Tomorrow is my third Czech lesson. Yes, I have been procrastinating wildly, but I have at least started ( Read more... )

Czech seasonal greetings are quite a mixed bag, and some are... challenging.

But I have noticed a short phrase used widely, even as an abbreviation: PF, standing for "pour féliciter". It's a French phrase and it means, roughly, "for congratulating" -- it originally referred to greetings cards, as in, it's something you'd use to describe them, ( Read more... )

As I've doubtless bored people silly with for years, another of my non-computery interests is languages and linguistics. One subsection of this is conlangs: constructed languages, as opposed to natural languages ( Read more... )

How I Met My WifeIt had been a rough day, so when I walked into the party I was very chalant, despite my efforts to appear gruntled and consolate. I was furling my wieldy umbrella for the coat check when I saw her standing alone in a corner. She was a descript person, a woman in a state of total array. Her hair was kempt, her clothing shevelled, ( Read more... )

(Prompted by this story in the Wall St Journal, found via an entertaining post on Language Log.)

It is probably well-known now that I like to dabble in foreign languages. I can make polite noises in more than half a dozen, though, alas, often not a lot more than polite noises. The hardest of any one I've tried so far, by a country mile - or ( Read more... )

The International Phonetic Alphabet is a wonderful thing, and like sign language, not nearly widely enough used ( Read more... )

Narafala dei, mo narafala dei, mo narafala dei ( Read more... )