There’s a frustrating article by Tim Parks up on the NYRBlog now about the the dull new global novel. I’ll save the breezy history of the novel Parks provides (making an economic and democratic case for moving to the vernacular from Latin) and furnish his closing two paragraphs, which turn the whine into vermouth:
If culture-specific [...]
Continue reading about Should one mourn national literature(s)?
I’m positive people are way smarter about this than I am, but I only alluded to what I see as three reasons for studying dying languages in my previous post on the documentary The Linguists. Our linguists in the movie, Anderson and Harrison, sketch out basically three reasons, and movie addresses the three reasons over [...]
Language Log has been getting me excited about the documentary The Linguists for quite some time now, but the DVD costs $300, and it didn’t seem to air on any local PBS stations. Luckily, the movie is finally available (for a short time) online at babelgum.com. I strongly encourage people to watch this movie, as [...]
Continue reading about Disappearing languages and documentaries
Last year while speaking to a professor about Obama, she mentioned that she had been collecting “flair” pertaining to Obama, and I somehow immediately understood that to mean either real, true baubles or buttons pertaining to the man (like those I continue to see daily on my commute), or, rather, Obama-themed “pieces of flair” from [...]
I posted on Lithchat a link to a Cafe Blogas article from today about an old book of Lithuanian erotica that includes a quick excerpt (with my translation into English) that simply has to be read to be believed.
It’s not that the language is forced (though perhaps it is simplistic). It’s that the topic and [...]
Language Log posted about the Typealyzer last month, and only today (while waiting for some video to digitize) did I get around to playing with it. The Typealyzer scans a blog and then decides what kind of Myers-Briggs personality type the blog represents. I’m allegedly an ENFP, so I thought it would be neat to [...]
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 [...]
