Here’s some advice. Whenever you hear someone starting to say something that begins with “The X have no word for Y”, or “The X have N different words for Y”, never listen to them, and always check your wallet to make sure it’s still there.

Sorta. ‘Nan’ is ‘bread’, hence ‘nan e-lavash’ (crisp flatbread) and ‘nan e-barbari’ (soft flatbread) and apparently ‘nan e-[elastic]‘ for pizza, though I doubt it’ll stick.

“Alcazar is a garlic-powered vision of a seaside Lebanese café, a terrace perfumed with apple tobacco puffing from a dozen bright hookahs, the sharp scent of fried fish with garlic and tahini, the sweet aroma of chicken kebabs grilling over charcoal. Late on weekend evenings, when the patio fills with live Armenian music and the restaurant becomes a nightclub lubricated with Almaza beer and the tasty arak imported from Beirut, a cook fires up a special cooking device in a corner of the courtyard, a sort of vast, inverted wok fixed over a powerful flame, and bakes ultrathin sajj bread, smoky and pliant and as broad as a sailboat sail, to wrap around grilled meat or make into the thin, crisp, thyme-scented Arab quesadillas called k’llej.”

Yum.

And where does the elastic part come in?

Methinks someone’s translation bot is malfunctioning.

The Icelanders’ conscious decision to reject foreign terminology makes sense in such an isolated and homogeneous society. China is similar, although its linguistic decisions have much to do with the need to make all vocabulary fit within its character system. Japan, more open socially and more flexible phonetically with its three writing systems, adopts foreign words where China does not — the Japanese use the word “computer” (spelled in katakana, of course) while the Chinese use the word “dian nao,” which means electric brain.

Hey, at least you can go there. I can’t even go to Thailand. There’s a non-trivial chance that I’ll be confused with a rape-murder suspect and be thrown in a Southeast Asian prison.

aimai

That is different than making English the official language of the US? Soon to be followed by “official English”?

BTW, I always thought that the word ordinateur (computer to you hamburger-eating, turn-up-for-wars-late monkeys) was an invention of the Académie Française, but it turns out we have to blame IBM for that.

What I can never understand about the Académie Française’s attitude is that about fifty percent of the words in the English language are of French origin.

The fact is that Coalition forces are unbeatable because of their superior élan and their esprit de corps.
/Ruppert

All part of the slide into mediocrity and banality…
I mean, it wouldn’t be quite so bad if the people suborning your democracy and usurping your government were evil geniuses (genii?). You know, soft-spoken sinister mafiosi from the Godfather mold. Or a middle-European cabal of machiavellian schemers with exotic accents, even more exotic vices, and names like Blofeld, gathering regularly for meetings in their volcano bases where they report progress on how they have managed to undermine the bastions of freedom. Or Professor Moriarty types, veritable Napoleans of crime, dressed in full-length red-lined Victorian cloaks which trail behind them as they stride back and forth on the podium, addressing the meeting in the volcano base.

But no. What you have is a bunch of kleptocrats, for whom the only significance of any branch of government is its possible use as a source of spoils, and of jobs to be farmed out to one’s cronies. Kleptocrats who have not advanced one inch in terms of sophistication from that Borgia Pope, whose name I cannot be arsed looking up… You know, the one of “Now We have the Papacy, let Us enjoy it” fame.

What depresses me is the missed opportunity. If they’re going to be criminals, why can’t they be classy criminals?

All off-thread, I know.

What’s the Farsi word for “smacktard”?