A sloth of talented tongues

Raja's latest post reminds me that, among the expected pleasures of JP's big party in the burbs (e.g. cheesy decorations, apple cider donuts, large hairy men) there was the unexpected pleasure of rampant language geekery. I mean, its presence could've easily been predicted given that aadroma and I were on the invite list, since you know that whenever the two of us are in a room together you've got a There Will Be Geekery situation on your hands. What I didn't expect, however, is how many other guests were able to join in.

In fact, it was positively surreal at one point to hear two young bears squabbling about an obscure point of grammar in a foreign language (French, in this case) and not have either of them be me or Raja! I hadn't been there two minutes when aadroma dragged me over to meet "the other Japanese-speaker here". Once again, I was put in the position of explaining that I didn't really know any Japanese, but as a student of Korean and Chinese it fell into my penumbra. Immediately he called my bluff by greeting me in Korean, followed by Chinese!

Not much later, I was outside cooling off with the smokers. Somehow the topic of Traditional vs. Simplified came up, a divide which someone characterised as Taiwan vs. PRC. I explained that it was more complex than that given that Traditional have long been preferred among overseas Chinese but massive recent emigration from the Mainland is tipping the balance. Astonishingly, all this was overheard by a Chinese teacher, who explained that he teaches his students to read Traditional but write Simplified. (Exactly the compromise I've been urging for years, I'll note.)

Neither of these, incidentally, developed into the conversation about machine translation that aadroma mentions in his Multilingual Monday. (IIRC, that took place the following morning, but anything after midnight is kind of a haze.) The 干 GAN_1/4 problem I brought up then has been discussed at length in Language Log and the blame laid squarely on the head of Kingsoft (whose name inexplicably slipped my mind after half a day of overstimulation and sleep deprivation).

(no subject)

Have you heard the one about the Pakistani-Canadian living two miles from us who was arrested for his involvement in an alleged plot to attack the offices of the Danish newspaper Jylands-Posten? According to the Examiner, he owns "a meat processing facility ... in Kinsman, Ill. ... [t]hat ... provides halal meat for Muslim costumers [sic]."

And if ABC News is to be believed, he was in contact with "a commander of the Lashkar-4-Taiba group". Unless I miss my guess, this is the hip-hop arm of the notorious Pakistan-based terrorist organisation, but their MySpace page seems to be down at the moment.