Lenox here and here and here writes: Well, here’s a race you won’t want to miss – it’s the prize-winning ‘Stupidest Titled Activity 2014’ which this year goes to the World Capital of Plastic Farming: ‘1st Trail Where Is Limit El Ejido’. Yes, they are all very excited, especially the chap who had the honour…
“Year1a”, by mail: Dear ladies and gentleman, We are Fisheries Ltd. Company in kunming Yunnan China. We need import some fishmeal. If you have this products, please you contact with us.We expect that cooperation with you. Thanks! Telephone ，13759557137 Sincerely, Mr.Xu Oh, George: Why would China need to import fishmeal? Is West African fish waste…
The Venerable Bede said that whoever talks in church talks not with his own voice but with that of the devil within him, says Jerónimo de Alcalá in Alonso, mozo de muchos amos (1624). Judging by David Jackson’s tale (taxes wasted on the signs alone: €37,752), and on past experience, ragamoffyn has a rich furrow…
Possible evidence of the Spanish Conquest of England, seen on a neighbourhood barbecue (“BQ”) notice on Wick Road, Hackney. Though perhaps, given the character of some of the dogs round there, the adjective was simply intimidated into agreeing. Adjectives have feelings, known as adverbs.
Transblawg picks up again on an Economist thing suggesting translation as an outlet for under-billing associates, and quotes one of the comments: I am also a US qualified lawyer working in document review in Spanish and Portuguese. I have been steadily employeed in these temporary projects for quite some time, but inoalls is correct, these…
The other day in the London City out of scientific interest I ate from a hipster stall a portion of /pʌɪˈɛlə/. It wasn’t paella – it looked and tasted like sewage sludge, black, oily, foul – but I couldn’t work out (and didn’t dare ask) what method had led to this madness. A couple of…
None of the immediate context enables one to say whether the South Tangier refugee relief committee was anxious to grasp Helena Maleno’s breasts à la Egyptienne because they read her as a Spanish prostitute (adjective española classifies noun puta (restrictive)), or as a fucking Spaniard (adjective puta describes more fully the noun española (non-restrictive)): Agredida…
Bruno Gonçalves and David Sánchez’s Crowdsourcing dialect characterization through Twitter subjected 50 million geotagged tweets to lexical analysis (beginning with stuff like auto/carro/coche/concho/movi) to come to this conclusion. Neither author belongs to the academic linguistic establishment, and they challenge the traditional view, which in Spain at least has defined linguistic variation to a considerable extent…
Over at Colin Davies’: Google Translate as free copy Terminator, or, if your masterpiece is illegible in the source language, then don’t expect a transbot to help you out. Similarly, if not in style, Salvador Sostres says that language learning is for secretaries and salespersons, something you should encourage in your child only if his…
Over at Futility Closet: rua torta lua morta tua porta. No solution occurs to me, but in general rendering in English Portuguese meaning and mode should surely be easier than doing so in Spanish (that is where García Yebra struggled), because of English’s far greater lexical resources and linguistic freedoms. Perhaps the Spanglish revolution will…