I’m unreliably informed that Real Zaragoza star Ewerthon Henrique de Souza’s dad couldn’t spell Everton rather than Erewhon (buy USA/UK). Not that anyone gives a feck, but by all means keep the tips flowing.

Andrew Scull digs up and burns Foucault in the TLS:
Foucault’s account of the medieval period fares no better in the light of modern scholarship. Its central image is of “the ship of fools”, laden with its cargo of mad souls in search of their reason, floating down the liminal spaces of feudal Europe. It is [...]

With transportation delays of as much as six to nine months and very limited shipping capacity, this is surely a project less suited to MIT than to Correos, the Spanish postal service.

Here, from Emil Helfferich (1878-1974)’s Südostasiatische Geschichten (Jever/Oldenburg, 1966), is an account of what happened to another German-speaker who made light of girlie-men:

Salvador Sostres & procreation

You’ve got to feel laugh at La Retaguardia which, in a piece on the hunger strike by illegals, describes Urdu as a “Pakistani dialect.” There are only about 20,000 mother- and second-tongue speakers in Barcelona, so it’ll take probably them a few more years to get it right.

Mark Liberman points to an article by Laura Durnford on the Radio Netherlands World Service site which describes how the C17th Fort Oranje on the Hudson River
and the town that sprang up around it, Beverwijck, was part of just one settlement within the Dutch colony of New Netherland. The other and more famous was New [...]

Recognising an urgent need, Barcelona’s excellent Institut Français has undertaken to explain love to the Catalans (translation Googlebotted for style, steam, and speed):

Condescending southerner David Green (he’s Manchester-based) has a piece on the Beeb listing the delights that await Rivaldo when he finally signs for Bolton Wanderers. What many people this morning find difficult to understand is why Rivaldo can’t be arsed to travel those extra 10 miles up the A666 to the Anchor Ground, home of [...]

Francesc Candel, Els altres catalans, “The other Catalans” (1964):
For some time the immigrants [to Catalonia], and specifically those from the south [of Spain], have been called “Koreans”. They are also called this in Bilbao and Avilés. It is curious that in Turin and Milan those who come from the south of Italy are also called [...]

There’s a good article in LaVa this morning by their man over the pond, Xavier Sala i Martín, in which he deplores the general tendency here to call one’s political opponents murderers. He goes on to point out that the attacks aren’t about Iraq but about a general hatred of the West and ends by [...]

The difficulty of interpreting intent in materials published in a different language and cultural context was one of the interesting facets of the case of the Fuengirola imam, convicted of publishing with malicious intent a manual on how to beat women without leaving scars. It’s not going to get any easier here once radio and [...]

The sports stars interviewed here by Pennsylvania’s Patriot-News confirm what every Dutch child knows already: watch television in your target tongue and you can skip those expensive and boring language classes. Different alphabets are another kettle of fish, however:

NRC Handelsblad, Holland’s most respected rag, says that the French commission that advocated banning the headscarf was strongly influenced by what it was told during a fact-finding trip to Holland in November. The two out of three members of the delegation contacted by the paper said they were shocked by the situation and in particular [...]

This suggests that it may not be as easy as I had thought to have myself declared a latter-day Celtiberian.

It may seem childish, but it did please me to discover that Doris Moreno Martínez was supervised for her thesis on the Inquisition in C16th Catalunya by one Ricardo García Cárcel. Having survived his encarcelación in these parts, Abenatar Melo escaped to Amsterdam where he wrote a verse version (1626) of the Psalms of David, [...]

Theatre that really sucks

I suggested to Mark Liberman the other day that the word Frank turns up in western Arabic in the C8th. A provisional apology is due because the first reference I’ve found in a hitherto brief search is not until the first half of the C9th, when ʻAbd al-Malik b Habīb (display problems?) of Granada uses [...]

“Definitely not for those with scrupples. “

New York heeft er 300, en de druk is zo moordend dat sommige Chinese verslaggevers een dagelijkse quota van 2000 karakters krijgen.