2002-07-12 12:11 (UTC+1)

Victoriadagen countdown

Aftonbladet has had a special section on the Swedish Crown Princesses impending 25th birthday celebrations for a while now. I hadn't linked it because it wasn't very good - it seemed to be dominated by photobiographies at the

When Victoria was a little girl she wanted a pony, so her Mummy and Daddy got her one. Her Daddy is the King! Victoria liked her pony very much. Its name was Gerald.

sort of level, and even I can't be bothered with that kind of rubbish.

It's got better, though. Yesterday they had a refutation of a German skvallerbladet's repeated insistence that Vickan has the hots for Felipe of Spain. Experienced court-watchers (viz. me) were astonished to see the denials attributed to Ann-Christine Jernberg of the courts press-service. Is Elisabeth Tarras-Wahlberg unwell, or are they indicating that such a frivolous story doesn't warrant her attention?

By coincidence (or is it?) Aftonbladet today has the first paparazzi shots of Vickan snogging her actual boyfriend, but that's only linked off of the paper's front page, so far.

The plot thickens...

2002-07-12 10:45 (UTC+1)

Sachin! Sachin!

Cricket, even in the one-day form that purists (like me) consider abbreviated to the point of being closer to show-business than serious sporting engagement, is not really a quick game. We were in our seats from shortly after two o'clock in the afternoon until a little after ten o'clock at night. Cricket is a game of enthralling nuance and delicacy and I love it to pieces, but I would be lying if I claimed that we didn't spend those eight hours drinking ourselves into a stupor. That's OK - I like beer, too.

Astonishingly, given recent form, the weather was on its best behaviour. Little wispy clouds gazed benignly down on the immaculate baize of the pitch as if butter wouldn't melt in their mouths. I suspect that, like everyone else, they had set their hearts on seeing Sachin Tendulkar play. Certainly that's what the crowd (of mostly India supporters) wanted - the dismissal of the batsman before him by a stupid run-out was greeted with rapturous applause and chants of "Sachin! Sachin!".

Padded and helmeted, he looks like a school-boy striding out to the crease and taking his stance. Then he dispatches the first ball he faced for four with an effortlessly authoritative cover drive and you realise that he really is as good as people say he is. (Most people agree he's the best there is, some people think he's the best there's ever been.)

And that's that, really. Tendulkar's century is as inevitable as it is beautiful to watch, and it's the corner-stone of an innings of over 300 which the Sri Lankans never really look like threatening.

The rain, also on its best behaviour, confines itself harmlessly to the half-hour interval between innings; the crowd is as well-behaved as ecstatic celebration permits (I've long claimed that I could happily listen to Indian drumming all day - I now have empirical proof) and the beer is cheap and nasty but abundant.

Even the over-priced greasiness of the burger van burgers is exactly as it should be and not otherwise. An utterly perfect day.

11/07/2002 10:53 (UTC+1)

Cricket and consonants

Gah! Please, Miss, I did do my homework, but the Diaryland interface ate it.

I'm off to the cricket this afternoon. Sri Lanka vs. India in a one-day match in Bristol.

ObPhonetics: 'shr' (as in 'shrink') and 'sl' (as in 'slimy') are valid initial consonant clusters in English, but 'shl' and 'sr' are not. This explains why 'Sri Lanka' is more usually pronounced (by English people) as if it were spelled 'Shri Lanka', doubtless to the bewilderment of the Sri Lankans.

10/07/2002 14:54 (UTC+1)

A sonata in Swedish, a fandango in French.

The bbc is reporting a proposal to model language teaching on music teaching.

(Ah. In the UK, music tests are in grades 1 to 8 for a given instrument. Grade 1 is pretty straightforward and mostly for ickle kiddies, grade 8 is pretty serious and mostly for aspiring pro's and university entrance.)

The main reason this works well for music (and pretty much everyone seems to agree that it does) is that people progress through the grades at their own pace, independently of the rest of curriculum and discretises accomplishments into pleasingly small chunks, with certificates for each.

I've no idea how they propose to address the logistics, but even the idea of finer granularity in language teaching is worth pursuing.

But if I'm honest, I mostly just want the certificates. (None of the standard academic qualifications in the UK come in Swedish flavour, and I find this more annoying than it would be dignified to admit.)

10/07/2002 10:57 (UTC+1)

But what do I know?

I've mentioned the Que sais-je series of books before, but I only recently realised that they all exactly 128 pages long in their stockinged indicia.

It seems to me there's something very French (and not a little charming) about the assumption of a Universe of Knowledge built out of units exactly 128 pages long.

The closest British equivalent, the fairly new Very Short Introduction series from the OUP- which seems to be aimed at very much the same niche of pre-specialised students and interested lay readers - shamelessly tailors the number of pages to the authors' whims.

Sharing, as I do, the strong preference for round (binary) numbers which unites computer programmers and commercial printer (it's no coincidence that an American comic "book" or pamphlet contains exactly 32 pages, you know) I can only salute in wonder the magnificently a priori Procrusteanism of the French Universities Press.

Vive La France!

10/07/2002 10:40 (UTC+1)

I demand that I may or may not be Vroomfondel!

In the current issue of Mind (v.111, no.444) there's an intriguing article by Roy T Cook on "Vagueness and Mathematical Precision" in which he defends Dorothy Edginton's use of a formal metalanguage against the criticisms of Saintsbury and Tye:

In particular, the vagueness that they rightly argue needs to occur somewhere in our account of vagueness does not need to occur in the formal semantics itself but instead occurs in our description of the connection between the formalization and the informal discourse.

Exactly. We demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty!

(Can you tell that the computers are still down?)

09/07/2002 13:47 (UTC+1)_

The pun you can have!

Did you know that (the English words) special and spatial are homophones for native speakers of Spanish? Also there's some kind of bilabial craziness that makes curve sound like curb.

Incidentally, the main computer system where my home directory lives is currently down, so my computer is screwed, too, and I'm stuck in a text mode environment where I can't type foreign letters or cut and paste or use multiple windows.

Since it is also kind of hard to develop visualisation strategies for complex data-sets in a text window, I expect to spend much of the rest of the day reading. (I'd go out and bask in the sun, but there isn't any (bajskorv!), and you can't really get a tan by standing in the English rain, walruses notwithstanding. Goo goo g'choo! (sp?))

2002-07-08 12:17

�nlgisc invaders

The brutal Saxon invaders drove the Britons into Wales and compelled them to become Welsh; it is now considered doubtful whether this was a Good Thing.

[from Sellar & Yeatsman's 1066 and all that (1930) ]

What goes around comes around: this BBC article says much the same thing, only this time with added genetics:

Gene scientists claim to have found proof that the Welsh are the "true" Britons.

The research supports the idea that Celtic Britain underwent a form of ethnic cleansing by Anglo-Saxons invaders following the Roman withdrawal in the fifth century.

The linguistic evidence suggested this anyway - there are almost no Welsh loan-words in (Old) English, which makes peaceful assimilation seem fairly unlikely.

More worrying is this quote:

Archaeologists after the Second World War rejected the traditionally held view that an Anglo-Saxon invasion pushed the indigenous Celtic Britons to the fringes of Britain.

You can see why a theory of invading Germanic hordes inflicting exile or annihilation on those of a different ethnicity wouldn't be popular just after the war, but really - don't the implications of adjusting the preferred interpretation so as not to dishonour "our" race worry you, just a little?

If we can't accept that the Anglo-Saxons are not "us" in any meaningful sense - culture is not genetically encoded, dammit - then we're really not mature enough to be doing history at all. (Sadly, I suspect this is precisely the case.)

I like the Anglo-Saxon period because of the continuity between the language then and now, and because (like their contemporaries, the Vikings) they're funny. You probably wouldn't want to invite them round for tea, but at a safe distance ��elstan and co. are a laugh-riot. But they're not (*shudder*) us.