Fun with not-dead languages

[cosmolinguist]

Sarah and I are such nerds.

So, I was reading the BBC news online, and they had a link that said "How much do you know about migration" so I asked Sarah how much she knew about migration and clicked on the link. After the first question, which was abouot economic disparity as a reason for people to migrate, Sarah said, "I thought this was about...bird migration!" I laughed.

We got that question right--it's an easy one--and one more out of the eight, but at the end we saw the comparison with other BBC readers around the world: BBCArabic, BBCMundo, BBCRussian, BBCUrdu, BBCPersian, and the English-language BBC.

Sarah thought "BBCUrdu" was really funny, so I typed in http://www.bbc.co.uk/urdu/ and we delighted ourselves in the unusual characters and the fact that the ticker at the top when from right to left instead of the other way round.

But that wasn't enough; we marvelled over the Arabic numerals in the Persian version, which were oddly familiar despite the rest of the text being exotic to us, we smiled at the Cyrillic alphabet, we even had to check BBCMundo, which I figured would be Spanish since that's a word even I recognize, from my high-school Spanish days.

Comments

[stealthmunchkin.livejournal.com]

Electrolite is a song I've been obsessing over for months, ever since I bought the REM best-of (I'd not heard New Adventures in a couple of years and forgotten how good it was). Just so you know...

[cosmolinguist]

I bought "New Adventures in HI-Fi" when it came out, though I don't remember why. It totally wasn't the kind of thing that I liked when I was that age, even though I thought I liked R.E.M. (I did, but that just meant I liked "Monster," at that point, which is nothing like this) and so I don't know what happened to that CD. I heard it again now because I also recently acquired the best-of.

[stealthmunchkin.livejournal.com]

I only really became a 'fan' of REM, as opposed to quite liking some of the singles, in 1999 when I saw them live for the first time. Stipe is one of the two or three best frontmen I've ever seen, even though I didn't like his voice for a long time (it's grown on me, and now I love it), and I am nowhere *near* as impressed with his lyrics as some of the diStiples... but the thing that got me most was it was one of the very few gigs I've seen where after about four songs you think "Why have they done their four best songs this early in the set?", and then they do another one, and you think "no, actually, this is their best..." and that carries on throughout the show. They've done very few things that I would consider truly *great*, but for consistency they're almost unbeatable - they've been releasing solidly *good* stuff in a variety of styles for 20 years now...

Also, I think Peter Buck is some sort of parallel-dimension version of me. *EVERY TIME* I get into some band or musician, within a few days I see some interview with him where he talks about how they're his new favourite...(or that they've been a favourite for the last 20 years). My friend commonswings who has one of the best tastes in music of anyone I know only started listening to rock music with REM and for the first few years of buying rock/pop/folk records he just bought anything Peter Buck had recommended ;)

[cosmolinguist]

Oh, yes, and I spelled it wrong. Actually, I spelled it correctly (and it looks cooler) but that's not how the name of the song is supposed to be. ::goes to fix it, being the anal person she is::

[miss-newham.livejournal.com]

Guess what arrived in the post this morning! Thank you, thank you!

[cosmolinguist]

Excellent! I'm glad to hear that it made it, and I hope you like it.