It is suggested that an old Spanish slang word has nothing at all to do with Dutch pirates but instead adds weight to David Kleinecke’s generally discarded South American etymology of the word “pidgin”.
I’ll be visiting Jan van Bakel’s site again shortly to quote from his extraordinary collection of letters written by Flemish soldiers in Napoleon’s armies, but here‘s another strange thing I found, which he quotes from Rüdiger Safranski’s Martin Heidegger – Between Good and Evil (1998): Heidegger by then was a venerable old gentleman, and his…
I reckon Gayle Tomlinson has let herself be suckered for the purposes of this story in the Newcastle Evening Chronicle, passed along the counter by that notorious pie-lady, Margaret Marks: Belgians are turning their backs on the traditional buns and taking the Geordie stottie to their hearts. Greggs [a] has launched its fourth shop in…
Looking for something else, I just found this grammar, lexicon and corpus of Syldavian, the invented language used in the Tintin adventures King Ottokar’s Sceptre, Destination Moon and The Calculus Affair. Since I read Hergé before I learnt Dutch, and since, while old Syldavian uses the Roman alphabet, the contemporary script is Cyrillic, I’d always…
No, it’s not a Belgian joke: in Belgium you can send your email and have it delivered, registered, by a smelly man with a severe drinking problem, all for only €9.84. The business offering this innovative service, Certipost, is a joint venture between the dismal old state telecom and post businesses, Belgacom and De Post,…
Shop deliveries free on foot in Leeds LS1-8 & LS13. Dismiss
