overheard

... about three minutes ago here at the office, a wonderful example of Slovak-English code mixing so typical of corporatespeak:

Ísť go live s environmentom, kde nevieme restorovať produkciu, je suicide.

The items in bold are English, at least by origin. "Produkciu" is included as well - "produkcia" might be an honest-to-Shiva Slovak word, but in this context, it means "functionality" or "proper working order" and not, as it usually does, "output".

conference

Finally some good news: the programme for the GĦILM 3rd Conference on Maltese Linguistics is now available online. The conference, which will be held between April 8th and 11th in Malta, is jointly organized by the International Association of Maltese Linguistics (Għaqda Internazzjonali tal-Lingwistika Maltija, GĦILM) together with the University of Malta and, as the name says, the third since the founding of GĦILM. I missed the first two, but not this time - in fact, if you look closer, you'll see my name (misspelled, as required by tradition) on the very first day with a paper on object reduplication (also known as clitic doubling) in Maltese (abstract, PDF). I can't help but notice that my paper on syntax - which is really not my field of expertise - follows Ray Fabri who is the most likely candidate for the position of numero uno honcho when it comes to Maltese syntax. So, um, yeah, no pressure or nothin'...