Silmarillion’s got a post over at Après moi, la déluge about tinkers and Jenisch and … quinquis. Here the following perfectly reasonable explanation of “kinky” is given: Kink, nautical term, from Du. kink “twist in a rope” (also found in Fr. and Swed.), probably related to O.N. kika “to bend at the knee” (see kick).…
I love it when dog owners go on about racial purity: Gammel Dansk Honselhund The origin of this race goes back to around 1710 when for eight generations a man called Morten Bak (who lived in the district of Glenstrup near the cities of Randers and Hobro) crossed gypsy dogs with local farm dogs. So…
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…
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…
Submerging Markets is the only blog I know of that gets scraped by Google News. I don’t know if they’ll take Kaleboel now that Gypsy Eric the Beerstainvoyant has finally signed up to float by occasionally. Send in your photos…
On Saturday evening a 61-year old publican shot two Portuguese gypsies dead from the balcony of his flat in Terrassa for parking their Ford Transit opposite and sitting around drinking and playing the electric organ. A policeman here once threatened to arrest me for doing roughly the same, but this is Douglas Adams in So…