Sprache der Wissenschaft … People disappoint me … das/der/die Dschungel 6th of October, 2006 POST·MERIDIEM 03:51

Via Margaret Marks, I come across a Spiegel article, Sprache der Wissenschaft: Say it in broken English. I disagree with the broad impression it gives; the English I’ve seen written here by non-native-speaker academics has not been that bad, and certainly is not in need of significantly more editing than that of Irish English-language academic texts I’ve seen. (Hello, Vinny Cahill!) Of course, the problematic aspect of that is that people with a good English-language editing instinct in Germany are relatively rarer than in the English-speaking world.

Anyway. How fuсking depressing is it that enough people are interested enough in this bad science fiction show that they are willing to pay unrealistic amounts of money for its props, while there’s little enough demand for Tajik-English dictionaries that finding anything comprehensive is a pain in the arse: http://​software.​ericsink.​com/​entries/​Trek_Auction_Begins.​html ?

Word of the day: ҷангал is Tajik for “forest,” and not coïncidentally is phonemically identical with the English “jungle.” The OED tells me that the English is from Hindi and Marāṭhī; the Sanskrit origin of the word in the latter languages meant “waste ground,” and Google™ing the word in Arabic script—as جنگل— doesn’t give me any Arabic sites, so it looks like Iran was as far east as it made it in the Islamic world.