Who are the two dumbest people on the intertrons, readers? I think they might be Crazy Pammy and Mark Steyn. Here’s what happened when the two of them hooked up for an interview: Mark Steyn displayed quite a deep grasp of sociolinguistics. Yes, on the face of it yes Arabic is a language in a [...]
Timothy Noah, writing under Slate’s “Chatterbox” rubric, talked to the ghostwriter of O.J.’s controversial ex-book If I Did It. In his article, Noah wrote a sentence I can’t quite understand: Goldman assumed a karate stance, according to Miller’s description. “Then,” Simpson/Fenjves writes discreetly, “something went horribly wrong, and I know what happened, but I can’t [...]
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,” [Gitmo commanding [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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. Maltese is [...]
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″ being [...]
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 [...]
