Butter Sculptures are fabulous
“The remarkable story of how English spread within predominantly English-speaking societies like the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand is not, with the benefit of hindsight, unique. It is a process in language that is as old as Greek, or Chinese. The truly significant development, which has occurred only in the [...]
Donkey, nirrup, moke or my personal favorite, pronkus? Hee-haw and a kick in the shins!
“Throughout the history of English there has been a contest between the forces of standardization and the forces of localization, at both the written and the spoken levels.
There is an old Hindi proverb that ‘language changes every eighteen or twenty miles’. [...]
Eduardo Rózsa-Flores was born in Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia. His father, György Rózsa, was a painter and university professor who left Hungary in 1948 and married Nelly Flores Arias, a Catalan high school teacher. The family moved to Chile in 1972, but immigrated to Sweden in 1973 after Augusto Pinochet came to power. [...]
There is something amazingly satisfying about trying to read a book with a title such as PHILOSOPHY and PHILOSOPHERS: An Introduction to Western Philosophy. Yah, call me vain, but it’s just that there’s something deeply philosophical in reading about philosophy and the philosophers who wrote their personal views on philosophy. The thing is, and if [...]
“English has a few rivals, but no equals. Neither Spanish nor Arabic, both international languages, has this global sway. Another rival, Russian, has the political and economic underpinning of a world language, but far from spreading its influence it, too, is becoming mildly colonized by new words known as Russlish, for example seksapil (sex appeak) [...]
Anecdote - “a short tale narrating an interesting or amusing biographical incident”
Well, as much as I try to read books to further my professional development, these days I find myself putting them aside and lusting for a fictional page turner instead. Therefore my first blog post will be anecdotes of my first 6 [...]
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“The statistics of English are astonishing. Of all the world’s languages (which now number some 2,700), it is arguably the richest in vocabulary. The…Oxford English Dictionary lists about 500,000 words; and a further half-million technical and scientific terms remain uncatalogued. According to traditional estimates, neightbouring German has a vocabulary of about 185,000 words and French [...]