Geoffrey Pullum was relieved that alle bagage is gelost does not mean all luggage has been lost.

Meanwhile, Sally, at No Hard Chords, finds that there are advantages to hearing The Three Bells in the original French – especially if you don’t understand the language:

Listening to a song in an unfamiliar language can be freeing. For me, bad lyrics can render an otherwise great song unlistenable. But as long as the singer, the production and the melody work, foreign-language lyrics can be clunky or insipid or cliched with me none the wiser. If an English-language version of the song is recorded with bad lyrics, though, a puzzle emerges: were the lyrics this poor in the original or did the poetry get lost in translation?

(Here are the Browns).

The European Court of Justice has held that no matter how long an employee is on sick leave, the employee is entitled to holiday time, reports the Solicitors Journal:

The Dusseldorf employment tribunal and the House of Lords had both referred cases to the European Court for a preliminary ruling on the working time regulations.

Giving judgment in Schultz-Hoff v Deutshche Rentenversicherung Bund (C-350/06) and Stringer and others v HMRC (C-520/06) the Grand Chamber of the ECJ ruled that sick workers continue to accrue to holiday even if they are away from work for the entire year.

I wondered what the Düsseldorf employment tribunal (lower-case) was meant to be. In England and Wales, there are a large number of tribunals, ranging from ones similar to courts, such as the employment tribunal, to ones with much less room for appeal and legal rights. I would be inclined to translate employment tribunal into German as Arbeitsgericht.

What about the translation Arbeitsgericht: labour court, recommended by the German Foreign Office?

Labour is recommended in order to cover both individual and collective employment law. But employment court would be OK for me too. I would avoid using the term tribunal when translating a Gericht, because it suggests something less than a court. Still, this is a comprehensive translation of the court of first instance.

But apparently this was the next instance:

REFERENCES for a preliminary ruling under Article 234 EC from the Landesarbeitsgericht Düsseldorf (Germany) (C-350/06) and the House of Lords (United Kingdom) (C‑520/06), made by decisions of 2 August and 13 December 2006, received at the Court on 21 August and 20 December 2006 respectively, in the proceedings…

Well, I suppose at least it doesn’t matter much to the case in hand, as far as the House of Lords is concerned.

The snow has gone but there is still some ice. Time for a final report on the muskrats. This one was posing particularly well for the photo, or rather dead, lying on top of snow and ice, beneath which all the water in this small stream was frozen solid.

I wondered if it had simply been unable to get back home: the burrows are dry, but the entrances are under water. Anyway, I wasn’t the only person to notice it, and two days later it looks as if the rest of the family were cleared out too:

Meanwhile, on the Pegnitz, other birds had left their frozen ponds:

I haven’t seen any of these people in Nuremberg yet. I am particularly worried about the ones with paper-white faces.

Criggo found some good advertising placement in the Daily Telegraph, Sydney, for January 21st.