Currently doing a bit of literary translation out of one very strange dialect into another, and here’s something not so completely different: a basic grammar of Chistabín, the well-preserved (whatever that means) dialect spoken in the Chistau valley in northern Huesca. There’s a small lexicon, sorry, lesico. I like words like agila (águila in Spanish)…
There’s a disgraceful tendency to write about the über-rural province of Huesca as if all the brains drained from it a long time ago. No more, for it has just held a cutting-edge event dealing with the latest in media and technology. Shame the only blog post I’ve seen–from Mariano Gistaín–is of two people fixing…
Mark Liberman wonders whether Cinderella slipped two dead squirrels round her tootsy-toes that night, while Chris Waigl does not. I think glass is a reasonable interpretation, although it may not have been the material used. DH Green (Language and History in the Early Germanic World) notes that both Pliny and Tacitus used glaesum/glesum to refer…
Mark Liberman wonders whether Cinderella slipped two dead squirrels round her tootsy-toes that night, while Chris Waigl does not. I think glass is a reasonable interpretation, although it may not have been the material used. DH Green (Language and History in the Early Germanic World) notes that both Pliny and Tacitus used glaesum/glesum to refer…
If QEI didn’t like Catholics, then in harsher economic times she wasn’t too keen either on black people, many of whom also came from Spain, with, for example, Catherine of Aragon. Here‘s her deportation order. It’s not clear where they ended up. The site is interesting and includes the usual conjectures about the origins of…
I had an interesting chat (ie I listened) with someone the other night about the social position of musicians in the Middle Ages. I didn’t really buy his idea of the musician as The Other–at least not in Spain–but what he told me about Moorish and Jewish musicians in Christian society (as opposed to, for…
One pragmatic reason for creating and disseminating a standard language is to increase the political punch of speakers. Still, it’s going to be a while before Aragonese (English .doc here) overtakes Turkish. (I haven’t got time to check it, but I’ll bet the Turkish claim is flawed.)
Apparently (via Onze Taal) a Serbian village is changing its name from Smrdić (“old and dirty”) to Izvor (“spring”). Said Smilja Kostic: “All the young people used to leave the village because they were ashamed to live in a place with such a name.” This seems to me dubious reasoning: despite its tempting name, there…
The Guardian got a “panel of experts” to take a look at the Wikipedia. Here’s what Mark Kurlansky, author of The Basque History of the World, said about the Basque people entry: It says: “Aquitanians spoke a language which is proven beyond doubt to be akin to Basque.” I am not familiar with the Aquitaine…