Emphyteutic lease

The Catalan Generalitat has been using Enron-like accounting to accumulate hidden liabilities.

Fines for “incorrect” language use

As we go into recession the governments of two mini-“nations”, one with a state, the other with considerable autonomy, both worse afflicted by the downturn than might reasonably have been expected 20 years ago, have, within days of one another, rediscovered vaguely Biblical and distinctly 1930s strategies to disguise their failures of economic management: blame…

die tageszeitung compares Spanish regional nationalists to Franco

The taz has been obligatory reading for the thoughtful German green-left for the last 30 years. It has no particular sympathy for airline companies or Joachim Hunold. Highlights from a piece published June 14 (via MM): It is true [actually it isn’t–but Tobias Büscher isn’t the only one to make this error]: Franco prohibited regional…

How regional language policy in Spain is pissing off foreign investors

Here’s most of the second half of an article dealing with the Air Berlin affair in the Süddeutsche Zeitung, a MOR German daily: Hunold said … that he was proud that on internal Spanish flights they managed to have at least one Spanish-speaking stewardess on board. Introducing another language would be impossible. “Am I meant…

Asturian to become an official language?

From George Ticknor‘s superb History of Spanish literature … a Gothic remnant fled from the Moors into the Alpine Asturias, carrying with them race, name, creed, language, and country—scotched but not killed. In that rocky school, and amid storms and war, the infant Spanish language—eldest child and heir to the Latin—was slowly brought up; seven…

Banned language methods

Foreign language tutors are quite common in lists of books banned by the Inquisition. Check for example this page in the 1844 Indice general de los libros prohibidos, which records the proscription in 1797 of a French-Spanish commercial correspondence course and of an English-Spanish conversation primer published in 1719 by the Anglican minister in Seville.…