[Multilingual Monday] Miscellaneous

[aadroma]

I'm gonna go all over the place with this artcicle -- it might seem a bit ADHD, but bare with me ...

Comments

[urso]

I really like that new CNN logo. Have you seen the new Spanish one?

Here's a bit about it on one of my favo(u)rite blogs:
http://www.underconsideration.com/brandnew/archives/tilde_in_the_news.php

[gorkabear]

CNN+ (the Spanish franchise) is about to close
Believe it or not, it was a progressive TV station

[abbazabba]

Wow, somewhere, George Michael is crying and he doesn't know why.

[bluebear2]

A no-nonsense Cantonese friend who had lived in Japan for ten years was complaining that it was so hard to get any business done there because" nobody tells you the truth" in Japan.
She moved to Canada.

[wiped]

with regards to country names-- interestingly, while turkish takes 'fas' from the moroccan city fes, other languages (such as persian) refer to the country as 'marâkesh' (from the city of marrakech). many of the others (gürcistan, macaristan) were borrowed from persian, but arnavutluk comes from greek by way of an older albanian autonym.

[pne]

Polish and Hungarian also have a couple of doozies, such as Włochy and Olaszország, respectively, for Italy. (I presume the first is cognate to Vlachs?) Lengyelország (Hungarian for Poland) is also pretty opaque to me.

Also amusing what roots various languages have for Germany, the German language, and/or Germans: referring to various tribes such as the Germani (brothers?), Alamanni (all men?), or Saxons (e.g. Finnish Saksa), or calling Germans "mute" (various Slavic languages)