Wednesday, April 11, 2007

News feeds: update

The Google news feeds are turning out to be pretty engaging, in part in unexpected ways. The range from really local to really international is nice, for example: I wouldn't have known about the new linguistics major at Emory otherwise, nor about the new society for Maltese linguistics.

Some other stuff is off the intended mark, like the use of 'linguist' in the DynCorp story (although it's hilarious to read about "a disputed $4.65 billion linguistics contract"!). We are reminded that 'dialect' still means 'language' to lots of folks, e.g. when talking about dubbing Spiderman into Bhojpuri (where it seems to be widely believed among speakers that it's a dialect of Hindi) or singing in Tamashek (an Afroasiatic language, part of the Berber group, from Mali).

But what the heck does this link mean? Here's the key quote:
The film Bobby now on DVD directed by Emilio Estevez captures raw dialect between different ethicists of actual accounts of people who were present during the final hours of the assassination of Senator Robert F. Kennedy. ... Ironically, the dialect is true today as it was then which spoke volumes regarding current discuss of imagination reform.
OK, 'ethicist' should probably read ethnicities, and maybe 'dialect' should be dialectic? But what is 'imagination reform'? Immigration reform doesn't quite fit (though I haven't seen the movie and there is a possible immigration angle, given the assassin).

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Try Babelfishing 'imagination reform' into another language to see if it make the English any better:

E > Germ: Phantasieverbesserung
E > G > F > D > Sp > E: Amélioration de fantaisie > Verbeeldingsverbetering > Mejora de la imaginación (ironically, I received a 'site not available' message at that point)

or

F (using E) > Germ: Einbildung reform

or maybe it is a coinage for the joy of Babelfishing.

Mr. Verb said...

Brilliant. See the next post.