Ukulele & Languages is a blog by a Frenchwoman married to a Norwegian (does the ukulele playing come via Norway?). Some ukulele videos.

Via Ukulelia

Do you need something to add to your model railway for Easter? There are transparent Easter eggs containing carriages, or this figure of the Pope (note red shoes):

Discussion (in German).

Vollmer offers the house where Pope Benedict XVI was born.

Preiser, which made the figure.

Märklin

(Photographed in window of local model railway shop)

LATER NOTE: when I took this photo on April 15, the Easter eggs with trains in them had been reduced in price. Whether the Pope had been reduced I don’t know – certainly he seems to be worth less than he was here.

The UK Supreme Court will be making a decision in the case of Rademacher v. Granatino on the question of whether a prenuptial contract is valid under English law.

This has been in the public eye for some time now. If you’ve missed it, it might be interesting as an example of English law’s attitude to marriage contracts. It may or may not make prenuptial agreements more binding in England and Wales.

It’s quite common for marriage contracts to be recognized in German law, and also in French law. The parties are of German and French nationality, but because they mainly live in London, their divorce went to the English courts.

In Germany a person who does not want a notional 50-50 sharing of all marital property can enter into a prenuptial contract. But both spouses have to get legal advice. The contract will normally be binding.

In England and Wales, there may be a prenuptial contract, but the court will not feel bound by it. It retains discretion to divide the property fairly. It may follow the prenup if it seems fair.

Radmacher and Granatino agreed that if they divorced they would not make any claims against each other, only for the two children. There was neither independent legal advice (which there would have to be in Germany) nor did Katrin Radmacher disclose the millions she was about to inherit. Granatino also argues sexism in the current state of the proceedings (his award at first instance was greatly reduced by the Court of Appeal) because, he argues, a woman who had given up a well-paid job would have been treated more generously.

Guardian article
More links from John Bolch.

I have a link to the British National Corpus in my sidebar. But that is for a simple search. I gather from separated by a common language that Mark Davies has an interface which can be used to compare the BNC and COCA, the Corpus of Contemporary American English at Brigham Young University. I will add that to the sidebar soon. Here’s a quote from Lynne today showing how it can be used – she was comparing the use of prepositions with ‘protest’ in BE and AmE (sorry, the table hasn’t come out properly):

I used (as I usually do these days) Mark Davies’ wonderful interface for the British National Corpus (BNC) and the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) and searched for in protest with six prepositions: at, against, of, over, to, and about. The last two only occurred at tiny rates in both corpora, so I haven’t included them below: These are the results, expressed as percentages within each dialect:

BrE AmE
at 70 3
against 24 34
of <1 42 over 7 18

A colleague today received some translations as reference material and was surprised to see they capitalized ‘claimant’ and ‘defendant’. Is this correct? I don’t do it myself, but I thought it was unnecessary rather than wrong.

It is definitely common in translations into English done in Germany. Is it more American?

In the BlueBook and Ritter’s Style Guide I found information about capitalization / upper case, but not this point. But Googling a combination of words such as “the defendant” “seeks an order” did get some American and UK ghits that looked correct. “The claimant” will narrow it down to the UK more or less (even in inverted commas, I don’t think Google is case-sensitive). I suspect, therefore, that it has at least become acceptable.

Or has anyone any evidence to add here?

Incidentally, last week I learnt the term camel case, which refers to words like WordPerfect that suddenly have a capital letter, like a hump, in the middle. The New York Times even had a rant against it in November.

LATER NOTE: Adrian says that all statements of case (pleadings) in England and Wales always capitalize the parties (by capitalize I mean initial capital – I don’t think ALL CAPITALS is good style). He recommends the Bar Manual on Drafting. Despite heavy recommendation I refuse to buy it without taking a look!