Gaelic

Thursday

Angus Colwell

The brilliance of BBC Alba

During lockdown, a friend and I moved into a flat that had a difficult relationship with the TV aerial. Ineptitude and laziness combined to ensure that the only channels we were able to watch were BBC ones via the iPlayer app. So most nights – if there was no live sport – we found that our entertainment was at the behest of the state broadcaster. And what a drag it was. Every time, we’d reject the populist crap on BBC1, the parochial crap on BBC2, the braindead crap on BBC3, the boring crap on BBC4, the insane crap on BBC News, the wrist-slashing crap on BBC Parliament. And then we’d

Tuesday

Harry Ritchie

The world’s most exotic languages are vanishing in a puff of smoke

It is one of academia’s horrible ironies that linguistics, the subject devoted to human communication, has managed to communicate nothing about its many startling and fundamental discoveries to the world outside its university departments. So any book such as this linguistic tour of some of the world’s exotic, hidden and endangered languages is to be welcomed with sobbing gratitude. Almost all the languages Lorna Gibb describes are staples of linguistics course books, but I’m assuming each will come as startling news to a general readership. One which was new to me was the sign language used by native north Americans throughout the Great Plains, and thanks to Gibb, I also