Icy roads

Rain + cold ground = not a good combination. Pavements were icy and really slippery this morning; I fell once and sprained my wrist slightly.

I hope the sun will shine today and melt the ice away.

Amy had an appointment with the state school medical service, but Stella phoned me to say that they turned around and went home after going 10 m or so because it was just too slippery. So they rescheduled the appointment (for the third time… something kept getting in the way: I think Stella was ill once and Amy once, and today it was the ice), and the next appointment is in March.

On speaking a language to a child in which you don’t have a huge vocabulary

I found this article on “speaking Esperanto adequately to your child”.

Apart from the specific suggested dictionaries, it’s obviously also applicable to parents who talk to their child in a language where their vocabulary isn’t particularly vast—for example, in my case: I did go to school through the medium of English, but the things we talked about there are not always the things that interest children (such as names of animals, plants, or construction machines).

So the formula “prepare—anticipate—apply or improvise—check” mentioned there is probably also handy for cases like mine, even if they do not involve Esperanto.

Including the advice not to be ashamed to admit that you don’t know a word and have to look it up—and the reassurance that even native speakers of the local language don’t always know the (“proper”) word for something, or don’t always “properly” distinguish between related words (say, cricket/grasshopper). (Or for a personal example: for me, “yoghurt” and “pudding” are pretty much interchangeable, perhaps meaning something like “dairy-based sweet dessert”.)

A calendar pun

“Jews use a lunisolar calendar; Muslims use a solely lunar calendar.”

(Seen as the .signature of Pierre Abbat.)

To make pronunciation easier / it sounds better that way

I’m always amused when I read about the morphophonology of a language and come across a note describing the purpose of a morphophonological alternation as “to make pronunciation easier”.

It always seems like a cop-out to me: the native speaker has no idea why the alternation is there, but can’t imagine it being any other way, and so imagines that the pronunciation must be easier that way.

“Easier for whom?” is just the first problem with that :) Different people (influenced by their native languages) have different ideas of what’s “easy”, especially when it comes to consonant clusters.

A related amusement is when a different grammatical construction in particular cases is explained with “it sounds better that way”, which also begs the question (it only sounds better because of the Sprachgefühl of someone who’s grown up with the language; a foreign learner may well have different opinions of which grammatical construction would “sound better” in a given situation).