Diacritiques

Sorry for today’s layout upheaval. There were a number of css bugs that needed fixing and problems that only showed up in Internet Explorer, which is not available in my setup. For once, it was not all IE’s fault. Those nifty new navigation-cum-language-changing bars were more difficult to implement than I had thought. I learnt a lot about the obscure science (or art?) of clearing floats. (If you you’ve never heard of it, be glad. I won’t even try to translate the term into French.)

Thankfully, with the help of Root at the 404! and the great people in the #wordpress irc channel the worst errors seem to be corrected now. How, we aren’t quite sure. Or in Root’s words:

I am reading your css but to tell you the truth I have never really understood what is holding your layout together, so I am looking for variations in something I do not understand anyway

Well, neither do I. :-)

You stumble into a room, by chance, and before your eyes appears a wondrous display. As you get closer, amazing events start to unfold. You savour the sounds, words, images, and when they seem wind down you think the curtain is about to fall. But no, the scene just shifts, and new marvels materialise. And all this happens not once, but several times over, each unlike the others.

This is how I felt last night when I discovered this site (thanks to soc.motss’s Corry W.). It belongs to the Musée de la civilisation in Québec. It’s bilingual. And it’s astonishing.

(Notes: You need Macromedia Flash to view the site. Without Flash, you’ll still be able to look at John James Audubon’s 435 magnificent engravings. The image on the right is a very small portion taken from one of them, © Musée de la civilisation. I use it in the same sense and spirit in which I would quote from a text.)

ˌser.ənˈdɪp.ɪ.ti  is getting more and more bilingual! Thanks to noprerequisite’s language picker plugin (and my fiddling with the template) reading this blog in the language of your choice has become much easier. You have two options:

1. Imagine you are reading a post that exists in both English and French and you’d like to see the French version: simply switch back and forth between the two languages by clicking on the link “Lire la version française de ce billet“ that is displayed at the top and bottom of the post. The language setting for all the other posts you might access later (I’m optimistic and hope you are reading more than just one post) will not be changed.
2. You can also globally change your preferred language setting from English to French and vice versa by clicking on “FR” or “EN” on the red navigation bar above each post. If you choose “FR”, the French version (if there is one) of every post you access will be displayed. Unilingual posts will of course appear in whichever language they are written in.

If you run into any problems, please leave a comment or send an email. I need your feedback!

Ellipsis Eclipses is the title of a work of art that will soon embellish the English town of Newcastle upon Tyne. I am mentioning it because pronouncing its name ten times a day might help people who want to improve their spoken English master the notoriously difficult lax i-sound [ɪ]. Just try it: [ɪˈlɪp.sɪs ɪˈklɪp.sɪz […]

You’d think the CIA were presenting ironclad evidence after receiving reports of interviews with an English-speaking Iraqi defector who claimed to be able to provide first-hand information on mobile biological weapons labs? You’d be wrong. Not if the interviews were conducted in English and Arabic by German intelligence officers, translated into German, and finally “translated […]

The linguists at Language Log have coined the word eggcorn, which refers to a particular kind of lapsus. An eggcorn is created by speakers (or writers) who, when searching for a word the meaning and pronunciation of which they know but the etymology and the spelling of which they have forgotten or never learnt, […]

ˌser.ənˈdɪp.ɪ.ti  has recently added a collection of free online dictionaries to its menu section on the left-hand side of this page. So why is the Académie française’s famous dictionary absent from the list? Because its online version is nothing short of a disgrace, an ergonomic nightmare, pitifully designed and unworthy of any reputable institution. If […]

BBC News held a caption competition for this picture showing Colin Powell, the US Secretary of State, singing and dancing to the Village People’s YMCA at this year’s ASEAN security meeting. The winners are here. Apparently, this is a tradition the government delegates can’t avoid. Don’t miss the (low-quality) video, but careful, I found […]

Updated version following up a comment. Scroll down! Open the Iliad and you find that the Greeks referred to their goddess Hera as βοῶπις (bo-ôpis), i.e. cow-eyed. A 19th century scholar must have translated this as “ox-eyed” – the term is still around – but I frankly doubt he was on-target. Homer and his contemporaries weren’t […]

Here is Steve Bell’s (the Guardian cartoonist’s) account of Mr Kerry’s choice for a potential future vice president. It might be slightly frustrating for politically active US citizens who are deeply involved with the differences between the candidates, insofar as they are at all interested in what Europeans think. But face it, right now […]