Xavi Caballé mentions an oft-cited Catalan etymology of paper:
1249; del ll. papyrus, i aquest, del gr. pápyros ‘papir’, adaptat per via semiculta a una terminació catalana, d’on passà a les altres llengües europees
AFAIK the Enciclopèdia Catalana has never substantiated this. The Dictionnaire de l’Académie francaise says:
PAPIER n. m. XIIIe siècle. Issu, par l’intermédiaire du latin [...]

Michael Gilleland believes it was coined by Ezra Pound (”It occurs in one of the Pisan Cantos, dated 1948″). I wonder if the Spanish-speaking peoples, who have considerable experience in the field, may not have been first. José Ortega Munilla’s Chispas del yunque were published in ABC 1920-2, and in GBS’ useless snippet view he [...]

Many thanks to Javier for introducing me to the Cantabrian Quixote, which devotes a whole chapter to a duel resulting from a disagreement about who should dexar la acera, give the wall sidewalk. Not surprisingly, like the cognate discussed in the linked post, it doesn’t turn up in the dictionary of the Royal Spanish Academy. [...]

Samuel Johnson reports on making acquaintance with London in 1737 that
In the last age, when my mother lived in London, there were two sets of people, those who gave the wall, and those who took it; the peaceable and the quarrelsome. When I returned to Lichfield, after having been in London, my mother asked me, [...]

The taz has been obligatory reading for the thoughtful German green-left for the last 30 years. It has no particular sympathy for airline companies or Joachim Hunold. Highlights from a piece published June 14 (via MM):
It is true [actually it isn't--but Tobias Büscher isn't the only one to make this error]: Franco prohibited regional [...]

I tend to concentrate on the Catalanist language nuts because they’re closer to hand, but Madrid has its own share of nationalist loons. For example, Amando de Miguel over at Libertad Digital is given to making unfounded claims about the dangers of English. I showed a while back that there’s no statistical basis for his [...]

Se trata de un primer intento de hacer un transformador fonético español-andaluz con el propósito de facilitar la producción de textos en diversos dialectos andaluces. Utiliza un algoritmo casero basado en las normas especificadas en el artículo sobre el andaluz en Wikipedia, me parece en gran parte el trabajo de Antonio M Romero Dorado, y [...]

In English:

Dubbed into Spanish:

If the standard of dubbing wasn’t so amateurish then maybe we could accept the fact that very little stuff is original version with subtitles, resulting in half the freaking Chinese talking better English than the Spanish. (I’m talking about the standard of voice acting, not the way Spanish post-production has ended up [...]

Here’s most of the second half of an article dealing with the Air Berlin affair in the Süddeutsche Zeitung, a MOR German daily:
Hunold said … that he was proud that on internal Spanish flights they managed to have at least one Spanish-speaking stewardess on board. Introducing another language would be impossible. “Am I meant to [...]

Here (thanks MM). So are you with Joe or against him? Does the Guernica page header mean the author identifies Air Berlin with the Luftwaffe? I thought only racists indulged in that kind of generalisation.

Is not a gay bar but a lingerie-and-that-kind-of-stuff shop on the street in Barcelona named after Pi i Margall, Mr Pine and Wall barley:

Didn’t expect this one: “Not inviting Catalan authors writing in Spanish was, in my opinion, a big error. They should have positioned the Catalan culture as an open culture with excellent contributions in our mother tongue and also in other languages like Spanish. They could have even tried to find Catalans who write in other [...]

Watching Helen Mirren last night. Quoth the people of Spain: Elizabeth -> Bess not Beth because it was given her by her Andalusian seseo-masters. And one was snoring too hard to disagree.

Lucanus cervus (Ciervo volante) on the hills above San Juan de Plan in the Pyrenees of Huesca:

Proyecto Ciervo Volante writes:
Flight abilities seem, in principle, well developed. Fight speed reaches 6 km/h (D’Ami, 1981) but dispersal abilities are unknown. There are XIX century tales about mass movements (Darwin, 1871; Lacroix, 1968; Paulian & Baraud, 1982). [...]

Mr Clarke blogging at It’s Probably The Pox, My Son links to a typical bit of mendacity, or gross ignorance if you are feeling charitable, from John Hooper at the Guardian:
Silvio Berlusconi, who won a general election earlier this month, welcomed the latest evidence of Italy’s leap to the right by declaring: “We are the [...]

Apparently it’s quite well-known, but I only found it this morning in HG Bohn’s A hand-book of proverbs (1855), in the household reading room:
To build castles in the air. Far castelli in aria.–Ital. The French say, Faire des chateaux en Espagne.
It is tempting although perhaps erroneous to believe that this derives from Frankish experiences with [...]

Peret’s (Catalan-language) recording of El mig amic is from Spanish telly in 1969, when, as Wikipedia continues to remind us, the “use of Catalan in the mass media was forbidden.” Such claims have decreased considerably over the last five years due solely to kalebeul’s relentless and fearless campaigning. One important defeat for the inventors of [...]

Generic Manu Chao-ist dumbagogy in Che Sudaka’s latest ¡uf!re, but a nice little Raval puppet theatre by Marta Pujol & Joan Picó:
Something with a bit more musical class (tho in playback) from pioneer Peret, Mataró-born and hence the only sensible reason why the genre is called rumba catalana instead of barcelonesa:

I sometimes wonder what would [...]

The proceedings of the Old Bailey are now searchable to 1913. Apart from anything else they are an interesting source of information re the misfortunes of London’s Spanish population, from the refugees from Fernando VII to the anarchist trials in the 1890s. The following testimony to the traditional linguistic handicap of the Iberian tribes was [...]

Ta meao, pissed on, one rendering of the Generalitat’s €400,000 exercise in vanity publishing.

La Vanguardia, 2008/4/21: “Piratas somalíes secuestran un atunero vasco. El ‘Playa de Bakio’ lleva 26 tripulantes, trece africanos, ocho gallegos y cinco vascos. Anoche, una fragata española acudía desde el mar Rojo a auxiliar al barco.” Victims from north of the Mediterranean are dissimilated on the basis of their autonomous community, while victims from the [...]

“In the sentence it is considered to have been proven that [in the church of St James of the Sword, Andalusia during a funeral] Refugio MS [74] approached the other woman saying, “I’m going to have your cunt, I’m going to have your cunt,” at the same time pinching her with her hand in her [...]

Xavi Caballé has read a book which suggests that the 18th century predecessors of the Norfolk Regiment were thus called because Spanish soldiers thought their Britannia badge represented the Virgin Mary. There’s another, more scurrilous version:
Well, I got fond enough, after all, of the Holy Boys, as the old Ninth lads were called… You see, [...]

Or, as La Vanguardia has it, “El presunto parricida de su madre…“. I thought Eve had left the Garden of patriarchal vocabulary, or maybe this is just what happens when you’re paid by the word.

Surreal quote in this doc on personal adoptive languages, a typically absurd Belgian scheme to avoid civil war, appropriate EU funds, and inflict a tactical defeat on the Anglo-Saxons by having the Flemish learn French and the Walloons learn Dutch, instead of just letting everyone get on with their English classes: “An Le Nouail Marlière [...]

Is one of the all-time greats of popular Spanglish linguistics, so it is very much to be hoped that the NYT will again use the former after the next pirate raid off Barbary or in the Caribbean. There’s probably similar wordfun to be had in the South China Sea, but we don’t go there.

Or something along those lines. Jerry R Craddock clears up this and a number of other confusions in his excellent inaugural Disparatorio del suroeste. (Via Jesús Rodríguez Velasco). Galdós was politer in Trafalgar, but we all know what he meant. This one will run and run.

Colin Davies refers to progress in his neck of the desert. I am told that staff at a distinguished Barcelona institute of higher education, none of whom speak English, have petitioned to have Basque rather than English as the third language on their website “because we can speak Spanish to them, and what are we [...]

One of the many etymologies of flamenco is rather curious. From the typically poor Spanish-language entry in Wikipedia:
Durante el siglo XVIII el asistente Olavide pretendió combatir el bandolerismo instaurando colonias de catolicos alemanes y flamencos (tenidos por disciplinados y laboriosos) en el Alto Guadalquivir. El fracaso de adaptación de muchos de ellos engrosó las [...]

Items:

Shasha: worn-out palm-broom. (Pott, Doppelung (Reduplikation, Gemination) als eines der wichtigsten Bildungsmittel der Sprache, beleuchtet aus Sprachen aller Welttheile (1862))
Gananciosa took a new-palm broom, which she found in the house, and with scratching it, made a sound, that though it was hoarse and rough, agreed well enough with [Escalanta's] patten… Rinconete and Cortadillo being surprized [...]

I’m curious as to the relationship–if any–between Manuel Girona i Agrafel, who has a street on one side of Avinguda de Pedralbes, and “Jordi Girona”, whose street on the other side of Av de P takes up more or less where Manuel Girona leaves off. Also as to how Jorge Girona Salgado managed to keep [...]

The monument is a quality marble tomb round about where the sea gate was, on which Habsburg general Josep Moragues’ head hung in a cage for 12 years from 1715-1727, his body having previously been quartered on the Ramblas. This for surrendering on a Bourbon pardon at the end of the War of the Spanish [...]

German sausages commonly arouse Spanish bar owners to orthographical orgasm, but this is perhaps the most beautiful, and at first sight most puzzling spelling of Frankfurt in the peninsula:

No time to inquire her ancestry of the lady at this magnificent tapas bar in the Creueta del Coll park, Barcelona, but one suspects the Dread Hand [...]

Provided by the Junta de Andalucía in collaboration with Vodafone. Don’t forget your glasses, and enjoy the raffle, presumably to be held in the rest break between the Introduction and the Practice sections:

The English Wikipedia says that the history of Andalusia ended with the Muslims, which seems like fair comment. The Spanish version says that [...]

An ex-English teacher says:
One thing I tried to discourage the students from doing, as it happens, was pursue their interest in learning colloquial English phrases. They all wanted to do so: they thought it would show how much they knew real English, English as it is spoken and therefore English as they wished to speak [...]

For rural tourism + magical & mysterious garden project in the UNESCO Biosphere Reserve of Babia, summer home of the kings of León. Brief brainstorm: The León King, Clanging gardens of Babia (garden features mobiles with bottles/bits of metal), The banging gardens of Babia (but erotic gardens are so C20th), Flower of Babel, er… Spanish [...]

Here, via Gazophylacium. Poem 3 here alleges that Count Sigismund was a (heterosexual) pederast. Byron said that the count, Manfred’s dad, “was proud, but gay and free”, but things were different then. Which Sigismund are we talking about here?

The manager of this distinctly non-Bond den of one-armed banditry in c/ Hospital, Barcelona subscribes to the commonly-held opinion that illegal Spanish signs can be turned into legal Catalan ones simply by removing the last letter of each word. In his case, SALON RECREATIVO -> SALO RECREATIV:

One hopes the spelling police will take a relaxed [...]

Actually Ludwig Hilberseimer, Entwurf für eine Hochhausstadt/Design for a high-rise city (1924). Hitler exported idealistic architects rather than bombs to the US. Hilberseimer ran the Chicago planning department for a while, and they and other public institutions have spent the last ten years tearing down projects built by him and other Bauhaus luminaries.
Enthusiasm in [...]

“The Mahávansa and the Rájaratnákari state, that the king Walakanabhaya, or according to the latter work, Deveny Paetissa, caused the temple of a heathen named Girrie (doubtless Giri) to be destroyed, and caused to be constructed upon its site twelve temples consecrated to Sákya, which communicated with each other; and in the midst of which [...]