For those of you unfamiliar with The Exile, it’s a sort of Moscow-based bastard son of The Weekly World News and Hunter S. Thompson; their “In Brief” section tosses in a goodly dollop of The Onion. If you’ll go to this one and scroll down to the last entry, “Russia Language Richer,” you’ll find a perfect distillation of the kind of idiocy purveyed by linguistic nationalists the world over:
The Russian language is richer than the English language, according to a report issued by a panel of Russian experts.
Russian is more expressive and has many more words which have different meanings, whereas English is more direct and simple….
The study also cited the fact that “everyone knows this.” The report will be officially published as soon as certain last-minute technical difficulties are overcome.
The sad thing is that so many people would read such a parody about their own language without ever realizing they were being mocked. (Via Mildly Malevolent.)
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