Link roundup: 28 January 2013

Tuesday, January 29, 2013

Just a few links today.

--- Welsh, Gaelic, Irish and Cornish are making a comeback. I mention this frequently because it's a popular myth that small languages naturally just get swallowed up and destroyed by large languages like water sucked into a sponge, but it's simply not true: in any well-developed country with free speech and minority rights there's no reason for a small language to disappear.

--- The Pope's tweeting in Latin now. I follow that account as of yesterday, as I do any account written entirely in Latin.

--- Last night's dream had a mixture of languages again:


We knew the bomb was going to go off at 12 o'clock because the "Romanian" bomber had used the word that in the dream meant 12, but was just Lithuanian 10 with a ț and putting a ț on the end doesn't make a word Romanian (douăsprezece is Romanian for twelve). The bomber, by the way, intended to place the bomb in a fridge he claimed he had come to fix in order to keep us trapped in the 19th century.

--- Plans for Spanish to move into Asia. Another one of those woo Spanish is going to take over the world articles but also with some numbers to note:
In 2000, there were only 1,500 university students studying Spanish in the 90 universities that teach the language but now, there are 25,000. Seventy percent of requests to study Spanish are currently rejected because there are not enough Spanish teachers there to teach them. China “exports” students to 34 Latin American and 22 Spanish universities.
--- Comment dit-on hashtag en français? Mot-dièse. Ce mot me convient tout à fait car je ne sais pas exactement ce que le mot hash en hashtag veut dire... # = un hash peut-être?

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