Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Education’ Category

The English course that I’m doing started off nice and gradually with a history of the English language all the way back to its origins as a dialect of Frisian and motoring at a fair pace up to the establishment of the colonies and arrival of Colonial English.

Now we’re moving into a section which you’d think would be easy enough to follow as I’ve obviously been using it all my life: English grammar. Except, of course, that schools haven’t taught English grammar for a very long time indeed and therefore large chunks of it are only any way familiar to me as I’d learnt a number of the terms in French and Spanish earlier. That actually doesn’t make it a whole lot easier though as English is a completely different type of language and therefore many of the terms I’ve had to start going over are quite different from any that I’ve seen before.

Still, at least there’s only one more section of this part of the course and then it’s onto something completely different.

Or is it?

What I’ve to do is to take a dialect word and analyse how it came to be used. So, I’ve to trace the development of the word that I choose as far back as I can. That’s surprisingly easy as it turns out as the Oxford English Dictionary covers a lot of the history of the words within it which, of course, includes the words used in the various dialects.

Anyway, I’m provisionally running with “wee” which is considered very much a Scottish word these days but it turns out that it’s derived from a very, very old Old English word related to our present-day weigh: essentially meaning a small measure. That’s changed somewhat over time and now we have both the word “weigh” for the weight whilst “wee” is very much a synonym for “small” in Scots and several English dialects too. Not only is it not really a Scottish word but in fact it was only really taken up by Scottish writers from the early 1700s.

Now, of course, the question is whether or not I can write enough about it for the assignment.

We’ve been without TV since December 31st when the satellite decided to down tools.

It’s not that we’ve not been trying to get it sorted but, until this evening, all our efforts were in vain. We changed the satellite dish from our trusty 80cm to a 95cm, we changed the LNB to a nice new one instead of our very weather beaten four year old one, we changed the coaxial cable and we even changed the satellite decoder. And nothing.

So we thought we’d go back to first principles late this afternoon. Within 30 minutes of going back to our old dish and old LNB we started picking up TV channels. OK, we’re not getting the right satellite just yet but we should have that sorted in fairly short order tomorrow.

However, we do need to source a new Sky box as the old one ain’t working anymore so, for the moment, we’re limited to non-subscription channels.

Winter is the time when we get around to looking in detail at our various sites and so it was only yesterday that we noticed that one of them wasn’t nearly so complete as it could be.

An easy thing to fix and as from this afternoon our Holiday Rental Homes site now lists all the properties that it should have been listing all along. The effect of this is that the site should have a much greater profile than it did before with hundreds of new pages under it’s wing.

Whether it’ll make any difference with the search engines is something that we’ll just have to wait and see.

As we’re edging into the main booking season for the summer, the number of travel advertisements is increasing quite dramatically as you’ve probably noticed.

Although the world is obviously pretty much the same as it was last year, the emphasis on particular holiday destinations seems to change from year to year. So far this year, the emphasis seems to be split between Costa Rica, Canada and Carribbean cruises which are three very different options.

At first glance Costa Rica seems to be primarily an ecotourism destination with rain forests, exotic animals and so on. However, whilst making a point of ecotourism the tourist infrastructure in other areas has been built up substantially in recent years and you now have a very complete offering under most types of tourist activities.

Canada is, for the moment, concentrating on luxury ski vacations both around British Columbia at the west and Quebec in the east. Luxury seems to be the common theme for both sides of Canada with a lot of emphasis on personal service and fantastic meals.

The Carribbean cruises being pushed this year are also generally at the luxury end of the market but emphasising the discounts available from a number of cruise lines. Very substantial discounts too in some cases, notably from SilverSea which is very much a personal service cruise line.

Of course, where they want you to go will probably change as we move further into the year. For one thing, the Canadian ski resorts will be dropping out from around April/May as the snow starts to melt although those areas are very attractive in the summer too.