Ever wonder what all those Chinese expressions in FIREFLY and SERENITY were?  Just check out http://fireflychinese.kevinsullivansite.net/index.html for the answer…

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.

( Read more... )

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 Muslims ( Read more... )

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

• snogging
• doppus
• redding
• hailing

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 with a wry tone, and ( Read more... )

(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, ( Read more... )

• “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)