This old form is quite different from modern standard devangari (it's also upside down): http://titus.uni-frankfurt.de/personal/jg/unicode/table7.htm#tabelle I hesitate to call the upside-down lines (in the middle; below the Persian) devanagari. They seem to be very influenced by the ranjana script...

Are you working on Purifying Swedish?

Yes. like a former finance minister used to say:

Varför använda utländska ord, när det finns en adekvat nationell vokabulär?

:Why use foreign words, when there is an adequate national vocabulary?

I failed to mention that e-mail is always that, and never 'e-post' (although I'm sure someone's tried that). I think we've been into this sometime, somewhere, but anyhow. I insist on on translating into Swedish, so I write e-post. Many customers will prefer e-mail, but then they'll have to make the...

Try changing the character encoding (most browsers will put it under the 'view' menu) to 'UTF-8'. You might need a good Unicode font like Code2000 . That should help. Should, but didn't. Often it helps to copy such passages to Word and apply the font. Slightly better but not perfect. What doesn't w...

Why not simply 'Dear XXX YYY'?

I might consider 'Dear (or Honoured??) correspondent' or something like that as well. They will most probably understand the difficulties.

Babelonische spraakverwarring

In Swedish, babylonisk språkförbistring.

Suppose there were a song in Chinese named Beijing, Beijing . You could write it 北京々々。 Single 々's are used in Chinese as shown for Japanese. In Hindi and Indonesian, the repetition of a word may be indicated by a superscripted numeral 2. Frank, go here for a utility and font to write in the Nasta'li...

Makes me think of the idiocies that got published about Russian in the Cold War ("Russian doesn't have a word for peace").

A Soviet citizen ridiculed a Swiss guy:
How come you have a Naval Department?
Reply:
Well, you have a Department of Justice.

I'll try not to forget to ask her tomorrow about the pizza [...] A few months ago, Danish pastry and buttercookies, immensely popular in Tehran, got a new name, after the Danish cartoon situation. [...] Pizze: "elastic loaves" Danishes: "roses of Mohammad" (gul-e-muhammadi) Thos...

I think this supermarket quote works in translation as well:

Please have a look at our packaged meat counter.

[...]and the informal way of thanking includes 'mersi'.[...] "No, we absolutely don't say 'mersi', we say 'tashakkor'". "Oh, I'm sorry. Have a cigarette?" "Mersi." And regarding the name of the language, indigenous government authorized translators add to their work &q...

It seems, though, that "duck tape" precedes "duct tape".

For many of such errors/misunderstandings/etc., there's tons of examples, rivalling the number of the Eskimo words for 'snow', for which, like eggcorns or snowclones, you'll enjoy searching www.languagelog.com.

What do Chinese people call Chinese Food? Food. Well said. The most disturbing tv ad I've seen lately features a local car dealer in a superman-esque outfit, complete with whipping cape, ranting about the super deals they're offering for a limited time only. Thank god he is filmed from his waistal ...

92. Must be some errors there, even excluding my not having encountered any bellwethers.

Why ask for English only? In Swedish, it's formbröd , from at least 1925. In households, it is baked in a långpanna . Obviously, form = form, bröd = bread, lång = long, panna = pan. Our 'loaf' is a limpa , but used to be lev , which might have survived in dialects. Finnish has borrowed it as leipä .