Language Log is a new linguistics log with at least four authors: Steven Bird, Mark Liberman, Chris Potts, and Geoff Pullum (via Uncle Jazzbeau’s Gallimaufrey).

Matt Bulow reports that if you enter the word ‘Englischübersetzer’ in Google, you get 20 hits for a variety of front URLs, behind all of which zappmedia, a big agency, is hiding. He is reporting it so Google can take countermeasures.

Matt Bulow has started a weblog called alt0151 .

Entries are in English so far. (I very rarely give a German version nowadays, but maybe I should return to it, or at least a little summary in the other language à la Walter Simon). After all, unless I do it every time, people won’t expect it at all.

I will take up his first topic in a separate entry.

IPKAT links to an article in English, in The Register, on the new German copyright law. IPKAT also gives a link to the EU Copyright Directive, which the new German Act implements.
Brigitte Zypries, the German Federal Minister of Justice, spoke of a ‘second basket’ of copyright provisions (‘zweiter Korb’), hence IPKAT’s query as to whether this is a basket case. I knew of the grim history of the term basket case, but I thought it was American. The American Heritage Dictionary says it’s British:

bq. In popular usage basket case refers to someone in a hopeless mental condition, but in origin it had a physical meaning. In the grim slang of the British army during World War I, it referred to a quadruple amputee. This is one of several expressions that first became popular in World War I, or that entered American army slang from British English at that time.

The OED says it’s of U.S. origin, and the first example it gives is U.S., 1919. I thought it came from the Civil War, but I don’t know.

And a year ago, Time asked ‘Is Germany Europe’s Basket Case?‘. Here are some other speculations.

English law reports are very commonly cited. The traditional citations are from the printed reports, the All England Law Reports and the Law Reports. Times Law Reports can also be quoted in court (they’re written and signed by a barrister). And all these reports refer to the paper publication.

Now so many judgments are published on the Internet, a form of citation called neutral citation has been introduced. The Bodleian Library explains it.

and there is a practice direction too:

(these two texts are very similar).

A “neutral citation standard” is a means of citing court judgments without reference to specific publishers, databases or report series.

Here are the abbreviations used for various courts:

bq. Chancery Division EWHC number (Ch)
Patents Court: EWHC number (Pat)
Queen’s Bench Division EWHC number (QB)
Administrative Court EWHC number (Admin)
Commercial Court EWHC number (Comm)
Admiralty Court EWHC number (Admlty)
Technology & Construction Court EWHC number (TCC)
Family Division EWHC number (Fam)

For example, [2002] EWHC 123 (Fam); or [2002] EWHC 124 (QB); or [2002] EWHC 125 (Ch).
(from practice direction)

Neutral citation has been introduced in other common-law countries too.

US site defines vendor-neutral and medium-neutral citation systems.

German case reports are not so strictly reported, since Germany does not have a case-law system. They are often cited by the periodical they appeared in. But each judgment has its file number, and that is the number usually given when a judgment appears on the Web.

Following up on my entry on spaces between words, languagehat quoted another review of the book.

That review suggests reading Paul Saenger’s book on spaces between words together with Malcolm Parkes, Pause and Effect. An Introduction to the History of Punctuation in the West (1993). I managed to find a review of that on the Internet too. Among other things, the book discusses the importance of marking up text for intonation – this is the value of the inverted question mark used in Spanish, introduced by the Royal Spanish Academy in the 18th century.

I am very taken with the word punct, the precursor of the full stop (U.S. period) originally used to separate words. The OED has it, with a number of meanings, all obsolete.