This was earlier this week. I don't know how effective this sort of event normally is, but this year it was the day when George Best died.

Even by the most conservative estimates, domestic violence is much more widespread than the young-man-on-young-man violence the press has been so excited by this week. Oughtn't it to have a bit more press coverage, preferably not involving the editor of the Sun?

posted at: 19:24 | path: /maunderings | permanent link to this entry

Korean might be the ideal far-eastern language to teach to UK school children. Grammatically it is similar to Japanese, but unlike Japanese or Chinese it uses a script, Hangeul, based on consistent symbols for vowels and consonants.

A problem could be that Korean vocabulary written in Hangeul might not be as Memorable, in the Sellars and Yeatman sense, as CJK ideograms. One pleasing counterexample is the word for clothes, 옷, which is pronounced "os" and looks like a stick figure.

posted at: 17:02 | path: /CJK | permanent link to this entry

The ghosts in mediaeval libraries are chained to the shelves.

posted at: 16:32 | path: /aletheia | permanent link to this entry

is one of the infinitives of käy, pronounced in the same way as Scottish people say cowdah. This is both the custom among dairy farmers of not speaking to outsiders, and an elaborate padded seat for riding around on the backs of cattle.

posted at: 16:23 | path: /baltism | permanent link to this entry

I don't pay nearly enough attention to France. I have to pause and think before I can distinguish Nicolas Sarkozy and Michel Houellebecq. This doesn't mean that I should pay any attention to whichever of the two is the novelist who lives in Ireland, of course.

posted at: 16:27 | path: /hexagone | permanent link to this entry

There's a huge amount of received opinion about German in the UK, and I'm yet to come across a single piece of it that's not thoroughly misleading. Take this article in The Observer, for example.

The writer claims in the first paragraph that "you can pretty much make up [English] as you go along... unlike French and German, which are made rigid from committees deciding from on high whether or not new words or spellings should be admitted to the official lexicon."

Unlike the OED, I suppose. The writer also seems to assume that whereas we, in the UK, write down words without checking whether they're in the dictionary, foreigners can't.

Looking no further than the headlines in yesterday's taz, I find Asyl im Ego-Shooter-Land, Knietief im Prollfloor and Leben in Call Center, none of which have been cleared by the Dudenredaktion or the Rat für deutsche Rechtschreibung, or hyphenated consistently with one another.

All I can recommend is that if you're British, and about to mention German as an example of something, check first with a German or speaker of German. If you can't find either of those, use a better example.

posted at: 10:27 | path: /D | permanent link to this entry

This is the sound at the very beginning of Hancock's Half Hour, isn't it?

posted at: 20:44 | path: /baltism/redwhitered | permanent link to this entry