A famous German dictionary company has published a new book, Langenscheidt Deutsch-Frau Frau-Deutsch which was written by a 32-year-old German stand-up comedian, Mario Barth. His earlier book was called Männer sind Schweine Frauen aber auch (Men are pigs, but so are women). He’s from Berlin. [via Deutsche Welle]
I’ve been spending less time writing entries for this blog, and more time frittering time away on two or three word-oriented boards:
Quicker turn-around and no spicy ham product in the commentary. The end of blogging as I know it? Hardly. On the other hand, yesterday I heard blogs mentioned on the CBC. I hear they have electricity up in the Great White North, too, eh?
Geoffrey K. Pullum, over at Language Log, has an interesting theory about a central European brand name ZerGüt being a kind of Turkish pun. (He notes that his pickles came from Turkey.) I, too, have marvelled at the strangely inappropriate umlaut in this brand name. I picked up some sour cherries the other day at a Russian grocery store on the peninsula. But the thing that struck me about ZerGüt is that the cherries in question came from Bulgaria and that the ZerGüt sister company is called Indo-European Foods. (And that IE is a registered trademark!) I thought the erring diæresis was simply another case of Häagen-Dazs / Mötley Crüe punctuating panache.
You’ve all seen those red and blue maps of the US of A, right? Well, Ishbadiddle has created some alternate maps correlating size of state to number of electoral votes and then some. [via Kerim at Keywords] Wonder why the liberal media hasn’t picked up on it yet? Too busy running stories about cats stuck in trees and the latest diet fad murders no doubt.
And, while I was trying to ignore the failure of German Spelling Reform in the Bundesrepublik [via Arts & Letters Daily], I ran across these storm clouds boiling across the blogosphere: Steven Krause blogging about pseudonymous blogging. Read the entry it’s quite interesting. That reminds me, has the regime-in-need-of-a-change apologized to those who have been wrongfully arrested for wearing anti-Bush T-shirts and suchlike at any of the president’s pep rallies? NB: free speech has been suspended until morale improves. [via Frogs and Ravens]
Wow, another Berkeley linguistics blog, though Russell Lee-Goldman is studying in Japan right now. [via Ablaut Time]
A new linguistics blog! and it’s an historical linguistics blog! And the blogger, David Mortensen, is just a hop, skip, and a jump away in real life. Over at my alma mater in Berkeley. I see he’s working with James Matisoff on STEDT (the Sino-Tibetan Etymological Dictionary and Thesaurus project). I got to be about a decade and a half ago when I ran into Matisoff at a Macworld conference across the bay in San Francisco and discussed how he was using a database on the project. (Was it Filemaker?) I see that Mortensen is also studying Hmong and Mien languages, of which there are a lot of informants here in the East Bay. I look forward to more of his postings. [via Languagehat]
1. Was the film, on which my GGU co-worker Jim Bowlin worked, before he moved to Arizona, and which was directed by local independent filmmaker Caveh Zahedi, the unfinished I Am a Sex Addict or was it another flick? [via Fried Society via Language Log] 2. Which came first: the goose-egg or the foie gras? 3. [via Filmbrain] A nice Japanese take on the Tokyo film scene, in international English. 4. TBD. 5. The first steps towards democracy?
Years ago, there used to be a sign on 880 around Hayward that simply read stop casting porosity in big block letters. Something to do with casting metal, I always assumed. I wonder what became of it? I don’t remember seeing it for over a decade now.
I ran across this interesting article [via YIVO] on how Tomas Jelinek, a Czech Jewish official, brought John Kerry news of the deaths of his paternal great uncle and aunt in the Holocaust.
Jelinek also was in New York to launch a fund-raising drive for a new $6 million senior home for Holocaust survivors in Prague, called Project Hagibor. The planned 60-bed facility aims to provide round-the-clock care for some of Prague's estimated 1,500 Holocaust survivors.
Former Czech President Vaclav Havel is behind the project.
“In the history of our country, the biggest killing of Czech citizens in one day happened in Auschwitz-Birkenau on March 8, 60 years ago,” Havel wrote in a letter of support for the project. “Entire families, including children, were killed. The only thing that made them guilty was being Jewish.”