This Cádiz lexicon says (also here) that quillo is used indiscriminately to attract attention, rather like “¡Oye!” in Spanish and its English cognate, “Oi!”, or, alternatively, like the English “Love”. In Barcelona (and presumably in other Spanish cities) quillo is also used derogatively, to express perceived age, ethnic and class distinctions, rather like the Spanish/Catalan [...]

Here’s yet another intriguing Tunisian blog. Karim, the original, is meanwhile tracking the degradation and destruction of the southern Mediterranean coastline, following where Spain showed the way.

For freaks: Antonio Nebrija’s 1492 Gramática, the first systematic study of Spanish, summarises the various types of metaplasm referred to here, making clear here that he regards them as acceptable corruptions. Valdés attacks Nebrija for his Latinate affectations, but it’s unfair to regard them respectively as descriptivist and prescriptivist extremists.

There’s little doubt now that Tyler Hamilton’s going to lose his Olympic gold. I continue to find it difficult to believe–particularly given the Mike Anderson story–that it was just close friendship and the proximity of hills and flats that brought him and Lance Armstrong together in Gerona in doping-plagued Spain. Die an honest death: stick [...]

Joan Camp thinks there’s a language called Belgian, and that it’s essentially the same as Flemish.

I hear it is being torn apart to make it into a boring restaurant with bar, just like all the other pubs in the region. Hohum, back to drinking cider out of a plastic bag on a bench.

A: Its carpark. (You need to hit Enter)

Publisher Javier Ruiz Portella has been given six months by a Barcelona court for stealing Francisco Rico’s edition of Carmina Burana. He won’t serve it because of his age (59), his past record and the nature of the offence. One wonders how an immigrant car-thief on his first offence would have fared. Ruiz Portella was [...]

This is hilarious: Catalan separatists ERC survived their major political challenge this year (forget being kicked out of the government and losing the referendum) by getting hotel staff to remove the Spanish labels from the bottles of water provided at a press conference yesterday.

Because it was built that way when it opened in 1916 and it would have cost too much to change it when road transport switched to the right in the 1920s.

It seems to me a perilous sport to quote the father of Basque racism, Sabino Arana, in support of that vulgar ideal, the unity of the Spanish nation.

My front page aggregator removes diacritics, rendering local media tycoon Godó as God, which I doubt would displease.

Sounds like LanguageHat also got approached by Grant Barrett’s minder at McGraw-Hill offering “a look at our book” in exchange for a plug. I invited her to send dead tree all the way to Spain and have heard nothing more, which you may wish to attribute to Spain’s splendidly relaxed postal service or to a [...]

“[Language] academies, oscillating in the disjunction between description and prescription, will have to document prescription taking into account descriptions of use,” says Pilar Chargoñia. Burn em down, I say. (Here via here is news of lobbyists who want the RAE to undescribe various popular uses of terms.)

Speaking from baldie experience, most council tourism departments here offer an abysmal service, and things gets worse once you go online. I’m pursuing the tourismcrats at Vic, a medium-sized xenophobic town out in the sticks, to see how long and how far I’ll have to go to get any kind of response:
20/6 Mail to tourism [...]

The Progressive University, a subsidised summer wankfest for bourgeois Catalan nationalist-socialists, is running a course to explain to the proles, hordes of whom will doubtless attend, What the Catalanist, left-wing government did without anyone being aware of it. (Via David Millán)

Carlos Ferrera notes the bizarre preoccupations of Galician nationalist and regional deputy, Bieito Lobeira:
If some catastrophe were to occur today that would lead to the partial or total eradication of human life from the part of the planet which it is our fortune to occupy, with all probability future archaelogical studies of funerary remains would [...]

Klos is Dutch for sucker.

Near La Guardia in the province of Toledo. Via laboladelmundo and Pixel y Dixel, one of whose commenters says that there actually a bar there and that it is visible from the A4 motorway.

I don’t know if this belongs over with Nick Lloyd.

Linguistic syncopes are confusing for musicians, who think of syncopation as redistributive rather than reductive. Confusingly, too, many of the syncopated words in Juan de Valdés’ gem of early descriptive linguistics and linguistic politicking, Diálogo de la lengua (late 1530s), are not produced by medial deletions. Here’s the conventional scheme of things (Hartmann & Stork, [...]

To the extent that I ever was English, I hereby relinquish all claim. I was talking to an Ecuadorian the other day who, having observed the relative position of his country and Spain in the atlas, said he was a native of the Low Countries, los Países Bajos. Ecuador, Holland, anything but England.

Here, via Nando Caballero. The Uruguayan trannies have been alerted.

Given the interesting record of Basque philology, I wouldn’t be surprised if the early Basque fragments found at Iruña-Veleia (near Vitoria-Gasteiz) turned out to be fakes. The inscription urdin isar, blue/greyish star, certainly leaves me curious. Off-hand I can think of no pre-C18th texts in any Western European language that refer to stars by their [...]

Ephiphany may, of course, be a play on FIFA; alternatively, it may be telling us something about the state of Sean Ingle’s expenses in Stuttgart, where, according to the Guardian’s man on the spot, the streets are strained yellow.

Conservative ultra-nationalist Josep C Vergés proudly proffers his Big Lie here, slandering that group of ardent defenders of individual rights, Citizens of Catalonia, as filonazi. The English version (scroll down) has “neo-Nazi”, which means something different, but which clearly suffices for a writer so intellectually poverty-stricken that all he can hope for is to insult.

… is the word Mauricio was trying to come up with.

Kate Alcock (via Lingformant): children who were poor at moving their mouths were particularly weak at language skills, while those who were good at these movements had a range of language abilities.

This kind of thing is ridiculous. If someone doesn’t want to play for the national team, fine. Individual liberties shouldn’t just be available to people with whom we happen to agree.

Here, via Criterio.

Here.

Gabriel Bibiloni wonders whether folks here aren’t just naturally prone to vote whatever the authorities tell them to vote in referenda.

Definition: A tendency to express banal and obvious concepts pompously and loudly.
Example: The practice of freedom, as for example on La Stampa, constitutes nothing more than the blasts of shareholder trombonism, by now reduced to a state of pure nostalgia, but hoisted as a club against dangerous and sulphurous revisionism. (Il Foglio; either my Italian [...]

Someone just quoted me a bit of Clément Marot I didn’t know (OK, let’s be honest: I’d didn’t even know Marot):
En tant qu’Ouy et Nenny se dira,
Par l’univers le monde me lira.
Which Leigh Hunt (The Companion, 1828) translates as:
As long as Love says Yes and No,
The universe shall read Marot.
More info on les langues d’oc, [...]

I’ve got me doubts about the whole Ciutadans de Catalunya business, since (a) their potential electorate seems to have given up voting, and (b) they lack the common touch, and that’s putting it kindly. And when, for JC’s sake, is someone going to do something about their website? Even the neo-Nazis have a better one.

El monstruo de Barcelona sounds like it might be worth a read. It is not, however, as popular as the rather undevastating El bastardo de Ceuta.

A Herrero Mayor, Artesanía y prevaricación del castellano (1931): “En general, los vicios populares más arraigados se traducen en permanentes desviaciones semánticas, falsa correlación del tiempo de los verbos, barbarismos de construcción (italianismos, sobre todo), en el uso impropio de las preposiciones, trueque de accidentes en sustantivos comunes, ecolalia y empleo muy frecuente de voces, [...]

I often moan about how short Romance languages are on neologisms. Here’s yet another list of Dutch innovations, of which I think boeddhabuikje -> budabarriguita, for a woman’s beer-belly, would work here with little explanation, although there’d be the usual hassle about compound nouns.

Not that owners and estate agents here will be capable of reading and acting accordingly.

Over at Charlie Connelly, with thanks to the DG.