Awful weather today — really not conducive to anything approaching half-decent photography. This came out OK, though!
Have you ever wondered why it’s windy outside, but you wind someone up? Why there are windows, but you drive down windy roads?
It’s all thanks to the Great Vowel Shift, which was probably the single most important change in the creation of Modern English. I won’t bore you with the details, but basically it’s the reason many Continental Europeans (Romance and Germanic languages) sound a bit weird when they say our words. English is quite rare in its use of the ‘i’ sound in ‘bind’ — if you ask almost any non-Englisher to pronounce ‘bind’ it will almost certainly rhyme with ‘tinned’.
And there’s your bit of languagey education for today. Happy Saturday!
(If you’re interested in languages, check out Guy Deutscher’s The Unfolding Of Language; easy reading, and incredibly interesting.)
Sweta
Feb 6, 2011
I’ve had a bit of philology in my course,hm,but never got around to study this one.Love the trees.
sebastian
Feb 6, 2011
I love the trees too — but sometimes I wish I had a horizon near my house… makes it much easier to take photos, when you can see into the distance. We’re simply smothered by trees here
Senth
Feb 6, 2011
Never thought of that actually although I’m from Sweden… but I have a really vague memory that my English teacher taught us that when we began having English lessons; i.e. around the age of 10. Nowadays I think you start learning when you start school.
Continuing from the other post…
My English here might be OK, but it wasn’t on my blog on some posts since I didn’t reread them checking for grammar error etc.
I don’t know if the exercises helped me to fall asleep faster either. But I noticed one thing that did; I have a very bad habit of sleeping too much. Like if I don’t get up at the right time I just continue with my sleep, after I’ve slept 10 hours I can still wake up and just go to sleep again. Due to this I wasn’t awake 16 hours a day—or I was but the last 2 hours were in bed. When I have a fixed schedule it’s much easier to fall asleep, however it’s so damn hard not to sleep a bit longer on some days and that really messes up the rhythm