Ta' barra mod ieħor ieħor...

I recently had the misfortune of helping a Libyan University student of English with an assignment on something called Contrastive Analysis. The Contrastive Analysts were a school of linguists who emerged in the 1950s, buoyed with a familiar, depressingly quixotic idealistic belief that they were going to change the world. The Contrastive Analysts claimed that learning a language could be done by simply identifying the differences between the learner's native language (L1) and the language being learnt (L2) and subtracting them, thus leaving the "differences" as the only thing that needed to be learnt. Thus, if Icelandic was your native tongue, and you wished to learn, say, Ancient Aramaic, then all you needed to do was identify the differences between these two languages, subtract them and thus you would be left with the sum total of all that you needed to learn. I often find myself returning to George Orwell's quote that "only an intellectual could believe tha...

I was walking down the Girgarish Road and on the palm-tree lined grassy knoll, perhaps the only one on this fine road, some kids were playing football with a ball that was so flaccid that they may as well have been kicking a plastic carrier bag. When life gives you a crap football you play a crap game of football, I suppose. Football was indeed in the air and it puzzled me what the boys were doing outside when at that very moment the final of the African Nations Cup was being played out between Egypt and the Ivory Coast. Perhaps the boys just lost interest after Libya so predictably and ignominiously departed the competition in the first round. As Farag said, apparently irony-free, "The national team needs more funding!" 'Hmm,' I thought 'I wonder where they might be able to get that from.' There is no lack of enthusiasm for the game. There is even a football pitch on one of Tripoli's busiest roundabouts. Ball control is to be exercised carefully and Chris...

I would not be surprised if some Libyan father is putting their foot through their son's Lego multi-storey car park right now. Mozarella sales have collapsed. Despite the promixity to Italy, that is where it is imported from apparently. On the other hand, I imagine that exports of that other great Danish export, bacon, have not been so poorly effected. The newsreader on the BBC said that there have been protests from Lahore to Lebanon about the publication of the cartoons in the Danish newspaper The Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten , and their subsequent publication in other European countries. Well, I can think another place beginning with L where there have also been organised protests, although not as violent. The businesses in the centre of town closed up early today in anticipation of the gathering crowds. Sometimes, people seem to forget how wide a swathe Islam cuts across the middle of the planet. Despite the protests, my feeling is that here people are pretty stoical and ...