Roundup
As I’m still getting used to the grad student life, plus getting my schedule all together, posts will continue to be a bit irregular. So here’s just a short roundup of interesting things I’ve seen over the past couple days:
For some humorous accounts of what certain languages actually are, check out this site, including some nice ones like (via language hat):
- English is essentially a West Germanic language that’s trying very hard to look like a Romance one.
- English is essentially Norse as spoken by a gang of French thugs.
- French is essentially Latin spoken by a drunken Roman soldier.
- Modern Chinese is essentially Classical Chinese without any manners.
- Japanese is essentially Tagalog spoken by Koreans trying to do an impression of Americans from the point of view of Chinese people.
Sometimes Google news doesn’t get the headline right. Case in point, this headline: Note: Some graphics are oversized and require scrolling. I’m note sure how Google managed to extract that from this web page. The text appears in an inset to the main article with more info, related links, and so forth. Near the bottom of the section that links to more images is the extracted title of the article. It appears almost directly before a subheading of the inset that reads “SPECIAL REPORT,” but the actual body of the article, which is actually embedded in a table embedded in the main page’s table (love that formatting stuff) starts several lines further down.
Finally, on a not-so-light note, there’s been some activity in the blogosphere regarding the framing of certain recent goods-acquiring activities happening in the south: discussion here. Suffice it to say: dang.