Diacritiques

The French National Library proposes, among a wealth of digital documents that are available on their site, a beautifully done online exhibition: The Bestiary in Medieval Illumination. English and Spanish versions available. Via Viewropa.

According to an article (fr) in the French newspaper Libération, rural Colombians could substitute growing a (pretty) white flower, Caliphruria subedentata for the (relatively) lucrative but devastating coca. The plant produces an alkaloid that is sought-after for making anti-Alzheimer drugs and grows under about the same conditions on the slopes of the Andes. At the moment, the price of this substance is so high that even relatively modestly sized crops could sustain a family. The details of how to grow the plant are being worked out by Fabio Cabezas, a chemist with the University of Cauca and the discoverer of the virtues of Caliphruria.

If this works out, it would be more satisfying than the relatively helpless gesture of buying Colombian fair-trade coffee (the taste of which, however, I like). Now someone still has to find a viable option for Afghan farmers.

Update 2: The language was Yakut, and the solution was supposed to have been easy. Hum. I’m doubtful as to the the latter. Palimpsest has been updated. Who’d have known that the people of Yakutia have spiffy pop music radio shows like this? [The original entry was dated 2004/11/15.]

Update 1: Now this was really hard. I’m by no means sure, that is to say, I’d give a 20% chance that this is Bulgarian, 20% for Uzbek, a 30% chance that it’s Kurdish (which is my stab at a solution), and a 30% chance that it’s something completely different. Details, transcription, and lots of personal thought processes on my wiki.

Already a third language quiz by Mark Liberman at Language Log! But if you read this blog, you probably know already. This offering sounds deceptively simple. Allez! We have got one week this time.

Over the last few hours, ËŒser.É™nˈdɪp.ɪ.ti received 19 pieces of comment spam containing philosophical quotations by Ernest Becker, Annie Besant, Henri Bergson, Peter Fosl, Emma Goldman, John Burdon Sanderson Haldane, David Hume, Milan Kundera, Sophia Loren, John Stuart Mill, Friedrich Nietzsche, Plutarch, Hilary Putnam, Ayn Rand, George Santayana, Socrates and Herbert Spencer. We would […]

Or maybe the title of this post ought to read “Pertannual insubdurience”. Why? You’ll see. I am dismayed. I care about language as much as the next blogger, probably a lot more. And I enjoy reading a good rant, too. But there is an entire cottage industry dedicated to bewailing the decline, decrepitude, dissolution, and […]

Rock and Pop, that is. We knew already that your brain’s boosted by listening to Bach and Brahms. There is, at the very least, quite a bit of anecdotal evidence suggesting that the task of decoding allusions in their favourite songs can send kids to the library or have them start earnest dinner-table discussions with their […]

In yesterday’s Guardian, Ian Sample, a science correspondent, writes about an intriguing approach to pinning down those intractable differences between national styles in (classical) music. Researchers from San Diego attribute them to the composers’ respective native languages: [The researchers] found that English had more of a swing than French, a rhythm produced by […]

Les coups doux de la sérendipité (faites défiler, l’explication est en bas de page) m’ont amené une découverte merveilleuse. Il y a un nouveau blogue francophone s’intéressant à la langue  — il y en a franchement pas assez pour l’instant. C’est Langue sauce piquante, le blogue des correcteurs du Monde, Martine Rousseau et Olivier Houdart. […]

Il n’y a même pas un mois que nous fîmes connaissance avec Homo floresiensis, aussi appelé « Hobbit de Flores Â», l’hominidé qui vécut il y a 18.000 ans, ou même beaucoup plus récemment, sur l’île de Flores, en Indonésie. Aujourd’hui nous découvrons Pierolapithecus catalaunicus, mis au jour par un bulldozer en Espagne, ancestre potentiel des […]

Back in September, Language Log had a lot of interesting stuff on the obstacles faced by language communities that speak a Turkic language in the Soviet Union, between intense alphabetisation and soviet-style nationalist language policies. Today I am reading in this AP wire story (fr) that the trials of the Tatar-speaking part of the […]