Anfang September 2004 startete der Law Society of England and Wales, die Anwaltskammer für Solicitor, eine Werbekampagne mit dem Spruch “My hero, my solicitor“. Das kann nur schiefgehen!

Die drei Plakate kann man als PDF-Dateien sehen, wenn man auf die PDF-Icons unter dem Link oben klickt.

At the beginning of September 2004, the Law Society of England and Wales, the solicitors’ professional body, started a pilot advertising campaign with the slogan ‘My hero, my solicitor‘. The Law Society wrote:

bq. The ads will appear at London Bridge and Euston underground stations, and York, Leamington Spa and Newcastle-upon-Tyne mainline stations for four weeks from 6 September or 13 September.
In market research, 73% of those questioned found the ads believable and seven out of ten said they were helpful in telling people how to find a solicitor. A wider campaign may follow the pilot.

There are three posters, one for business law, one for employment law, and one for family law (see PDF files at above link). They’re a bit multicultural – is it harder to imagine a black or Chinese solicitor not caring?

The campaign was used by the Observer as the introduction to a story on complaints against solicitors yesterday, and no doubt it will provide many more happy associations of this kind.

Someone on Compuserve recommended the One Look Reverse Dictionary.

There are two kinds of reverse dictionary. In this kind, you enter some general phrases to remind you of a specific word.

The díctionary allows you to:

find words from their definition
explore related concepts
create a list of words in a category
answer basic questions (e.g. what is the capital of Vietnam?
solve crossword clues using wildcards

It apparently indexes hundreds of other online reference sites.

I have such a dictionary in print form, dated early 1990s.
Reader’s Digest Reverse Dictionary, 1989, ISBN 0 276 49541 1
Bizarrely, this was ‘translated’ into German:
Der schnelle Weg zum richtigen Wort, ADAD-Verlag, 1992, ISBN 3 87003 473 4

There are also reverse dictionaries that classify words by their endings, so that a group of words ending in ‘erely’ will be together.

Is there one of those online? There must be. All I have is a GDR one, Martin Lehnert’s Rückläufiges Wörterbuch der englischen Gegenwartssprache, VEB Leipzig 1971. The first three words are a, baa, sahaa, and the last buzz, abuzz, fuzz.

LATER NOTE: For those who found this information exciting, I must say I discovered I have already blogged it: my mind must be going.

STILL LATER NOTE: As Abnu points out in the comments (in a discussion as to which of us has not had enough coffee today), the OneLook dictionary can be used to find patterns and thus does the work of a rückläufiges Wörterbuch. Here are the results of a search for *nch.

The whole knotty problem of deciding who is a native speaker (Muttersprachler) of the target language, and whether a translator can have two native languages and how to tell, is neatly sliced through in an advertisement for a patent translator to translate mainly into English in the Süddeutsche Zeitung:

bq. The translation department in our Munich office is seeking a qualified TRANSLATOR with English to mother tongue standard to start as soon as possible. …

bq. We are looking for a translator with a careful and conscientious working manner who enjoys a challenge.

bq. … we are offering you an attractive and responsible position as part of an international team.

I wonder how you test ‘mother tongue standard’.

(found on the pt group at Yahoo, thanks to Silke)

But in the USA, the ironworkers have taken over the topping-out ceremony, wood or no wood.

A page at Columbia University (taken from The Ironworker) gives the history of the topping-out ceremony:

bq. At one time, Europe was covered with a vast forest. Those who inhabited the forest were dependent on trees for their survival. …

bq. Scandinavian mythology suggests that humans originated from trees and our souls returned to the trees after death, giving each tree a spirit of its own.

bq. Humans began constructing their shelter with wood. Before cutting a tree, they would formally address the forest, reminding it of the consideration they had always shown toward the trees and asking the forest to grant use of a tree for construction of their home. When the house was complete, the topmost leafy branch of the tree used would be set atop the roof so that the tree spirit would not be rendered homeless. The gesture was supposed to convince the tree spirit of the sincere appreciation of those building the home. …

bq. The custom of placing a tree on a completed structure came with immigrants to the United States and became an integral part of American culture in barnraisings and housewarmings.

This takes me back to learning Russian at Berlin University with Siegfried Tornow, who must have done linguistics and told stories about bears and trees in Indo-European times. (This was in 1967-68 – I wonder how old he is now?)

Last week I was invited to the topping-out ceremony (Richtfest) of the multi-storey car park they’ve been building opposite my office since January.

But then we were told it wasn’t a real Richtfest. As some translators know (and others don’t), there is a sequence of building trades (Gewerke) in a building project.

For instance, the sequence might be (in part): piling, drainage and sewage, masonry, roofing, plastering, rainwater plumbing. gast and water mains, painting and decoration.
Trades in English here, in German here.

For a Richtfest to take place, the carpenters have to come in and make a timbered roof. There are no wooden beams in the car park, so no tree on top.

The Deutsches Rechtswörterbuch defines Gewerk as Zunft (guild).

This picture does not show the beer, which was in large quantities elsewhere. And I didn’t stay for the food, as I was working.
The speaker is Thomas Jung, the Oberbürgermeister of Fürth, whom some would apparently translate as Lord Mayor (there was a recent discussion on pt of how to translate Oberbürgermeisterin without making her sound like a mayor’s wife). Someone said Senior Mayor for Oberbürgermeister (there is a Bürgermeister too).

On July 21st I had an entry on a new language invented in Regensburg. I have now received an email from one Robert Maier, who apparently knows something about this but mysteriously describes himself as ‘happily far from Regensburg’. I reproduce it here and also in the comments below the earlier entry, which I have temporarily re-opened. I don’t imagine the original commenters will all see it, either way:

a few comments/flames?! from someone who – for his own taste – knows way too much about the thing…

New language not a COD… well it used to be; aber auch dort hatte man wohl so eine Art Rechtschreibreform. (Although COD was quite o.k. IMHO, theres sth very fishy about all this new language/un-language business…)

Tomas points to the issue of empiricity & testing, and quite rightly so… but his linguistics prof might be made aware of the fact daß seine (und mithin auch meine) Zunft ganz fröhlich an der ganzen internationalen Planspracherei mitgebastelt hat. Otto Jespersen gab der Welt Novial – http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novial – , André Martinet war in den Vorstufen von Interlingua – http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlingua_%28Plansprache%29 – beteiligt, und selbst der Name de Saussure taucht in den Annalen der Interlinguistik auf – allerdings nicht Ferdinand, sondern sein Bruder René; der dafür aber recht umtriebig auf der Esperanto-Seite der Dinge: http://www.fenetreeuropetv.com/forum/read.php?f=1&i=13456&t=10984

Das bei persistent illusions erwähnte Sommerloch… genau, das war auch mein erster Gedanke. Das passt auch, da gehört das auch hin – just like the Loch Ness Monster, Bigfoot and the Yeti… :)
(“Persistent Illusions”, actually – true true true… seems like the world of science has been hunting for THE international language ever since the early 17th century… and before that for the philosopher’s stone. Genau dasselbe, genau den gleichen Realitätsgehalt…)

Incidentally, you mention the UFO content of the institute’s name… actually, the acronym is meant to indicate the equivalent of R&D – or rather D&R: Entwicklung Und FOrschung… die Überlegung, ob das denn die richtige Reihenfolge ist, überlass ich jetzt aber dir… (but sure *does* remind of one song of Schwaben’s finest (of 1979 vintage), “Schwoißfuaß”: “Guck, guck, i han E UFO gsäa…”)

Und was Qoh angeht: Klingonisch, warum nicht? Once the fundamental auxlangers’ (auxiliary language proponents) postulate of “we need an artificial language to ease communication between people of differnt languages” is accepted… there is nothing, absolutely NOTHING, that would make one language preferable over any other (which is my huge heresy against them all, right).
[Und von daher nehmen diese Leute in Regensburg auch ihren Stolz von wegen, no grammar. Vielberth apparently assumes that it is grammar which causes the worst difficulties when learning a language – und darauf fußt das ganze Ding. Daß das Vokabular notwendig anschwillt, wenn man (wie dort betrieben) die ganze Morphologie lexikalisiert… tja! Oder? “The real intrinsic difficulty of learning a foreign language lies in learning to master its vocabulary.” Henry Sweet, 1899 – not a word about grammar…]

Anyway, das brannte mir so am Freitagabend grad mal noch so unter den Nägeln.
Happily far from Regensburg,
viele Grüße –
Robert