Few people know that the 7-storey building (Comte Borrell 223) that fell down this morning housed the local Harley Davidson club. Maybe the workmen weren’t to blame after all.
The Italians sem to take a more practical attitude to the trombone than do the Spanish: “Rossini’s father played trombone in a company of travelling comedians, in which his mother sang. At 10 Rossini deputised for his father; later he sang in the choruses until he lost his voice; and at 21 he was the…
Sorry to hear news of the demise of my favourite hair salon, Gifty Collins‘ It Will Grow Back, which I used to cycle past every day on my way down the Kingsland Road to a hard day’s lunch.
This is cool, but I’m holding back till I’ve read Jan van Bakel’s study of Nuenen dialect. I used to have a one-man business selling used cultural goods throughout rural Holland and, having become accustomed to a very different bunch of dialects, I had the greatest of difficulty in understanding one of my earliest clients,…
Not surprisingly, translators and interpreters and “personnel of international organisations” (not budget-hungry Eurocrats, surely?) constitute the largest groups of publicly acknowledged signatories of this call to wage war on mounting European institutional mono- and trilingualism (English, French, German) and promote the language of Julio Iglesias. (Via Carlos Ferrero.)
I added Mithridates to Langwich Sandwich. One recent post links to a North American language called Mi’kmaq, while another includes an interesting bunch of sites related to the Pennsylvania Dutch. If the latter were Dutch in the modern sense, and if they lived anywhere near the Mi’kmaq, then it would still make little sense to…
A frequently heard complaint re regional nationalists like our bunch is that they play the diversity card to central government while rigidly suppressing variety, principally of a linguistic nature, in their own backyard. Here (via Onze Taal) is an example of the kind of thing they use to justify this stance: the lingering death of…
Interesting to note that the BBC considers “moderate” a party, the PNV, that proposes unilaterally to tear up the constitution if it wins today’s elections. (I suppose you all know the joke in which los de Lepe travel to the metropolis to register a new separatist party. So tell me the name of this new…