Two reviews of Language Log‘s book ‘Far from the Madding Gerund’ (it has a prominent place on the blog’s home page). I didn’t do a linguistics course, but Old High German instead, and who’s to say I was wrong (mumbling Phol ende Uuôdan uuorun zi holza) – not that I had a choice – but of course linguists know all that stuff anyway. This is linguists meaning scholars of linguistics. I first met some of them when I was doing Siegfried Tornow‘s Russian course in Berlin in 1967 and these people were there who were also doing a one-year course on Hausa and all sorts of other things.

What do linguists do? Hint: They’re not language cops or polyglots by Jan Freeman in the Boston Globe:

bq. In their capsule biographies, the authors reveal their youthful career detours: Liberman was kicked out of Harvard and sent to Vietnam, while Pullum, a high school dropout in England [this sounds like an incredibly American thing to be], worked as a rock musician. Linguistics saved them, they say, and “linguistics can save you, too.” Not, perhaps, from being sent to war or forced to live by your guitar pick; but linguistics, in this user-friendly form, really might help save you from boredom, complacency, and a multitude of misapprehensions about languages and linguists.

Analyzing Eggcorns and Snowclones, and Challenging Strunk and White by Michael Erard in the New York Times:

bq. Blogging has put him [Mark Liberman] in touch with an audience he never imagined existed, including a walking-tour guide, a horse farm owner, a high-energy physicist and a rock musician, all regular e-mail correspondents. “There is a group of very smart and very well-read people out there who like to read about language and who can put together arguments based on evidence from sources and background knowledge which is not made up or nuts,” he said. “It’s a big world out there.”

No, I didn’t know the walking-tour guide existed, either, and he can certainly put those arguments together. Hey, Language Log, not just smart and well-read, educated too!
(Via the Forensic Linguistics mailing list)

Uni Magazin online hat einen sehr gründlich recherchierten und informativen Artikel zum Dolmetscherberuf.

Der Artikel basiert auch noch auf die Arbeit der Dolmetscherin-Bloggerin Tanja Barbian (Plain English), von der wir auch noch Bilder sehen. Nichts wie hin!

Trevor’s scholarly translation (with footnotes disguised as sidenotes) of a chapter in Pío Baroja’s novel The adventures, inventions and mystifications of Silvester Paradox / Aventuras, inventos y mixtificaciones de Silvestre Paradox (1901) introduces an English conman called Mr Macbeth:

bq. Still not satisfied, Macbeth, drunk and impassive as ever, explained to the public an apparatus of his invention, the optical and acoustic translatoscope. The translatoscope was a simple apparatus—how simple!—based on the learned and little-known principle of Dr Philf, by which words, spoken or written, expand as they advance to the tropics and contract as they recede. Hence, the construction of a translatoscope requires nothing more than the combination of a system of convergent mechanisms that pass gradually to flat menisci and then to divergent menisci and place them in a tube. The menisci may be optical or acoustic, as is wished.
If one talks through one end of the tube in English, the words will issue from the tube’s other extremity in Spanish. The same occurs when one looks through the tube, since the translatoscope translates everything. The secret lies in nothing more than the calibration of the screws.

They are still trying to make this kind of thing work today.

Some curious statements from the local rag (most of them yesterday, so probably no longer available online):

In Britain, 29 per cent of the population are Anglicans, 11 per cent Protestants, 11 per cent Catholics and 1.5 m Moslems. 41 per cent have no religion.
(Who did they get this from – a Presbyterian?)

An English woman who has lived in Nuremberg for fourteen years had terrible trouble getting a job when she first came and it was almost impossible to get a residence permit (Aufenthaltsgenehmigung) – Pardon? What happened to the EU?

Green party city councillor Brigitte Wellhöfer on the number of English fans who go around with their shirts off: ‘Die Männer hier sehen doch alle nach Feinripp-Unterhosen aus’. (The men here all look as if they had fine-ribbed underpants.) – I find this hard to understand – does she mean you can see the imprint of their jersey underpants on their skin? Just as well the fans couldn’t hear it.

Insgesamt ist Großbritannien eine Inselgruppe zwischen Atlantik und Nordsee.
(Haven’t they left someone out?)

They also have a map entitled England, where Scotland and England are marked black, whereas Ireland and the Hebrides have been left green.

Well, they didn’t get that from a Presbyterian.

British police dog handlers are having to learn some Dutch commands to deal with imported dogs:

LONDON (Reuters) – Police dog handlers are having to take language classes — to communicate with their latest recruits.
Finding it increasingly hard to find suitable German Shepherds in Britain, some police forces are bringing in dogs from continental Europe.
But there’s a problem.
Although the latest arrivals possess all the attributes needed for police work, they only respond to commands in their native language.
Dog handlers at Avon and Somerset police for example,
which has recruited three dogs from the Netherlands, have been given a sheet of practical commands in Dutch.

Thanks to TranSlater.

Just a few pictures since, as I have already said, this blog has nothing to do with the World Cup!

There is a webcam of the main marketplace in Nuremberg, where fans can drink and watch, either the scene at present or a speeded-up film of the past 30 minutes, at the Nürnberger Nachrichten site (scroll down).

This was ‘God save the Queen’ by a fan with drum who had gatecrashed a classical music busking duo:

This one needs some Photoshopping:

Note the Lebkuchenherz slogans: Wir holen den Titel and Elf Freunde müsst ihr sein

I’m afraid this person’s friends tried to put paint on my face in the German colours!

Trinidadians on stilts:

The baker Beck:

Some people will get in the way of the camera: