Committing suicide by strangling yourself with a bedsheet is now known as “asymmetrical warfare” –
“They are smart. They are creative, they are committed. They have no regard for life, neither ours nor their own. I believe this was not an act of desperation, but an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us,” [...]
The Liberal Avenger sent me a link to a a BBC story about a tuna fish, found in Mombasa, Kenya, which has what (supposedly) looks like a snippet of Koranic verse on it:
Supposedly, the markings on this tuna fish spell out a phrase from the Koran:
ﻮأﻨﺕ ﺨﻴﺭ اﻠﺭاﺰﻗﻴﻥ
wa-anta khayyiru r-raaziqiina
And you are the best of [...]
The “miracle Allah fish” phenomenon has hit the news just a couple days before the 1st of April; the fish could have literally, not just figuratively, been poissons d’avril.
I saw it on Michelle Malkin’s site, where she, predictably, managed to make a complete fucking ass out of herself:
So, finding Allah’s name on sea life [...]
Are any of you, readers, familiar with the Pimsleur family of language-learning products and courses?
I am deeply skeptical of the “Pimsleur approach” –
You really can learn everything you need to speak [language X] fluently in only 10 hours! Numerous studies have revealed that in every country, native-speakers use only about 2,500 distinct words [...]
How do you remember which months have how many days, readers? Do you use some version of the mnemonic device that most English-speakers learned as children:
Thirty days hath September,
April, June, and November.
All the rest have thirty-one,
Except for February alone.
There seem to be about eight zillion variations of this poem floating around. It dates [...]
Yesterday I mentioned the Maltese language. If you’re interested, here is some more information about Maltese, and a sample (thanks to Versteegh’s The Arabic Language (2001), a very handy and readable reference work).
The Ethnologue reports that there were some 300,000 speakers of Maltese in 1975. The Wikipedia entry says there are 400,000. [...]
Yesterday I wrote about foreign-language “proficiency.” Today, there’s an article in the Washington Post “Outlook” section about the United States’ shortage of proficient Arabic-speakers. This is a good article; it sums up the major issues in a nutshell pretty tidily.
This is interesting:
The Foreign Service classifies language ability into five levels, with “1″ [...]
How long does it take for an English-speaker to become “proficient” in Mandarin Chinese? An NYT article cites a statistic from the FSI:
Some parents here [in Chicago] worry at first about how relevant the Chinese classes are and whether they will be too difficult. The Foreign Service Institute, which trains American diplomats, ranks Chinese [...]
My friend The Liberal Avenger alerted me to this story, which seems to be making ripples in the blogosphere. It seems that Burger King (in the UK) has recalled some prepackaged ice cream cones, because the swirly-confection picture on the label looks a lot like the Arabic word allah, and people were complaining about [...]
Here’s something I’ve been meaning to link to: a cool post from the always-excellent Jabal al-Lughat on the Alfiyyat ibn Maalik, a 1002-line poem (rhyme, or verse, being, of course, a mnemonic device, among other things) that was intended to help students remember some of the details of the grammar of Classical Arabic.
It was [...]
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