Link Banana

Being a native (and, to my chagrin, monolingual) English speaker I’ve never much considered Wikipedia in other languages. The Arabic version is prehaps the most conspicuously small:

It has fewer than 65,000 articles, and ranks 29th among the various Wikipedias, just behind Slovenian, and well behind the artificial tongue, Esperanto.

Some possible reasons:

…young people find it easier to communicate in English online — whether chatting, sending instant messages or contributing to Wikipedia — both because not all keyboards are compatible with the Arabic alphabet and because they want their words to be more accessible to the wider world. (Some write in Arabic using the Roman alphabet.)

I’m a sucker for both Correspondent’s Diaries and languages which means I was quite enamored wtih the one The Economist ran last week. A tidbit:

Russians are inordinately proud of their tongue’s complexity. Friends have told me in all earnestness that they think Shakespeare might be better in Russian. in Moscow, a taxi driver attempted to prove the point by asking me to consider the words written next to the date on a carton of milk.

In Russian this is an orotund, literary phrase—a direct translation, in fact, of the French à consommer de préférence avant. “Zhelatel’no upotrebit’ do”, repeated the driver, rolling his tongue around the words and lifting a hand from the steering wheel to trace their curvaceous cadences. “It is beautiful, cultured. And in your language?” He puckered his mouth sourly. “Best bee-for!”