25 February 2024
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Watching a recent episode of RobWords (video at the end of this post), I was reminded of something I mused on about 15 years ago – why do we call England ‘Ingland’? Rob asked the same question and said that … Continue reading
20 March 2023
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Yesterday, we marked Mothering Sunday at church. This is the traditional title for what is often now called Mother’s Day. I think the apostrophe would be better placed to give Mothers’ Day, a community celebration of all mothers but apparently … Continue reading
19 February 2021
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What is the most widely-spoken language in the world? Based on the data presented on The 100 Most Spoken Languages Around the World, which has been sitting in my collection of interesting snippets for a while now, English safely claims … Continue reading
16 July 2020
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I think that English spelling is not quite as hairy as English pronunciation (do you start the name of the language ‘en’, as in pen, or ‘in’ as in pin?). However, it is still far from rational or predictable. We … Continue reading
21 May 2019
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Having recently acquired a copy of German Short Stories for Beginners from Touri Language Learning as part of the LibraryThing Early Reviewers programme, I can definitely confirm that the answer is nein. Even my reading of German, which used to … Continue reading
4 October 2017
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I’ve been aware of online ‘organising board’ service Trello for several years now but haven’t dug into it too deeply as I’ve had a home-brewed system bubbling along, involving Inkscape and a diagram of jobs I’m doing, jobs I ought … Continue reading
10 July 2017
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I found an opportunity to use that new word, piddock, that I learned last week. I saw a cloud which appeared to have a neat hole drilled in and and thought… Okay, to be honest, I thought, “what was that … Continue reading
28 June 2017
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Most of the book reviews I write are for things I have received as part of the LibraryThing Early Reviewers scheme. I don’t enjoy all of them but I promised I would write an honest review and so I do … Continue reading
28 April 2017
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What is the difference between countries? What colours in between the invisible lines on the ground? No matter their national identity, humans all breathe air, consume food and drink and need shelter and sleep. However, there are plenty of tangible … Continue reading
6 June 2016
by wpAdmin
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Apparently this is Greenlandic, an Eskimo-Aluet language from Greenland. It sounds like the tape is playing backwards. What wonderful and strange things languages are! Oh, and I think the subtitles are in Danish.