LanguageHat tells of seeing Kurosawa’s 生きる Ikiru (1952) for the first time, and provides the words of the song “Life is Short”.
Wikipedia tells more than you might imagine asking about the heavy metal umlaut. (Cited by Desbladet in a comment on John Holbo‘s blog.)
Bad advice, running around loose.
In utterly unrelated news: This week I shared an office with someone who sounds to me as if she’s from some unfamiliar part of Australia but is in fact from Derby. Learn something every day.
Brian Micklethwait took a mess of pictures of the EU complex in Brussels. One that caught my eye shows the words “European Parliament” in eleven languages, leading me to ask myself what rule decided the sequence. It appears to be alphabetical by native name: Dansk, Deutsch, Elliniki, English, Español, Français, Italiano, Nederlands, Português, Suomalainen, Svenska. (Spanish and Italian are identical; Danish and Swedish differ by a hyphen. If such they are.)
Afterthought – what are the native spellings of Slovene and Slovak? I seem to remember that the adjective for Czechoslovakia was Československo. (The first letter of that word, in case your font lacks it, is C with caron.)
Later: My old friend Ulrika tells me svenska, not svensk. Is the Swedish word for language feminine, or what?
the former future prime minister
I’ve often mocked The Media for saying “former Italian prime minister” (what kind of prime minister is he now?) and so it is mildly disappointing that I won’t get to apply the phrase to Mrs Gandhi. The Agonist (cited by Brad DeLong) says:
News reports said she [Mrs Gandhi] would support Dr. Manmohan Singh, a former finance minister, as prime minister. A Sikh, he would be India’s first minority prime minister.
Nu? India has a majority?