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Amy’s end-of-school party; Dilara’s languages
It was Amy’s (and her class’s) end-of-school party yesterday; their elementary school years will be over in two and a half weeks and then it’ll be off to secondary school for the children.
The class performed a few acrobatics and a couple of songs, including a surprise one for their teacher which they had secretly practised with a couple of the ( Read more... ) -
Random memory: memorising powers of two
When I was a child, I memorised the powers of two up to 216 = 65536.
I don’t remember why I decided to do that, nor why in particular I decided to stop there, but it did come in handy occasionally later in my computing career.
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The things you learn: inhaled objects are more likely to land in your right lung
According to Wikipedia, Foreign bodies that fall down the trachea are more likely to enter the right bronchus because the carina of the trachea (a little ridge at the place where it divides into the two bronchi) lies to the left of the midline.
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Two things that don’t go together
Occasionally, someone mistypes their email address on some form, ending up with mine instead. Lack of confirmation (confirmed opt-in; what some call ‘double opt-in’) results in unwanted email in my inbox.
Recently, I’ve got some stuff from Telstra in Australia, with a slightly puzzling footer. It tells me that if I have received the email in error ( Read more... ) -
I can speak Esperanto; the test says so!
So, about three years ago, I took an Esperanto exam at level B2, and figured that would be the highest level I would take; partly since certification in Esperanto is pretty pointless anyway and partly because I didn’t think I’d ever get to C1, as I thought that’s basically native-speaker level.
But this year, I decided (more or less on a whim) to ( Read more... ) -
English needs a preposition “atto”
I thought of a gap in English: it has no preposition corresponding to German “an”+accusative.
In some cases, what is one preposition in German with dative or accusative (for position vs. movement) is the same preposition in English (The cat is under the table vs. The cat runs under the table; The bird is over the table vs. The bird flies over the ( Read more... ) -
The things you learn: Canaanite shift
Someone on Quora linked to the Wikipedia article on the ‘Canaanite shift’:
In historical linguistics, the Canaanite shift is a sound change that took place in the Canaanite dialects, which belong to the Northwest Semitic branch of the Semitic languages family. This sound change caused Proto-NW-Semitic *ā (long a) to turn into ō (long o) in Proto- ( Read more... ) -
You know you’re getting better at a language when…
…you see it written in ASCII and your mind automatically fills in the appropriate diacritics. (In some cases, even guessing them based on some kind of statistical process.)
I shall have to make some time to brush up on my Slovak before I head to SES again this summer, but probably not till after my Cornish exam in June as I don’t want to get mixed ( Read more... ) -
3/14 1:59
Happy Pi Day!