Review

Apolonia 13. A woman’s journey to the moon and back. From theater to painter. A moving documentary worth watching

by
APOLONIA poster e1677069915285

— SHORTLISTED FOR AN OSCAR NOMINATION FOR BEST DOCUMENTARY —

(Translated/revised from Danish for the occasion for an international audience.)

(The slightly different Danish version: https://www.lingoblog.dk/apolonia-13-en-kvindes-rejse-til-maanen-og-tilbage/)

It took 13 years to make the film. Lea Glob, a former student at Aarhus Cathedral School, Denmark, trained as a documentary filmmaker, decided in 2009 to make a film about a young woman, Apolonia Sokol, living in Paris. They became friends and no matter where they are, they keep in touch. Lea is fairly stable in Denmark, while Apolonia moves from one place to another. Lea has been able to film Apolonia everywhere and always. After all, Apolonia was used to being filmed. Her parents filmed their intercourse where she was … ↪

Some Bridges

by
Canadian group of islands 1

It is with some trepidation that I approached the second issue of Some Islands, not least because it was described to me as a journal about linguistics, art, and architecture. My training in these fields causes me to tense up with a conscientious undergraduate’s panic about not having studied for the exam. My trepidation was amplified when I saw that Lingoblog’s review of the previous issue was also beautifully illustrated by Miša Hejná, also a contributor to the present issue — something I have not braved in the present review. 

The theme, representation, conjures half-remembered memories of lectures in semantics that I’m sure were also only half-understood. So, perhaps, as befits the issue’s theme of representation, it’s best to begin … ↪

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

by
image002

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 … ↪

Papiamentu: a new description of a young language

by
images 2

A new book has just appeared, describing and analysing the grammar of Papiamentu, the principal language of Aruba, Bonaire, and Curacao (aka the ABC islands), three islands off the coast of Venezuela. It is the first in a new book series from Brill Publishers edited by Peter Bakker, dedicated specifically to contact languages, including pidgins, creoles and mixed languages.

As the world is home to an estimated 7,000 different languages, you have to ask yourself why you would want to spend time looking specifically into Papiamentu. Does this language in any way stand out as special or unique?

In fact, it does.

First of all, Papiamentu is a creole language. This means that, like other creole languages, it was formed … ↪