Muham-mad … Less readable still … lengua materna 3rd of April, 2006 POST·MERIDIEM 04:37

Last week, on my way home from work, there was a group of people on the S-Bahn, apparently either from Turkey or from somewhere else in the former Ottoman empire. They were speaking a language I didn’t recognise, with lots of [x] and [ç], (something Turkish doesn’t have); then about three-quarters of them got off, and two of them, in their late twenties, started talking in German. To my fascination, one of them corrected the other’s pronunciation of “Muhammed;” evidently the other had grown up in Germany, and he couldn’t handle the double consonant that the first used for it.

Now, that didn’t make it any clearer to me exactly what language they had been speaking— according to Wikipedia Kurdish doesn’t have them either, though it does have [q]. But, yeah, it’s nice living in a huge multinational city and having the opportunity to hear that sort of thing.

Ich vermute dass ich mehr hier auf Deutsch schreiben soll, weil ich nicht viele Gelegenheiten habe mein geschriebenes Deutsch zu üben. Da wenig von meinen Leser Deutsch verstehen, könnte das problematisch sein; ich brauche nicht unbedingt weniger Leser, das Gefühl dass ich allein ins Dunkel pisse fängt schon an. Aber, was, die Seite ist schon fast unlesbar für die meisten Leute—niemand hat wirklich Interesse für alle von XKB, Michael Tomasello, Wolfram von Eschenbach u.s.w. Noch was wird niemanden wegjagen.

Word of the day забони модарӣ is the Tajik phrase for “mother tongue.”