The Off Topic Topic

[Grey Fox]

Is it Cthulhu day?

[garbon]

Wow

His post or my comment?

His message

[mongers]

Wow

His post or my comment?

His message

Yeah, on my old browser it only looked like Khmer characters.

[Grey Fox]

It says :

All hail Cthulhu. Our glorious overlord. May our souls be devoured for his succor.

[Jacob]

[Josquius]

Haha.


In other stuff... Any of our resident German speakers...

https://lithub.com/the-time-terry-pratchetts-german-publisher-inserted-a-soup-ad-into-his-novel/

Is this true? Is/was it common for German translations to have random adverts in them?

[ulmont]

Is this true? Is/was it common for German translations to have random adverts in them?

...if you read through, you'd know.  Yes, as confirmed by Diane Duane with some of the German translations of her Star Trek novels:

https://www.dianeduane.com/outofambit/2015/02/14/whats-rihannsu-soup/

[Syt]

Can confirm. It was mostly in older books I think (70s?), and it was clearly marked as ad - separated from the main text visually, but usually written slightly tongue in cheek.

At first I was WTF when I read this post, but then when they described it memory returned. It was mostly done in genre books like sci-fi and fantasy, I think.

[Syt]

Example from a Star Trek book:

[Zanza]

  I have no recollection of seeing such in text adverts before. There used to be adverts at the end of book (after the last content page) though. Often for other books.

[Syt]

[Grey Fox]

A place for friends.

I have a myspace.com baseball hat. I got it waiting in line at the 2004 Vans Warped tour in either Quebec city or Montreal.

[Sheilbh]

So some (minor) French politicians have proposed a resolution for French to become "the only" working language of the EU. And their statement is everyhthing you could hope for. Brexit is a "unique opportunity" to reverse the encroachment of English and "Anglo-Saxon culture" as English is now only the mother tongue of 1% of the EU's population.

I particularly enjoyed their thoughts on why not German: "it may be objected that German is today in the European Union the language with the largest number of mother tongue speakers. To put forward such an argument would be to forget, however, that German does not have the same international status as French."

I alost wish they'd worked through the entire union explaining their objections to each language.

[Jacob]

 

[The Brain]

I seem to recall an anecdote of a 16th century Swedish king who got a letter in French from the king of France, and sent his answer in Finnish.