The Süddeutsche Zeitung reports on the use of a kind of pig Latin in the village of Frammersbach in the Main-Spessart district. Most of the 36 speakers are between 60 and 80 years old. There are audio files of speakers.

The trick is to take the consonants from the beginning of a word and put them at the end, followed by an ä. The existing vowels become ue or ie. Thus Blume becomes Uemeblä.

This language, known as Welschen, is probably hundreds of years old and was started by traders who didn’t want their agreements to be understood by others. The article mentions a large number of similar secret ‘languages’ used in Germany. Welschen is being researched by Florian Ziem of the Technische Universität Darmstadt. I see he has a very occasional blog.

bq. Im knapp 5000 Einwohner großen Frammersbach, vor allem im Zentrum, auf der Skihütte und im Ortsteil Herbertshain, unterhält man sich eben gelegentlich auf Welschen. „Uitehä euthä ishä iendä uenzengä uegtä geirgneträ“, heißt hier: „Heute hat es den ganzen Tag geregnet.

The FLEFO forum on Compuserve is dead. It’s been replaced by the Languages Forum, which is accessible to everyone without charge via a Web browser.

The migration to the new system was foreshadowed by the appearance of a Wizop, who removed some sections and renamed the Issues section Tower of Babel, a ridiculous title. There is also a chat section called, in the U.S. spelling, Coffee Klatch. You can read the section headed Announcements to see a little of the frustration so well expressed by Stephen Brown, a long-standing and multilingual FLEFO member, to the erstwhile blogger Derek Thornton:

bq. << It is abundantly clear that everything possible is being done to alienate those who were members of this forum before >>
That has been my impression, too. I feel as though I’ve returned home only to find someone else living in my house and wearing my clothes … and most of them don’t even have real names. Extremely unpleasant!

For those who are interested in an attempt to keep the community going, there is a FLEFO Yahoo group and also www.flefo.org, although the latter has not got off the ground yet. These are both run by Carsten Kuckuk, a German programmer who was a member of FLEFO for some time.

I’m sorry FLEFO has gone. When I joined in 1994, there was no WWW and searching the Internet was not what it is today. The translators’ sections of FLEFO were erudite and helpful places. Still, with the development of the Internet, members have scattered and it long since ceased to be the place to find answers. But I didn’t expect its final demise to be irritating in quite this way.

Sandy has a new blog on the EFL teaching industry in Britain. In the left-hand column is a list of ads for particularly badly-paid jobs, and the comments are quite heated.

Via TEFL Smiler

OLBG – Online Betting Guide – is not a bookmaker, apparently, but it shows the odds for bets on the next pope (via Desbladet). Dionigi Tettamanzi leads the field.
Episcopal lineage is new to me. It seems to be synonymous with apostolic succession, which I have heard of but which I probably don’t understand either. It apparently means who consecrated whom.

bq. Episcopal lineages have long fascinated students of church history. It was not until the middle of the present century, however, that a systematic attempt was made to trace and catalogue the consecrations of bishops on a world-wide basis. A small group of researchers has catalogued the consecrations of tens of thousands of bishops dating back many centuries. The fruits of their labors – labors which are on-going – have resulted in a data base which can trace the episcopal lineage of any living bishop and the vast majority of deceased bishops.

I remember the last papal election. I suppose they’ll be using the smoke signals again and not mobile phones?

It can be useful to see an English translation of a German statute one is quoting in a translation. At worst, such translations may contain so many errors that they are not worth consulting. Better ones may give a springboard for ideas. And the best may be very useful, especially if they draw your attention to elements of the statute that would not have been clear merely from the short section you need to translate.

Today I was translating a website that contained links to a page of the Bundesanwaltskammer containing, inter alia, a link to a PDF file with a translation of the Bundesrechtsanwaltsordnung (Federal Lawyers’ Act).

You can find a list of German statutes and other legislation translated into English at the German Law Archive and another one at Robin Stocks’ Carob.

However, as I’ve said before. there are more statutes in English on the Web than linked at those sites. In particular, new and important statutes are likely to be somewhere. Perhaps I should study how to search the Deep Web. LLRX.com had an article on that only this January.

LATER NOTE (December 2011): The site to find German statutes in English is www.cgerli.org. The German Law Archive site has some too, and they may also be found via juris. But the cgerli (Centre for German Legal Information) site allows you to search by German title, which is ideal, and tries to keep links to all translations of existing statutes – although unfortunately for us translators, I believe it does not keep translations of statutes which are known to be out of date, although these do often have to be quoted in translations.

The BBC reports the death on Monday at 37 of Ivan Noble from the brain tumour he has been writing about online for the past two years.

It was only very recently that he announced he had just written his last column. I didn’t know about his German connection (I knew his wife was German, but not that he studied German):

Ivan was born in Leeds in 1967 and was educated at comprehensive schools in Luton and Leeds before studying German at the University of Aston in Birmingham.

He lived in East Germany from 1988 until 1990 where he worked as a translator. After graduation he joined the BBC, initially as a translator, then as a sub-editor in Nairobi.