Peter Harvey, linguist

A misattached participle clause

According to the South Yorkshire Star:

IT'S been the butt of smutty jokes for years... But now fed-up residents on South Yorkshire's most embarrassingly named street - Butt Hole Road - have finally ended the jokes. The residents on the Conisbrough street have clubbed together to change its name to Archers Way.

Well that’s fair enough, but I first read about it in The Northerner, a weekly digest of news from the north of England sent out by the Guardian newspaper. And what I read was this (my emphasis):

A street in Sheffield that has been the butt of jokes for many years has finally won a battle to change its name to something less ... behind the times. Residents of Butt Hole Road long ago stopped seeing the funny side of the legions of titterers taking pictures of themselves with their pants down next to the road's sign. After clubbing together to raise the GBP300 necessary to pay for a new sign, the local council has agreed to name the road Archers Way, in honour of its half-mile proximity to Conisbrough Castle.

We know that local councils are strapped for cash but such a munificent gesture from the councillors also seems somewhat improbable!

Barça can’t be bothered with translators

It is well known that in Romance languages the superlative form is made with the preposition de. If this flag which I saw in Barcelona the other day had been written in Catalan, it would have said El millor del món. In English it should say The best in the world, as any native speaker – let alone a professional translator – could have told Barça if they had bothered to ask. As it is, they have made a Great English Mistake.

(Click picture to enlarge.)

Gothic for Goths

When I studied the history of the German language at university, I discovered that the Goths got themselves converted to Christianity by a Greek-speaker, so, like the Slavs and for the same reason, they had an alphabet that shows distinct similarities with the Greek alphabet. Now there is a lesson in the Gothic language on the Internet. To introduce it I can do no better than quote directly from LanguageHat, whom I thank greatly for bringing it to my attention:

I have fond memories of the semester I spent studying Gothic in grad school, but the texts were a little dry. That's not a problem with Ben's series of videos "Gothic for Goths," which uses for its dialogue someone trying to find a lost chupacabra. The first video (10 min.) is an introduction to the alphabet, with explanations of the names of the letters and where they came from; the second (just a couple of minutes, created because YouTube cut his first off at ten minutes) is a continuation, discussing the diphthongs; and the third, "Gaitsugja Meins" ['My chupacabras'] (5 min.), is a dialogue with explanations of grammar. It's a lot of fun, and I hope he does more of them. (Thanks, Jonathan!)