Link roundup for 30 December 2011

Just one day before the end of the year. Here are some tabs I've had open for a few days now:

-- Latin Making a Comeback - this one is thanks to Steve Rice from auxlang. It mentions the most recent audio recording of the Latin New Testament that I've written about so much here.

-- English vowel shift - listen to the same (short) passage read in four varieties of English from the Middle Ages to the 18th century.

-- The European Extremely Large Telescope's 2012 budget has been approved, meaning that construction can now start. This land-based telescope will have a resolution 15 times that of Hubble, and of course will be able to observe the entire night instead of 30 minutes at a time. Most exciting for me: the direct imaging of large exoplanets and characterizing their atmospheres. Thanks to Kepler I foresee a huge spurt in interest in building telescopes of this size, since the cost for even a massive observatory only ranges in the tens of millions to a bit over a billion dollars, a pittance for an ambitious nation or group of universities. The best part about a land-based observatory? No nail-biting launch to orbit.

-- An article here in German with the title "Der s-Plural ist originär Deutsch" (The plural in s is originally German) with plenty of discussion below.

-- Another article in Portuguese with numbers on trade between China and Portuguese-speaking nations.