querbeißer

Arnold Zwicky’s lovely post this morning about baguette and how it’s surprisingly not a diminutive of bague threw me into reminiscing about my time in Paris — 12 years of my life. Instead of continuing to hijack the comment space over there, this is something to pursue on this blog, even though we seem to [...]

Today’s links still follow the endangered language theme with special emphasis on Alaska Native languages. The first one is fun. Frozen Whitefish  is a rock band from Bethel (a town and Yup’ik village of 6500 off the road system in south-west Alaska close to the coast) that was features in the Discovery Channel series Flying [...]

Today we have two Inuit (Canadian) videos to complement the recent Alaska Native language/culture resources post. Two school girls practicing Inuit throat singing (YouTube). There are many videos on the various video services that demonstrate this art form, which can be referred to by a variety of terms and is carried out typically by two [...]

On one of my blogs, there used to be automatically generated link posts via Delicious.com. The method was never very reliable, and I abandoned it as it was never updated from its rather basic functionality. In particular, every single link I saved on Delicious.com was re-posted (instead of, say, just the links marked with a [...]

So I live in Alaska now: circumstances change, and life remains endlessly fascinating. For a new European expat in North America, Alaska is one of the more unusual places to land on. Compared to Texas, the second largest US state, it’s 2.5 times the size, but less than 3% of the population (about 700,000, half [...]

Yesterday, the a new major version of the Unicode Standard was published in Unicode 6.0, a year after version 5.2 and more than four after the last major upgrade to 5.0. There is of course a slew of new stuff in it, and I’m sure I’ll spend a good while digesting at least some of [...]

@guardianstyle on Twitter points to an article by Mark Brown announcing what sounds like a wonderful exhibition the British Library is preparing: Evolving English: One Language, Many Voices (Nov 12, 2010 – Apr 3, 2011).  There’s even a second piece, by Alison Flood. British Library exhibits are reputed to be large, well-made and almost over-abundant [...]

Sometimes automatic social media integration on news sites can be a little… callous. The fact that there may have been realtively well-known former US senator on the plane only underlines the macabre element.

In the Twitter client Tweetdeck, and on my Twitter page itself, I run a search for “i18n”: the frequently used abbreviated form of “internationalization” (or “internationalisation” in BrE). A while ago, I noticed that this search feed contained some odd posts that seemed to have nothing to do with the topic, but originated from accounts [...]

A few days ago, my friend Melinda Shore, who knows I’m interested in internationalization, sent me a screenshot from the search bar of her Safari browser. It is a drop-down list of search suggestions provided by Google just after typing the letter h: The top suggestion is a mess: What does it mean? Why is [...]