Year: 2005

Idiots and cowards, to boot.

Honolulu Police are looking for the person(s) responsible for setting off an improvised explosive device on New Year’s evening that severely injured an 11-year old girl. The suspects in the case have hired lawyers and refused to cooperate with police. I saw a TV interview with the girl and it was heart-wrenching.

And I used to like John McCain.

He says that he will oppose legislation that would allow Native Hawaiians to seek federal recognition, and claims that “when Hawai’i became a state there was an implicit agreement at that time that Native Hawaiians would not receive the same status as Native Americans.” Bullshit. Did Native Hawaiians agree to that? How exactly was it implied to them, Senator? Was it also implied to native Alaskans when Alaska was admitted as a state, just prior to Hawai’i?

iTunes Music Store Gets Its Irish Up.

If they’d just get some more Irish music in there. Actually there is a considerable amount of Irish music there, but some some of my favorites, including Paul Brady and Sean Keane, are no where to be found. Cost is .99 Euro per song, currently approximately $1.30 US at the currently exchange rates.

Geoffrey K. Pullum makes an interesting post on the the future of Cornish on Language Log.

A timely follow up to our earlier discussion. I’m sure Scott won’t like this news. “Cornish is dead, stone dead” and Irish “will be dead in thirty years.” Thankfully there are people who will continue to fight for their survival. We can only hope that it is not in vain, because most of us won’t live long enough to see what happens one way or another. I can relate to his observation of that “almost every story they (“The Economist”) do on language is goofy.” I’ve done very few newspaper and magazine interviews on any subject, from Hawaiian language to…

Can you really acquire perfect pitch?

David Lucas Burge claims that you can. I’ve seen his ads in music magazines for years. He tells a story from his youth where, frustrated by a classmate’s seemingly God-given ability to discern pitches, he figured out on his own how to identify pitches without using a reference pitch (known as “relative pitch”). I never bought his course, though always lamented what I believed were my sub-par listening skills. I have not played much over the twelve or so years since I last gigged, and struggled mightily in transcribing the music for my MA thesis. Once I figured out a…

Scott Waters gently reminds me that Irish is not the only Celtic language still being used.

Of course not, it’s just the one I’m most interested in. Scott points to this site dedicated to Cornish, or Kernewek. The language received some good publicity some time back on the cartoon “The Simpsons” when Lisa Simpson shouted ‘rydhsys rag Kernow lemmyn’ (Freedom for Cornwall now). There is a page dedicated to this episode on the Warlinenn site. So Scott, I’ll learn Irish, you learn Kernewek, and we’ll meet over a few and determine between us if there is mutual intelligibility

Modernise Irish?

An Teanga Nua, The Millennium Gaelic Society, is a pressure group for “the modernisation, standardisation and regalicisation of the Irish language.” Is “grammar” spelled “grammer” in Ireland? They seem to have some HTML problems as well.

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