Weekly News Splatter: May 9, 2010

I love it when things just fall into place. In last week's news splatter, I mentioned a report about the growing multilingual nature of the internet. And, this week, several Egyptian and Saudi Arabian websites became the first internet sites with addresses (URLs) written in the Arabic alphabet. You can read more about implementing non-Latin URLs at the BBC and Ben Zimmer's post over at Language Log. Congratulations, and may I say better luck next time, Chinese.

I can honestly say that I've never been a regular XKCD reader. Probably because my sense of humor is still stuck in Junior High. However, I do have a great deal of respect for the webcomic's creator, Randall Munroe, after he released the results of an online survey of sex and color terms this week.  Leave it to a cartoonist to do a better job researching color terms than some linguists have.

It is commonly assumed that women will have more color terms than men, right? Fuchsia, Lavender, Mauve, Eggshell, Tangerine, etc. No matter where you sit in the usual “sex versus gender” or “language versus thought” cheering sections, there's probably going to be something surprising for you in these results. Personally, I hadn't known that “Penis” is a color. See, I learned something today....