered at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. The device consists of a grid of 144 gold-plated electrodes set in the mouth and able to activate the cerebral cortex, the area of brain normally used for…
I caught the first train out of town this morning to go and inspect what a certain farmer has in the fields round the the back (large sections of horse skeleton) before the man rose from his slumbers. Sitting across the carriage from me was an attractive woman, and at the next stop a drunk…
Here’s a photo of Gypsy Eric in his first proper job after attempting to cycle to the Ends of the Earth with two pigs, Space and Time, in his panniers. He was quite frequently stoned during the trip, and children also threw rocks at him, partly on account of his clothing but principally because of…
Interlingua is a highly user-friendly language with a pedigree that is a bagful of doughnuts better than bitter, twisted Esperanto. Try this: Interlingua es un lingua international facile e de aspecto natural elaborate per linguistas professional como un denominator commun del linguas le plus diffundite in le mundo in le dominios del scientia, cultura, commercio,…
I’m pretty sure this picture is of the boar-pig hybrids mentioned the other day: These little darlings have been tusked where applicable, but the shoulders look broader to me than on boar I’ve seen before and the hide less hairy. On the other side of the hill there are what look like their feral cousins,…