Mir gefällt diese englische Entscheidung nicht besonders, sie ist aber nicht korrekt wiedergegeben worden.
n-tv report (via law blog)

Siehe Korrektur bei der Guardian.

The Guardian corrected its article on the Bridgewater Two, which originally said that the two men, released after 18 years of wrongful imprisonment, had to pay 25% of their compensation for board and lodging (and presumably not very good board and lodging, and not in friendly surroundings, since they were charged with killing a child, a paperboy Carl Bridgewater – I can remember the case):

bq. The report below may mistakenly have given the impression that the three people concerned had been ordered to pay back 25% of their total compensation because of living expenses not incurred while they were in jail. The order related only to one element in their compensation and not to the whole sum, as the figures quoted accurately in the report should have made clear.

The Guardian’s figures make it clear that it was more like 5 to 6 per cent of the total award that was to go for accommodation. This was 25% of the loss of earnings element. Incidentally, it appears the deductions would not happen in Scotland, so the word ‘British’ is inappropriate for the case:

bq. The appeal court ruled in favour of other aspects of the challenges made on behalf of Mr O’Brien. The assessor has been in the practice of awarding a lump sum without explaining how figures were arrived at.

bq. Lawyers for the claimants argued this practice resulted in glaring inconsistencies. In future, claimants must be told how much they are getting for each aspect of their ordeal.

bq. Furthermore, future awards must be based on rules that apply in the civil courts rather than an arbitrary sum decided by the assessor. The “bed and breakfast” ruling appears peculiar to the prison system in England and Wales. The Guardian has seen a letter from the Scottish executive which states that it does not intend to deduct saved living expenses from people jailed wrongfully.

n-tv has an account in German which does not even mention the figures.

One should always distrust journalists’ accounts of court cases, and all the more so if they are reporting on a foreign country. The court was the Court of Appeal.

There’s a new version of Textcount available. Information is mainly in German but there is an English manual.

Neue Fassung von Textcount erschienen.

I described the problems of counting in an earlier entry.

In einem früheren Eintrag habe ich die Probleme beim Zählen beschrieben (auf Englisch).

Ich hatte nicht die Zeit, das Programm näher anzuschauen, aber alle Informationen sind jetzt online.
All the downloads in English and German here.

Manual including new features in English.

Weitere Informationen in der Fortsetzung / for more information read on: Continue reading →

Trevor at kaleboel reports on a Guardian article by Steven Wells on why the USA owes its existence to cricket.

bq. FLASHBACK: Frederick, Prince of Wales, eldest son of George II, was, by all accounts, a bit of an arse. His mum called him a beast and a monster. And his dad seriously reckoned he was “wechselbalg” – a werewolf. And then, in 1749, Frederick got smacked in the head by a cricket ball. Two years later he died of an infected cyst in his head, leaving the way clear for Fred’s slightly mad son to become George III.

But a Wechselbalg is not a werewolf – that’s a Werwolf (as in the famous Morgenstern poem where the Werwolf wants to be declined – wer, wen, wes, wem – or as the Germans say, confounding my language-learning attempts, wer, wes, wem, wen). Wechselbalg is changeling. According to Hermann Paul’s Deutsches Wörterbuch – a dictionary well worth having: it doesn’t deal with the whole of the German vocabulary, but what it does deal with, it does thoroughly and in detail, with etymology and history – amazon.de link: Deutsches Wörterbuch
‘nach dem Volksglauben ein von Hexen stammendes untergeschobenes Kind, daher als Schimpfwort für ein mißratenes Kind gebraucht. Andere Bezeichnung Kielkropf’. (This is not the only German reference in the Guardian article).

Language Log spawns Eric Bakovic’s phonoloblog:

bq. Welcome to phonoloblog, a weblog for phonologists (and other interested linguists) to share any and all ideas relevant to phonology and phonological theory.

This should be very useful for those who like that kind of thing (it’s too difficult for me).

Real property is land. It’s called real because a person dispossessed of land used to be able to claim the land itself (res: thing – the Germans have a term dinglich – ‘thingly’ – that is close to this meaning). This means the same as the immovables /immoveables in Roman law systems: Immobilien, Liegenschaften, Grundstücke.

Personal property is everything apart from ‘ownership’ of land (actually you can’t own land in England and Wales, because it belongs to the Crown, but let’s forget about that for the moment). It doesn’t mean movables, therefore – it’s a wider term. It breaks down into:

Chattels real: leasehold interests in land – called real because they have to do with land, called chattels because they aren’t land.

Chattels personal: a superordinate term for:

Choses in action: debts, cheques, claims, patents. These are forms of property you may have to take legal action to enforce.

Choses in possession: physical movable things, bewegliche Sachen in German.

Were I to return to the interesting question still pursued at Language Log as to when and if a fish changes its status without being smoked, and what possessed the Irish Senate to consider this, I would need to start with this diagram. Unfortunately I still have to do some work today.

It was hard work doing this diagram. The slightly grey background of the top three fields was not intentional.