2011/05/27 18:29
The European Broadcasting Union have just released the details of the voting split of the recent Eurovision contest.On their website, it's just numbers, so I've made a pretty graph to illustrate the difference between the juries' opinions and how people voted in their living rooms:It is clear that they were very lucky Azerbaijan won, given that it was the popular...
2011/05/21 14:09
Alex Salmond sagde flg. i Det skotske Parlament, da han var blevet genvalgt som førsteminister:Now these voices of the past are joined in this chamber by the sound of 21st-century Scotland. The lyrical Italian of Marco Biagi. The formal Urdu of Humza Yousaf. The sacred Arabic of Hanzala Malik. We are proud to have those languages spoken here alongside English,...
2011/05/29 23:06
Those of you who have been reading this blog for two years or more might be wondering why I’ve been writing so little about Amaia’s language – after all, when Anna was one, I regularly wrote blog postings describing how her language was developing.
The reason for this is that Amaia seems to use almost no words. Instead, she uses complete sentences, such as “Where are you?”, “Where did you put it?”, “What’s that for?”, “What are you doing?”. Yes, they’re not that clear – it sounds at bit like a drunk person speaking – but in context it’s normally clear what she means.
It’s basically as if she isn’t picking out individual words from what we’re saying but instead hearing the sentences as indivisible chunks to be repeated.
This is slightly exaggerated – she does use names, such as “Far” and “Pudge” – but she doesn’t seem to have any words for concrete objects.
Anna and Léon tended to overgeneralise certain nouns, just like all other babies I’ve ever come across.. For instance, Anna called all walking animals ‘ka’ (from ‘cat’) and all flying ones ‘pippi’ (from Danish pip-pip ‘tweet-tweet’).
So what’s going on? Is Amaia following a well-known (but less common) route to developing her language skills? A bit like the way she’s refusing to crawl and walk and instead bum-shuffles around at a hundred miles an hour.
2011/05/25 18:48
Most people have assumed that an independent Scotland won't introduce passport controls at the Scottish-English border.I'm sure that's not the intention, but as a blog posting on Better Nation pointed out today, Scotland will probably have to join Schengen at some point post-independence, simply because England will be seen as the continuation of the UK, so Scotland will be treated as a new EU member, and they generally don't get many opt-outs (which will also mean that Scotland will eventually...
2011/05/22 20:21
I've created an entirely new design for my blog.I had been looking for a newspaper-style layout, but I couldn't find any that I liked, so I decided to create my own.It's not entirely finished yet, but it's good enough that I'm activating it now.
2011/05/16 0:28
I Storbritannien, hvor det p.g.a. valgsystemet er normalt, at ét parti har absolut flertal i parlamentet (omend dette ikke er tilfældet for tiden), har partiernes valgprogrammer ("manifestos" på engelsk) en nærmest mytisk status: Det regnes for påkrævet at gennemføre alt,...
2011/05/10 23:49
As part of a discussion on the Better Nation blog, Chris Jones wrote:A couple of ideas spring to mind that would help Labour to get serious about Scotland:Re-organising around Scottish Parliamentary constituencies instead of Westminster CLPs – firstly to get...
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