They come over ‘ere…

Here’s a little popery, I mean potpourri—a resumé of some of my more wacky linguistic fantasies:

• Two studies on the “French pieces” of the Tang dynasty (faqu and faqu 2)
• A drôle synopsis of my film, for screenings in France
• Teach yourself Japanese
• Some Portuguese epigrams (following Jottings from Lisbon, also stimulating)
• English and Italian variants of another car and class joke
• Foucault and Chagall puns in On visual culture.

Among many fine Chinese jokes, my piques du jour* are

• Forms of address
• Interpreting pinyin
• Transliteration
• Daoist wordplay
• More Daoist wordplay
• One-off sex supplement, and Prince Sihanouk
• Classic stories from the great Paul Kratochvil: Exchanging spectacles, and Empirical language acquisition
• For readers of Chinese, play with characters.

* Rather than piqes-niques.