English clock

I saw a cool clock on the gadget reviews part of a Dutch news website (here). It tells you the time not in numbers, but in words, so it has a part that has numbers one, two, three, four, ..., ten, eleven, twelve and a part that has phrases five past, ten past, quarter past, ..., ten to, five to. The website shows a nice picture of this clock.

There is also a link to Amazon, where you can buy it. Amazon has a picture as well, with two clocks. One as described above, the other one saying één, twee, drie, vier, ..., tien, elf, twaalf and vijf over, tien over, kwart over, ..., tien voor, vijf voor. In Dutch.

This gadget website usually works in a very non-journalistic way: copy, paste, don't read closely and get things wrong, and steal pictures from your source website. But I wonder why they cropped the Amazon image to show the English clock rather than the Dutch one.

I suppose it's cool or something.

Style don't

Surely it is wrong for boys to wear Ugg boots?

Faroese musings

Edd (ð)
Ð is a strange letter in Faroese. It is only there because Icelandic has it, but it is never pronounced. That is, sometimes it indicates a weird type of linking sound, and there are allomorphic alternations with d (as in deyður 'dead' - deydlingur 'dead body'), but in general it's just there for its prettiness value. This results in Faroese people having no idea where to spell it and where not to:

• In the centre of Tórshavn, there's a big rectangle painted on a wall where kids play football. In the rectangle it says MÁLÐ (correct: mál 'goal'). Someone has scribbled a question mark there, with an arrow to the Ð, but it's been there for ages, and it's sort of become an iconic symbol of either silly Faroese spelling rules or of Faroese schoolkids not mastering those rules.


• When we were having lunch in one of Tórshavn's fine establishments at Ólavsøka 2004, the menu read MATSKRÁÐ. Again, the correct form is without a ð, matskrá 'menu' (literally 'food list'). We (and with 'we' I mean 'I') scribbled out the Ð but I doubt it had any effect.


• The writing on the van that belongs to the Faroese natural history museum reads Náttúragripasavni. This should have a ð on the end.

Right, so much for the introduction. Misplaced ðs sometimes lead to some confusion or amusement, this much is clear. But the example I spotted this morning takes the cake. In an article on the main (free) Faroese news website about the musical influences for some 80s Faroese rock band that are making a comeback (heaven help us), it said one of them was Uriað Heap. Right.

Syntactic change
Less interesting maybe is an example of syntactic change in progress. I like Faroese because the verb to like doesn't take a subject, it only takes an experiencer and a patient object. (To love on the other hand takes an agent subject and a patient object. Spot the semantic difference.) So usually you would get:

Mær dámar tónleikin
me.dat like.3sg music-acc.def
'I like the music'

But on the same page as the Uriað Heap thing, in the list of current chat topics:

Hví dáma fólk betur pen enn ljót menniskjur?
why like.pl people.ntr.nom.pl better pretty.ntr.acc.pl than ugly.ntr.acc.pl person.ntr.acc.pl?
'Why do people like pretty people better than ugly people?'

Assigning case to these is a bit dodgy, as Faroese has nominative-accusative syncretism in neuter (as, in fact, all Indo-European). But fólk is definitely not the dative it should be (fólkum), and moreover, the verb agrees with a plural subject likely to be fólk rather than being impersonal and in the 3rd person singular.

Hví dámar fólkum betur pen enn ljót menniskjur?

This is not spectacular or anything. It's been going on for a while, and the same thing happened to impersonal verbs in mainland Scandinavian, Dutch and English (me thinks, for example), but it's still cool to see some syntactic change in action.

So, Dumbledore eh?

According to the Beeb and J. K. Rowling, Albus Dumbledore, the late headmaster of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, was gay. Although this isn't made explicit in the book, this was Rowling's image of the man, and she even made sure that a reference in the sixth Harry Potter movie script to a childhood girlfriend of Dumbledore's, which isn't in the book either, was removed. Rowling is well aware that this gives our evangelical friends one more reason to hate the books, but who cares.

As per the BBC,

... a spokesman for gay rights group Stonewall added: "It's great that JK has said this. It shows that there's no limit to what gay and lesbian people can do, even being a wizard headmaster."

Well, yes, apart from the fact that it's actualy impossible for anyone, gay or straight, to become a wizard headmaster, as such beasts are things of fiction and do not really exist in real life.

This, by the way, has been the most read and most e-mailed news story on the BBC website all day. So it's apparently very important.

There's a time and place for everything

Dinner time conversation was about silly names I got from the Dunkirk marriage registers. Lupus who turned out to be Wolfgang, a Swiss mercenary. Or Iler, in Latin Hilarius, which was Hillary. And there were a couple of Ægidiuses, which prompted some Middle Dutch poetry recital:

Egidius, waer bestu bleven?
Mi lanct na di, gheselle myn

This in turn prompted a modern Dutch parody:

Egidius, waer bestu bleven?
Het is al twintig over zeven

Then Myshele asked for the time and it was, in fact, 19:20.

Buses

As is commonly known, driving on the wrong left side of the road is one of many things people in England Britain do wrong differently. What I've only just realized, is that English British Scottish buses tend to have the order of the information on them wrong mixed up inverted. So instead of, for example,

22 Emmen

which was the bus I took to high school, they say,

Penicuik 37

which will bring you to IKEA.

It all makes perfect sense if you insist on driving on the wrong left side of the road, of course, seeing as in both cases it's easier to see the bus numbers in a big long line of buses if you're standing on the pavement. But that doesn't make it right.

Diagnosis murder

From the Beeb:

Symptoms develop after three to 10 days, and include flu-like illness, inflammation of the brain, coma and death.

Hmm... if death is a symptom of the disease, then you're pretty much fucked from the start. Quite scary stuff, this.

I was going to comment on the world being a healthier place before mass long-distance travel, when all we had was the occasional outbreak of ergot giving entire villages a nice trippy experience. But even then there was the plague being spread by rats travelling on ships to Norway (Det kom eit skip til Bjørgvin and all that), and I don't suppose the mass long-distance travel that were the crusades were the healthiest pastimes around. And then of course there is the case of mass long-distance travel being caused (well, facilitated, more like) by an unhealthy situation (*).

(*) Exodus 7-12, mainly.(**)
(**) Airport gates, and exits more generally, are called έξοδος in Greek. I wonder whether flights to Tel Aviv depart from Gate 12...

In the past week I have...

• been to Ikea and bought a Billy and a Benno, among other things;


• finished The English by Jeremy Paxman (see below);


• had the Evil Article finally accepted in Transactions of the Philological Society;


• been sore-footed, for which I blame KH's idea that we should set with a 150 degree turnout;


• failed to get internet banking, probably because they only have my mobile and I gave them the landline and so there are ‘discrepancies’ between different sets of information;


• decided to do some NeighborNet stuff for my PhD, as well as do some geostatistics;


• contacted the necessary people to actually do NeighbourNet stuff and geostatistics;


• learned about Romance plurals;


• purchased two Faroese CDs through iTunes – Fram á hermótið by Páll Finnur Páll (*) and Hugafar á ferð by Høgni Reistrup;


• done some other things not worth mentioning.

Book review:

Paxman sets out on a mission to explain why the English are so damn, well, English. This mainly involves an explanation of how the English are so English, of what Englishness actually is. Another recurring argument in the book is that the English actually aren't very English at all; this is reserved for a tiny proportion of the English that Paxman calls ‘the Breed’. The Breed are the ones that live in the countryside, that are all about honour, dignity, patriotism and Etonian nepotism, that think "what-ho" and "jolly" are actual words, that excel at hunting and sports, that would gladly sacrifice a limb if it meant a Frog or a Kraut would lose two – all these quintessentially English things. The rest of them are really poor buggers who don't even have an identity. The Scots, Welsh and Irish are better off than the plebs of England; they may have been kicked off their land and replaced by sheep, or sent to work in the mines, but at least they have an identity.

But although Paxman's book is a very enjoyable read, and quite instructive about the essence of Englishness and its diachronic continuity within the Breed, I haven't been able to figure out the real crux: why are the English, if only a select few of them, so English? Or more importantly, why are most of them not?

(*) In Faroese this gets a dative: við Pálli Finni Pálli. Joyful geekery.

Beastly food

Welcome to Tesco's.

stir fry veggies	1.29
pâté	0.58
butter	1.12
yoghurt	0.58
milk	1.34
bread	0.68
chocolate cookies	1.07
total	6.66

And six points on my clubcard, too.