A Mind @ Play

random thoughts to oil the mind

Tag: Languages

The infected German language

This post is nothing more than the idle musings of a person entirely unqualified to judge upon the vagaries of the German language. Certainly being no linguist, nor even having control over anything stronger than a tiny smattering of Denglish, I can only claim to comment as an outsider looking in, and any resemblance to [...]

Beware the squiggly red line

Our language is constantly evolving. That’s almost a tautology for any language that hasn’t been officially pronounced dead. Whilst the rate of change often appears virtually imperceptible to us, a quick flick through a dictionary containing word etymologies, or a glance at the literature from bygone centuries soon proves the point. Words arise and mutate, [...]

WordPress 2.8 roadmap

With the latest 2.7 release barely out of the door, the WordPress team are already looking to set out the roadmap for 2.8. The recent update had an impressive mix of tweaks, fixes, features and a nice interface overhaul, and their little survey has a list of tasks to prioritise for the next release. Unfortunately, [...]

Mała anegdota

Kiedy byłem w Polsce pierwszy raz, mieszkałem z przyjaciółką w Olsztynie. Rano matka mojej przyjaciółki zapytała mnie, czy chciałbym kawę lub herbatę. Wtedy jeszcze prawie wcale nie rozumiałem po polsku, tylko piąte przez dziesiąte – “dziękuję”, “proszę”, “przepraszam”, “nie rozumiem” – ale dlatego, że jestem z Wielkiej Brytanii, oczywiście chciałem herbatę! Odpowiedziałem po prostu “proszę”, [...]

О ком?

Just a little character development from a recent Russian class: Лет 30 назад он пользовался уважением, и это несмотря на то, что он был низким и хрупким. Он сверкал харизмой и его глаза светились силой молодости, его ум работал замечательно когда он красноречиво и убедительно представлял свои страсти и мечты: воплощение юношеского идеализма. Сегодня, та [...]

Language Switcher Widget v1.01

After a little more research and experimentation, I’ve updated the little Language Switcher widget to enable the user to choose whether to display flags and/or names for the available languages when setting up the widget, and change the heading in the sidebar if required. Click here to download Language Switcher Widget v1.01.

Language Switcher widget

This certainly isn’t my area of expertise, but I’ve been trying to figure out a way to integrate the Language Switcher plugin with a widget-enabled theme. As this hasn’t yet been implemented, I copied wrote the simplest of Widgets which will list the available languages on your blog in the sidebar. There really isn’t anything [...]