Diacritiques

I interrupt this blog’s unscheduled silence because of a disturbing annoucement.

When I’m online, I almost constantly hang out on a few IRC chanels on the server irc.freenode.net (website). This message was broadcast this evening, about 10min ago:

[22:17] -christel- [Global Notice] On the 12th September Rob Levin, known to many as Freenode's lilo, was hit by a car while riding his bike. He suffered head injuries and passed away in hospital on the 16th. For more information please visit #freenode-announce

This is a horrific thing. May lilo rest in peace.

I can’t say I knew him, strictly speaking, though I certainly knew some snippets about the person who used to send those regular Global Notices. The last time I exchanged a few words with him was after a particularly vile attempt at character assassination, when I basically said I appreciated the work he was doing to run the freenode service. He was, like many who pour themselves into a somewhat idealistic project, a controversial figure. And he will be missed.

<chryss> .seen lilo
<phenny> chryss: I last saw lilo at 2006-09-09 00:53:53 UTC on #joiito

On Digg.

(Practically crossposted from upstairs.)

Update 3: To make this perfectly clear, there is no deadline. As long as the translated posts were published in June 2006.

Hell and damnation! I hate it when that happens — and this was indeed a bad time for things to go awry. No I didn’t forget the Carnival of Blog Translation, which I’ve agreed to host for the month of June. I’ve just been horribly snowed under with my new job and moving to the pleasant suburb of Brixton. So not only did I find myself too sleepy to blog, I even missed posts going missing and all but the most egregious server problems. Because there’ve been some.

Update 1: This post, too, is affected. It seems it’s up now — at least I hope so.

Be that as it may, I am horribly, horribly late for the June edition, which Angelo/Caelestis at Sauvage Noble so kindly suggested that I host. No; Liz Henry’s excellent initiative deserves better.

Still, all is not lost, maybe, and June’s not really quite finished yet, if you squint. So Bi- and Multilingual Bloggers of All Countries, Unite! Here are the rules:

1. Choose a blog post written in June 2006 and get permission to translate it. You can choose one of your own.
2. Translate it.
3. Post it on your blog.
4. All topics and language combinations are welcome.
5. Notify me, either by leaving a comment or trackback here, or by email to chris AT lascribe POINT net, or by Technorati-tagging your post. The notification should include: The URL, title and author’s name of the original post (in the source language), your name and blog URL, the URL and title of your translation.

Technorati-tagging? Like so: add this code to the end of your post, and I’ll automatically see it:

<a href="http://www.technorati.com/tag/carnivalofblogtranslation" rel="tag">carnivalofblogtranslation</a> or, if you prefer,
<a href="http://www.technorati.com/tag/carnival_of_blog_translation" rel="tag">Carnival of Blog Translation</a>

The deadline is

Sunday, the 32nd of June 2006 at 23:99

(whichever your time zone).

Update 2:Liz Henry herself has come through wonderfully. Read her translation of Yuyu’s post Tormentas de verano: Music, roses, and thunderstorms. To be read while listening to Paula and Odile’s very beautiful Coplilla de la rosa amarilla.

But in fact, I’ll post whatever comes in, even later. I’ll do two translations myself, to make up for my tardiness. And if I fail to give satisfaction as a hostess, I’ll accept 100 lashes with a Unicode string as a punishment.

My landlady here in London — I’m renting her spare room while looking for a more permanent place — left for a week-long business trip early this morning. So I wasn’t surprised to find a message from her with last-minute instructions. Understanding it, however, posed an unexpected problem.

The first half of the message was clear enough — an invitation to help myself to any vegetables left in the kitchen. Very nice. The second part, though, read as follows:

Pocket go big bag on kitchen floor can be pulled off stems and 10 mins soak go cold water will revive it

My esteemed readers are probably just as baffled as I was. But I had two or three additional pieces of information at my disposal which, after a minute’s contemplation and a search of the kitchen floor, allowed me to unravel the mystery:

1. My landlady is a native speaker of English and an editorial writer by profession.
2. She is an avid gardener and very much into fresh home-grown food.
3. The message arrived via SMS (”text message”) on my mobile (AmE: cell) phone.

From 1. we conclude that this was not another case of wood flower picks sea cucumber hoof, but simply the result of her being in a hurry.

Number 2 confirms or at least suggests that the topic of the message was garden vegetables (as opposed to, say, voodoo).

Finally, 3. sends us on the right track as to what went wrong. Indeed, over here in the UK, most mobile phones are equipped with predictive text input systems, T9 and the like. And these systems are usually rather crudely based on global word frequencies, without taking context into account. I’ve noticed myself that whenever I’m texting “me”, my own (Nokia) phone will invariably prefer “of”. And the other day, I nearly replied to a text inquiring about my whereabouts saying that I was “at H&M buying rocks”. (Do people really text so much about rocks?)

So “go” isn’t “go” at all — it’s “in”! Furthermore, the key with the letter P also houses Q, R and S. And wouldn’t you have thought it, under the kitchen table there was a carrier bag filled with a huge bunch of rather sorry looking greenery. Resolving two textonyms was all it took.

I’m typing this from the kitchen table — three cheers for wireless broadband — while the rocket (also called arugula or rugola, French: roquette, German: Rauke or Raukelkohl, Italian: rucola, ruccola, ruchetta or rughetta) is recovering in the sink. Here’s a photo of the revivification process about a third way through:

Enough salad to feed an army. Not to mention the other huge bag full of Swiss chard (French: blette, German: Mangold). I think I need a recipe.

Oh, and does anyone have an idea what that exotic fruit to the left of the tap might be, and how to prepare it? It doesn’t look like it’s going to survive the week either…

[The spell-checker didn’t know: texting and textonym; and it’s indeed arugula, not jugular.]

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For our second instalment let’s turn our attention to a bit of syntax. This sign adorns a narrow footpath from Charing Cross train station down to the river Thames: If we give the first sentence its final punctuation back and try to group together what goes together, we get, on the surface, this: [It [is an offence […]

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