Trevor at kaleboel reports on a Guardian article by Steven Wells on why the USA owes its existence to cricket.

bq. FLASHBACK: Frederick, Prince of Wales, eldest son of George II, was, by all accounts, a bit of an arse. His mum called him a beast and a monster. And his dad seriously reckoned he was “wechselbalg” – a werewolf. And then, in 1749, Frederick got smacked in the head by a cricket ball. Two years later he died of an infected cyst in his head, leaving the way clear for Fred’s slightly mad son to become George III.

But a Wechselbalg is not a werewolf – that’s a Werwolf (as in the famous Morgenstern poem where the Werwolf wants to be declined – wer, wen, wes, wem – or as the Germans say, confounding my language-learning attempts, wer, wes, wem, wen). Wechselbalg is changeling. According to Hermann Paul’s Deutsches Wörterbuch – a dictionary well worth having: it doesn’t deal with the whole of the German vocabulary, but what it does deal with, it does thoroughly and in detail, with etymology and history – amazon.de link: Deutsches Wörterbuch
‘nach dem Volksglauben ein von Hexen stammendes untergeschobenes Kind, daher als Schimpfwort für ein mißratenes Kind gebraucht. Andere Bezeichnung Kielkropf’. (This is not the only German reference in the Guardian article).

Language Log spawns Eric Bakovic’s phonoloblog:

bq. Welcome to phonoloblog, a weblog for phonologists (and other interested linguists) to share any and all ideas relevant to phonology and phonological theory.

This should be very useful for those who like that kind of thing (it’s too difficult for me).

Real property is land. It’s called real because a person dispossessed of land used to be able to claim the land itself (res: thing – the Germans have a term dinglich – ‘thingly’ – that is close to this meaning). This means the same as the immovables /immoveables in Roman law systems: Immobilien, Liegenschaften, Grundstücke.

Personal property is everything apart from ‘ownership’ of land (actually you can’t own land in England and Wales, because it belongs to the Crown, but let’s forget about that for the moment). It doesn’t mean movables, therefore – it’s a wider term. It breaks down into:

Chattels real: leasehold interests in land – called real because they have to do with land, called chattels because they aren’t land.

Chattels personal: a superordinate term for:

Choses in action: debts, cheques, claims, patents. These are forms of property you may have to take legal action to enforce.

Choses in possession: physical movable things, bewegliche Sachen in German.

Were I to return to the interesting question still pursued at Language Log as to when and if a fish changes its status without being smoked, and what possessed the Irish Senate to consider this, I would need to start with this diagram. Unfortunately I still have to do some work today.

It was hard work doing this diagram. The slightly grey background of the top three fields was not intentional.

The John Doe topic leads Mark Liberman at Language Log to a discussion of personal chattels and chattels real in the Irish Senate in 1973.

bq. Mr. Cooney: There is no definition in the Statute or in the parent Act of personal chattels. But “personal chattels” has been for so long a legal term that it now has a certain legal standing. If the Senator wishes I can quote for him a definition from Wharton’s Law Lexicon where “personal chattels” is defined. When the Senator hears the definition he will be quite satisfied that no difficulty will arise in interpreting the Act and deciding what it applies to.

bq. Chattels personal or in a more narrow and more modern sense, “chattels” means movable property or effects which belong personally to the owner and for which if they are injuriously withheld from him he has, in general, no other remedy than by personal action … while a mixed action of ejectment in which the plaintiff could recover the specific property was available in the case of “chattels real”.

I find this discussion a bit confusing. To my mind there is a difference between chattels personal and personal chattels. The Oxford Dictionary of Law confirms this: personal chattels are defined in the Administration of Estates Act 1925 and do not include chattels used for business purposes at the intestate’s death. So chattels personal is a broad property term more or less corresponding to moveable property, part of a system more complex than the division between real and personal property, whereas personal chattels are the chattels personal a person owns, things like toilet articles, bags, umbrella. The Irish Senate appear to be discussing when a fish becomes a personal chattel. Or when it becomes a chattel personal? But they do quote the Administration of Estates Act 1925. If any Irish lawyers are reading this blog, they are offline for a couple of weeks, so I will have to leave it there.

The excellent and well-established online Translation Journal now has its own weblog (via Carob).

The idea of the weblog is to allow people to join in a discussion. It uses the Blogger comments system, that is, you can register and sign in or post anonymously.

Sonja Tomaskovic (excuse lack of diacritics) has a medical translation weblog, mainly in English but with some German and Croatian.
The weblog was originally here , where there are older entries (there may have been an earlier stage still). It’s now here.

Sonja’s website has a useful list of tools. She has a FURL page too. FURL, already mentioned by Handakte WebLAWg more than once, allows you to collect webpages online, at present free of charge. Weblinks that survive will direct you and others to the original site, but those that die will be saved. Amy Gahran’s Contentious weblog has more information on how she used FURL.

LATER NOTE: in a comment, Sonja points out that she will shortly be deleting her own weblog. A good opportunity to use FURL to preserve it if you want to!