In first grade, the “Mr. Men” books were all the rage. The short length and taxonomic/essentialist nature of the series and characters appealed to me very greatly. And though many of the books taught me terms for vices that I didn’t know (fussy, mischievous, nosey), the only book I could not understand was Mr. Uppity. [...]
I’m taking a day to catch up on some of my more neglected Google reader feeds, and that includes catching up on Language Log. Today I saw a post by Victor Mair that in strong language advocates for discarding character learning as a component of beginning Mandarin study.
Amen. Though my ponderous doodles of Chinese characters [...]
Vincas sent me a photo he took of a sign in Užupis naming the republic in all five historical languages of the city:
UŽUPIO RESPUBLIKA (Lithuanian)
ЗАРАЧАНСКАЯ РЭСПУБЛІКА (Belarusian)
רעפּובליק פון זאַרעטשע (Yiddish)
РЕСПУБЛИКА ЗАРЕЧЬЕ (Russian)
REPUBLIKA ZARZECZA (Polish)
Here we have four different grammatical ways of expressing “Republic of Užupis.” The Lithuanian and Polish take two nouns and create a [...]