Memnison Journal

A young student from China is Ireland-bound, and runs into a problem..agus faigheann sé amach go bhfuil an nach labhraíonn Gaeilge i bhfad Gaelic! 10 minute YouTube video, very funny and sweet: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qA0a62wmd1A

Twenty-ten or two-thousand-ten? Your thoughts.

Just a followup note here from me on a topic broached earlier in my LJ version of the journal about the Chinese explorer Zheng He.   I was gassing on about ‘we need fresher AH situations’ and Steve Silver brought up the idea of Zheng He’s expeditions finding Australia and colonizing it (as it would have [...]

….never hurts when you’re setting up your fonts and browser and such.

Online search references for the Quran and the Bible;  the Quran part has both the Arabic and three English translations, and the Bible one has a BUNCH of different translations, most NOT English (which has around 20 different versions). Note that the authoritative version of the Quran is the Arabic one, of course.  And this [...]

Coming Anarchy also highlights multiple historical places with the same name; Albania, Iberia, Alexandria,  various African nations, and Guinea.  They don’t have one for Galicia, but they ought to.

From the Coming Anarchy site: projected maps of Europe in the future and the former Yugoslav areas, along with their tag on microstates.  Personally, I strongly doubt some of this; France has been doing a thorough stomp of its minority groups (linguistics-wise, especially) for the last 100+ years to Make Everyone Parisian, and the Bosniak [...]

What is your understanding of the following terms (multiple definitions accepted for this): snogging doppus redding hailing

I’m really amazed at the rapid speed I’m making through the VHS tapes.  Part of that is that there’s a lot of the BBC stuff that is now available; I was absolutely shocked to find that the Tim Curry ‘Life of Shakespeare’ was available on DVD (I sweat blood finding the VHS). (Yes, I’m very [...]

Languages are a hot item of discussion at our house, because – well, there’s a big language gap here. Susan’s family is a mix of Norwegian, Danish and variations on British Isles, and there’s a little bit of the ‘Fargo’ Scandinavian-American accent there. Not much, mostly in word choice and the occasional ‘ya, sure‘ delivered [...]

(h/t to cakmpls) Laotian-American high school student in rural Iowa is seventh in her class with a 3.9 GPA, and school administrators are beating her up over her refusal to take a yearly Dick-And-Jane-Run-With-Spot-Run-Spot-Run test of her English abilities. The administrators point to the fact that her parents aren’t really very good in English, and [...]

The tax program choked and died on me on install; had to clean everything out and reinstall.  Had to also dig up our old tax files for the program, so that it could pull forward old information for multi-year stuff affecting our taxes, and those had gotten stuck away somewhere and were more of a [...]

“The way to a woman’s BLANK is through her BLANK“, the Obama’s dog will be a BLANK, Nixon and LBJ had worried opinions about the BLANKs all around them, as did the FBI Jefferson Davis had a BLANK spy in his home and Teaching BLANK language in Summer School can get dangerous.  (h/t Deb Geisler)

Miep Gies, the last of the group who hid Anne Frank from the Nazis, turns 100 today (hat tip to aisb23). Weekend news anchors at a local TV station have a ritual they do during a commercial break – get up and DANCE! (h/t andrewducker) Jabba and other beach huts on the Lincolnshire (UK) coast [...]

In the same vein, there are names for countries that are given to them by their neighbors that don’t connect easily to what we’d call those countries in English. For example, a lot of tribes might call themselves ‘The People’, while a neighboring tribe would call them ‘those horse-stealing thieves to the West’.    The tribe [...]