Italian

NOW THAT’S WHAT I CALL LINGUISTIC CHRISTMAS

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now thats what i call linguistic christmas

It’s Christmas-time again – and what would this time of year be without Christmas music? A lot of us start counting the days ’till Christmas from the moment “Last Christmas” surprises us in a shopping center sometime around November 20th – and let’s just admit it: We can’t get enough of Christmas songs!

Or maybe Christmas music just isn’t your thing. Is it really possible to listen to ”All I Want for Christmas is You” throughout December without losing your mind, you might be thinking. I mean, I’d say it is, but… I get it. You need something new – something different! I’ve dug around on the internet and asked Twitter for help, and now I’m happy to present … ↪

Lingua Franca: Elusive contact language of Christian slave colony based in Algiers finally pinned down

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Not long ago, I wrote a review on Lingoblog.dk, discussing Nolan’s (2020) book The Elusive case of Lingua Franca. That book was an open-ended study akin to an enchanting yet frustrating detective novel, in search of the famous contact language of the Mediterranean. It discusses the difficulties in tracing that famous ‘mixture of all languages, by means of which we can all understand one another’, ‘that all over Barbary and even in Constantinople is the medium between captives and Moors, and is neither Morisco nor Castilian, nor of any other nation’, as Miguel de Cervantes describes in Chapter XLI of the Don Quixote, most probably, the “Lingua Franca”.

Cervantes wrote the masterpiece of Don Quixote … ↪

How does Lingua Franca induce loneliness? Thoughts upon reading Nolan’s 2020 “The Elusive Case of Lingua Franca”

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340px Linguafranca

How would it be if people of all nations spoke but one language? If the world had a universal tongue so that all people, regardless of their mother tongues, their cultures, and their religions, could easily and readily communicate? And what if it took very little effort to learn this language? A code where all language borders dissolve, and the world is without misunderstanding: a true lingua franca, no less.

This dream is not a new one. As Umberto Eco for instance has eloquently shown in his book “The Search for the Perfect Language”, the romantic notion of a universal language has been around for millennia, and it was highly popular in Europe throughout Renaissance and then Enlightenment. In the … ↪