In connection with the La horda business, I’m just reading around a bit. One think I’m interested in is the migration of /r/ in some Spanish speech, so that for example pobre > probe. I’d like to know why it happens (is it along the lines of the al-oud > lute shift, or is it…
Onze Taal > some inaccessible site: “Mierenneuker [ant-fucker] is the swearword most frequently used against the [Dutch] police.” Here, however, is the case of the man who was fined for calling a traffic warden an ant-fucker, appealed, and won: according to the judge, “ant-fucker” can also be complimentary. The British equivalent of an ant-fucker is…
Here’s another daisy for my chain of Spain-goes-south posts, unlikely to be of interest to anyone at all, although the ads may amuse. Vital Fité’s Las desdichas de la patria viewed China as an imperial basket case. Ricardo Beltrán y Rózpide in La geografía en 1898 (1899) explains why it was to remain so: The…
I suspect Amando de Miguel’s “se deliveran groserías” comes from Alfredo Ochoa’s “se deliveran grocerías” and that it’s an invention designed to discredit the EU’s future sole official language, Spanglish. I’m not going to believe that a Dominican corner store in NYC would offer to deliver insults until someone shows me a storefront or flyer…
The right is perturbed because men are getting married on Los Lunnis. Their objections are historical rather than theological–no one’s suggesting we respect Genesis 24:3 and 38:6 and allow fathers to select girlies for their sons–and their problem is that the world has moved on. I’d regard myself as a natural PP voter (although that…
What has driven Margaret Marks to cook and, presumably, eat Indians? Since Ms Marks has quite clearly gone native, I suspect this of being some bizarre offshoot of Central Europe’s Orientalist anti-Tarzan industry: In Germany after World War I, Tarzan’s sales were so vast that a disgruntled local publisher printed a counter-Tarzan tract called Tarzan…
Towards the end of part 2 of Quixote, Sancho Panza is hailed by a German pilgrim who turns out to be Ricote, a Morisco from Sancho’s village. Ricote was driven out of Spain by religious persecution and has spent his exile in France, Italy, and Germany, near Augsburg, where I found we might live with…
Not surprisingly, translators and interpreters and “personnel of international organisations” (not budget-hungry Eurocrats, surely?) constitute the largest groups of publicly acknowledged signatories of this call to wage war on mounting European institutional mono- and trilingualism (English, French, German) and promote the language of Julio Iglesias. (Via Carlos Ferrero.)
Shop deliveries free on foot in Leeds LS1-8 & LS13 Dismiss