I can read (and write) Romansh!

This morning I was giggling like a little schoolboy.

Why? I had asked a question in the Romansh Wikipedia (six [short] paragraphs!) yesterday and felt that I had managed to produce something that was, if not idiomatic, at least comprehensible. I felt totally proud of myself for achieving that much after only having had contact with the language for—what, two weeks or so?

What definitely helped, of course, was the availability of an online German–Romansh dictionary, which even provides conjugation tables for each verb lemma—faster than looking up in a paper dictionary.

Then this morning, I found that I had received an answer. Yay! I had been understood!

And what's more, I understood the response! And I only had to look up a handful of words.

Here it really helps that Romansh is a Romance language, so you (well, I) can understand quite a bit just from the cognates with languages I already know, such as French and English. For example, "consequenza" or "differents" I don't have to look up, and I doubt most readers of this entry would, either.

I think this ease of recognition gives Romansh a pretty low barrier to entry for me compared to many other languages: if you can more easily read texts in it, you feel more accomplished than if at first you can only read "See Spot run" because of the gigantic vocabulary barrier.

Anyway, the whole thing left me all giggly and happy and accomplished, and feeling all clever.

Leap second

Whoohoo!

At "long last"[*], there'll be a leap second again this year at the end of December, according to the email I just received!

So 2008-12-31T23:59:59 (UTC) will be followed by 2008-12-31T23:59:60.

Go and spread the word!

...I'm such a geek.

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[*] Leap seconds have historically come roughly every 18 months, but it's been three years since the last one, and the last one before that was seven years earlier. (They don't come regularly since they depend on the earth's rotation speed, which is a bit irregular and hard to predict much in advance.)

Not completely original

"Elbisch? Wo ist denn da der Sindarin? Das Quenya eh keiner!"

Amy can spell!

A little while ago, I was playing around with the Fisher-Price schoolhouse and spelling some words.

Amy asked me to write horse, because she was a horse, so I put the letters H O R S E on the roof of the school.

Then she asked me to write monkey, because I was supposed to be a monkey.

I asked her, “What letter does mmmmmmmonkey start with?” and she replied, “With a M!”

I was very surprised; as far as I can remember, that was the first time she guessed how to spell a word she hadn't seen written before.

When it worked, I would give her clues in the past, such as “ddddddog starts with a dddddee” or “bbbbbaby starts with a bbbbbee”, to show that at least some letters have regular sound-to-symbol correspondences (even in English :D), but this was the first time she showed that she had even taken notice of those hints: by applying the knowledge to the spelling of an unknown word!

I was well chuffed.

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In unrelated news, Stella’s computer was running a Norton Security scan just now. I asked her where she got that from and she said that it installed with something she got from the Internet yesterday.

I suppose it’s better than some keyboard Trojan, but still… I’m prejudiced against Norton and would rather not buy it, and having it appear “by itself” seems rather suspicious. Especially since we already have anti-virus software on our computers.