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▶ Tom Waits - Strange Weather - YouTube - http://www.youtube.com/watch...

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As one of the commenters observed, no one ever mentions this wonderful song. Esther, I <3 it, too. There were times I listened to it over and over. - maitani - -

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The Grammar Rules Behind 3 Commonly Disparaged Dialects | Mental Floss - http://mentalfloss.com/article...

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"Linguists are always taken aback by the overwhelmingly negative and sometimes virulently expressed reaction they get when stating something that every linguist believes (and linguists do not agree on everything!) in a rather uncomplicated way: Every dialect has a grammar." - maitani - -

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Found via Languagehat <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.languagehat.co... ; title="http://www.languagehat.co... ; - maitani - -

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An Uncertain Glory: India and its Contradictions, by Jean Drèze and Amartya Sen, review - Telegraph - http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture...

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"Nearly half (43 per cent) of Indian children under five are underweight, compared with four per cent in China and two per cent in Brazil. India’s central government spends four times more on petroleum and fertiliser subsidies than on health care. When investigators visited schools in 1996 and 2006, half of them had no teaching activity at all. None of the world’s top 200 universities is in India. Ninety per cent of the country’s labour force works in the “informal sector” – under the official radar." - maitani - -

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"How apt that the English word “juggernaut” is borrowed from Sanskrit. The India that emerges from this illuminating and powerfully argued book by the economists Jean Drèze and Amartya Sen has the look of one. India’s shining cupola is perched on a dilapidated chassis, crushing those who fall under its wheels. From one angle, it appears to be conquering the world. From another, it is rolling steadily towards the edge of a cliff." - maitani - -

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King Alfred and the Anglo-Saxons on BBC Four - Medieval manuscripts blog - http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digitis...

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"Alfred the Great (reigned 871–899) is perhaps the best-known Anglo-Saxon king. The son of King Æthelwulf of Wessex, Alfred succeeded his three older brothers to the throne in 871. At that time, Viking invaders had conquered much of England, and Alfred struggled to prevent Wessex from succumbing to the same fate, until his victory over the Vikings at Edington in 878. Alfred's reign is also marked by the revival of learning – for example, he instructed that certain works be translated from Latin into English – and by the reform of the coinage, the issuing of new laws, and the creation of fortified towns (or "burghs"). Alfred's defence of Wessex, combined with his administrative reforms, ultimately paved the way for the formation of the kingdom of England during the 10th century." - maitani - -

"A major television series featuring some of the British Library's Anglo-Saxon manuscripts is to air soon on BBC Four. Presented by Michael Wood, King Alfred and the Anglo-Saxons examines the careers of King Alfred the Great, the Lady Æthelflæd and King Athelstan respectively. Episode one, entitled "King Alfred", will be broadcast on Tuesday, 6 August (21:00–22:00), and will then be available on the BBC iPlayer." - maitani - -

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Ziyaret Tepe | Follow the archaeological excavations at Ziyaret Tepe, the Assyrian city of Tushhan, in southeastern Turkey with daily updates on the latest discoveries, journal entries from the excavators and scientific specialists, and a candid snapshot of life on a real dig in the modern Middle East - http://blogs.uakron.edu/ziyaret...

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Found via AWOL - The Ancient World Online <a rel="nofollow" href="http://ancientworldonline... ; title="http://ancientworldonline... ; - maitani - -

"Follow the archaeological excavations at Ziyaret Tepe, the Assyrian city of Tushhan, in southeastern Turkey with daily updates on the latest discoveries, journal entries from the excavators and scientific specialists, and a candid snapshot of life on a real dig in the modern Middle East" - maitani - -

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A Calendar Page for August 2013 - Medieval manuscripts blog - http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digitis...

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"The aristocratic pursuits which have so characterised this manuscript (see here for April, May, June and July) take a back seat in these scenes from the calendar pages for August. In the opening full-page miniature, a man and a woman are pausing from their labours in the fields to take some refreshment; the man is holding out a bowl towards another woman, who bears a basket of food and a jug (one hopes that it is full of wine). A dog with a studded collar plays nearby, while behind the resting pair more peasants are at work harvesting grain. In the bas-de-page, a group of men are engaged in the rather disquieting game of 'cock-throwing', hurling sticks at a bird that has been tied to a stake. On the following page are the saints for August, and a small roundel miniature of a woman holding a flower, for the zodiac sign Virgo. Below, another group of men are snaring birds, using an owl to attract them." - maitani - -

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Shapers of the Language 1: The Early Adopters (450-1066) | Caxton - http://caxton1485.wordpress.com/2013...

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"The island of Britain was invaded in the fifth century by tribes from north-west Europe who came to be known as Anglo-Saxons. They brought with them a collection of dialects that coalesced into what we now know as Old English, and which developed into the English that we use today. No invasions, no English language." - maitani - -

"Unlike modern English, it was highly inflected. That is, the function of a word in a clause was shown by its endings, like Latin or German. However, as Bruce Mitchell points out in ‘An Invitation to Old English and Anglo-Saxon England’, the greatest obstacle to understanding Old English is not the grammar. ‘I have come to the conclusion,’ he writes, ‘that the factor which above all makes Old English seem a foreign language to those trying to read it today is neither its inflections nor its word-order nor its syntax but its vocabulary.’" - maitani - -

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The Books Project - Carlo Rovelli - http://thebooksproject.co/carlo-r...

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I have read The Odyssey, and I'm very grateful to be done with The Brothers Karamazov. De Rerum Natura and Ethics are in my possession. "The Forgotten Revolution" sounds intriguing. I'll add that to my list. - maitani - -

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"Carlo Rovelli is an Italian theoretical physicist. He is Professor of Physics at Aix-Marseille University, in the Centre de Physique Théorique, in Marseille, France, and member of the Intitut Universitaire de France. His work is mainly in the field of quantum gravity, where he is among the founders of the loop quantum gravity theory." - maitani - -

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DCblog: On on or in the Internet - http://david-crystal.blogspot.de/2013...

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"Both are used, but on is hugely predominant. This is to be expected: on is the normal preposition when talking about specific communications media that operate through transmission: on TV, on the radio, on the phone - and thus, on the Web, on Facebook, on Youtube - and on the Internet. Metaphorical expressions reinforce the usage: one surfs on the Internet. And the governing organizations, such as ICANN, all talk in this way." - maitani - -

"A correspondent writes to ask about which preposition to use in relation to the Internet: is it on or in?" - maitani - -

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Mountains of the mind | TLS - http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls...

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"William Windham, a young Englishman on his grand tour, had led a mock caravan to Savoy’s glaciers in 1741 and published a pamphlet with a fellow traveller, Pierre Martel, in which the name “Mont Blanc” appears as the supposed highest point. Thus the mountain was first “discovered” – one of the plethora of assumptions that Peter Hansen gleefully dismantles in this learned and complex analysis of “multiple modernities” as seen through the prism of mountaineering." - maitani - -

"O n August 8, 1786, two men reached the highest point in Europe, which to them was the top of the world: both hailed from Chamonix, a clockless rusticity of roofs in the valley below. Michel-Gabriel Paccard was its up-to-date doctor; Jacques Balmat a peasant farmer and chamois hunter with a sideline in crystals. For decades the mountain in question, some three miles high, had been celebrated for its glaciers, not its snow-capped altitude; Chamonix had very few visitors before the 1770s. Only hunters ever dared to go high in these colossal mountains, the peaks sensibly given up to dragons and ghosts – the mind’s old poetry of health and safety." - maitani - -

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TYWKIWDBI ("Tai-Wiki-Widbee"): How to walk through shoulder-deep flowers - http://tywkiwdbi.blogspot.de/2013...

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"Visit a prarie." - maitani - -

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Levantine Epigraphy and History in the Achaemenid Period (Schweich Lectures 2013) - British Academy - http://www.britac.ac.uk/events...

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"Wednesday 26 June 2013 West Semitic Epigraphy and the Judean Diaspora during the Achaemenid Period: Babylonia, Egypt, Cyprus According to the Biblical texts Kings and Jeremiah, after the fall of Jerusalem, King Nebuchadnezzar deported part of the Judean population to Babylonia while other Judeans took refuge in Egypt. Apart from in the book of Ezekiel, the Bible does not tell us much about their life there. New epigraphic data can now reveal how the Judean refugees’ lived." - maitani - -

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Found via AWOL - The Ancient World Online <a rel="nofollow" href="http://ancientworldonline... ; title="http://ancientworldonline... ; - maitani - -

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VQR » Summer on the Island - http://www.vqronline.org/article...

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"After college, he moved again to the Faroes, but didn’t have much luck shooting. “I was too immature visually, and too immature in my concept of aesthetic storytelling, to be able to really say anything about the Faroes,” he says. “There was this desperation to photograph like someone trying to create Family of Man pictures. It wasn’t until later that my perspective shifted. It took the ability for me to feel like this was my place in order to photograph it.” Based in Denver, he returns to the Faroes nearly every summer, when the daylight stretches to twenty hours and the neighbor’s kid might drop by around midnight to play. Summer is the work season, the social season. “The Faroese build relationships in the summer,” he explains. “They have experiences during the summer. The winter is narrative, revisiting those experiences.”" - maitani - -

"Benjamin Rasmussen, twenty-eight, had a far-flung childhood. His family moved to the Philippines within a year of his birth in Baltimore, then boomeranged to the Faroe Islands—his father’s country, a hearty archipelago between Iceland and Denmark—in time for kindergarten. This cultural triptych continued until he finished high school in Manila, at which point he left for Arkansas to study photography." - maitani - -

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The Negative Canon: Subjunctive | Caxton - http://caxton1485.wordpress.com/2013...

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I didn't realize that the subjunctive mood is better preserved in American English than in British English. - maitani - -

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"Formulaic subjunctive. The formulaic subjunctive survives in a number of fossilized expressions such as ‘Heaven forbid!’ and Be that as it may. They are relatively few in number, and have no bearing on the use of the subjunctive elsewhere." - maitani - -

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After WWII, Europe Was A 'Savage Continent' Of Devastation : NPR - http://www.npr.org/2013...

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"This is not the beginning to a futuristic thriller, but a history of Europe in the years directly following World War II, when many European cities were in ruins, millions of people were displaced, and vengeance killings were common, as was rape." - maitani - -

"Imagine a world without institutions. No governments. No school or universities. No access to any information. No banks. Money no longer has any worth. There are no shops, because no one has anything to sell. Law and order are virtually non-existent because there is no police force and no judiciary. Men with weapons roam the streets taking what they want. Women of all classes and ages prostitute themselves for food and protection." - maitani - -

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Black Sea Salt | Harvard Review Online - http://harvardreview.fas.harvard.edu/...

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"Exile in the ancient world was bound up in the identity of what we would call the individual with his or her community—not so much “family” in the ancestral sense of Native Americans and East Asians, but what we’ve come to think of as “the polity,” the city. The power of exile as punishment is a construct of urban life. Exile is always exile from—and the community left behind has to remain a powerful element in the exile’s life, or else the dispossessed suffers only emigration. When an ancient was thrust into exile, he or she (yes—think of Dido) carried the City on his or her back; and the foundations of “daughter” cities traced back to the laborious expulsion from parents. But all this was in the realm of legend, mythology, history. With Ovid, for the first time, we hear the voice of an exile in psychological and social depth—exulis hæc vox est: præbet mihi littera linguam, / et si non liceat scribere, mutus ero—“This is the voice of an exile: a letter serves as my tongue, / and if not permitted to write, I will be dumb.” [1] Ovid would have appreciated the pun available in English translation but not to him: In Latin, littera, a letter of the alphabet, is a different word from epistula, a missive." - maitani - -

"Publius Ovidius Naso invented exile the way Charles Dickens invented Christmas. Of course, the institution was there before, but it had not been given a definitive literary and cultural codification, a reference point for all subsequent experience." - maitani - -

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Letters of Note: She was the music heard faintly at the edge of sound - http://www.lettersofnote.com/2013...

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"(Source: Selected Letters of Raymond Chandler; Image: One of the very few photos of Raymond and Cissy together, via.)" - maitani - -

"Detective novelist Raymond Chandler's wife of 30 years, Cissy, died on December 12th, 1954 after a long and painful battle with pulmonary fibrosis during which the author wrote The Long Goodbye. As can be seen in the following touching and affectionate letter, written to friend Leonard Russell shortly after Cissy's passing, Raymond was deeply affected by the loss of his wife, and it seems he never really recovered. Sadly, he died five years later a broken man, having attempted suicide and returned to the alcoholism she had previously helped him to avoid." - maitani - -

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Inner speech speaks volumes about the brain | KurzweilAI - http://www.kurzweilai.net/inner-s...

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"This is a signal that helps us distinguish the sensory experiences we produce ourselves from those produced by external stimuli. It’s a kind of predictive signal generated by the brain that helps to explain, for example, why other people can tickle us but we can’t tickle ourselves. The signal predicts our own movements and effectively cancels out the tickle sensation." - maitani - -

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Explaining the Rapid Rise of the Xenophobic Right in Contemporary Europe | GeoCurrents - http://geocurrents.info/cultura...

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why is france green in the first map? - maitani - -

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@eivind I don't really know about 'Sweden Democrats' but Persut growth has stopped and there is visible return to centrists party (which was looser to Persut in recent years). Basically Persut had grown on population, loosing ground under and either desperately seeking new grounds or hanging on water for unclear future. Oh, Persut is local-coined pejorative nickname for Perus Suomalaiset (which is not true but basic) which co-sounds with perse (arse). - maitani - -

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Μπουζούκι, μπουζούκι, μπουζούκι… | Memiyawanzi - http://memiyawanzi.wordpress.com/2013...

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"About a year or so ago I made a post about Kostas Ferris’s film Ρεμπέτικο. Since then I’ve been gradually doing more exploration into Modern Greek ρεμπέτικα and λαϊκά music, and partly to give myself something to keep myself sane with something non-work related when I’m not concentrating on the Ph.D. (at least tangentially non-work related, anyway), I’ve also started to learn to play the bouzouki. Fortunately it has succeeded in distracting me from the minutiae of Greek dialectology, and it has fast become my newest addiction. As I’ve played various types of guitars in various styles since I was around fifteen, the basic techniques of playing are transferrable and I’ve been able to pick up a reasonable amount of basic technical skill in a short period of time, so it’s principally been a matter of first finding myself an instrument, then educating myself in the particularities of the modes and the main time-signatures used in Greek music—usually marked by a set of peculiar metres that make different subdivisions of 9/8ths rhythms." - maitani - -

"Finding a bouzouki in England was actually somewhat more difficult than I had originally envisaged. Well, to be more correct, there are ‘Irish’ Bouzoukis that were adapted from the Greek instrument for Irish folk music, but the adapted instrument as made by modern luthiers, depending on who you ask, is probably closer to an octave mandolin than the original Greek instrument. I was actually only able to find a single model (a Σακής Model 2) for sale that was an authentic Greek μπουζούκι in a London shop not too far from the UCL area without getting into the veritable grab-bag of the used instrument market." - maitani - -

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The Franz Kafka chronicles - FT.com - http://www.ft.com/cms...

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"In 1982, the Italian writer and Nazi concentration camp survivor Primo Levi embarked on a translation of Franz Kafka’s The Trial. At first he was enthusiastic, hoping to improve the German he had learnt so imperfectly at Auschwitz. Instead, Kafka involved him more terribly than he could have imagined. Levi found only bleakness in the hero Josef K, who is arrested and executed for a crime he probably did not commit." - maitani - -

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Proust Centennial | French Culture - http://frenchculture.org/books...

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"Of course, I’d been in Combray for those nine hours, strolling through the sun-soaked gardens and the rich object-laden rooms of Proust’s childhood. Proust’s great aunts are teasing his grandmother again, poking at her with their relentless barbs. Then the book wavers and twitches in my hand. My head lolls back into that specific nook between the train-seat headrest and the window. The giant trees of the Hudson River are flickering past. The morning sun slides across the water, sparkling as tiny waves lick at the light. A morning yellow that isn’t even quite yellow yet. The presaging of yellow. The train car is quiet with morning readers, morning nappers." - maitani - -

"I first opened Swann’s Way on a train. This is more than twenty years ago, Amtrak heading from New York City up the Hudson and finally to Montreal. It was a nine-hour train ride, the way I remember it. I remember stepping off the train in Montreal and wondering where the hours had gone." - maitani - -

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Journal of Jewish Languages » Brill Online - http://booksandjournals.brillo...

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"The peer-reviewed Journal of Jewish Languages (JJL) constitutes a venue for academic research in the multifaceted field of Jewish Languages. Jewish languages are the languages spoken and written by Jews in their communities around the world. Among these are Yiddish, Judeo-Spanish, Judeo-Arabic, Jewish Aramaic, Judeo-Italian, Judeo-French, Judeo-Provençal, Judeo-Persian, Jewish English, Jewish Malayalam and more. Although these belong to a variety of genealogical language families, Jewish languages have common linguistic features thus constituting a distinct field of research." - maitani - -

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Language Evolution: Who Benefits from Language Change? - http://langevo.blogspot.de/2013...

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"Since functionalism treats language as a tool designed and perfected by humans to serve their needs, it understands function as a purpose-oriented property of linguistic structures: it is a way of achieving a communicative aim by linguistic means. Language is fine-tuned to optimise communication, which means, among other things, that the natural conflict between the speaker’s needs (encoding and sending linguistic messages at a low cost) and the listener’s needs (receiving and decoding messages without unnecessary effort) must be resolved. Languages maintain a delicate balance between ease of production and ease of perception. For example, precise enunciation is expensive in terms of articulatory effort and neuromuscular control, but if the speaker tries to reduce this cost excessively by sacrifying precision, the result may be the listener’s failure to understand the message. Since having to repeat a sentence twice is usually costlier than saying it once with sufficient clarity, the speaker has to anticipate any undesirable difficulties at the listener’s end, and the tendency to favour ease of articulation is mitigated by those anticipations." - maitani - -

"Language change can make life minimally easier for the speaker or the listener. Sound changes are often classified into “lenitions” (weakenings) and “fortitions” (strengthenings). Weakenings consist in reducing articulatory effort (and the acoustic prominence of speech sounds), while strengthenings involve increased effort (and acoustic prominence). In this dualist interpretation, weakenings are speaker-oriented, while strengthenings are listener-oriented. Any change has a purpose, and therefore a functional significance – all that needs to be determined is its orientation: cui bono?" - maitani - -

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Naturschutzgebiet - Markt Neubrunn mit Ortsteil Böttigheim - www.neubrunn.de - http://www.neubrunn.de/Freizei...

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"Das Naturschutzgebiet liegt im westlichen Zipfel des Landkreises Würzburg und umfasst sechs Teilgebiete rings um Böttigheim. Es wurde 1999 erstmals mit 49 ha ausgewiesen und 2007 auf 151 ha erweitert. Die Lebensräume um Böttigheim sind nicht nur natürlichen Ursprungs, sondern das Ergebnis Jahrhunderte lang ausgeübter traditioneller Bewirtschaftungsformen auf Flächen mit extremen Klimabedingungen und entsprechender Exposition. Wo es die Bedingungen an den steilen Hängen zuließen, wurde früher Weinbau betrieben. Ansonsten war die Schafbeweidung verbreitet, da diese extremen Standorte keine andere land- oder forstwirtschaftliche Nutzung zuließen. Die Aufgaben dieser wenig ergiebigen Nutzungen führte zu einer Verbuschung der Flächen und damit zu einem Rückgang der einzigartigen Lebensräume mit den seltenen Tier – und Pflanzenarten." - maitani - -

"Die Hanglage um Böttigheim mit ihrem Mosaik aus trocken-warmen Magerrasen, Säumen, Hecken, Gebüschen, Wäldern, Mauern, Steinriegeln sowie Streuobstwiesen und extensiven Äckern als Biotopverbund der Trockenflächen des Taubertales zu sichern. Weiterhin die landesweit bedeutsamen regionaltypischen Trockenrasen, die herausragenden Orchideenbestände, den einzigen Standort des Lothringer Leins in Bayern, die Lebensräume des Uhus, die sehr seltene Insekten und Spinnenfauna und die Schönheit und Vielseitigkeit der Landschaft zu sichern und zu fördern." - maitani - -

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Homepage, Lexicon of Greek Personal Names, University of Oxford - http://www.lgpn.ox.ac.uk/#

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" The project: the origin and purpose of LGPN. Publications: details of published volumes including name lists and statistics; forthcoming volumes, associated works. LGPN online: Online facilities: Name Search over 35,000 published names; indexes and bibliographies of LGPN I-VA; LGPN IIA: addenda, corrigenda, name indexes and statistics from revised LGPN II (version April 2007). LGPN Database Search: conversion project using TEI-compliant XML. LGPN Website Search Ancient Greek names: an introduction, including their formation and development, and our sources for them. We also have a little information about modern Greek names. Announcements: new additions to the site, developments, news and events. Anatolian Society: a joint conference, July 11-12, 2011 Contact details: staff and the Advisory Committee." - maitani - -

"The Lexicon of Greek Personal Names (LGPN) was established to collect and publish all ancient Greek personal names, drawing on the full range of written sources from the 8th century B.C. down to the late Roman Empire." - maitani - -

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