Monthly Archives: February 2011

You could run franchises at railway stations

Posted on 2011-02-28 by colin

Is there any finer food than cold roast potatoes? Of course not. You could set up stalls selling them. Called Boxing Day.

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I get the impression palindromes may be significantly easier in German

Posted on 2011-02-26 by colin

See http://www.taz.de/1/wahrheit/artikel/1/die-paprika-des-fakirs/.

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Metaphors we don’t get funded by

Posted on 2011-02-19 by colin

Calling something a winter, like the AI winter in the 1980s, implies that it will come around again. When, I wonder, is the next AI winter due? And will it be caused by Semantic Web hype? The only winter this … Continue reading →

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Another language with /?/

Posted on 2011-02-17 by colin

I’m sure someone told me when I was quite young that it was just Welsh that had /?/. Then I read about Zulu. Then I discovered that Icelandic has a word-final /?/. Today I see that Liangshan Yi, which takes … Continue reading →

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??

Posted on 2011-02-06 by colin

Read as michigo in Japanese where it means “osprey”. But do ospreys ever go ?? (guan1guan1)? They have a high-pitched peeping quite inappropriate to a bird of prey. Matt No-Sword translates ?? as “robot waterfowl”, which you can imagine saying … Continue reading →

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Beer words are geographical not genetic

Posted on 2011-02-05 by colin

BEER: Faeroese, English, French, Dutch, German, Italian, Greek, Bulgarian, Romanian. ALE: Icelandic, Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, Finnish, Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian. CERVEZA: Welsh, (Basque), Spanish, Catalan. GARAGARDO: Basque LEANN: Gaelic, Irish. PIVO: Polish, Czech, Slovak, Slovene, Serbocroat, Russian. S?R: Hungarian. This isn’t … Continue reading →

Posted in maunderings | 6 Comments

Native speaker incompetence

Posted on 2011-02-04 by colin

On sentence-initial interrogative particles, I said: This is unusual among Indo-European languages in Europe, Latvian being another exception. forgetting the example I knew fine from my native Lothian Region (as it was at the time), “eh”. I don’t recall seeing … Continue reading →

Posted in tancat i tallat | 1 Comment

Sentence initial interrogative particle

Posted on 2011-02-04 by colin

I’ve only just noticed that Catalan has a sentence-initial interrogative particle, que. This is unusual among Indo-European languages in Europe, Latvian being another exception. In the Latvian case I’d assumed it was due to a Livonian substrate, like Estonian kas. … Continue reading →

Posted in tancat i tallat | 2 Comments