I viewed the mist and missed the view

That's what Mark Twain said when he reached the top of a mountain trail in the vicinity of Vienna.

Mark Twain spent most of the years 1897 and 1898 in Austria, and according to Carl Dolmetsch who wrote bis biography "Our Famous Guest", those 20 months were quite a prolific time.

Austria, especially Fin-de-siecle Vienna, had an impressive intellectual elite then, with Sigmund Freud, Gustav Klimt, Theodor Herzl, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Karl Kraus, Gustav Mahler, to name but a few outstanding names.

This week, on the occasion of the Mark Twain Centennial, a commemorative plaque was unveiled at the Hotel Ambassador, the former Hotel Krantz, where Twain spent most of his time in Austria.

There are some nice stories about Mark Twain's stay in Vienna here and here.

Some references in Twain's work to Vienna and Austria can be found in The Appetite Cure.

In 1897, Twain spoke to the Concordia Press Club in Vienna as a special guest about "The Horrors of the German Language", in German, to the amusement of the audience.

Here's the essay "The Awful German Language".

Notes and quotes on the German language:

A dog is "der Hund"; a woman is "die Frau"; a horse is "das Pferd"; now you put that dog in the genitive case, and is he the same dog he was before? No, sir; he is "des Hundes"; put him in the dative case and what is he? Why, he is "dem Hund." Now you snatch him into the accusative case and how is it with him? Why, he is "den Hunden." But suppose he happens to be twins and you have to pluralize him- what then? Why, they'll swat that twin dog around through the 4 cases until he'll think he's an entire international dog-show all in is own person. I don't like dogs, but I wouldn't treat a dog like that--I wouldn't even treat a borrowed dog that way. Well, it's just the same with a cat. They start her in at the nominative singular in good health and fair to look upon, and they sweat her through all the 4 cases and the 16 the's and when she limps out through the accusative plural you wouldn't recognize her for the same being. Yes, sir, once the German language gets hold of a cat, it's goodbye cat. That's about the amount of it.

A canny load of chink

Tomorrow at the scrake of dawn I'll have to clean this peasewisp of mawkit delf I've collected for days. Maybe I should call the midgie men ...

Need a translation? Just read Andy Mc Smith's article on dialect researchers at Leeds University who are sifting through a vast collection of examples of regional slang words.

Vocal cords made of tweed

Stephen Fry, the actor who is so very British, that he has vocal cords made of tweed (his own quote) thinks that the Americans confuse British accents for talent.

Stock Exchange for Trend Words

On Trendio you can bet on any word of which you think it will be more quoted in the media in the future (from the world of politics, sports, events, stars and so on).

The words are rated according to the number of times they appear in 3000 anglophone media web sites from around the world. You can buy the words you believe will be gainers in the next future and sell others. The service is free,but you have to register and you get $10,000 play money. Recent top gainers were the words "Cuba", "Michael Jackson", "Bill Gates","national debt", and "ADHD".

Language Matters

Lots of useful language information here, e g.:
In the US 322 languages are spoken, the most linguistically diverse states being California with 207 different languages and New York with 169 different languages.

In Austria, the official language is German, and there are two more additional official languages: Croatian and Slovene.In Carinthia, a legal right to use and display bilingual place-names has been granted in those areas where at least 25 per cent of the population belongs to the Slovene ethnic group. This right is not, however, implemented in all the areas to which it theoretically applies. Street-names are not put up bilingually, nor are place-names in telephone directories, public transport timetables and other such semi-official material given bilingually. But this is a political matter and has to do with the political situation in Carinthia and the right wing Carinthian governor, Joerg Haider. Besides Slovene and Croatian there are minority languages: Czech, Slovak, Hungarian, Turkish.
Germany includes five indigenous minority languages in addition to the official one, which is the German language: Danish and Northern Frisian, Sater Frisian, Sorbian, and the Romany language.

The Meaning of Tingo

There's a wonderful book by Jacot De Boinod The Meaning of Tingo: And Other Extraordinary Words from Around the World.

It's a fabulous collection of strange words that don't have a precise English equivalent but reveal a lot of other cultures' values.
"Fucha" (Portuguese) means "to use company time and resources for one's own purposes", "dhurna" (Anglo-Indian) stands for "extorting payment from someone by sitting at their front door and staying there without food, threatening violence, until you get paid", "sokaiya" (Japanese) means "a man with a few shares in several companies who extorts money by threatening to come to the shareholders' meetings and cause trouble". "Smonta" is Italian for "a theft carried out on a bus or train, from which the perpetrator descends as quickly as possible", "pana po'o" is Hawaiian for "to scratch your head in order to help you to remember something you've forgotten". A person who leaves without paying the bill is a "Zechpreller", and that's German - I wonder in what way THIS is typical for the German speaking countries...

And "tingo" from the book's title is from the Pascuense language (Easter Island) and means "borrowing things from a friend's house, one by one, until he has nothing left". I like this very much.