2012/08/29 22:46
Scottish Gaelic has a lot in common with Russian on a phonological level: Most consonants have two variants: a plain (or perhaps somewhat velarised) one and a palatalised one.However, their orthographies handle this situation in different ways: In Gaelic, any consonant is palatalised ("slender") if it is next to ‘e’ or ‘i’, and it's plain ("broad") otherwise (in Gaelic, this...
2012/08/25 21:02
My dear wife recently pointed out to me that you can download past papers from the Scottish Qualifications Authority's website.I have in the past only seen the French Intermediate 2, and I wasn't very impressed. I therefore decided to have a look at the various language exams available.Much to my surprise, it appears to me that all the language papers...
2012/08/31 21:57
In the days before the World Wide Web, the best way to procrastinate on the Internet was probably Usenet.
(If you don’t know it, it’s basically hierarchical discussions ordered by topic. You can read Usenet newsgroups for instance by using Thunderbird and the Eternal September newsserver.)
At first, the advent of the WWW didn’t really threaten Usenet, but Wikipedia and the social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter caused a lot of people to leave Usenet. I was one of them — I didn’t post anything from 2007 until last month.
However, I then decided to go back and have a quick look at my favourite newsgroup, dk.kultur.sprog, and to be honest it was really nice to be back. It’s actually better than it used to be, because it appears the trolls have mainly disappeared off to pastures new.
However, I must admit using Usenet is a pain these days. Using Google Groups to access Usenet isn’t as good as using a dedicated reader, but using a specialised tool for one social media just feels wrong (and yes, these days Usenet would have been considered a social network). Also, the Usenet is just text, and it’s sometimes annoying you can’t easily attach images and sound files or use HTML tags.
I can’t help thinking somebody should reinvent Usenet, because the discussions you can have there are superior to what you can do on newspaper website comments sections, Wikipedia, Facebook, Twitter or Branch.
2012/08/28 23:22
Skotsk udtale kan være vanskelig at mestre for danskere, men til dels skyldes det, at vi i skolen lærer engelsk engelsk, og det forvirrer os.Her er en oversigt over vokalerne på skotsk engelsk (ikke scots, omend forskellene er små):Som det ses, svarer de urundede vokaler rimeligt til danske vokaler. Det mest overraskende er nok her, at den vokal, man som dansker skal bruge i ord som mid, er det danske flade ‘a’, men min datter Anna (der er tosproget) mente...
2012/08/26 22:42
Most people in the UK will be aware of the recent GCSE results in England, Wales and Northern Ireland (but not in Scotland, where there is no such thing as the GCSE):Results fell by a modest 0.4 percentage points across the board but there was intense consternation about a deeper drop in English results focused in particular schools. The share...
2012/08/15 16:35
I dag var det første skoledag i East Renfrewshire Kommune, og da Anna blev født i december 2007, skulle hun begynde i P1 (1. klasse).Hun har glædet sig meget, og det var en meget stolt og glad pige, der pilede...
2012/08/14 0:32
Last year I blogged about a program I had written to calculate the nearest capital.It just occurred to me that once the area being the closest to a given capital has been established, the capital can then be moved to...
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