Radio National in Australia has a programme called LinguaFranca. A language or linguistics topic is discussed for 15 minutes once a week.

This week, Australian barristers begin to discuss legal terms relating to Guantanamo. This relates to the situation of David Hicks, an Australian detainee in Guantanamo. (By the way:

On one occasion when al-Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden visited an Afghan camp, Hicks allegedly questioned bin Laden about the lack of English in training material and, after allegedly accepting bin Laden’s advice, Hicks “began to translate the training camp materials from Arabic to English”)

In this week’s programme, by Julian Burnside, the term is habeas corpus, but there is also some discussion of enemy combatant

An ‘enemy combatant’ is an individual who, under the laws and customs of war, may be detained for the duration of an armed conflict. When the armed conflict ends, the captured enemy must be returned to his or her own country. …
By adopting the metaphor of the war on terror, the US has labelled David Hicks an enemy combatant even though Hicks is a citizen of Australia (therefore an ally) and at the relevant time was with the Taliban — the lawful government of Afghanistan — and the US has not declared war on Afghanistan. The logic beneath the surface is: the Taliban supported al-Qaeda, al-Qaeda are engaged in terrorism, we have a war on terror, those who support terrorists are our enemy, if they have a gun they are enemy combatants. …By the same reasoning, anyone captured by the US when it invaded Afghanistan in search of Osama bin Laden is called an enemy combatant. Since the war is a metaphorical one, the end of hostilities and the return of captured enemy combatants is delayed as long as the metaphor remains convenient or plausible. It is a predictable result of careless language.

Transcript, audio link and audio download link. (I think the programme is only live twice a week – till now I have only managed to read the transcript)

(Thanks to a poster on the Forensic Linguistics Mailing List)

Dr.-Erich-Mulzer-Haus Nürnberg.

So this is how they do it.

If posting gets a bit thin here, even though I usually like to offer quantity rather than quality, it’s down to an unprovoked and almost simultaneous attack on me yesterday by two pieces of software and two pieces of hardware. I won’t name them, as they may be OK.

The worst was when an antivirus programme deleted my whole email inbox. If anyone is waiting for an email, I now have an excuse not to reply. In particular, I received an email from a translator a few days ago which I was about to reply to, and I have no memory of her name – so please send again. I didn’t realize that inboxes could be deleted so easily. Fortunately, most of my email is automatically channelled into other files, but I still had more than I should have.

Meanwhile, Roger Shuy at Language Log talks about reasonable doubt, with references to early U.S. usage.

There’s an excellent website for the Cambridge Handbook of Phonology, where the whole tome can be searched and there are links and a forum. (Via Phonoloblog)

Boing Boing links to a doctored videoclip at Youtube (‘The Reagans on Drugs’) of Ronald Reagan and Nancy advocating drug use – good clean fun.

This was the closest I could get to a photo:

It reminds me of when I took the night ferry from Calais and some Germans regretted not seeing the white cliffs of Dover, but we were actually in Folkestone.
This one was taken at 2.08, 1/800 sec, with an ultrazoom camera and spot metering.

In the Independent, Mark Hix writes on sausages:

I occasionally get comments that the sausages we serve in our restaurants, lovingly created by Jean-Paul Habermann of the Franconian Sausage Company, are a bit tough. That can only mean that they must be used to the kinds of sausage that gives them a bad reputation in the first place – with synthetic skins and lots of filler. A proper bit of intestine, good chunks of meat and a generous seasoning is what a good sausage is all about – as well as a sausage-maker who has some passion and understanding in his belly like Jean-Paul (by which I mean that he’s a bit tubby).

Franconian Sausage Co. Ltd? Apparently so. Those red indentations represent the Franconian flag, by the way.

Here’s their site (it may be John Paul rather than Jean Paul, although the latter would be more Franconian). It looks good, although it may be a case of lese-majesty to refer to Leberkaes as Franconian luncheon meat.

More German food in the UK at the German Deli.

Oh dear.

(Shallow link)

Via RollOnFriday