Diacritiques

Tristan Nitot (se) demande comment dire « Holy shit! » en allemand, l’office fédéral allemand pour la sécurité informatique venant de recommander Opera ou Mozilla/Firefox.

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This is the third time the following has happened to me. I see a particularly obscure headline in the feed aggregator I use for reading news and blogs (Bloglines — I am quite happy with the service) and of course hasten to blog it. But checking the original on the news outlet’s site leads to an article with a different, usually quite understandable title. Do they think they are going to escape this blogger’s sharp-nailed keyboard-striking fingertips? They won’t any longer.

Today’s confusion arises from the headline Pole seals walk treble. “Furry maritime critters living right on the pole?” I wonder. “Walking funny?” No, as it turns out. The BBC article in question talks about the men’s race walk results at the Olympics. Still, I am not sure how it is possible to seal a hat-trick.

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Yet another English audio document in an accent other than Estuary English (also known as “BBC English ”) or what is sometimes called “General American”: Here are excerpts from several of poems by Robert Burns read in a Scottish accent.

Via Blogging in Paris, from where Claude Covo-Farchi remarks on the “translation” of the film title Ae Fond Kiss into Just A Kiss for the French audience. Not that this only happens in France. In the USA, the Swedish film Fucking Åmål, a sweet girl-meets-girl story, came out disguised as Show Me Love. The original title doesn’t refer to sexual intercourse, but reflects one of the protagonists’ opinion of her home town.

The other day, Dr Dave at unknowngenius passionately disputed something I had said earlier. My crime? Having suggested that in Terence’s line Homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto. the word homo should be translated as human being. I should, of course, know better than to reply to a post in which the term “PC” […]

Another WotW, for the only reason that I stumbled over it two days ago. This one is in French, so you might want to read the full story in the French version of this post. Moineau de Lesbie, literally Lesbia’s sparrow is the title of a bust of Rachel (Elizabeth-Rachel Félix, dite Elisa) (1821-1858), who was […]

As you can see on the left, I have taken a leaf, no, a page out of rogblog and added links to “word of the day” services. The Robert link is much less slick than the others, though, and I will have to change the code every few days by hand. Is there really no […]

#wordpress is an irc channel, ie a real-time discussion forum, for users of the WordPress blogging software. Its raison d’être is to provide help, advice and support, and it counts people from all over the world among its regulars, confused beginners and lead developers alike. Conversation doesn’t stick to blogging or programming questions, though. What […]

The Tensor at Tenser, said the Tensor (if I’m going to link to him or her in the future I will have to find a better naming scheme) has an enjoyable post on pseudo-IPA in advertising. You will have to be able to view phonetic symbols in your browser. Look up to this site’s logo […]

I half-misquoted Adolf Muschg in the last post; at the very least, I was being imprecise. His actual words were “[Die Rechtschreibreform] ist unnötig wie ein Kropf.” Unnötig (unnecessary), not überflüssig (superfluous). Former German federal president Roman Herzog, however, did call it “überflüssig wie ein Kropf” (as superfluous as a goiter). Meanwhile on […]

I finally caught up with my favourite blogs. How hard it is to get back on top of your reading after missing just ten days’ worth of blogging! Anyway, here are some commentaries inspired by the latest crop. Mark Liberman and Eric Bakovic continue Language Log’s campaign against the regrettably pervasive phenomenon of accent prejudice. Their […]