Charming and unexpected vocabulary from many languages. Why did Persians need a word,
alghunjar, to express 'the feigned anger of a mistress'? Could there really have been that many insincere mistresses in Persia? Why does Russia need a word meaning, 'dealer in stolen cats'? Or 'someone with six fingers'? And who can resist the Chinese
xiaoxiao, meaning, 'the whistling and pattering of rain or wind'? "These are more than funny foreign vocabularies; they are tiny windows into the way other people live, and the obsessions that drive them."
[via]
posted by Slithy_Tove
on Oct 2, 2005 -
89 comments
Explosion Over the N-Word When Kanye West blasted President Bush’s treatment of poor black people in New Orleans after Katrina hit, the rapper unintentionally set off a hurricane of words in Florida.
The Independent Florida Alligator, the student newspaper, ran a cartoon last week that criticized West’s statements by showing him holding a large playing card marked “The Race Card,” and having Condoleezza Rice, the secretary of state, exclaim with scorn at West: “Nigga Please!”
posted by Postroad
on Sep 20, 2005 -
135 comments
Weasel words 'Spare Don Watson, author of Death Sentences from all of these weasely, wishy-washy, and worst of all, ugly bits of management-speak that have drifted out of consulting sessions and into the social realm.' Forbes.com.....................
Your favourite
spin doctoring ?
posted by johnny7
on Sep 6, 2005 -
31 comments
Communication Breakdown is a problem that often prevents doctors from treating immigrant patients effectively. Language and cultural barriers prevent patients from understanding doctors instructions, sharing their symptoms of illness, and even from being examined by the doctor in cases where religious beliefs prohibit contact with someone of the opposite gender.
posted by gregb1007
on Sep 6, 2005 -
9 comments
English as she is spoke : Infamous as the world's most ludicrously inept foreign phrasebook, the misbegotten work of Jose da Fonseca and Pedro Carolino was revived in a new edition by the Collins Library in March 2002. Some
background.
posted by dhruva
on Sep 4, 2005 -
18 comments
Language Corner by Columbia Journalism Review, is incredibly helpful when it comes to learning the English language's subtle nuances and rather obvious rules.
posted by riffola
on Aug 29, 2005 -
20 comments
Subtitles on the radio. Last night Radio 1, the BBC's flagship youth station, broadcast an hour of Welsh language music and chat. The webcast includes subtitles.
posted by ceiriog
on Aug 24, 2005 -
6 comments
A picture of English nouns is a map of 33,000 English nouns. Each tiny rectangle corresponds to a noun. The color of the rectangle has been assigned a color, based on an internet image search for that noun. The words are clustered so that similar words are near each other.
Gallery. (Java required)
posted by jikel_morten
on Aug 14, 2005 -
30 comments
As of today, the
German language has changed, ending a 10 year state of flux which has seen new spelling rules mixed with the old ones. Under the new system,
"extremely long compound words have been broken up, comma rules have been simplified, and in many cases a double-S replaces the old letter sign for the sound, which resembles a capital B." But given the strong resistance to the new rules from some in the German community, it may be a little premature to add the old German language to to the list of
lost languages (previously discußed
here) just yet.
Anyway, for Mefite linguaphiles interested in this significant and now seemingly permanent change to the German language, check out the
German spelling reform timeline.
posted by Effigy2000
on Aug 3, 2005 -
54 comments
Walter Miller's homepage Picked up recently via
kottke.org, this is a years-old webpage (not updated recently) detailing the miserable details of poor Walter's white trash existence. It deserves to be read by a whole new generation. The art of misspelling is taken to new heights.
posted by Holly
on Jul 30, 2005 -
11 comments
El Indio in Hispanic proverbial speech "The proverbial speech of Hispanic America preserves, even today, numerous traces of the interaction between explorers, conquerors, or settlers and the native populations they found in the various regions of the so-called New World"
posted by dhruva
on Jul 11, 2005 -
6 comments
cli·ché :: 1 : a trite phrase or expression; also : the idea expressed by it; 2 : a hackneyed theme, characterization, or situation; 3 : something (as a menu item) that has become overly familiar or commonplace
posted by anastasiav
on Jun 25, 2005 -
42 comments
Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby So you’ve got to know that synergy doesn’t actually mean synergy in this book. I can’t do normal synergy. No, in this book, synergy means cartoon foxes. What I’m saying is: this book will be starting off with an exorbitant amount of cartoon foxes.
And I will be counting on you to turn them into synergy.
Possibly the funniest computer programming book ever written.
posted by carmen
on Jun 3, 2005 -
17 comments
The Vepsa are a distinct ethnic people who live in the Russian territory of Karelia, on the border with Finland. They are also scattered throughout the Leningrad and Vologda regions of Russia. Before many were assimiliated to Russian, the Vepsa spoke their own distinct variant of Finno-Ugric. [See more inside]
posted by gregb1007
on May 3, 2005 -
14 comments
Lauris is the spirit of the office, irrespective weather those are the numerous jokes for any occasion he has in his luggage or a basket of autumn apples, which he has picked in the morning to remind the colleges about the beauty of the autumn.
Zane has chosen to live in a beautiful world of internal and external beauty, where fragrances and aromas are of importance, however the uppermost value are harmonious relations with the closest people.
We are all fans of mangled English
translations from
Asia, but there is a certain added beauty in this site for a Latvian law firm, which boasts "professional, fast and qualitative translations" while
"introducing a spirit of poetics in the daily routine of the office".
posted by szechuan
on Apr 13, 2005 -
11 comments
TORK! For your friday flash fun, a game about...linguistics? Learn a language, have some fun. Now if only I could figure out how to work that damn oven....
posted by jearbear
on Mar 25, 2005 -
31 comments
Frank Luntz GOP Playbook Now Online: No Downloads, Searchable Text I can't stress enough the importance of reading this document. It is absolutely amazing how politicos co-opted so much of our language and led us down the path to THEIR agenda.
Unfortunately, the monstrous PDF file previously available for download made that a 'challenging' endeavor. Thus, I thought it was very important to bring to everybody's attention the existence of an online, readable, searchable, text version of Frank Luntz’s Playbook. It is a masterpiece of manipulation and an historic political document.
posted by jb_thms
on Mar 3, 2005 -
85 comments
Is your favorite
swear word losing its
potency? Stock up on some new ones with the
Swearsaurus, a "
vast array of swearing, profanity, obscenity, blasphemy, cursing, cussing, and insulting in a massive 165 languages"
posted by Quartermass
on Feb 27, 2005 -
21 comments
Malu cachu (that's Welsh, I'll leave the interpreting to you) - a comprehensive guide to swearing in 165 languages. This probably offers the most appeal to the younger crowd,
subverting classroom etiquette undetected--but it's not without its draw for the
inebriated.
It may also be a good idea to cross check your
business name before going global. A representative of
AmaCorp visiting Japan is likely to catch a few odd looks.
posted by ThePrawn
on Jan 27, 2005 -
14 comments
Do you speak American? The companion website to a PBS series, full of interactive language and dialect tools. You can
map your attitudes about regional correctness,
guess the speaker's home, learn about
American varieties, track the
history of certain words, hear
samples of regional dialects, and more.
Further reading:
Dialect Map of American English [
image],
Slanguage's local terms, and this collection of
local phrases.
Previously on MetaFilter: The Dialect Survey (and results), The Speech Accent Archive, Pop vs. Soda.
posted by stopgap
on Jan 20, 2005 -
13 comments
Looking for
ohibitutic and
purspermal words, but need something a little more
rhymmeal?
Cromulac might just be the
tingulen you're
spranning for.
posted by Robot Johnny
on Jan 7, 2005 -
17 comments
Collins Word Exchange "At Collins we pride ourselves on reflecting current language, used by real English speakers across the world."
Collins have launched a public forum designed for (amongst other things) discussing 'new' words and the legitamacy of their inclusion in official dictionaries.
Chav is probably on its way, but I'm no intellectual snob, but
bounce-backability? Even I'd balk at that one.
And, just remember kids,
flip-flopper is not valid for use in scrabble
posted by qwerty155
on Dec 16, 2004 -
8 comments
Etymology-wise, which hormone is an island? What word both denotes a prime and euphemizes Satan? What word denotes "the future" and abbreviates the unknown? Is urine pith? These are some of the questions from "
Moot: The World's Toughest Language Game," a homemade and little-known board game for lovers of words.
Some puzzles are available online; there are a few more available on a page detailing the
interesting story behind the game's creation. You can
sign up to have a new language puzzle e-mailed to you every week.
posted by painquale
on Dec 4, 2004 -
8 comments
More on arithmetic in the Amazon The 10/15 issue of Science has the official publication of Peter Gordon's work on numerical cognition among the Pirahã, and a companion article by Pierre Pica et al. on similar research among another Amazonian tribe, the Mundurukú. What with the U.S. election and the discovery of H. Floresiensis, this is not getting nearly as a much play as the pre-publication back in August of Peter Gordon's work.
Brian Butterworth has an
piece in the Guardian about both articles, and I've put some links, quotes and diagrams
here.
Compared to the reports on the Pirahã, the Mundurukú people, language, and experiments are all somewhat different, although the conclusions are broadly similar.
posted by myl
on Oct 31, 2004 -
19 comments
