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…
The London Magazine, 1734: Verses occasioned by Mr. Budgel’s modest Proposal, in the Daily Post-Boy of Aug. 31. to give the Publick a new and accurate Translation of a late celebrated French Treatise, on the Causes of the Grandeur and Declension of the Romans, and which has been already translated. Dulness, good goddess, chanc’d to…
The Vocabulaire européen des philosophies has now been versioned in English as Dictionary of untranslatables and Spanish as Diccionario de intraducibles. Here Mark Liberman cites Adam Gopnik, who seems to think the book is self-refuting Sapir-Whorfism, and here Jacques Lezra, coordinator of the English-language version, seems to be indulging the following incoherence: linguistic relativism is…
Between thieves, who profit from mistranslation, and fools, who know no better (and no profit), there lurks an intriguing class: lunatics, whose often considerable mind is whisked off to unexpected places by absurd fancies as to the nature of their task. The bigot Barnaby Rich writes in The Irish Hubbub (1617): And as the irish…
Spain may be about to be saved by Pablo Iglesias, a dead syndicalist whose name has passed to the political toyboy of media tycoon Jaume Roures. But a small band has risen to defend to the death (of Twitter) traditional Spanish orthography against revolutionary revisionism: Camarada #Vox@Castiel_Stinson Por ulima vez, es Stanli, no Estanli, comunistas…
I recently read Edmund Morris’ great biography of Theodore Roosevelt, and someone suggested that for some continuity as well as change I segue into the collected works of Zane Grey. Grey is the great romancier of the American West, and his theme – the forging of the American Nation – is that of Roosevelt: birth…