The New York Times reports today German Court Bans Very Long Names.

A Munich couple sought to challenge the constitutionality of a 1993 ruling limiting the length of hyphenated names.

Frieda Rosemarie Thalheim, a Munich dentist, wanted to take the last name of her husband, Hans Peter Kunz-Hallstein, to become Frieda Rosemarie Thalheim-Kunz-Hallstein. The case brought Germany’s minister of justice before the court in Karlsruhe for oral arguments in February to defend the ban on what the Germans call “chain names.”

By a vote of five to three, the court refused to budge, ruling that ballooning names “would quickly lose the effectiveness of their identifying purpose,” and declined to overturn the law on the grounds that it infringed on personal expression.

The court decision document (in German) is online at http://www.bundesverfassungsgericht.de/entscheidungen/rs20090505_1bvr115503.html.

There is a computer technology implication of the very long names. Many databases still have rather short field lengths for surnames and family names. It is possible to move towards more room for long names. (Just as long as nobody seeks a names to cause a computer buffer overflow. <g>)

Maybe the judges did not want a future edition of Romeo und Juliette to have a line like this:
"Oh, Romeo, Romeo, Warum bist du Romeo Werner-Hoffman-Lange-Zimmermann-Montague?"

David Kopel posted on the Volokh Conspiracy law blog about a box of ammunition that that had its warranty written several languages. The nuances of the different translations raise the question of which warranty applies?

<<--
Being an attorney, I of course carefully read the warranty on the box. The Spanish warranty states: "Garantizamos que fue fabricado con esmero." [We guarantee that it was made with great care.] In French: "Nous garantissons que ce produit a ete fabrique avec the plus grand soin." [We guarantee that this product has been made with the greatest care.] (Note for linguists: the box's printed text does not include accent marks in any language.) In English: "We guarantee the exercise of reasonable care in the manufacture."

So we have three different levels of guarantee: greatest care (French), great care (Spanish), and reasonable care (English). If there were a product liability case in which the particular standard made a difference, which one would control?
-->>

Good question.

Somewhat related was one of Jay Leno's Tonight Show "Headlines" last Monday night. He had a package for light bulbs that stated in English that the bulbs last about 1,000 hours. In Spanish, it said that the bulbs last about 2,000 hours. Sometimes, it pays to light one's home en Español. <g>

Cheers,
Jonathan D. Abolins

Jacob Richman has posted on his site photos of two sugar packets from a restaurant in Emek Refaim (עמק רפאים) street in Jerusalem. The packets have pictures of famous people in Israeli history and brief biographies.

Nice!
By the way, take a look at Jacob Richman's site for other Israeli pictures and resources, including Hebrew language helps.

Kol Tuv,
Jonathan D. Abolins

Geoffrey K. Pullum of the Language Log writes that "post" is a new preposition born. "He credits Brett Reynolds and Rodney Huddleston with this discovery.

Example: Post the wash-out from the credit crunch, most assets globally were overpriced (The Weekend Australian, 26-27 April 2008, page 39).

Post this blog post, I am going to bed.
Jonathan D. Abolins

(Reposted from a post on my Entering the Networked World blog.)

Humorous at least if you're not Microsoft Corporation... The image of the "New Windows" potato crisps box was derived from the photo in Josef Assad's blog posting "Cavalier Egyptian Attitudes to Trademarks". (The use of the photo is per the blog's Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.) Cheers, Jonathan D. Abolins

ويندوز = "Weendooz"; Arabic transliteration of "Windows"

 

 

Saturday Night Live (NBC-TV, US) did a nice spoof, La Policia Mexicana, of a Mexican Spanish language police drama with a script based upon typical introductory Spanish courses' dialogue. Muy Bueno!

Barry Gottlieb humorously comments on the Global Language Monitor's claim that by the end of April 2009, the English language will be one million words strong. (At the time of this posting, the GLM English Language Word Clock was at 998,773.)

Then, Gottlieb asks:

But do we really need a million words?

The typical American knows about 20,000 words but uses only 7,500 of them in a given day. This means that on many days, we have 12,500 unused words gathering dust in the crannies of our cerebellum. That being the case, what could we possibly do with 980,000 more of them? As it is, I'm afraid that if I stuff one more thing into the right side of my head, my Social Security number's going to fall out my left ear.

Now, I have some questions of my own:

 

• Which English is the GLM tracking? British English? American English? 'Strine? All of them?
• Do spelling variants, such as colour and color, count as one word or multiple ones?
• As English words fall out of use, do they still count?
• What about words that fall out of favour and, decades later, recycled? Do they score multiple counts?

It seems ironic having Yiddish, a particularly Jewish language, being a topic in a comic strip with the title mentioning a particularly un-kosher animal, a title that is borrowed from a reference in the Gospels. But I really enjoyed this week's Pearls Before Swine comic strips and their Yiddish references.



Monday 23 Feb 2009:

• "Shmulky" appears to be play on the name Shmuel (Samuel).
•   Shlumperdik" plays on "Schlump", a slob. It seems that "Shlumperdik" would be an adjective for "sloppy" rather a noun, but I am not a Yiddish expert. I only speak a bisl Yiddish.

Tuesday 24 Feb 2009: I especially loved this one. Thank you very much, Stephan Pastis!

• Oy veh = an exclamation of dismay. (Related to Israeli Hebrew exclamation אוי וווי - "oy va voy".)
• Kvetch = to complain or whine. Comes from a term meaning to press, to compress.
• Meshugenah = crazy or insane; in this strip, it means a crazy person.
• Chutzpah = gall, audacity, impudence. An old saying to explain what chutzpah: "Chutzpah is a man killing his parents and begging the court to ahve mercy upon him becuase he is an orphan."
• Farklempt (also spelled verklempt) = choked up, ready to cry, too emotional to talk. One can be verklempt from joy as well as from negative emotions.
• Shabbes (or Shabbos) =  שבת (Shabbat), Sabbath, the day of rest.
• Klopper = somebody who bangs, makes loud noises. (A Shabbes Klopper could be a person who makes loud noises and a kerfuffle when everybody else is trying to enjoy a peaceful day.)
• Schmendrick = an inept or stupid person, a person who should know better.
• Nudnik = pest, a persistant nag, a person who is a nuisance. (נודניק) One word blog suggests nudnik has its origins in the Russian word Нудный (noodnay) for tiresome or boring.

Wednesday 25 February 2009:

• Se Shtinkt! = This stinks!
• Shlimazel = Very unlucky or inept person.
• Shmegegi = Buffoon, idiot, fool.
• Shlatten Shammes = communal busybody, talebearer, messenger.
• Shlub = jerk, fool, inferior person.
• Shiksa = Non-Jewish girl.
• Strudel = A flakey pastry. (The word isn't particularly Yiddish.)

If you are interested in looking up other Yiddish words, take a look at TranslationDictionary.com's Yiddish-English Dictionary.

Sei gesund, be well,
Jonathan D. Abolins

UPDATED 26 February 2009 to add the third comic strip and its words. Also adjust the text format.

"Hello world" programs are a common choice for first programs people write. So, I'll use this theme for this blog's first entry.
So, "Hello world".

What is a "Volodas"?

Volodas means "language" in Latvian. I chose it as the name of this blog because I will posting about human languages and wanted a nice sounding name that was novel for most people. Also, Latvian was my first language. So "Valodas" it was.