Diacritiques

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.]

The latest batch of news from the “talking animals” department, and the exasperation it is met with by the linguabloggers reminds me that I neglected to post a particularly expressive keyphrase for a search engine hit that brought someone to my site back in January 2006:

talking seals|rats|dogs|unicorns|horses|animals language log

At the time, I thought this was better than Mark Liberman dopebook or occitan autocollant [autocollant means “sticker”] or apostrophe europe or couilles epingles [épingles means “needles”, and you can look up couilles yourselves]; and more constructive than chirac en prison mp3 download or les angicismes - un problème? or horiflamme shape or chinese words such as serendipity.

(And then there’s the search term that asks the thorniest question of all, and that, unsurprisingly, keeps returning in various guises: nutella masculin ou feminin. Dear visitors: it’s supposed to be masculine, but why, I don’t know.)

(I swear on my copy of CGEL that all these search terms are authentic. And I particularly liked the unicorns.)

(Beautiful French neologism to note down: googleries.)

My friend and resident Unicode advisor Patrick Hall, when not busy getting the blogosphere on the road towards mutually translating itself, has branched out into the comic strip genre. I fully admit that I lent a hand (or rather, a few brain cells) in the naming process, but the idea is all his: three-panel strips […]

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 […]

What misspellings can tell the reader about the underlying speech: This shop on Portobello Road had three or four hand-written signs indicating the prices of various types of “scalf”: No rhotic speaker (who would pronounce the R in scarf) would have chosen this spelling.

For once there is a good excuse for this latest bout of silence on Diacritiques: For the last month I’ve been in London, after a somewhat hurried move across the Channel. Indeed, if everything goes well, I’m here to stay. I manage to be insanely busy just settling in, searching for permanent work and in […]

Some time ago, on the occasion of doing other editing/proofreading work, I reconnected with Project Gutenberg, and in particular the excellent network of distributed proofreaders — the folks who bring you the wonderful Project Gutenberg eBooks. Poking around among the current projects, I came across a curious Victorian novel written by Jessie Fothergill and called […]

From Alternet (emphasis mine): When the U.S. State Department released its annual report on human rights on Wednesday, countries like Iran, Pakistan and Zimbabwe scored very poorly, as they have for many years past. But trumpeting these countries’ shoddy rights’ records was apparently no disincentive to prevent the United States […]

What about Gold silver lotus root silk fries shrimp fucks? Carbon burns black bowel? Maybe Benumbed hot Huang fries belly silk? Or a Good to eat mountain? It’s like Patrick Hall said: the worst-translated restaurant menu ever. (The link comes with a health warning — it can bring on an asthma attack if you are asthmatic.) P.S.: […]