Transplanting a Seattleite

https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2023/04/14/babs-gons-wordt-de-nieuwe-dichter-des-vaderlands-a4162099

Like a poet laureate, and in classic Dutch fashion, named by an unexpected array of organizations including the NRC.

This is really great!

“Ik wil een taal waarin/ ‘gewoon’ en ‘anders’/ hun langste tijd hebben gehad/ een zachte dood sterven/ en niemand ooit meer/ onzichtbaar kunnen maken.”

Obviously, I totally agree with the desire expressed (wanting a language in which the dichotomy between normal and other has been gone a long time and no one can be made invisible anymore) and “een zachte dood sterven” is a delightful phrase that translates really well — “and die a soft death”.

I don’t know if my Dutch is up to it, but what an opportunity this is to listen to Dutch at a pace I might actually be able to keep up with, but material that I care about and am interested in. Babs Gons is primarily a spoken word artist; I’ll go in search of YouTube or whatever soon.

I walked with M.

A. had her portal playdate with K.

We went to PuzzlEscape and did the single room “Christmas Crisis”. It was fun. We had some minutes left on the clock! Lots and lots and lots of locks. They are going to use this as a “seasonal themed room”, and change it several times a year, so we’ll be back opening more locks later. Which is fine! Still waiting on the Halloween room, and also they have a Spam Emails room coming. Should be fun!

I’m trying to get Duo Dutch to five star, but it is a chore. However, in good news, separable verbs are no longer completely infuriating to me. Also, with covid variant omicron in the news, and lots of getting-of-the-plane testing of people coming into Schiphol, I went over to read NRC today. It was easier than it was. So there’s that, too.

We (author of blog and daughter A., with assistance from J., another relative of we) are working on proposal “Radical English”. First draft:

Radical English

Verb of Radical English: No Conjugation Remain

Pronoun of Radical English: We, You and They. Radical English have no number, no gender, no case and no distinction between person and thing. Corresponding to pronoun are Our (ours), Your (yours) and Their (theirs). Possessive are otherwise formed in the usual way (‘s).

Definite and Indefinite Article of Radical English Are Removed; Number And None Remain

We are Jane Doe.
You are Joan Doe.
They are John Roe.

We are Jane and Joan.
They are John and Ron.

Ron are member of Doe/Roe Family.
They are one of we.

If you like Jane, you like they.
If you like Jane and Joan, (and speaker/writer are Joan) you like we.

We drive i3. They are our i3.
John drive Odyssey. They are their Odyssey. (<— Antecedent confusion; rewrite for clarity. John drive their Odyssey clearly indicate that in addition to driving, John possess Odyssey).

If you have really big problem with idea of using “they” to refer to non-specified gender person, have we got deal for you!

No more it! People refer to animal as “it”, which are not cool! They are now “they”. See Spot run. They run!

You already do almost all of work of Radical English for Second Person. You go to store, whether you are Joan, or Joan and Jane, or Joan and Spot. Now, Spot can be you, going to store. You like Jane, and Jane like you.

They need little help, beyond removing gender and number. They has case problem. They like Joan, but Joan like “them”. What fuck are them anyway? They are accident waiting to happen and be pounced on by elite speaker. In Radical English, They like Joan, and Joan like They.

First person need lot of help.

About Conjugation

We simplify conjugation when we get rid of third person singular.

Eliminate all definite and indefinite article; number are still available. “We have one dog.” “We have more than one dog.” “We have no dog.”

Eliminate plural form of noun.

My -> Our / ours
His / Her / Its -> Their / theirs
You -> Your / yours

We are still working on:

This / That / These / Those

Contractions?


Some translation: first, Genesis 1 (based on NRSV)

Six Day of Creation and Sabbath
1 In beginning when God created[a] heaven and earth, 2 earth were formless void and darkness covered face of deep, while wind from God[b] swept over face of water. 3 Then God said, “Let there be light”; and there were light. 4 And God saw that light were good; and God separated light from darkness. 5 God called light Day, and darkness they called Night. And there were evening and there were morning, first day.
6 And God said, “Let there be dome in midst of waters, and let they separate water from water.” 7 So God made dome and separated water that were under dome from water that were above dome. And they were so. 8 God called dome Sky. And there were evening and there were morning, second day.
9 And God said, “Let water under sky be gathered together into one place, and let dry land appear.” And they were so. 10 God called dry land Earth, and water that were gathered together they called Seas. And God saw that they were good. 11 Then God said, “Let earth put forth vegetation: plant yielding seed, and fruit tree of every kind on earth that bear fruit with seed in it.” And they were so. 12 Earth brought forth vegetation: plant yielding seed of every kind, and tree of every kind bearing fruit with seed in it. And God saw that they were good. 13 And there were evening and there were morning, third day.
14 And God said, “Let there be light in dome of sky to separate day from night; and let they be for sign and for season and for day and year, 15 and let they be light in dome of sky to give light upon earth.” And they were so. 16 God made two great light—the greater light to rule day and lesser light to rule night—and star. 17 God set they in the dome of sky to give light upon earth, 18 to rule over day and over night, and to separate light from darkness. And God saw that they were good. 19 And there were evening and there were morning, fourth day.
20 And God said, “Let water bring forth swarm of living creature, and let bird fly above earth across dome of sky.” 21 So God created great sea monster and every living creature that move, of every kind, with which water swarm, and every winged bird of every kind. And God saw that they were good. 22 God blessed them, saying, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill water in sea, and let bird multiply on earth.” 23 And there were evening and there were morning, fifth day.
24 And God said, “Let earth bring forth living creature of every kind: cattle and creeping thing and wild animal of earth of every kind.” And they were so. 25 God made wild animal of earth of every kind, and cattle of every kind, and everything that creep upon ground of every kind. And God saw that they were good.
26 Then God said, “Let we make humankind[c] in our image, according to our likeness; and let they have dominion over fish of sea, and over bird of air, and over cattle, and over all wild animal of earth,[d] and over every creeping thing that creep upon earth.”
27 
So God created humankind[e] in their image,
    in image of God they created them;[f]
    male and female they created they.
28 God blessed they, and God said to they, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill earth and subdue they; and have dominion over fish of sea and over bird of air and over every living thing that move upon earth.” 29 God said, “See, we have given you every plant yielding seed that is upon face of all earth, and every tree with seed in their fruit; you shall have them for food. 30 And to every beast of earth, and to every bird of air, and to everything that creep on earth, everything that has breath of life, we have given every green plant for food.” And they were so. 31 God saw everything that they had made, and indeed, they were very good. And there were evening and there were morning, sixth day.

Pretty fantastic! But that passage sound good in many translation. Look at progression of Shylock’s speech —from flesh, to man, to Jew and Christian as category … and then back to individual.

Salerio
Why, we are sure if they forfeit, you will not take their flesh. What are they good for?
Shylock
To bait fish withal. If they will feed nothing else, they will feed our revenge. They have disgraced we, and hindered we half a million, laughed at our loss, mocked at our gain, scorned our nation, thwarted our bargain, cooled our friend, heated our enemy, and for what reason? We are Jew. Have not Jew eye? Have not Jew hand, organ, dimension, sense, affection, passion? Fed with same food, hurt with same weapon, subject to same disease, healed by same means, warmed and cooled by same winter and summer, as Christian are? If you prick we, do we not bleed? If you tickle we, do we not laugh? If you poison we, do we not die? And if you wrong we, shall we not revenge? If we are like you in rest, we will resemble you in that. If Jew wrong Christian, what are their humility? Revenge. If Christian wrong Jew, what should their sufferance be by Christian example?Why, revenge. The villainy you teach we, we will execute, and they shall go hard but we will better instruction.

Interesting change! Sleep now, and we will think more tomorrow.

ETA: We find copyediting Radical English challenging. Assistance in comment are welcome.

When I was first learning Dutch, it struck me as very odd that the Dutch word for window is "raam". Especially since (which I must have been aware of at the time but had since forgotten until recently), the German word for window is the Latin-derived Fenster. I commented on this to R. as we were headed out to dinner on Thursday (I cannot remember why), along with a rambling monologue about how odd it is that sometimes Dutch has germanic words where the German equivalent word is itself Latinate.

R. then proceeded to look up some of these words in various languages using online tools (which I had not ever done. No, I don't know why) and noted that Rahm in German is "frame". From there, he went, "raam = frame". And in the sense of, "raam is sometimes used to mean what we would mean by frame" he is correct. But I violently objected to the idea that raam is etymologically related to frame, thus leaving me with the puzzle of how to explain _why_ I felt this way.

I guess the first observation I would make is that I don't really understand where my etymological instincts come from, because the vast majority of my etymological instincts predate when I learned to pay attention to sourcing. So I can generally tell you that I spent hours and hours and hours one a fairly regular basis for years on end as a child reading etymologies in dictionaries (and the New World Cyclopedia. Yum.), and I had some specific curricula in school about etymologies. But beyond that, everything is a haze.

The second observation I would make is that R. and I _frequently_ have these kinds of disagreements (where he goes, hey, frame and raam -- kinda similar, just that pesky f, probably come from the same place, right? and I go, no way, no how and I can prove it just give me a few hours/days). Since I'm operating off of instinct and he's operating off of a bunch of theories about word similarity that turn out to have nothing to do with how languages evolve, his explanations invariably seem a lot more reasonable than my objections. But I am much more likely to be correct.

In this particular case, the core insight turned out to be that "raam" is all about the edge (rim). And "frame" is a nounization of a verb, and it is all about the action of going around. All of a sudden, many things make sense.

What you or I might call a window can be thought of in at least three ways: the pane of glass (piece of paper, shutters), the hole covered by same, and the edge around that hole. So the German word for window frame is precisely correct: a Fensterrahmen is the edge around the hole. (This was the word that put R. onto the theory that frame = rahm, and again, from a definitional perspective, sure, but from an etymological perspective, absolutely not.) And then I went off onto a huge tangent about how the Greeks and Romans were all about the static load and we didn't have frame construction until the middle ages, and that's when a word finally had to be invented for the building technique and its most obviously wonderful artifact, the modern window. (The most wonderful artifact of framing is roofs that don't slide out and then fall in, of course, but that's not obvious because things which are absent are never obvious in their absence.) That's when the noun (rim) intersected with the verb (frame, which goes around). Because that's when the edge started actually _doing_, instead of just _being_.

Also, R. is correct when he says that Dickens' use of the term "the little window" when referring to the guillotine was in fact a direct translation of a contemporary French phrase used by the Jacobins, altho to find that, I wound up digging around in google books.

Also, classic New England sash windows are called "guillotines" in French.

Finally, all those wikipedia comments about how the Romans had all the techniques necessary to do timber construction (in the framing sense) are Missing The Point. Framing construction is not about the techniques used to do the joinery. Framing construction is about the central insight of tying together static loads that should point down but have a component which goes out, and needs to be balanced. And I very belatedly remembered that we learned about this in school at some point, starting with people literally using rope to tie together roof structural members to prevent the characteristic out then down roof collapse, then the rope rotting/mice eating it (roof falls down) and then new practice became using carpentry instead of the rope. And the rope AND the carpentry techniques, along with the important engineering insight about the nature of the loads came from shipbuilding.

R. is trying to figure out if any of the words came over from the boat builders. I haven't attempted to research that, because if there is one thing that is true about language, it is that the land lubbers win when it comes to words.

I have four languages going on Duolingo, two of which (German and French) are the languages I have spent the most time learning in traditional school contexts (French in junior high school, high school and college; German in high school and at a language school that used to be located near Pioneer Square in Seattle the name of which I've forgotten and which may not be there any more), and which I've spent almost no time on Duolingo doing. One of the languages, Dutch, I've worked all the way through the tree and maintain it completely golden; I've never taken a traditional academic class in Dutch, but at this point I've probably spent the most hours in a conversational class (one on one) setting learning it. Finally, there is Spanish, which I originally started doing so my daughter could play with Duolingo with me, and, well, Dora the Explorer.

Not too long ago (perhaps a couple months?), Duolingo added a "Fluency Badge", which you get in percentage increments ("You are now 43% Fluent!" I am not joking.) as you work through the tree. You can go backwards, just like your little golden circles can lose their golden status until you practice them again. I only discovered the "Fluency Badge" very recently, when I was bored and decided to work on the Spanish tree. At first, I laughed hysterically ("You are now 11% Fluent!" What does that mean, anyway?). Then I eye rolled. And today, I went digging around to find out why I never saw that on the Dutch tree. New feature, not rolled out everywhere yet. And then I found this comments thread.

https://www.duolingo.com/comment/8726201

a_david describes the feature and then the fun begins. One thing I've noticed about Duolingo is, that like nearly everything ever in the history of ever, way more people start than continue. And of those who continue, only a comparatively small number participate in the forums/comments threads. And it really seems like the more trees a person has worked on and/or worked up to a high level on, the more critical they are of the feature, of the concept that doing anything with Duolingo can make you fluent, or . . .

kamil.kryn says: "2 years ago I start Italian on Duolingo. I'm a meticulous type, I make my way through the skill tree inhumanely slowly (self imposed limit of one subunit a day). And then, about 2 months ago, I go to Italy. Surprised as I was - I spoke Italian. I. spoke. Italian. Given, it was a choppy version of Italian, full of stuttering, "eeeem"s and "aaaam"s, and as rudimentary as they get ("one pizza please"), but there I was. Understanding and speaking Italian. Full Stop.

Now the fluency shield pops up and tells me I'm 60% fluent. You know what? I felt like 60% :)"

This seems pretty reasonable to me. Is it the CEFR definition of fluency? (And, yes, critics of the fluency badge bring up CEFR: "While it could be useful to know the level of fluency we have achieved if it was based on a known or accepted measure such as CEFR but to just give a percentage of a very vague measure seems a bit pointless for an academically respected site.") Not at all. But it is apparently capturing some notion of what it might mean to be fluent, according to a general population of people who do _not_ aspire to be polyglots. Fluency, as understood by people who don't speak a second language well, is the ability to get through a transaction at a shop, or exchange greetings, or order at a restaurant after making sense of the menu. And that appears to be approximately Duolingo's intention with the fluency badge.

It's a little tricky, when you launch a new service or product, trying to use early adopters to get the word out about your new service or product. You can't JUST sell to the early adopters, because early adopters are finicky and fickle. They demand the moon, complain about having to pay for it, and then are dissatisfied once they have the moon: it's so big, where are they going to put it, also it isn't actually made of green cheese as they had expected. Very quickly, they are bored with the moon, and want Mars. But of course, once they get Mars, they'll complain about that, too.

Another dilemma for Duolingo is trying to figure out whether they should cynically market the service to people who show up, do a level or two, and never return, or if they should try to help people keep coming back and doing levels so they actually attain a level of proficiency that will stick and might actually be useful to them, whether they are traveling or dating someone or working in an ER.

The fluency badge seems designed to encourage people who are NOT finicky, fickle, early adopters -- they are not polyglots who are going to work through every tree in the place, complaining relentlessly about how someone this doesn't Count as language learning. The fluency badge seems intended to get the person who shows up to keep coming back and actually learning something -- and to help that person _feel_ like they are learning something, which can be really difficult with language.

While I, too, laughed at the fluency badge, it's really grown on me. I think it's a great feature, and I hope they refine it and roll it out more widely. Gamification of language learning strikes me as a really positive development, and I'd love to see more people participate.

I've been lazy, and mostly just maintaining everything golden on Duolingo, with very occasional forays into Babbel. Sentence of the day, courtesy Duolingo:

"Ik zou nooit over wapens zingen"

Of course, haven't we all, at some point, sung about weapons?

"And the rockets red glare, the bombs bursting mid air"?

Or, for the more foolish and less patriotic among us, sung along with Warren Zevon:

"Send lawyers, guns and money"

I'm sure you can come up with more, like, say, this gem from very early in the 2008 presidential election, in which John McCain abused a Beach Boys refrain:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-zoPgv_nYg

It's all well and good to say you never will sing about weapons, but honestly, good fucking luck with that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Battle_Hymn_of_the_Republic#Lyrics

"He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword"

ETA: Bonus, from Spanish Duolingo

"Tu oso bebe cerveza."

Your bear drinks beer. Sounds like a problem, honestly.

I was going to take A. to open gym today, but it was closed. I was going to have company this afternoon/evening, but they canceled. So: free day! When T. and R. get back from bicycling, I'll probably go for a walk, but for now, I'm here at home successfully NOT playing Farmville 2: Country Escape and I _am_ refreshing some of the Duolingo Dutch. But there's only so much of that I can do before I feel like self-distracting, so today's question is driven in part by having noticing just how badly the quality fell off in Duolingo in the later levels, and R.'s theory that happened because so few people worked through the entire course.

Question 1: How do people count and measure fluency in a second language in the US? In the EuroZone, because each state has its own (or more than one) language, and because there is a high degree of commitment to working together, the EU is largely working from a model of Everyone Learns English As A Second Language. There is widespread understanding that (a) it's easiest to get a British teacher and (b) you'd rather have an American accent. There is less understanding -- and I mean by everyone -- that European English is its own Thing. It has its own idioms, usage and vocabulary that does not exist in other versions of English (my go-to example: "social partners"). Because English is a working language across the EU, there are extensive testing metrics and credentialing systems for measuring proficiency.

If you ask the goog, how many people in the US someverbhere a second language, you get stuff like this:

http://www.gallup.com/poll/1825/about-one-four-americans-can-hold-conversation-second-language.aspx

Basically, you call random people up on the phone and ask them in English if they can carry on a conversation in a second language and you note down their answer. No testing. No credentialing. No asking when the last time they did so. No asking whether this was something simple like telling the guy at the burrito stand you want that sin queso or something more complex.

The goog also offers up more substantial and less cheery analysis like this:

http://www.nbcnews.com/id/41992862/ns/technology_and_science-science/t/fluent-another-language-cia-wants-you/

This is an article that news organizations have been producing my entire life. Learn a language and the guv-mint will hire you to somethingorother in really sketchy places. Or at least read their news media and provide a precies in English of what you thought it said.

Entire language learning companies made their nut selling products and services promising to help the armed forces, the intelligence agencies and others try to turn people who speak some regional variant of American English into someone who can successfully navigate some other part of the world without unthinking and dangerous dependence on a local translator. I'm thinking of you, RosettaStone, and basically all of these companies are very quiet when they inevitably lose their contracts because basically, nothing works really well.

The article also says businesses will want you. Sure, they all say that. But they aren't that much better at actually hiring people who really speak a second language -- everyone wants to train people. (Which raises all kinds of fascinating questions. What's wrong with all those people who already speak the target language, anyway? Is this one of those "fit" things which is really about bias?) The usual conclusions are reached: executive function helps, but what _really_ works is how bad you want to use the new language, and whether you're willing to look like an idiot by using it.

This comment seems most relevant to my observation about Duolingo's drop off in quality:

"From knowing nothing to a little bit, (there are) huge changes in the brain," Osterhout pointed out."(From) knowing a little to knowing a lot, (it is) much more subtle."

The balance -- we should start teaching kids other languages when they are younger -- is probably true, if we really cared about our population being fluent in other languages. But the hard truth is that the languages we cared about a lot when I was a child are not the languages we care about right now. And that could well happen again. And I'm pretty sure that the _actual_ demand for being really fluent in Farsi or whatever is a lot smaller than the _actual_ demand for competency at the early levels of, say, calculus. Pretty easy to predict which of these two low demand educational attainments is gonna win, given that calculus is written into the prereqs for a lot of highly desirable higher education credentials. And Farsi ... is not.

I'm ignoring that guy over at Fluent in 3 Months because ... he's That Guy Over At Fluent in 3 Months.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/stacie-nevadomski-berdan/obamas-right-more-america_b_116583.html

"Obama is absolutely right. We live in a global economy and whether it's Spanish, French, Russian or Chinese, Americans lag behind the rest of the industrialized world when it comes to mastering a second -- or even a third -- language."

Notice that the author identifies as an "international careers expert". So _of course_ she's gonna say ya gotta do this. This is what she sells. As for lagging behind the rest of the industrialized world, well, there's a reason for that. They're all busy learning our language as a second language. If your first language anywhere in the world is Not English, the next obvious language to learn is ... English. With an American accent. It's a lot less obvious what the next language to learn is if you grew up speaking English with an American accent. (<-- Does this sound imperialist to you? It sure as fuck should!). The balance of the article is an ad for Praxis, and arguments in favor of learning Spanish for travel to, say, Pamplona for the Running of the Bulls. Or Chinese, the language of global commerce. (<-- I'm quoting.)

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sarah-wike-loyola/conquering-the-holy-grail_b_5640074.html

This high school Spanish teacher is death on grammar based school lessons, a big believer in the use-it-or-lose-it principle, and a hardass when it comes to immersion: she married a native speaker of Spanish and hired a Spanish speaking nanny for the kids. She says: "This component to your studies is absolutely necessary--you MUST experience immersion. Studying or working abroad after having gained a good base is what it truly takes if you want to become fluent in a language. From my own experiences abroad, I can assure you that there is no substitute for having to navigate your daily routine and maintain personal relationships in a language that is not your own. Students who take four to six years of language in a classroom setting find their proficiency level high enough that they can reach fluency in a matter of months abroad."

If this is the criteria for Americans to attain fluency in a second language, I think it is safe to say that This Ain't Gonna Happen. For one thing, the same guv-mint that supposedly wants to hire fluent speakers of languages spoken in places where Americans Aren't Real Popular Currently At Least Not With the Existing Regime, that guv-mint absolutely will not hire anyone _from_ those countries, or with too many connections or time-in-country, in those countries. Loyalty reasons. I so did not believe this at first, because I was like, what? But you know, Empire (I'm not talking about the TV show here).

This blog entry at the Economist is critiquing the idiots over at Freakonomics:

http://www.economist.com/blogs/prospero/2014/03/language-study

Of course, all of the arguments made in this gilded turd apply way more strongly to studying computer science -- and the payoff for get a CS degree are widely understood, yet we still have a shortage, which suggests that this may not be a motivational issue.

Bizarrely, the author tosses this nugget out:

"What is the return on investment for history, literature or art?"

Wow. If you want to get foreign language more space in the school system, you'd better learn to work _with_ the other people already there, not against them. Also, I would argue at least in favor of learning history, simply because the personal payoff (and I mean dollars in net worth) has been so ludicrously huge.

The NYT weighs in with a new frame. Maybe we _aren't_ really a monolingual country.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/15/opinion/sunday/are-we-really-monolingual.html?_r=0

Great quote from Arne Duncan here, proving, as always, that people who attain the highest, most rarefied levels of education are astonishingly foolish:

"“For too long, Americans have relied on other countries to speak our language,” Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said at the Foreign Language Summit in 2010. “But we won’t be able to do that in the increasingly complex and interconnected world.”"

Er, we won't? Interesting assertion. I'd love to hear the back story on that one, because the current evidence suggests that it's just gonna get easier as we go along. I mean, if the EU had settled on something _other_ than English for their working language, sure, I could see the argument. But now? Yeah, right.

Anyway. In this article, the author compares the census question (Anything other than English spoken at home?) and says that's the wrong question for assessing bilingualism in the US. He compares it to the EU question (can you have a convo in some other language returns!) and says the EU isn't as multilingual as we assume, and the US isn't as bad off as we assume. He may well be right -- I've certainly found people in the Netherlands who speak little to no English, and we got through on my Dutch (for the record, the main one I remember was a truck driver in 2002, so don't be thinking that failure to speak English is a route to great success; the rest were restaurant workers in Ameland, where we got by primarily in Dutch, because their two languages didn't include strong English).

This article is worth reading. The author has written a book about people who learn languages. I'm going to go off to read reviews of that at Amazon and decide whether it's worth reading.

"De vriendschap die ik met de koeien had was heel speciaal."

The friendship that I had with the cows was very special. D'oh.

I figured at 150 odd pages in, if I really didn't believe anything I was reading and didn't much care either, I should probably just give up. There's no way I'm getting through the whole thing before book group anyway, and it's increasingly clear to me that I avoided reading it this month for a host of very, very good reasons.

ETA: Who knew that the pronunciation of Gouda could be so difficult to nail down? On Sunday, one of my best and longest friends said a Dutch woman down the street told her it was pronounced "How-duh". I was like, um, pretty sure you mis-heard that, because that's not an "h" at the beginning. It's more like a throat clearing. I didn't debate the "ow" part, however. But then a sentence pops up in Duolingo with the throat clearing G but a very clear "oo". What?!? As near as I can tell, if it isn't a regional variation, Duolingo somehow managed to get a speaker who said it wrong. Which seems impossible, so I'm betting on regional variation (and yes, I listened to it several times -- since the word "gouden" showed up in the sentence, there was the opportunity to do a direct comparison and ou was pronounced "oo" in the city name and "ow" in the adjective golden). If I come up with an explanation, I'll add it here.

http://nl.forvo.com/word/gouda/

8Dori says "h" with no apparent throat clearing. All four agree on "ow".

So I got this great email today, with a mystery to be solved! The mystery had language and decorative arts elements.

Here are the pictures that were in the email:





Here is the background: we think the language might be some form of Latin, but would like to know more about the language. The person who asked the question notes that the text repeats and so the assumption was that it was a song or poetry.

Here is what I believe the text of the wall hanging is _from_:

http://www3.cpdl.org/wiki/index.php/Conditor_alme_siderum

It is from a very old hymn, part of the liturgy.

But I think that the wall hanging itself looks like it was machine made (because the object is in Australia, I haven't seen it -- just those two pictures). And the text in the hanging is neither complete nor, to be entirely honest, accurate.

So: any theories out there on why the text is partial? This hymn in some variations was sung faux bourdon (not _originally_, obvs!), so maybe one of my readers has encountered it sung in a round or round-like way during their time in a choir? Have you ever seen a wall hanging like this? The _oldest_ I can imagine it being would be some sort of late arts-and-crafts 19th century/early 20th century thing, but if anyone has seen any similar looking wall hanging (tapestry, etc.), I'd be curious to know what they've seen and where.

We have what I believe is a definitive answer on the language question, at any rate, but I'm still curious about just what this is and why it came to be (in Australia, no less!).

Since I have missed a couple Dutch lessons, and our August trip is approaching, I thought I'd go do some Duolingo Dutch by way of review. Of course, my daughter then got all obsessed with it (this is _my_ daughter, after all), but she wanted to do Spanish. We got her set up, but remember, this is an almost 7 year old, just finishing kindergarten and she's only been reading at all for less than a year. On the other hand, Dora the Explorer and a handful of bilingual board books that have been hanging around the house. On the third hand, her keyboard familiarity is limited, as is her spelling in _any_ language.

We're obviously providing a fair amount of support. But she is piecing together some things, more than I would have expected. Her spelling of English words is as uneven as I expected it to be. Her pronunciation of Spanish is, predictably, pretty awful. She's ignoring gendered stuff AND conjugation -- totes expected because (a) native language ungendered and (b) she's weak on conjugating in English. Still, it's clear that it's not so impossible that it has stopped being fun, and I don't mind that there's a bunch of English (making it not as immersive), given that she needs to work on that, too.

It's extremely difficult for me to tell when I'm making progress with a language (well, absent somebody producing grades on my work, which is not happening with my Dutch teacher because it's conversational only). Going back to redo stuff in Duolingo is kind of fun, in that it's fairly obvious that a bunch of things I used to have to think about are now very automatic. Of course, it is discouraging that I still forget the words for "empty" and "dry" (dry you would think would stick -- droog, drought, right? I won't forget it now, hopefully.).