One Mangalorean is a betel-nut seller.
Two Mangaloreans can’t stand one another.
Three Mangaloreans is a Udupi restaurant.
Four Mangaloreans is a fanatical Konkani Sabha.

Not surprisingly, translators and interpreters and “personnel of international organisations” (not budget-hungry Eurocrats, surely?) constitute the largest groups of publicly acknowledged signatories of this call to wage war on mounting European institutional mono- and trilingualism (English, French, German) and promote the language of Julio Iglesias. (Via Carlos Ferrero.)

Captain Kettle, the British Library Online Newspaper Archive and our fellow-Europeans.

The ongoing Catalan construction corruption hooha in a nutshell, from the first contractor to turn king’s evidence: “Your friends take you up the arse, you take your enemies up the arse, and you apply existing legislation to the rest.”

Crocodiles have no tongue; frogs have half, because it’s backwards, attached at the front and free at the back; men have one, the best of all, because with it they speak all languages and imitate every animal, as the philosopher Archidamos said; sea foxes [raposas marinas] have two, as I have said; women have three, because they talk with their mouth and with their fingers and heart, and their tongues are rough and sharp, like those of cats and leopards.

Rodrigo Fernández de Santaella, Vocabulario eclesiástico (1499) says that a bilingual person is one who sings a different song depending on his location or conversational partner, a two-tongued [serpent]:
Bilinguis y hoc bilingüe. quien dize vno aqui otro alli o vno a este y otro a aquel. E por esso se dize que tiene dos lenguas. [...]

Is a killer that sounds pretty 70s, but is apparently newish. Over at Eric “Babe” Morse’s Subjunctivitis.

I added Mithridates to Langwich Sandwich. One recent post links to a North American language called Mi’kmaq, while another includes an interesting bunch of sites related to the Pennsylvania Dutch. If the latter were Dutch in the modern sense, and if they lived anywhere near the Mi’kmaq, then it would still make little sense to [...]

A frequently heard complaint re regional nationalists like our bunch is that they play the diversity card to central government while rigidly suppressing variety, principally of a linguistic nature, in their own backyard. Here (via Onze Taal) is an example of the kind of thing they use to justify this stance: the lingering death of [...]

A Spanish friend once freaked me by referring to what Follow The Baldie does as “footing“. De Standaard’s language blog says that in Spanish the term refers to walking/rambling, while the Royal Academy definition approximates to “jogging” (a point on which the Italians seem to agree) and has the word arriving via the French, who [...]

Disturbing news for those of you following the progress of a certain member of the Spanish delegation to a conference in the land of the Turk.

The Guardian has tracked down the British Labour Party’s deputy leader and leading pugilist, John Prescott.

Otto von Pope is known as Benet in Catalan. His friends here call him Gordon. (Brendan D Lynch’s Triumph of the Red Devil: The Irish Gordon Bennett Cup Race 1903 claims, however, that the roots of the English exclamation “Gordon Bennett!” lie in the dubious commercial practices of Irish hoteliers.)

Re Céline’s post here attacking bidding systems on translation sites: I’m sure cranky old Mr Smith would be delighted to see that people of the same trade have not yet given up meeting together for merriment and diversion, the conversation ending in a conspiracy against the public and in contrivances to raise prices.

Catalanista writer, Jordi Coca, has figured out a good PR stunt for this year’s Sant Jordi books ‘n’ roses extravaganza: invite people round to his place (Bruc 16) to sign a petition protesting against the Hispanification and commercialisation of the day, in the course of which he’ll try to sell them his lousy books. Mr [...]

There’s a lot of fuss at the moment in the land of the free about attempts to make English the official language of government. In Catalonia the 1979 statute of autonomy, responding to the political reality of a bilingual society, designated two official languages: Spanish and Catalan. Trouble, however, has arisen from the use by [...]

Son of ferret takes on the unkilled.

Dress code, hand signals, and messiahs apart, there were few important differences between the Falangists and the Stalinists. Hence the bizarre nature of the punchup started by the former at a PR event the other day for a book (Santos Juliá, Historia de las dos Españas) promoted by the latter. Here’s Arcadi Espada:
In a chapter [...]

Interesting to note that the BBC considers “moderate” a party, the PNV, that proposes unilaterally to tear up the constitution if it wins today’s elections. (I suppose you all know the joke in which los de Lepe travel to the metropolis to register a new separatist party. So tell me the name of this new [...]

Sez Miquel Porta Perales.

When Latin American characters appear in an American series or film, in Spain the convention is to transform them into speakers of standard peninsular Spanish.

Apart from wondering how small a tsunami has to be to become a mere wave, whether the relative accessibility of trees should not be worked into the stats, and what a pechelingue was doing off Galicia, I was curious as to the origins of Nick’s figure for literacy in Spain–20% in 1606. The 1860 Spanish [...]

I’m not on my home machine very much, so I’ve banged together a little, slow language blog aggregator to keep me amused.

The word “cat” does not appear once in the proposed European constitution, although there are five “animals.” Here’s a search tool.

Via We Are Free Morphemes:
A Cheshire man sail’d into Spain,
To trade for merchandise;
When he arrived from the main
A Spaniard him espies,
A Spaniard him espies.
The rest is here.

Francesc Pujols’ global taxonomy of women’s caresses.

I’ll bet no-one’s going to make jokes about English having become the official language of West Virginia.

I am forgotten the newspaper, and it has forgotten me.

A deformed heap of dwarves
Cuts pourpoints in your coat of king;
And the imperial eagle, which, formerly, under your law,
Covered the whole world of thunder and flame,
Cuit, poor plucked bird, in their infamous pot!

A 16th century recipe you may not want to try at home.

A word of warning to Jacques Chirac.

Fine upstanding gentleman, prepare your great serpent to play the lovely Encarnación’s fandango.

Re this and this, this.

Is the term used for Fuck Patois by Carlos Mayor and Eduardo Iriarte in their Spanish translation of Tom Wolfe’ I Am Charlotte Simmons. (Via Taccuino di traduzione)

I’m moving tomorrow to a house just along from the castle in a small hilltop village about 40km outside Barcelona, where my monster will have to contend with others (no sheep, ‘fraid). I’m going to carry on doing the Barcelona walking tours and conducting the Industrial School choir, but I hope to be able to [...]

Here, for no good reason, is a dog monster some of you will know:

As the people of Africa prepare to give thanks for the life of the misogynistic, homophobic, hissing zombie who saved them from AIDS, some of Calle Carmen’s sharpest minds are said to have spent last night in a Punjabi curry house, planning to raid the remains, pope them in the popmobile, and give the man [...]