Diacritiques

Isn’t there an extraneous apostrophe in the logo of this Firefox extensions repository?

Click on the thumbnail (or look at the site itself) to see if you can find other slightly misplaced — or at least superfluous — apostrophes.

I also wonder if the pun on “experience” (Firefox extension file names end in .xpi) doesn’t work better for native speakers of, e.g., Romance or Germanic languages (among which, Dutch) than for native anglophones.

But that’s a facet of World English. Over all the whingeing about the nefarious effects of Anglicisms on our respective languages, those of us who live in continental Europe might just be forgetting the liberties we take with English.

[I’ve considered giving this post the English title Pragmatic breakdown because breakdown is just so much more expressive and general than the French panne, which mostly refer to cars breaking down. But the event this is going to be about happened in the French blogosphere, so a French title is it.]

Yes, I know, I owe you all a number of posts. News on the “the/a” investigation, for starters — and indeed, two posts are planned out and will make their way here in due course. And a redux of last Wednesday’s Paris Carnet (the more laid-back of two regular local blogger meet-ups), which brought in a surprisingly rich harvest of poteaux roses — French eggcorns; meanwhile greetings to Beleg (the talented visual artist), Jacques (the fellow collector of linguistic strangenesses) and Mr Affleurements#[1] (the inspiring writer), who provided one of the most pleasant conversations I can remember in a long time.

And then there are the little things that just want to be blogged — another one or two in the pipeline.

But first I must reply to the horrible slander I’ve been the target of, on the part of the traitorous Michel. The link leads to his account of a “conversation” we had, and it’s really rather embarrassing for me.

The setting is a WiFi-enabled pub where I was playing with plotting data while waiting for Michel to arrive so that we could have a bite to eat before heading over to the Paris Carnet meetup.

Here is the English translation:

Chris : Ah, this is better; sounds really like a “the” now.
Michel : But can you hear anything over the noise?
Chris : Sorry? No, I haven’t eaten yet.
Michel : …OK, I think you just answered my question. :)
Chris : Hmm? If this reassures you, I think your chances are quite good.

In my defense: I didn’t say “sounds like a ‘the’” (”sonne comme un ‘the’”) but “looks like a ‘the’” (”ressemble à un ‘the’”). Indeed, I wasn’t listening to anything, just looking at a plot. Of vowels. In the word the. Didn’t even have my headphones out. Second, Michel’s voice is in a range that I feel quite hard to correctly perceive in noisy surroundings. He must have realised that I asked him to repeat a number of times over the evening. (Maybe I do need to get my ears checked out after all.) Third, my last line actually makes sense in the context of a conversation we had a day earlier on IRC.

(And all through our meal he kept talking about “a quesiton [I] hadn’t answered”, and I thought he was referring to last Sunday’s blogger picnic…)

A study in misunderstanding.

P.S.: Michel knew more than he probably cared for about the “the/a” stuff since he got me the installation CD I needed after I nearly wiped out my Linux system in a misguided brute-force attempt to update the sound drivers and libraries because some of the software was giving me trouble… and of course he has my eternal gratitude for that.

[1]: … who complimented me in such a charming way on the collection of poteaux roses that I promptly forgot to ask for his name.

I’ve played around with anagrams of my name before, and even had “A Chisel Writing” in the tagline for a while.

But now Jean Véronis takes the name-anagram fun one step further with his pen-name generator. (Yes, in French, but you won’t have any problems figuring out how to work it.)

Unlike the previous anagrams, these don’t need to be composed of words that have meaning. Instead, they ought to sound well as first and last names.

For me, the results have a satisfyingly Germanic or Slavic consonance — the first is what my real ethnic origins are, the second what I’m rather often taken for. The only thing that is less than ideal is that the first names too often sound male. Or maybe that’s just for me.

So … what’s the future nom de blog going to be? Walsh IRGIC? (Can I add diacritics?) Wira GHLISC? Lach WIGRIS?

Or slightly longer… Heilwig CATRINS? Leigha WISCRINT? (I like the second one.)

But nothing beats the full-length version: Gilchrist WANNE-ZIARASKIF.

BBC Radio 4 has a new programme#[1] on language which will air once a week through August and September: Word 4 Word . It is part of the BBC Voices project and produced with the Open University, so this might be quite interesting. Quoting Dermot Murnaghan off the Voices page: Language is a badge. […]

Céline at Naked Translations knows a retired Canon — the clerical rank, not the weapon — who drew her the most marvellous sketch of a typical English church, with all the parts labelled. I downloaded it for future reference.

Reading this post on Margaret Marks’ Transblawg, I realised I had no I idea that outside Germany, if you have someone cremated after their death, you don’t have to give the ashes a proper burial (in a graveyard, or at sea, or whatever the options are the law provides for). The land of Saxony-Anhalt is […]

You know, a little over a year ago, I was wondering whether blogging was an activity I should take up. I was hesitant for a while because it seemed you had to be either your own journalist, which I am not, or to spend a considerable amount of time gazing at your own navel. I was, […]

Some of Mark Liberman’s recent Language Log posts were dealing with dealing with reduced vs. unreduced vowels in the pronunciation of the articles a and the. (Reduced: [ə] and [ðə]; unreduced: [ɛɪ] (or [ɛj]) and [ði:]). In his latest post, he examined a G. W. Bush speech and found that, as other readers had claimed, […]

Trouvailles : Quel plaisir de faire violence à ce qui auripile nos oreilles. (lien) […] il se donne un genre qui m’auripile et je ne supporte pas sa façon de massacrer les chansons de nos grands chanteurs français. (lien) La n’est pas la question, mais ça m’auripile de vous entendre dire: “Attention aux motos Ecoles”, vous en avez eu […]

Continuation du billet précédent, coupé en deux pour raison de longueur excessive. Voici donc la liste des poteaux roses français : héraut » héros : Un héros de la lutte contre le SRAS élu président de l’Association médicale chinoise (lien) ôter » hauter : Mon père avait sélectionné avec soin deux sabres pour nous hauter la vie, […]