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Я в Париже и мне здесь хорошо :) Гуляю, гуляю, гуляю...


( еще фотографии, с Монмартра )

While browsing Wikipedia, I found that apparently in Finnish, ilma means "air".

In Maltese, of course, it means "water".

Now if somebody can dredge up two language where it means "fire" and "earth", respectively....

(A third language is optional, especially since the fifth element in the set of classical elements seems to vary widely from culture to culture, as does whether there are four or five in the first place. Though apparently, Chinese wu xing only share earth, fire, and water with most of the other traditions, but not air, having metal and wood instead.)

I applied for a parking permit for the underground car park here at work, since I did use it several times this year when I had the use of Inka's car for several weeks this summer, and perhaps I might use it again in the future.

(Previously, I had simply put a little card on the dashboard with my phone numbers, which the lady at the reception had recommended in lieu of a permit when I said I'd only occasionally come by car.)

And the funny thing was, it listed my phone number extension here (2361) and a number: 999.

I asked whether that was some kind of dummy, and she said no, that was just a consecutive serial number.

So yay! Fun pattern.

Yesterday, while waiting at the bus stop, Amy was watching some pigeons walking around.

She pointed at one and said, "Look at that woman pigeon!". I asked her how she knew it was a woman and she said, "Because it's so much prettier than the others!"

Heh :)

Amy often has a w-like pronunciation for her English /r/, and sometimes vocalises her "dark L"; together, this means that her pronunciations of "arrow" and "owl" are very similar (something like "awwoh").

I thought this was just a pronunciation difference, but perhaps it's also a perception thing; when I asked her today what rhymes with "wall", she said "tall... and door!" After a bit of thinking, she added "floor".

So I'm wondering whether "pore" and "Paul" sound the same to her (like "paw").

Amy, this morning, to Jana, about a card that she got:

„Guck mal, da ist Schreibung drin!“

I wonder where she got “Schreibung” from, since that’s not a German word, to the best of my knowledge; I imagine it’s a morpheme-by-morpheme translation of “writing” (as in “it’s got writing in it”).

Fun stuff!

Считаю, что шедевр в духе Достоевского уже прослеживается, даже несмотря на то, что видео я пока накидала в черновом варианте ;)

Наслаждайтесь - кино об Автобусе "Милосердие", одном из наших удивительных проектов.

53 секунды:


Жду комментарии!

The other day, I suggested that Amy go into the kitchen to pick a bowl for her breakfast cereal (she's pretty pick about which bowl and which spoon she wants on a given day), and she replied, "I am but so tired!".

German FTW :)

In English, you can put a word at the beginning ("But I'm so tired!") or at the end ("I'm so tired, though!"); in German, it can go either at the beginning ("Aber ich bin so müde!") or the middle ("Ich bin aber so müde!")—but the middle position (where Amy had placed it in her English sentence) sounds better to me in this case for some reason I can't put into words.

Thinking about other situations where German puts particles in the middle where English wouldn't, I came up with "Dann lese ich ein Buch." vs. "Ich lese dann ein Buch.", which means "I'll read a book, then."

This could mean two things in English: "In that case, instead of doing something else, I'll read a book" or "In that case, instead of reading something else, I'll read a book". The version in German with the particle in the middle is also ambiguous between those two meanings, but with the particle at the beginning... I just realised that one's also ambiguous. So much for that insight :)

Occasionally, I'll come across text which uses a superscript 1 as an apostrophe; these also tend to use superscript 3 and 2 as opening and closing quotation marks, respectively. Here's an example message in this encoding which I found by googling "can¹t"; it also features the use of "‹" as a dash of some kind (invisible on the page itself, where it's rendered as character U+008B (the control character "PARTIAL LINE FORWARD"), but visible in the Google "snippet" on the SERP as "‹" (i.e., Google interpreted the byte 8B as Windows-1252, while the page shows it as Latin-1).

Does anyone have any idea where this particular variety of mojibake comes from?

I think that such texts come from Macs, but I'm not sure how; my first instinct was to have a look at the MacRoman charset, but there, 0xB9 is not an apostrophe but rather the Greek letter π, and 0xB3 and 0xB2 are not smart quotes but rather the mathematical symbols ≥ and ≤. (And 0x8B is ã, rather than a dash.)

Anyone else?

Today was the ward's Christmas celebration—a bit early (even before the first Sunday in Advent).

It started off in the chapel, with a short talk and a video about the birth of Christ (with dialogue only in—presumably—Aramaic, and no subtitles). A couple of songs, including one by the ward choir.

And at the end of that segment, we were asked to leave through the front door of the chapel because there were some angels standing there who would give each person a little bag of biscuits and a booklet.

The booklet was about four Christlike virtues or attributes that the bishopric asked us to focus on in the four weeks of Advent, and which would also be the topics for the next four Sundays: faith, hope, charity, and patience.

The angels were the young women: Esther, Jeva, Verena, and Melissa. The last three were even dressed up as angels, with white blouses, white dresses, and white wings.

So, after that, we went into the cultural hall, where a buffet table had been prepared; everybody chose a seat at the tables which had been put up and set, and when the buffet was opened, could help themselves to the cakes and biscuits that had been provided, as well as to the fruit tea, cereal "coffee", or mineral water that was there.

After a while, three wise men (who looked rather similar to the bishop and his two counsellors) came in, bearing a big wrapped box. They each told a short story and then asked one child to unwrap the box carefully.

The box inside bore the inscription, "For the Primary children of Wilhelmsburg Ward". Inside were individually addressed envelopes with a card in each and small chocolate bars stuck to the outside, as well as a couple of somewhat bigger presents, two of which were for the missionaries and two of which were for the Primary as a whole; those last two ended up being xylophones (since the one the Primary has now is missing some of its "keys"(?)).

Amy exemplified the spirit of Christmas when she brought me the card and confided to me, "But I wanted a real present!". Ah well :)

What was less nice was getting Amy home afterwards; she didn't want to leave and kept disappearing rather than getting dressed.

Stella joined Facebook a little while ago, in order to stay in touch better with her mother and her sister (her mother, in her turn, had joined Facebook to stay in touch better with Stella's sister).

And she seems to be quite the Facebook user now! Chatting with friends, uploading photos, playing Zynga social games such as FishVille or FarmVille... quite a difference to my use of the site :)

(On the other hand, she said she was annoyed that she had to answer a CAPTCHA whenever she approved a friend, but she didn't want to verify her mobile phone number. So perhaps she's not quite the power user.)