A Sinn Fein politician wants and looks forward to a united Ireland by peaceful means, acknowledges the troubles but emphasises those days are in the past. It seems uncontroversial and certainly unsurprising.
Either her Gaelic isn't very good, or Google Translate isn't!
Both are probably true. Irish is taught in schools but no-one speaks it, so there is not much of a corpus for Google Translate to learn from. Ireland is no Israel, where Hebrew was successfully resurrected.
Ireland (most of it anyway) is independent but it's language doesn't appear to be doing so well. There's little prospect of Welsh independence but the language seems to be coming back. Scots Gaelic is on it's last legs, apparently.
Hmmm.
Is Cymraeg really breaking out from Welsh Wales? I got the impression in South Wales that it is still confined to the schoolroom and road signs.
Depends where you live. If you live in Newport yes. If you live in Ystradgynlais or Llanelli, it’s a bit different.
A Sinn Fein politician wants and looks forward to a united Ireland by peaceful means, acknowledges the troubles but emphasises those days are in the past. It seems uncontroversial and certainly unsurprising.
Either her Gaelic isn't very good, or Google Translate isn't!
Both are probably true. Irish is taught in schools but no-one speaks it, so there is not much of a corpus for Google Translate to learn from. Ireland is no Israel, where Hebrew was successfully resurrected.
Ireland (most of it anyway) is independent but it's language doesn't appear to be doing so well. There's little prospect of Welsh independence but the language seems to be coming back. Scots Gaelic is on it's last legs, apparently.
Hmmm.
Largely because Welsh is the touchstone of Welsh identity, and was the first language of nearly all the ordinary people of Wales until the early twentieth century. Scottish and Irish Gaelic were never important to the people in the same way partly because there were so many distinct dialects (eg Deeside Gaelic, Roscommon Irish) and as a result from a very early stage English was the common language of communication for people from different areas. It was also the basis for some of those dialects, eg Scots and Ulster Scots, for which there is no real equivalent in Wales.
That is very interesting. Given the geography I am surprised there are not big differences between Welsh in the south of the country and the north, or is it just that the south varieties have largely died out?
I am all for the maintenance of as many languages as possible. I think we lose a bit of ourselves every time a language dies. They are direct connections to our past.
There are, although due to television and radio they’re much less marked than they are. But they are still the same language. I can hold a conversation with somebody from Bangor and we will understand each other. That wasn’t true of Ullapool and Aberdeen.
Have a bit of credulity - that’s almost certainly a fake picture imo. From a previous year or something. It’s not credible that there isn’t single person wearing a mask. Even round their chin or something.
EDIT: apparently it’s from the Daily Mail so maybe it is. I still find it very difficult to believe they haven’t been duped.
I agree. On any High Street, let alone one as busy as that at least 1/3 of people would be wearing masks now. I can't see a single one.
Even so here in Spain masks outdoors are virtually 100%
A Sinn Fein politician wants and looks forward to a united Ireland by peaceful means, acknowledges the troubles but emphasises those days are in the past. It seems uncontroversial and certainly unsurprising.
Either her Gaelic isn't very good, or Google Translate isn't!
Both are probably true. Irish is taught in schools but no-one speaks it, so there is not much of a corpus for Google Translate to learn from. Ireland is no Israel, where Hebrew was successfully resurrected.
Ireland (most of it anyway) is independent but it's language doesn't appear to be doing so well. There's little prospect of Welsh independence but the language seems to be coming back. Scots Gaelic is on it's last legs, apparently.
Why any parent would want to impede their child's education in this way escapes me completely.
Surely the language teaching lobby has always told us that learning one foreign language helps with others. If true (which tbh I doubt) then French, German and Spanish results should be on the up at those schools.
There's some research I think which confirms that. I believe teaching of foreign languages in British schools is declining generally, though. Or is it just European languages?
We don't even teach English in our schools. I went to a grammar school in the 1970s and was never taught English grammar. And if you don't know how your own language works, how on earth are you going to be able to learn other ones?
Well they teach you it in those other languages. I learned most of my grammar from Latin, for example.
But English is a catastrophic subject at school. It teaches you almost nothing useful at all. No grammar, not how to write in different styles, not how to impart information clearly and succinctly, nothing. Time is wasted studying tedious poetry of little merit where the only correct answer is how wonderful it is. My son managed to get an A in his Higher last year without ever studying a Shakespeare play. As a subject it has completely lost its way.
A Sinn Fein politician wants and looks forward to a united Ireland by peaceful means, acknowledges the troubles but emphasises those days are in the past. It seems uncontroversial and certainly unsurprising.
Either her Gaelic isn't very good, or Google Translate isn't!
Both are probably true. Irish is taught in schools but no-one speaks it, so there is not much of a corpus for Google Translate to learn from. Ireland is no Israel, where Hebrew was successfully resurrected.
Ireland (most of it anyway) is independent but it's language doesn't appear to be doing so well. There's little prospect of Welsh independence but the language seems to be coming back. Scots Gaelic is on it's last legs, apparently.
Why any parent would want to impede their child's education in this way escapes me completely.
Surely the language teaching lobby has always told us that learning one foreign language helps with others. If true (which tbh I doubt) then French, German and Spanish results should be on the up at those schools.
Gaelic bears no resemblance whatsoever to any of those languages. In fact, I would have thought learning French after learning Gaelic would be more confusing, not less.
You want those results to go up? Start teaching Latin in primary schools.
A Sinn Fein politician wants and looks forward to a united Ireland by peaceful means, acknowledges the troubles but emphasises those days are in the past. It seems uncontroversial and certainly unsurprising.
Either her Gaelic isn't very good, or Google Translate isn't!
Both are probably true. Irish is taught in schools but no-one speaks it, so there is not much of a corpus for Google Translate to learn from. Ireland is no Israel, where Hebrew was successfully resurrected.
Ireland (most of it anyway) is independent but it's language doesn't appear to be doing so well. There's little prospect of Welsh independence but the language seems to be coming back. Scots Gaelic is on it's last legs, apparently.
Why any parent would want to impede their child's education in this way escapes me completely.
Surely the language teaching lobby has always told us that learning one foreign language helps with others. If true (which tbh I doubt) then French, German and Spanish results should be on the up at those schools.
There's some research I think which confirms that. I believe teaching of foreign languages in British schools is declining generally, though. Or is it just European languages?
We don't even teach English in our schools. I went to a grammar school in the 1970s and was never taught English grammar. And if you don't know how your own language works, how on earth are you going to be able to learn other ones?
Same for me the concept of dealing verbs came as a shock and has limited my ability to learn other languages.
A Sinn Fein politician wants and looks forward to a united Ireland by peaceful means, acknowledges the troubles but emphasises those days are in the past. It seems uncontroversial and certainly unsurprising.
Either her Gaelic isn't very good, or Google Translate isn't!
Both are probably true. Irish is taught in schools but no-one speaks it, so there is not much of a corpus for Google Translate to learn from. Ireland is no Israel, where Hebrew was successfully resurrected.
Ireland (most of it anyway) is independent but it's language doesn't appear to be doing so well. There's little prospect of Welsh independence but the language seems to be coming back. Scots Gaelic is on it's last legs, apparently.
Why any parent would want to impede their child's education in this way escapes me completely.
Surely the language teaching lobby has always told us that learning one foreign language helps with others. If true (which tbh I doubt) then French, German and Spanish results should be on the up at those schools.
There's some research I think which confirms that. I believe teaching of foreign languages in British schools is declining generally, though. Or is it just European languages?
We don't even teach English in our schools. I went to a grammar school in the 1970s and was never taught English grammar. And if you don't know how your own language works, how on earth are you going to be able to learn other ones?
Were there not complaints when Michael Gove tried to fix that as education secretary?
Insert 50 Guardian articles claiming such a move is a) unnecessary and b) racist in the 21st century.
A Sinn Fein politician wants and looks forward to a united Ireland by peaceful means, acknowledges the troubles but emphasises those days are in the past. It seems uncontroversial and certainly unsurprising.
Either her Gaelic isn't very good, or Google Translate isn't!
Both are probably true. Irish is taught in schools but no-one speaks it, so there is not much of a corpus for Google Translate to learn from. Ireland is no Israel, where Hebrew was successfully resurrected.
Ireland (most of it anyway) is independent but it's language doesn't appear to be doing so well. There's little prospect of Welsh independence but the language seems to be coming back. Scots Gaelic is on it's last legs, apparently.
Why any parent would want to impede their child's education in this way escapes me completely.
Surely the language teaching lobby has always told us that learning one foreign language helps with others. If true (which tbh I doubt) then French, German and Spanish results should be on the up at those schools.
But it would probably be better to teach a useful language (like French, German or Spanish) to help with others. Or even Latin, which is indirectly useful, as the basis for half a dozen European languages, though obviously directly useless in itself.
A Sinn Fein politician wants and looks forward to a united Ireland by peaceful means, acknowledges the troubles but emphasises those days are in the past. It seems uncontroversial and certainly unsurprising.
Either her Gaelic isn't very good, or Google Translate isn't!
Both are probably true. Irish is taught in schools but no-one speaks it, so there is not much of a corpus for Google Translate to learn from. Ireland is no Israel, where Hebrew was successfully resurrected.
Ireland (most of it anyway) is independent but it's language doesn't appear to be doing so well. There's little prospect of Welsh independence but the language seems to be coming back. Scots Gaelic is on it's last legs, apparently.
Why any parent would want to impede their child's education in this way escapes me completely.
Surely the language teaching lobby has always told us that learning one foreign language helps with others. If true (which tbh I doubt) then French, German and Spanish results should be on the up at those schools.
There's some research I think which confirms that. I believe teaching of foreign languages in British schools is declining generally, though. Or is it just European languages?
We don't even teach English in our schools. I went to a grammar school in the 1970s and was never taught English grammar. And if you don't know how your own language works, how on earth are you going to be able to learn other ones?
I was 11 when I went to America in 1975, and that was the first place that I got taught English grammar. It was taught in a very rigid manner, but very useful later on.
English and maths were well taught in Georgia, the rest of the subjects much less so.
Who the f*ck is getting on a plane at this point ? The only people I know who have flown recently really didn't want to fly but it was neccessary for their work. But that's not the majority of flyers right now, particularly over christmas when contracts pretty much all go into a de facto pause. Just who are these would be flyers ?
A couple I know say they have to go to a warmer climate for Christmas because they can't cope with the British winter.
It is an annual tradition apparently.
My dad was literally instructed by the doctors one year that unless he relocated to a warmer climate the winter would kill him. So they went to Spain for 5 months.
A friend of mine is away in Barbados. She appears to be having a lovely time! I’m rather jealous!
I went to Barbados last year and didn't really enjoy it. This has convinced me that I'm an incurable grouch, because if I can't have a good time at a tropical resort then it's not the setting but the subject of the experiment which is causing the problem.
Actually, I rarely enjoy holidays. They are expensive, require planning, and while I get to see new places I lose the convenience of home. I can't work 52 weeks a year for my whole life, so I ask you:
What are good holidays for people who don't really like holidaying?
Unless you are peak season, not a lot of planning is required. Avoid flying and travel by train. You see much more of a country that way, and getting there becomes a pleasure rather than pain. Stay in cheap hotels as luxury is alienating, and there are always good value places around railway stations to stay and to eat.
Interrail tickets are good, as it is so easy to move on, if you don't like a place, or even the weather.
That's good advice for Europe, but many of the most interesting countries in the world don't have a decent rail network (Latin America, Africa, Australasia etc.) They are still worth going to, indeed often more so than Europe, but you need other strategies for getting around.
I don't think the Senate races are quite so essential as we're making out but that might be wishful thinking on my part. I think we are heavily influenced here by recency bias. Trump was confrontational in extremis and Obama was useless at inter-personal negotiation skills.
Prior to those two, Presidents knew how to work with moderates from opposing parties. In Joe Biden we have a guy who knows how to do business with people like Mitch McConnell.
So recency bias is skewing our perspective.
This may be wishful thinking on my part because although I have money on Jon Ossoff I don't think the Dems are going to win the run-offs. I hope I'm wrong.
And in some ways the best thing for America is to show that it's possible to work together. The best result might be if the Dems lose the runoffs and Biden then demonstrates that he can pull the country together. By winning over some moderate Republicans and moderating extremes in his own party he will simultaneously neutralise the Trump nutjobs ahead of 2024.
You cannot contrast Obama and Biden's dealings with the Senate, given that Biden was negotiating on behalf of Obama. If Obama was unsuccessful, that was because Biden was unsuccessful.
The brutal arithmetic is that if the GOP retains at least one of the Georgia seats, then McConnell, and this is the crucial part, retains control of what appears before the Senate. McConnell, like an increasing number of Republicans in particular, is highly partisan. If McConnell does not fancy Obama's choice of Supreme Court Justice, then his nomination will never be called. Conversely, McConnell has broken convention to have the Senate rubber-stamp Trump's choices even since the election of Biden.
It does not matter how many Republican Senators are charmed by Joe Biden if McConnell will not let them vote.
A Sinn Fein politician wants and looks forward to a united Ireland by peaceful means, acknowledges the troubles but emphasises those days are in the past. It seems uncontroversial and certainly unsurprising.
Either her Gaelic isn't very good, or Google Translate isn't!
Both are probably true. Irish is taught in schools but no-one speaks it, so there is not much of a corpus for Google Translate to learn from. Ireland is no Israel, where Hebrew was successfully resurrected.
Ireland (most of it anyway) is independent but it's language doesn't appear to be doing so well. There's little prospect of Welsh independence but the language seems to be coming back. Scots Gaelic is on it's last legs, apparently.
Why any parent would want to impede their child's education in this way escapes me completely.
Surely the language teaching lobby has always told us that learning one foreign language helps with others. If true (which tbh I doubt) then French, German and Spanish results should be on the up at those schools.
There's some research I think which confirms that. I believe teaching of foreign languages in British schools is declining generally, though. Or is it just European languages?
We don't even teach English in our schools. I went to a grammar school in the 1970s and was never taught English grammar. And if you don't know how your own language works, how on earth are you going to be able to learn other ones?
I found it worked the other way round. It was learning foreign languages that gave me an appreciation of English grammar.
My dad was literally instructed by the doctors one year that unless he relocated to a warmer climate the winter would kill him. So they went to Spain for 5 months.
Have a bit of credulity - that’s almost certainly a fake picture imo. From a previous year or something. It’s not credible that there isn’t single person wearing a mask. Even round their chin or something.
EDIT: apparently it’s from the Daily Mail so maybe it is. I still find it very difficult to believe they haven’t been duped.
I agree. On any High Street, let alone one as busy as that at least 1/3 of people would be wearing masks now. I can't see a single one.
Even so here in Spain masks outdoors are virtually 100%
In Edinburgh on Saturday it was over half but nothing like 100%. I find I am keeping my mask on outside more and more as I get used to it. If only my glasses didn't steam up.
I think America would be in a lot better place right now if these runoff elections didn’t exist and had been settled on Nov 3rd. I think they are THE single thing that has allowed Trump (and those influencing him) the space to push their ever more ludicrous theories and schemes to keep him in power. Because whilst some Republicans are supporting him out of loyalty or fear, I think most are just trying to keep quiet for the sake of control of the Senate. In any other scenario I think he would have been largely abandoned by now. Even if they don’t succeed (which they surely won’t) they may have terminally poisoned American democracy to a point where it is going to be very difficult to recover.
A Sinn Fein politician wants and looks forward to a united Ireland by peaceful means, acknowledges the troubles but emphasises those days are in the past. It seems uncontroversial and certainly unsurprising.
Either her Gaelic isn't very good, or Google Translate isn't!
Both are probably true. Irish is taught in schools but no-one speaks it, so there is not much of a corpus for Google Translate to learn from. Ireland is no Israel, where Hebrew was successfully resurrected.
Ireland (most of it anyway) is independent but it's language doesn't appear to be doing so well. There's little prospect of Welsh independence but the language seems to be coming back. Scots Gaelic is on it's last legs, apparently.
Why any parent would want to impede their child's education in this way escapes me completely.
Surely the language teaching lobby has always told us that learning one foreign language helps with others. If true (which tbh I doubt) then French, German and Spanish results should be on the up at those schools.
But it would probably be better to teach a useful language (like French, German or Spanish) to help with others. Or even Latin, which is indirectly useful, as the basis for half a dozen European languages, though obviously directly useless in itself.
More than that, surely? Without breaking a sweat I come up with Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan, Romansh, Romanian, Galician, Sardinian, Provençal and Monagasque.
A Sinn Fein politician wants and looks forward to a united Ireland by peaceful means, acknowledges the troubles but emphasises those days are in the past. It seems uncontroversial and certainly unsurprising.
Either her Gaelic isn't very good, or Google Translate isn't!
Both are probably true. Irish is taught in schools but no-one speaks it, so there is not much of a corpus for Google Translate to learn from. Ireland is no Israel, where Hebrew was successfully resurrected.
Ireland (most of it anyway) is independent but it's language doesn't appear to be doing so well. There's little prospect of Welsh independence but the language seems to be coming back. Scots Gaelic is on it's last legs, apparently.
Hmmm.
Largely because Welsh is the touchstone of Welsh identity, and was the first language of nearly all the ordinary people of Wales until the early twentieth century. Scottish and Irish Gaelic were never important to the people in the same way partly because there were so many distinct dialects (eg Deeside Gaelic, Roscommon Irish) and as a result from a very early stage English was the common language of communication for people from different areas. It was also the basis for some of those dialects, eg Scots and Ulster Scots, for which there is no real equivalent in Wales.
That is very interesting. Given the geography I am surprised there are not big differences between Welsh in the south of the country and the north, or is it just that the south varieties have largely died out?
I am all for the maintenance of as many languages as possible. I think we lose a bit of ourselves every time a language dies. They are direct connections to our past.
Off topic
Both my parents and their parents were first language Welsh speakers. Being born and raised South of Birmingham it was not a skill that a 1960s baby boomer was seen to require. On our school holiday trips to Burry Port the local children also appeared to have little or no Welsh. The resurgence of the Welsh language I believe is largely down to Gwynfor Evans, his hunger strikes demanding Welsh Language TV and ultimately S4C. For some bizarre reason I have a picture in my mind's eye of Gwynfor Evans protesting half way up a tree...whatever?
I think your dialects point is interesting. Gog dialects are certainly different from counties down South that naturally retained Welsh as a living language, namely Carms. and Ceredigion, but I would hazard everywhere else is predominantly S4C Welsh, which is also taught in schools. The Welsh spoken as a second language by schoolchildren outside the areas where Welsh survived naturally, I would contest is a (post 1980) modern construct.
A Sinn Fein politician wants and looks forward to a united Ireland by peaceful means, acknowledges the troubles but emphasises those days are in the past. It seems uncontroversial and certainly unsurprising.
Either her Gaelic isn't very good, or Google Translate isn't!
Both are probably true. Irish is taught in schools but no-one speaks it, so there is not much of a corpus for Google Translate to learn from. Ireland is no Israel, where Hebrew was successfully resurrected.
Ireland (most of it anyway) is independent but it's language doesn't appear to be doing so well. There's little prospect of Welsh independence but the language seems to be coming back. Scots Gaelic is on it's last legs, apparently.
Why any parent would want to impede their child's education in this way escapes me completely.
Surely the language teaching lobby has always told us that learning one foreign language helps with others. If true (which tbh I doubt) then French, German and Spanish results should be on the up at those schools.
There's some research I think which confirms that. I believe teaching of foreign languages in British schools is declining generally, though. Or is it just European languages?
We don't even teach English in our schools. I went to a grammar school in the 1970s and was never taught English grammar. And if you don't know how your own language works, how on earth are you going to be able to learn other ones?
Same for me the concept of dealing verbs came as a shock and has limited my ability to learn other languages.
What's a "dealing verb"?
I have Russian O Level and it has stood me in great stead. Not only for countries that used to be in the Soviet Union, but it gives you a head start for other Slavic languages as well, which are closer to each other than say the Romance and Germanic languages are.
Besides which, it is a fascinating and subtle language.
I hope this comes out right, but I am concerned about Philip Thompson. He seems to spend an inordinate amount of time on Political betting. I dip in and out these days, but he seems to be on the site literally every time I come on, except first thing in the morning. I am pretty sure he is not some kind of group effort but a genuine human, so I can't help wondering whether spending so much time on here is good for him. We frequently joust, so this may seem like point scoring, but it genuinely isn't. I hope he's OK.
...or the Conservative Party breaching The Working Time Directive, somewhat 'bigly'.
Can't wait to be back in school on 4th Jan, or get sued by Gavin Williamson.
I won’t be going back until we are out of tier 4: I’ve had an email telling me to work from home, sent by the Department of Health.
Would have been more useful if they’d written it on blocks of stone, so when Nick Gibb or some other random lowlife from the DfE threatened you with enforcement action you could literally beat it into their thick skulls.
I don't think the Senate races are quite so essential as we're making out but that might be wishful thinking on my part. I think we are heavily influenced here by recency bias. Trump was confrontational in extremis and Obama was useless at inter-personal negotiation skills.
Prior to those two, Presidents knew how to work with moderates from opposing parties. In Joe Biden we have a guy who knows how to do business with people like Mitch McConnell.
So recency bias is skewing our perspective.
This may be wishful thinking on my part because although I have money on Jon Ossoff I don't think the Dems are going to win the run-offs. I hope I'm wrong.
And in some ways the best thing for America is to show that it's possible to work together. The best result might be if the Dems lose the runoffs and Biden then demonstrates that he can pull the country together. By winning over some moderate Republicans and moderating extremes in his own party he will simultaneously neutralise the Trump nutjobs ahead of 2024.
You cannot contrast Obama and Biden's dealings with the Senate, given that Biden was negotiating on behalf of Obama. If Obama was unsuccessful, that was because Biden was unsuccessful.
The brutal arithmetic is that if the GOP retains at least one of the Georgia seats, then McConnell, and this is the crucial part, retains control of what appears before the Senate. McConnell, like an increasing number of Republicans in particular, is highly partisan. If McConnell does not fancy Obama's choice of Supreme Court Justice, then his nomination will never be called. Conversely, McConnell has broken convention to have the Senate rubber-stamp Trump's choices even since the election of Biden.
It does not matter how many Republican Senators are charmed by Joe Biden if McConnell will not let them vote.
This is misguided in almost every word. Obama was the problem as everyone who has studied his presidency notes. The 'brutal arithmetic' is your own projection. McConnell and Biden are good friends: McConnell was the only Republican to attend the funeral of Joe's son. They know how to do business together.
It will be a good thing for America to demonstrate that pulling together and finding compromise in the middle can work and can be a really good thing. As Robert pointed out, all the best Presidencies have worked with minorities on the hill.
And Alex is right: The runoffs are the worst possible thing for America right now. Thankfully they will be out of the way before inauguration. Biden will work brilliantly with the Senate even on a 52-48 or 51-49 split which is notionally against him.
A Sinn Fein politician wants and looks forward to a united Ireland by peaceful means, acknowledges the troubles but emphasises those days are in the past. It seems uncontroversial and certainly unsurprising.
Either her Gaelic isn't very good, or Google Translate isn't!
Both are probably true. Irish is taught in schools but no-one speaks it, so there is not much of a corpus for Google Translate to learn from. Ireland is no Israel, where Hebrew was successfully resurrected.
Ireland (most of it anyway) is independent but it's language doesn't appear to be doing so well. There's little prospect of Welsh independence but the language seems to be coming back. Scots Gaelic is on it's last legs, apparently.
Why any parent would want to impede their child's education in this way escapes me completely.
Surely the language teaching lobby has always told us that learning one foreign language helps with others. If true (which tbh I doubt) then French, German and Spanish results should be on the up at those schools.
There's some research I think which confirms that. I believe teaching of foreign languages in British schools is declining generally, though. Or is it just European languages?
We don't even teach English in our schools. I went to a grammar school in the 1970s and was never taught English grammar. And if you don't know how your own language works, how on earth are you going to be able to learn other ones?
Same for me the concept of dealing verbs came as a shock and has limited my ability to learn other languages.
TBF that is the traditional view of language learning, and the one I have mostly experienced. The counter view would come from the immersion approach - pimsleur and the like - who claim success from skipping the rules and jumping straight in to real world usage. Part of this at least will be motivation - the early payoff from learning something useful, rather like the difference between starting piano with learning scales versus simple tunes. But they also claim it’s a more effective way to learn in the round.
We decline verbs of course. You just have to teach people that's what they're doing, and that foreigners (except for Scandinavians) do more of it. I think people will always experience their mother tongue differently to learned languages.
A Sinn Fein politician wants and looks forward to a united Ireland by peaceful means, acknowledges the troubles but emphasises those days are in the past. It seems uncontroversial and certainly unsurprising.
Either her Gaelic isn't very good, or Google Translate isn't!
Both are probably true. Irish is taught in schools but no-one speaks it, so there is not much of a corpus for Google Translate to learn from. Ireland is no Israel, where Hebrew was successfully resurrected.
Ireland (most of it anyway) is independent but it's language doesn't appear to be doing so well. There's little prospect of Welsh independence but the language seems to be coming back. Scots Gaelic is on it's last legs, apparently.
Why any parent would want to impede their child's education in this way escapes me completely.
Surely the language teaching lobby has always told us that learning one foreign language helps with others. If true (which tbh I doubt) then French, German and Spanish results should be on the up at those schools.
There's some research I think which confirms that. I believe teaching of foreign languages in British schools is declining generally, though. Or is it just European languages?
We don't even teach English in our schools. I went to a grammar school in the 1970s and was never taught English grammar. And if you don't know how your own language works, how on earth are you going to be able to learn other ones?
Were there not complaints when Michael Gove tried to fix that as education secretary?
Insert 50 Guardian articles claiming such a move is a) unnecessary and b) racist in the 21st century.
My impression of West Indian, African and Subcontinent schools is that English Grammar is heavily taught, and in an old fashioned method. Old fashioned in the sense of properly...
A Sinn Fein politician wants and looks forward to a united Ireland by peaceful means, acknowledges the troubles but emphasises those days are in the past. It seems uncontroversial and certainly unsurprising.
Either her Gaelic isn't very good, or Google Translate isn't!
Both are probably true. Irish is taught in schools but no-one speaks it, so there is not much of a corpus for Google Translate to learn from. Ireland is no Israel, where Hebrew was successfully resurrected.
Ireland (most of it anyway) is independent but it's language doesn't appear to be doing so well. There's little prospect of Welsh independence but the language seems to be coming back. Scots Gaelic is on it's last legs, apparently.
Why any parent would want to impede their child's education in this way escapes me completely.
Surely the language teaching lobby has always told us that learning one foreign language helps with others. If true (which tbh I doubt) then French, German and Spanish results should be on the up at those schools.
But it would probably be better to teach a useful language (like French, German or Spanish) to help with others. Or even Latin, which is indirectly useful, as the basis for half a dozen European languages, though obviously directly useless in itself.
More than that, surely? Without breaking a sweat I come up with Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan, Romansh, Romanian, Galician, Sardinian, Provençal and Monagasque.
I meant to write "major" before European languages but with my early morning tiredness forgot to.
A Sinn Fein politician wants and looks forward to a united Ireland by peaceful means, acknowledges the troubles but emphasises those days are in the past. It seems uncontroversial and certainly unsurprising.
Either her Gaelic isn't very good, or Google Translate isn't!
Both are probably true. Irish is taught in schools but no-one speaks it, so there is not much of a corpus for Google Translate to learn from. Ireland is no Israel, where Hebrew was successfully resurrected.
Ireland (most of it anyway) is independent but it's language doesn't appear to be doing so well. There's little prospect of Welsh independence but the language seems to be coming back. Scots Gaelic is on it's last legs, apparently.
Hmmm.
Largely because Welsh is the touchstone of Welsh identity, and was the first language of nearly all the ordinary people of Wales until the early twentieth century. Scottish and Irish Gaelic were never important to the people in the same way partly because there were so many distinct dialects (eg Deeside Gaelic, Roscommon Irish) and as a result from a very early stage English was the common language of communication for people from different areas. It was also the basis for some of those dialects, eg Scots and Ulster Scots, for which there is no real equivalent in Wales.
That is very interesting. Given the geography I am surprised there are not big differences between Welsh in the south of the country and the north, or is it just that the south varieties have largely died out?
I am all for the maintenance of as many languages as possible. I think we lose a bit of ourselves every time a language dies. They are direct connections to our past.
Off topic
Both my parents and their parents were first language Welsh speakers. Being born and raised South of Birmingham it was not a skill that a 1960s baby boomer was seen to require. On our school holiday trips to Burry Port the local children also appeared to have little or no Welsh. The resurgence of the Welsh language I believe is largely down to Gwynfor Evans, his hunger strikes demanding Welsh Language TV and ultimately S4C. For some bizarre reason I have a picture in my mind's eye of Gwynfor Evans protesting half way up a tree...whatever?
I think your dialects point is interesting. Gog dialects are certainly different from counties down South that naturally retained Welsh as a living language, namely Carms. and Ceredigion, but I would hazard everywhere else is predominantly S4C Welsh, which is also taught in schools. The Welsh spoken as a second language by schoolchildren outside the areas where Welsh survived naturally, I would contest is a (post 1980) modern construct.
Something similar happened in Italy when they introduced national TV.. Prior to that, most people spoke local languages such as Piedmontese and Sardinian.
I hope this comes out right, but I am concerned about Philip Thompson. He seems to spend an inordinate amount of time on Political betting. I dip in and out these days, but he seems to be on the site literally every time I come on, except first thing in the morning. I am pretty sure he is not some kind of group effort but a genuine human, so I can't help wondering whether spending so much time on here is good for him. We frequently joust, so this may seem like point scoring, but it genuinely isn't. I hope he's OK.
...or the Conservative Party breaching The Working Time Directive, somewhat 'bigly'.
To what extent is a team of Russians working shifts covered by the WTD?
I hope this comes out right, but I am concerned about Philip Thompson. He seems to spend an inordinate amount of time on Political betting. I dip in and out these days, but he seems to be on the site literally every time I come on, except first thing in the morning. I am pretty sure he is not some kind of group effort but a genuine human, so I can't help wondering whether spending so much time on here is good for him. We frequently joust, so this may seem like point scoring, but it genuinely isn't. I hope he's OK.
A Sinn Fein politician wants and looks forward to a united Ireland by peaceful means, acknowledges the troubles but emphasises those days are in the past. It seems uncontroversial and certainly unsurprising.
Either her Gaelic isn't very good, or Google Translate isn't!
Both are probably true. Irish is taught in schools but no-one speaks it, so there is not much of a corpus for Google Translate to learn from. Ireland is no Israel, where Hebrew was successfully resurrected.
Ireland (most of it anyway) is independent but it's language doesn't appear to be doing so well. There's little prospect of Welsh independence but the language seems to be coming back. Scots Gaelic is on it's last legs, apparently.
Why any parent would want to impede their child's education in this way escapes me completely.
Surely the language teaching lobby has always told us that learning one foreign language helps with others. If true (which tbh I doubt) then French, German and Spanish results should be on the up at those schools.
There's some research I think which confirms that. I believe teaching of foreign languages in British schools is declining generally, though. Or is it just European languages?
We don't even teach English in our schools. I went to a grammar school in the 1970s and was never taught English grammar. And if you don't know how your own language works, how on earth are you going to be able to learn other ones?
Well they teach you it in those other languages. I learned most of my grammar from Latin, for example.
But English is a catastrophic subject at school. It teaches you almost nothing useful at all. No grammar, not how to write in different styles, not how to impart information clearly and succinctly, nothing. Time is wasted studying tedious poetry of little merit where the only correct answer is how wonderful it is. My son managed to get an A in his Higher last year without ever studying a Shakespeare play. As a subject it has completely lost its way.
It’s got no academic rigour at university level either. There is a Cambridge professor in English with just three books, two of them not peer reviewed. For History, that might be enough for a temporary contract at the University of Gloucestershire.
A Sinn Fein politician wants and looks forward to a united Ireland by peaceful means, acknowledges the troubles but emphasises those days are in the past. It seems uncontroversial and certainly unsurprising.
Either her Gaelic isn't very good, or Google Translate isn't!
Both are probably true. Irish is taught in schools but no-one speaks it, so there is not much of a corpus for Google Translate to learn from. Ireland is no Israel, where Hebrew was successfully resurrected.
Ireland (most of it anyway) is independent but it's language doesn't appear to be doing so well. There's little prospect of Welsh independence but the language seems to be coming back. Scots Gaelic is on it's last legs, apparently.
It really makes we wonder where I have gone wrong. I mean I make plenty of mistakes, have lapses of judgment, take on things well beyond my competence, why don't I get these kind of gigs?
A Sinn Fein politician wants and looks forward to a united Ireland by peaceful means, acknowledges the troubles but emphasises those days are in the past. It seems uncontroversial and certainly unsurprising.
Either her Gaelic isn't very good, or Google Translate isn't!
Both are probably true. Irish is taught in schools but no-one speaks it, so there is not much of a corpus for Google Translate to learn from. Ireland is no Israel, where Hebrew was successfully resurrected.
Ireland (most of it anyway) is independent but it's language doesn't appear to be doing so well. There's little prospect of Welsh independence but the language seems to be coming back. Scots Gaelic is on it's last legs, apparently.
Why any parent would want to impede their child's education in this way escapes me completely.
Surely the language teaching lobby has always told us that learning one foreign language helps with others. If true (which tbh I doubt) then French, German and Spanish results should be on the up at those schools.
There's some research I think which confirms that. I believe teaching of foreign languages in British schools is declining generally, though. Or is it just European languages?
We don't even teach English in our schools. I went to a grammar school in the 1970s and was never taught English grammar. And if you don't know how your own language works, how on earth are you going to be able to learn other ones?
Well they teach you it in those other languages. I learned most of my grammar from Latin, for example.
But English is a catastrophic subject at school. It teaches you almost nothing useful at all. No grammar, not how to write in different styles, not how to impart information clearly and succinctly, nothing. Time is wasted studying tedious poetry of little merit where the only correct answer is how wonderful it is. My son managed to get an A in his Higher last year without ever studying a Shakespeare play. As a subject it has completely lost its way.
It’s got no academic rigour at university level either. There is a Cambridge professor in English with just three books, two of them not peer reviewed. For History, that might be enough for a temporary contract at the University of Gloucestershire.
Does explain Richard Burgon, of course...
All non STEM subjects at University are just Sociology in disguise.
A Sinn Fein politician wants and looks forward to a united Ireland by peaceful means, acknowledges the troubles but emphasises those days are in the past. It seems uncontroversial and certainly unsurprising.
Either her Gaelic isn't very good, or Google Translate isn't!
Both are probably true. Irish is taught in schools but no-one speaks it, so there is not much of a corpus for Google Translate to learn from. Ireland is no Israel, where Hebrew was successfully resurrected.
Ireland (most of it anyway) is independent but it's language doesn't appear to be doing so well. There's little prospect of Welsh independence but the language seems to be coming back. Scots Gaelic is on it's last legs, apparently.
Why any parent would want to impede their child's education in this way escapes me completely.
Surely the language teaching lobby has always told us that learning one foreign language helps with others. If true (which tbh I doubt) then French, German and Spanish results should be on the up at those schools.
Gaelic bears no resemblance whatsoever to any of those languages. In fact, I would have thought learning French after learning Gaelic would be more confusing, not less.
You want those results to go up? Start teaching Latin in primary schools.
Yes, I mean that.
Let's see the evidence for that. Meanwhile, if you want a generation of French-speaking children, teach French in primary schools (which does happen in some schools) rather than teach Latin and hope some of it rubs off.
It really makes we wonder where I have gone wrong. I mean I make plenty of mistakes, have lapses of judgment, take on things well beyond my competence, why don't I get these kind of gigs?
The first line of the article is so wrong. It is easy to overstate the importance, and the article itself overstates it.
Regardless of the results of the election, real power in the Senate will lie with Romney, Lee, Murkowski, Paul, Collins, Manchin and Sinema (plus possibly some of the new intake) who are willing to vote against their parties. The Warren Sanders wing likely have enough for blocking but not passing bills.
A Sinn Fein politician wants and looks forward to a united Ireland by peaceful means, acknowledges the troubles but emphasises those days are in the past. It seems uncontroversial and certainly unsurprising.
Either her Gaelic isn't very good, or Google Translate isn't!
Both are probably true. Irish is taught in schools but no-one speaks it, so there is not much of a corpus for Google Translate to learn from. Ireland is no Israel, where Hebrew was successfully resurrected.
Ireland (most of it anyway) is independent but it's language doesn't appear to be doing so well. There's little prospect of Welsh independence but the language seems to be coming back. Scots Gaelic is on it's last legs, apparently.
Hmmm.
Largely because Welsh is the touchstone of Welsh identity, and was the first language of nearly all the ordinary people of Wales until the early twentieth century. Scottish and Irish Gaelic were never important to the people in the same way partly because there were so many distinct dialects (eg Deeside Gaelic, Roscommon Irish) and as a result from a very early stage English was the common language of communication for people from different areas. It was also the basis for some of those dialects, eg Scots and Ulster Scots, for which there is no real equivalent in Wales.
That is very interesting. Given the geography I am surprised there are not big differences between Welsh in the south of the country and the north, or is it just that the south varieties have largely died out?
I am all for the maintenance of as many languages as possible. I think we lose a bit of ourselves every time a language dies. They are direct connections to our past.
Off topic
Both my parents and their parents were first language Welsh speakers. Being born and raised South of Birmingham it was not a skill that a 1960s baby boomer was seen to require. On our school holiday trips to Burry Port the local children also appeared to have little or no Welsh. The resurgence of the Welsh language I believe is largely down to Gwynfor Evans, his hunger strikes demanding Welsh Language TV and ultimately S4C. For some bizarre reason I have a picture in my mind's eye of Gwynfor Evans protesting half way up a tree...whatever?
I think your dialects point is interesting. Gog dialects are certainly different from counties down South that naturally retained Welsh as a living language, namely Carms. and Ceredigion, but I would hazard everywhere else is predominantly S4C Welsh, which is also taught in schools. The Welsh spoken as a second language by schoolchildren outside the areas where Welsh survived naturally, I would contest is a (post 1980) modern construct.
Something similar happened in Italy when they introduced national TV.. Prior to that, most people spoke local languages such as Piedmontese and Sardinian.
A lot of Italians still have a 'public English' and dialectical 'home English', and slip from one to the other depending on context, in a similar way to some who drop some of their strong English accents away from home.
A Sinn Fein politician wants and looks forward to a united Ireland by peaceful means, acknowledges the troubles but emphasises those days are in the past. It seems uncontroversial and certainly unsurprising.
Either her Gaelic isn't very good, or Google Translate isn't!
Both are probably true. Irish is taught in schools but no-one speaks it, so there is not much of a corpus for Google Translate to learn from. Ireland is no Israel, where Hebrew was successfully resurrected.
Ireland (most of it anyway) is independent but it's language doesn't appear to be doing so well. There's little prospect of Welsh independence but the language seems to be coming back. Scots Gaelic is on it's last legs, apparently.
Why any parent would want to impede their child's education in this way escapes me completely.
Surely the language teaching lobby has always told us that learning one foreign language helps with others. If true (which tbh I doubt) then French, German and Spanish results should be on the up at those schools.
There's some research I think which confirms that. I believe teaching of foreign languages in British schools is declining generally, though. Or is it just European languages?
We don't even teach English in our schools. I went to a grammar school in the 1970s and was never taught English grammar. And if you don't know how your own language works, how on earth are you going to be able to learn other ones?
Well they teach you it in those other languages. I learned most of my grammar from Latin, for example.
But English is a catastrophic subject at school. It teaches you almost nothing useful at all. No grammar, not how to write in different styles, not how to impart information clearly and succinctly, nothing. Time is wasted studying tedious poetry of little merit where the only correct answer is how wonderful it is. My son managed to get an A in his Higher last year without ever studying a Shakespeare play. As a subject it has completely lost its way.
It’s got no academic rigour at university level either. There is a Cambridge professor in English with just three books, two of them not peer reviewed. For History, that might be enough for a temporary contract at the University of Gloucestershire.
Does explain Richard Burgon, of course...
All non STEM subjects at University are just Sociology in disguise.
Well, I should point out that any books at all for a STEM subject are quite good going, as they mostly focus on shorter papers
A Sinn Fein politician wants and looks forward to a united Ireland by peaceful means, acknowledges the troubles but emphasises those days are in the past. It seems uncontroversial and certainly unsurprising.
Either her Gaelic isn't very good, or Google Translate isn't!
Both are probably true. Irish is taught in schools but no-one speaks it, so there is not much of a corpus for Google Translate to learn from. Ireland is no Israel, where Hebrew was successfully resurrected.
Ireland (most of it anyway) is independent but it's language doesn't appear to be doing so well. There's little prospect of Welsh independence but the language seems to be coming back. Scots Gaelic is on it's last legs, apparently.
Hmmm.
Largely because Welsh is the touchstone of Welsh identity, and was the first language of nearly all the ordinary people of Wales until the early twentieth century. Scottish and Irish Gaelic were never important to the people in the same way partly because there were so many distinct dialects (eg Deeside Gaelic, Roscommon Irish) and as a result from a very early stage English was the common language of communication for people from different areas. It was also the basis for some of those dialects, eg Scots and Ulster Scots, for which there is no real equivalent in Wales.
That is very interesting. Given the geography I am surprised there are not big differences between Welsh in the south of the country and the north, or is it just that the south varieties have largely died out?
I am all for the maintenance of as many languages as possible. I think we lose a bit of ourselves every time a language dies. They are direct connections to our past.
Off topic
Both my parents and their parents were first language Welsh speakers. Being born and raised South of Birmingham it was not a skill that a 1960s baby boomer was seen to require. On our school holiday trips to Burry Port the local children also appeared to have little or no Welsh. The resurgence of the Welsh language I believe is largely down to Gwynfor Evans, his hunger strikes demanding Welsh Language TV and ultimately S4C. For some bizarre reason I have a picture in my mind's eye of Gwynfor Evans protesting half way up a tree...whatever?
I think your dialects point is interesting. Gog dialects are certainly different from counties down South that naturally retained Welsh as a living language, namely Carms. and Ceredigion, but I would hazard everywhere else is predominantly S4C Welsh, which is also taught in schools. The Welsh spoken as a second language by schoolchildren outside the areas where Welsh survived naturally, I would contest is a (post 1980) modern construct.
Something similar happened in Italy when they introduced national TV.. Prior to that, most people spoke local languages such as Piedmontese and Sardinian.
A lot of Italians still have a 'public English' and dialectical 'home English', and slip from one to the other depending on context, in a similar way to some who drop some of their strong English accents away from home.
It really makes we wonder where I have gone wrong. I mean I make plenty of mistakes, have lapses of judgment, take on things well beyond my competence, why don't I get these kind of gigs?
The first line of the article is so wrong. It is easy to overstate the importance, and the article itself overstates it.
Regardless of the results of the election, real power in the Senate will lie with Romney, Lee, Murkowski, Paul, Collins, Manchin and Sinema (plus possibly some of the new intake) who are willing to vote against their parties. The Warren Sanders wing likely have enough for blocking but not passing bills.
Exactly
And as I pointed out, even McConnell and Biden can do business together. They're friends.
A Sinn Fein politician wants and looks forward to a united Ireland by peaceful means, acknowledges the troubles but emphasises those days are in the past. It seems uncontroversial and certainly unsurprising.
Either her Gaelic isn't very good, or Google Translate isn't!
Both are probably true. Irish is taught in schools but no-one speaks it, so there is not much of a corpus for Google Translate to learn from. Ireland is no Israel, where Hebrew was successfully resurrected.
Ireland (most of it anyway) is independent but it's language doesn't appear to be doing so well. There's little prospect of Welsh independence but the language seems to be coming back. Scots Gaelic is on it's last legs, apparently.
Why any parent would want to impede their child's education in this way escapes me completely.
Surely the language teaching lobby has always told us that learning one foreign language helps with others. If true (which tbh I doubt) then French, German and Spanish results should be on the up at those schools.
There's some research I think which confirms that. I believe teaching of foreign languages in British schools is declining generally, though. Or is it just European languages?
We don't even teach English in our schools. I went to a grammar school in the 1970s and was never taught English grammar. And if you don't know how your own language works, how on earth are you going to be able to learn other ones?
Well they teach you it in those other languages. I learned most of my grammar from Latin, for example.
But English is a catastrophic subject at school. It teaches you almost nothing useful at all. No grammar, not how to write in different styles, not how to impart information clearly and succinctly, nothing. Time is wasted studying tedious poetry of little merit where the only correct answer is how wonderful it is. My son managed to get an A in his Higher last year without ever studying a Shakespeare play. As a subject it has completely lost its way.
It’s got no academic rigour at university level either. There is a Cambridge professor in English with just three books, two of them not peer reviewed. For History, that might be enough for a temporary contract at the University of Gloucestershire.
Does explain Richard Burgon, of course...
I had a girlfriend that studied English when I was wasting my time with law. It was weird. I remember that she was studying Tolkien's Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Without any reference to any other of his works, any other Arthurian texts, any other comparative material at all. I found the lack of context completely bewildering and bizarre. It was all about "textual analysis", whatever that was supposed to mean.
Why not vaccinate them at the same time as testing the lorry drivers? The vaccine priority list starts off reasonably enough but then ought to weigh more heavily needs and logistics, imo.
A Sinn Fein politician wants and looks forward to a united Ireland by peaceful means, acknowledges the troubles but emphasises those days are in the past. It seems uncontroversial and certainly unsurprising.
Either her Gaelic isn't very good, or Google Translate isn't!
Both are probably true. Irish is taught in schools but no-one speaks it, so there is not much of a corpus for Google Translate to learn from. Ireland is no Israel, where Hebrew was successfully resurrected.
Ireland (most of it anyway) is independent but it's language doesn't appear to be doing so well. There's little prospect of Welsh independence but the language seems to be coming back. Scots Gaelic is on it's last legs, apparently.
Hmmm.
Largely because Welsh is the touchstone of Welsh identity, and was the first language of nearly all the ordinary people of Wales until the early twentieth century. Scottish and Irish Gaelic were never important to the people in the same way partly because there were so many distinct dialects (eg Deeside Gaelic, Roscommon Irish) and as a result from a very early stage English was the common language of communication for people from different areas. It was also the basis for some of those dialects, eg Scots and Ulster Scots, for which there is no real equivalent in Wales.
That is very interesting. Given the geography I am surprised there are not big differences between Welsh in the south of the country and the north, or is it just that the south varieties have largely died out?
I am all for the maintenance of as many languages as possible. I think we lose a bit of ourselves every time a language dies. They are direct connections to our past.
Off topic
Both my parents and their parents were first language Welsh speakers. Being born and raised South of Birmingham it was not a skill that a 1960s baby boomer was seen to require. On our school holiday trips to Burry Port the local children also appeared to have little or no Welsh. The resurgence of the Welsh language I believe is largely down to Gwynfor Evans, his hunger strikes demanding Welsh Language TV and ultimately S4C. For some bizarre reason I have a picture in my mind's eye of Gwynfor Evans protesting half way up a tree...whatever?
I think your dialects point is interesting. Gog dialects are certainly different from counties down South that naturally retained Welsh as a living language, namely Carms. and Ceredigion, but I would hazard everywhere else is predominantly S4C Welsh, which is also taught in schools. The Welsh spoken as a second language by schoolchildren outside the areas where Welsh survived naturally, I would contest is a (post 1980) modern construct.
Something similar happened in Italy when they introduced national TV.. Prior to that, most people spoke local languages such as Piedmontese and Sardinian.
A lot of Italians still have a 'public English' and dialectical 'home English', and slip from one to the other depending on context, in a similar way to some who drop some of their strong English accents away from home.
And Germans of course have traditionally done the same. Although in Italian there is often a difference between the local flavour of Italian, and the traditional local language..
It's worth noting that we call Turin by the correct Piedmontese name, it's the Italians that get it wrong.
It really makes we wonder where I have gone wrong. I mean I make plenty of mistakes, have lapses of judgment, take on things well beyond my competence, why don't I get these kind of gigs?
It's who you know, not what you do.
Actually it's worse than that. I am genuinely not as incompetent as these guys and I doubt you are either.
A Sinn Fein politician wants and looks forward to a united Ireland by peaceful means, acknowledges the troubles but emphasises those days are in the past. It seems uncontroversial and certainly unsurprising.
Either her Gaelic isn't very good, or Google Translate isn't!
Both are probably true. Irish is taught in schools but no-one speaks it, so there is not much of a corpus for Google Translate to learn from. Ireland is no Israel, where Hebrew was successfully resurrected.
Ireland (most of it anyway) is independent but it's language doesn't appear to be doing so well. There's little prospect of Welsh independence but the language seems to be coming back. Scots Gaelic is on it's last legs, apparently.
Why any parent would want to impede their child's education in this way escapes me completely.
Surely the language teaching lobby has always told us that learning one foreign language helps with others. If true (which tbh I doubt) then French, German and Spanish results should be on the up at those schools.
Gaelic bears no resemblance whatsoever to any of those languages. In fact, I would have thought learning French after learning Gaelic would be more confusing, not less.
You want those results to go up? Start teaching Latin in primary schools.
Yes, I mean that.
Let's see the evidence for that. Meanwhile, if you want a generation of French-speaking children, teach French in primary schools (which does happen in some schools) rather than teach Latin and hope some of it rubs off.
I thought teaching language at primary level is now much more common than when I was young, when it was private schools only? Based on evidence that humans are hard-wired to learn language semi-automatically until somewhere around age 10-12.
The evidence that we are hard-wired from birth not just to learn languages by listening, but also to their structure, is fascinating. I remember reading one of Trask's books that contained an anecdote about some deaf and dumb children who had been abandoned together in some assylum - in Venezuela or Colombia as I recall - and apart from someone dropping off food had grown to teenage with next to no external human contact. When they were 'rescued' it was discovered that they had developed among themselves a form of sign language that was unique - but which contained many of the grammatical twiddles (concerning tense etc.) and conventions of languages more generally, including sign.
It isn't just animals that appear hard-wired from birth for certain tasks, with no prior experience or training.
It really makes we wonder where I have gone wrong. I mean I make plenty of mistakes, have lapses of judgment, take on things well beyond my competence, why don't I get these kind of gigs?
Maybe you have to do it on a really grand scale?
Could be. I have an important case today. I will try to really **** it up and see where that gets me.
It really makes we wonder where I have gone wrong. I mean I make plenty of mistakes, have lapses of judgment, take on things well beyond my competence, why don't I get these kind of gigs?
Wrong dinner parties?
Suspect he, rather foolishly, has not been running the local pub for a cabinet minister or two.
A Sinn Fein politician wants and looks forward to a united Ireland by peaceful means, acknowledges the troubles but emphasises those days are in the past. It seems uncontroversial and certainly unsurprising.
Either her Gaelic isn't very good, or Google Translate isn't!
Both are probably true. Irish is taught in schools but no-one speaks it, so there is not much of a corpus for Google Translate to learn from. Ireland is no Israel, where Hebrew was successfully resurrected.
Ireland (most of it anyway) is independent but it's language doesn't appear to be doing so well. There's little prospect of Welsh independence but the language seems to be coming back. Scots Gaelic is on it's last legs, apparently.
Why any parent would want to impede their child's education in this way escapes me completely.
Surely the language teaching lobby has always told us that learning one foreign language helps with others. If true (which tbh I doubt) then French, German and Spanish results should be on the up at those schools.
Gaelic bears no resemblance whatsoever to any of those languages. In fact, I would have thought learning French after learning Gaelic would be more confusing, not less.
You want those results to go up? Start teaching Latin in primary schools.
Yes, I mean that.
At our kids' primary they teach German right from reception, including a load of a German activities and traditions. It has certainly given the kids a real head start in that language, but I think has also contributed to their learning more broadly.
A Sinn Fein politician wants and looks forward to a united Ireland by peaceful means, acknowledges the troubles but emphasises those days are in the past. It seems uncontroversial and certainly unsurprising.
Either her Gaelic isn't very good, or Google Translate isn't!
Both are probably true. Irish is taught in schools but no-one speaks it, so there is not much of a corpus for Google Translate to learn from. Ireland is no Israel, where Hebrew was successfully resurrected.
Ireland (most of it anyway) is independent but it's language doesn't appear to be doing so well. There's little prospect of Welsh independence but the language seems to be coming back. Scots Gaelic is on it's last legs, apparently.
Why any parent would want to impede their child's education in this way escapes me completely.
Surely the language teaching lobby has always told us that learning one foreign language helps with others. If true (which tbh I doubt) then French, German and Spanish results should be on the up at those schools.
There's some research I think which confirms that. I believe teaching of foreign languages in British schools is declining generally, though. Or is it just European languages?
We don't even teach English in our schools. I went to a grammar school in the 1970s and was never taught English grammar. And if you don't know how your own language works, how on earth are you going to be able to learn other ones?
Didn’t, not don’t.
That’s the past tense by the way.
It may surprise you to know that teaching is different now to how it was when you were at school.
I don't think the Senate races are quite so essential as we're making out but that might be wishful thinking on my part. I think we are heavily influenced here by recency bias. Trump was confrontational in extremis and Obama was useless at inter-personal negotiation skills.
Prior to those two, Presidents knew how to work with moderates from opposing parties. In Joe Biden we have a guy who knows how to do business with people like Mitch McConnell.
So recency bias is skewing our perspective.
This may be wishful thinking on my part because although I have money on Jon Ossoff I don't think the Dems are going to win the run-offs. I hope I'm wrong.
And in some ways the best thing for America is to show that it's possible to work together. The best result might be if the Dems lose the runoffs and Biden then demonstrates that he can pull the country together. By winning over some moderate Republicans and moderating extremes in his own party he will simultaneously neutralise the Trump nutjobs ahead of 2024.
You cannot contrast Obama and Biden's dealings with the Senate, given that Biden was negotiating on behalf of Obama. If Obama was unsuccessful, that was because Biden was unsuccessful.
The brutal arithmetic is that if the GOP retains at least one of the Georgia seats, then McConnell, and this is the crucial part, retains control of what appears before the Senate. McConnell, like an increasing number of Republicans in particular, is highly partisan. If McConnell does not fancy Obama's choice of Supreme Court Justice, then his nomination will never be called. Conversely, McConnell has broken convention to have the Senate rubber-stamp Trump's choices even since the election of Biden.
It does not matter how many Republican Senators are charmed by Joe Biden if McConnell will not let them vote.
This is misguided in almost every word. Obama was the problem as everyone who has studied his presidency notes. The 'brutal arithmetic' is your own projection. McConnell and Biden are good friends: McConnell was the only Republican to attend the funeral of Joe's son. They know how to do business together.
It will be a good thing for America to demonstrate that pulling together and finding compromise in the middle can work and can be a really good thing. As Robert pointed out, all the best Presidencies have worked with minorities on the hill.
And Alex is right: The runoffs are the worst possible thing for America right now. Thankfully they will be out of the way before inauguration. Biden will work brilliantly with the Senate even on a 52-48 or 51-49 split which is notionally against him.
Look at what McConnell is doing right now and forget your optimistic fantasies. The only way McConnell will see the merits of bipartisanship is if Republicans lose control of the Senate by losing both Georgia seats.
A Sinn Fein politician wants and looks forward to a united Ireland by peaceful means, acknowledges the troubles but emphasises those days are in the past. It seems uncontroversial and certainly unsurprising.
Either her Gaelic isn't very good, or Google Translate isn't!
Both are probably true. Irish is taught in schools but no-one speaks it, so there is not much of a corpus for Google Translate to learn from. Ireland is no Israel, where Hebrew was successfully resurrected.
Ireland (most of it anyway) is independent but it's language doesn't appear to be doing so well. There's little prospect of Welsh independence but the language seems to be coming back. Scots Gaelic is on it's last legs, apparently.
Hmmm.
Largely because Welsh is the touchstone of Welsh identity, and was the first language of nearly all the ordinary people of Wales until the early twentieth century. Scottish and Irish Gaelic were never important to the people in the same way partly because there were so many distinct dialects (eg Deeside Gaelic, Roscommon Irish) and as a result from a very early stage English was the common language of communication for people from different areas. It was also the basis for some of those dialects, eg Scots and Ulster Scots, for which there is no real equivalent in Wales.
That is very interesting. Given the geography I am surprised there are not big differences between Welsh in the south of the country and the north, or is it just that the south varieties have largely died out?
I am all for the maintenance of as many languages as possible. I think we lose a bit of ourselves every time a language dies. They are direct connections to our past.
Off topic
Both my parents and their parents were first language Welsh speakers. Being born and raised South of Birmingham it was not a skill that a 1960s baby boomer was seen to require. On our school holiday trips to Burry Port the local children also appeared to have little or no Welsh. The resurgence of the Welsh language I believe is largely down to Gwynfor Evans, his hunger strikes demanding Welsh Language TV and ultimately S4C. For some bizarre reason I have a picture in my mind's eye of Gwynfor Evans protesting half way up a tree...whatever?
I think your dialects point is interesting. Gog dialects are certainly different from counties down South that naturally retained Welsh as a living language, namely Carms. and Ceredigion, but I would hazard everywhere else is predominantly S4C Welsh, which is also taught in schools. The Welsh spoken as a second language by schoolchildren outside the areas where Welsh survived naturally, I would contest is a (post 1980) modern construct.
My Valleys father appears, from the certificate I have, to have 'done' Welsh in the 20's at school, although I don't think it was an examined subject, and I have Welsh language hymn books which were apparently (from the names on the fly-leaves) used by my grandparents and my father's younger sister. By the early 40's my family was all in S Essex but my grandmother sometimes used Welsh, and they subscribed to a, partially at least, Welsh language weekly newspaper.
A Sinn Fein politician wants and looks forward to a united Ireland by peaceful means, acknowledges the troubles but emphasises those days are in the past. It seems uncontroversial and certainly unsurprising.
Either her Gaelic isn't very good, or Google Translate isn't!
Both are probably true. Irish is taught in schools but no-one speaks it, so there is not much of a corpus for Google Translate to learn from. Ireland is no Israel, where Hebrew was successfully resurrected.
Ireland (most of it anyway) is independent but it's language doesn't appear to be doing so well. There's little prospect of Welsh independence but the language seems to be coming back. Scots Gaelic is on it's last legs, apparently.
Why any parent would want to impede their child's education in this way escapes me completely.
Surely the language teaching lobby has always told us that learning one foreign language helps with others. If true (which tbh I doubt) then French, German and Spanish results should be on the up at those schools.
There's some research I think which confirms that. I believe teaching of foreign languages in British schools is declining generally, though. Or is it just European languages?
We don't even teach English in our schools. I went to a grammar school in the 1970s and was never taught English grammar. And if you don't know how your own language works, how on earth are you going to be able to learn other ones?
Well they teach you it in those other languages. I learned most of my grammar from Latin, for example.
But English is a catastrophic subject at school. It teaches you almost nothing useful at all. No grammar, not how to write in different styles, not how to impart information clearly and succinctly, nothing. Time is wasted studying tedious poetry of little merit where the only correct answer is how wonderful it is. My son managed to get an A in his Higher last year without ever studying a Shakespeare play. As a subject it has completely lost its way.
It’s got no academic rigour at university level either. There is a Cambridge professor in English with just three books, two of them not peer reviewed. For History, that might be enough for a temporary contract at the University of Gloucestershire.
Does explain Richard Burgon, of course...
If you are going to fire an assault at people for their use of language you'd better be on bloody rock solid ground yourself.
A Sinn Fein politician wants and looks forward to a united Ireland by peaceful means, acknowledges the troubles but emphasises those days are in the past. It seems uncontroversial and certainly unsurprising.
Either her Gaelic isn't very good, or Google Translate isn't!
Both are probably true. Irish is taught in schools but no-one speaks it, so there is not much of a corpus for Google Translate to learn from. Ireland is no Israel, where Hebrew was successfully resurrected.
Ireland (most of it anyway) is independent but it's language doesn't appear to be doing so well. There's little prospect of Welsh independence but the language seems to be coming back. Scots Gaelic is on it's last legs, apparently.
Why any parent would want to impede their child's education in this way escapes me completely.
Surely the language teaching lobby has always told us that learning one foreign language helps with others. If true (which tbh I doubt) then French, German and Spanish results should be on the up at those schools.
There's some research I think which confirms that. I believe teaching of foreign languages in British schools is declining generally, though. Or is it just European languages?
We don't even teach English in our schools. I went to a grammar school in the 1970s and was never taught English grammar. And if you don't know how your own language works, how on earth are you going to be able to learn other ones?
Were there not complaints when Michael Gove tried to fix that as education secretary?
Insert 50 Guardian articles claiming such a move is a) unnecessary and b) racist in the 21st century.
More racist not to teach English, I'd have thought. It is just another reflection of Gove's failure as Education Secretary. Perhaps if he'd not set out by treating even his allies as mortal enemies, or "the blob", aided and abetted by Dominic Cummings.
It really makes we wonder where I have gone wrong. I mean I make plenty of mistakes, have lapses of judgment, take on things well beyond my competence, why don't I get these kind of gigs?
...but are you married to a Conservative MP? Conundrum solved!
Can't wait to be back in school on 4th Jan, or get sued by Gavin Williamson.
I won’t be going back until we are out of tier 4: I’ve had an email telling me to work from home, sent by the Department of Health.
Would have been more useful if they’d written it on blocks of stone, so when Nick Gibb or some other random lowlife from the DfE threatened you with enforcement action you could literally beat it into their thick skulls.
But emails are easier to forward to my boss to explaining why they won’t be seeing me for a while...
A Sinn Fein politician wants and looks forward to a united Ireland by peaceful means, acknowledges the troubles but emphasises those days are in the past. It seems uncontroversial and certainly unsurprising.
Either her Gaelic isn't very good, or Google Translate isn't!
Both are probably true. Irish is taught in schools but no-one speaks it, so there is not much of a corpus for Google Translate to learn from. Ireland is no Israel, where Hebrew was successfully resurrected.
Ireland (most of it anyway) is independent but it's language doesn't appear to be doing so well. There's little prospect of Welsh independence but the language seems to be coming back. Scots Gaelic is on it's last legs, apparently.
Hmmm.
Largely because Welsh is the touchstone of Welsh identity, and was the first language of nearly all the ordinary people of Wales until the early twentieth century. Scottish and Irish Gaelic were never important to the people in the same way partly because there were so many distinct dialects (eg Deeside Gaelic, Roscommon Irish) and as a result from a very early stage English was the common language of communication for people from different areas. It was also the basis for some of those dialects, eg Scots and Ulster Scots, for which there is no real equivalent in Wales.
That is very interesting. Given the geography I am surprised there are not big differences between Welsh in the south of the country and the north, or is it just that the south varieties have largely died out?
I am all for the maintenance of as many languages as possible. I think we lose a bit of ourselves every time a language dies. They are direct connections to our past.
Off topic
Both my parents and their parents were first language Welsh speakers. Being born and raised South of Birmingham it was not a skill that a 1960s baby boomer was seen to require. On our school holiday trips to Burry Port the local children also appeared to have little or no Welsh. The resurgence of the Welsh language I believe is largely down to Gwynfor Evans, his hunger strikes demanding Welsh Language TV and ultimately S4C. For some bizarre reason I have a picture in my mind's eye of Gwynfor Evans protesting half way up a tree...whatever?
I think your dialects point is interesting. Gog dialects are certainly different from counties down South that naturally retained Welsh as a living language, namely Carms. and Ceredigion, but I would hazard everywhere else is predominantly S4C Welsh, which is also taught in schools. The Welsh spoken as a second language by schoolchildren outside the areas where Welsh survived naturally, I would contest is a (post 1980) modern construct.
My Valleys father appears, from the certificate I have, to have 'done' Welsh in the 20's at school, although I don't think it was an examined subject, and I have Welsh language hymn books which were apparently (from the names on the fly-leaves) used by my grandparents and my father's younger sister. By the early 40's my family was all in S Essex but my grandmother sometimes used Welsh, and they subscribed to a, partially at least, Welsh language weekly newspaper.
Of course the Chapels were the last bastions of the Welsh language. My paternal grandparents owned two records, a Mary Hopkins single of "Those were the days" and a Christmas Evans (real name) sermon LP..
A Sinn Fein politician wants and looks forward to a united Ireland by peaceful means, acknowledges the troubles but emphasises those days are in the past. It seems uncontroversial and certainly unsurprising.
Either her Gaelic isn't very good, or Google Translate isn't!
Both are probably true. Irish is taught in schools but no-one speaks it, so there is not much of a corpus for Google Translate to learn from. Ireland is no Israel, where Hebrew was successfully resurrected.
Ireland (most of it anyway) is independent but it's language doesn't appear to be doing so well. There's little prospect of Welsh independence but the language seems to be coming back. Scots Gaelic is on it's last legs, apparently.
Why any parent would want to impede their child's education in this way escapes me completely.
Surely the language teaching lobby has always told us that learning one foreign language helps with others. If true (which tbh I doubt) then French, German and Spanish results should be on the up at those schools.
Gaelic bears no resemblance whatsoever to any of those languages. In fact, I would have thought learning French after learning Gaelic would be more confusing, not less.
You want those results to go up? Start teaching Latin in primary schools.
Yes, I mean that.
At our kids' primary they teach German right from reception, including a load of a German activities and traditions. It has certainly given the kids a real head start in that language, but I think has also contributed to their learning more broadly.
Jobs for German teachers! It used to be a job for life but at most schools, Spanish has replaced German as the second foreign language.
A Sinn Fein politician wants and looks forward to a united Ireland by peaceful means, acknowledges the troubles but emphasises those days are in the past. It seems uncontroversial and certainly unsurprising.
Either her Gaelic isn't very good, or Google Translate isn't!
Both are probably true. Irish is taught in schools but no-one speaks it, so there is not much of a corpus for Google Translate to learn from. Ireland is no Israel, where Hebrew was successfully resurrected.
Ireland (most of it anyway) is independent but it's language doesn't appear to be doing so well. There's little prospect of Welsh independence but the language seems to be coming back. Scots Gaelic is on it's last legs, apparently.
Why any parent would want to impede their child's education in this way escapes me completely.
Surely the language teaching lobby has always told us that learning one foreign language helps with others. If true (which tbh I doubt) then French, German and Spanish results should be on the up at those schools.
There's some research I think which confirms that. I believe teaching of foreign languages in British schools is declining generally, though. Or is it just European languages?
We don't even teach English in our schools. I went to a grammar school in the 1970s and was never taught English grammar. And if you don't know how your own language works, how on earth are you going to be able to learn other ones?
Didn’t, not don’t.
That’s the past tense by the way.
It may surprise you to know that teaching is different now to how it was when you were at school.
I attended a grammar school in the 70s as well, and there was very little if any English grammar taught in English classes. My English grammar was imparted to me by my Latin teacher. We only studied English grammar during the first term of the course. This helped me a lot in my study of Latin, and French and German later at school. Sadly my memory of those 2 languages is now very limited as I went on to do the sciences at A level and University.
A Sinn Fein politician wants and looks forward to a united Ireland by peaceful means, acknowledges the troubles but emphasises those days are in the past. It seems uncontroversial and certainly unsurprising.
Either her Gaelic isn't very good, or Google Translate isn't!
Both are probably true. Irish is taught in schools but no-one speaks it, so there is not much of a corpus for Google Translate to learn from. Ireland is no Israel, where Hebrew was successfully resurrected.
Ireland (most of it anyway) is independent but it's language doesn't appear to be doing so well. There's little prospect of Welsh independence but the language seems to be coming back. Scots Gaelic is on it's last legs, apparently.
Why any parent would want to impede their child's education in this way escapes me completely.
Surely the language teaching lobby has always told us that learning one foreign language helps with others. If true (which tbh I doubt) then French, German and Spanish results should be on the up at those schools.
There's some research I think which confirms that. I believe teaching of foreign languages in British schools is declining generally, though. Or is it just European languages?
We don't even teach English in our schools. I went to a grammar school in the 1970s and was never taught English grammar. And if you don't know how your own language works, how on earth are you going to be able to learn other ones?
Same for me the concept of dealing verbs came as a shock and has limited my ability to learn other languages.
I did Latin at my Grammar school in the early 70s. Hugely useful throughout my life and helped me greatly with Spanish when I retired to Spain.
A Sinn Fein politician wants and looks forward to a united Ireland by peaceful means, acknowledges the troubles but emphasises those days are in the past. It seems uncontroversial and certainly unsurprising.
Either her Gaelic isn't very good, or Google Translate isn't!
Both are probably true. Irish is taught in schools but no-one speaks it, so there is not much of a corpus for Google Translate to learn from. Ireland is no Israel, where Hebrew was successfully resurrected.
Ireland (most of it anyway) is independent but it's language doesn't appear to be doing so well. There's little prospect of Welsh independence but the language seems to be coming back. Scots Gaelic is on it's last legs, apparently.
Why any parent would want to impede their child's education in this way escapes me completely.
Surely the language teaching lobby has always told us that learning one foreign language helps with others. If true (which tbh I doubt) then French, German and Spanish results should be on the up at those schools.
There's some research I think which confirms that. I believe teaching of foreign languages in British schools is declining generally, though. Or is it just European languages?
We don't even teach English in our schools. I went to a grammar school in the 1970s and was never taught English grammar. And if you don't know how your own language works, how on earth are you going to be able to learn other ones?
Well they teach you it in those other languages. I learned most of my grammar from Latin, for example.
But English is a catastrophic subject at school. It teaches you almost nothing useful at all. No grammar, not how to write in different styles, not how to impart information clearly and succinctly, nothing. Time is wasted studying tedious poetry of little merit where the only correct answer is how wonderful it is. My son managed to get an A in his Higher last year without ever studying a Shakespeare play. As a subject it has completely lost its way.
It’s got no academic rigour at university level either. There is a Cambridge professor in English with just three books, two of them not peer reviewed. For History, that might be enough for a temporary contract at the University of Gloucestershire.
Does explain Richard Burgon, of course...
If you are going to fire an assault at people for their use of language you'd better be on bloody rock solid ground yourself.
"It's" is not a contraction of "it has" ...
G'day to y'all.
A stack of grammar websites and dictionaries say you are wrong.
I checked because his formulation is common in spoken English, and sounds naturally right.
Grammar pedants can be a pain in the ass. Tbh I'm pretty chilled about some rules which once should have been obeyed in the kind of latin driven crap in which Michael Gove believes. And having studied latin for years at school I'm very grateful it is now given the boot. Language should be alive and literature should thrill. That's why I often take to task fellow authors who diss J.K.Rowling (usually out of pure jealousy).
A bestseller friend of mine, who was also a very good writer, the words 'bestseller' and 'good writer' often not being synonymous, once pointed out to me that we should always remember that English serves us, not the other way around.
A Sinn Fein politician wants and looks forward to a united Ireland by peaceful means, acknowledges the troubles but emphasises those days are in the past. It seems uncontroversial and certainly unsurprising.
Either her Gaelic isn't very good, or Google Translate isn't!
Both are probably true. Irish is taught in schools but no-one speaks it, so there is not much of a corpus for Google Translate to learn from. Ireland is no Israel, where Hebrew was successfully resurrected.
Ireland (most of it anyway) is independent but it's language doesn't appear to be doing so well. There's little prospect of Welsh independence but the language seems to be coming back. Scots Gaelic is on it's last legs, apparently.
Why any parent would want to impede their child's education in this way escapes me completely.
Surely the language teaching lobby has always told us that learning one foreign language helps with others. If true (which tbh I doubt) then French, German and Spanish results should be on the up at those schools.
Gaelic bears no resemblance whatsoever to any of those languages. In fact, I would have thought learning French after learning Gaelic would be more confusing, not less.
You want those results to go up? Start teaching Latin in primary schools.
Yes, I mean that.
At our kids' primary they teach German right from reception, including a load of a German activities and traditions. It has certainly given the kids a real head start in that language, but I think has also contributed to their learning more broadly.
Jobs for German teachers! It used to be a job for life but at most schools, Spanish has replaced German as the second foreign language.
They are primary school teachers who speak German rather than secondary school German teachers though. I suspect that we get better teachers too as a result.
A Sinn Fein politician wants and looks forward to a united Ireland by peaceful means, acknowledges the troubles but emphasises those days are in the past. It seems uncontroversial and certainly unsurprising.
Either her Gaelic isn't very good, or Google Translate isn't!
Both are probably true. Irish is taught in schools but no-one speaks it, so there is not much of a corpus for Google Translate to learn from. Ireland is no Israel, where Hebrew was successfully resurrected.
Ireland (most of it anyway) is independent but it's language doesn't appear to be doing so well. There's little prospect of Welsh independence but the language seems to be coming back. Scots Gaelic is on it's last legs, apparently.
Why any parent would want to impede their child's education in this way escapes me completely.
Surely the language teaching lobby has always told us that learning one foreign language helps with others. If true (which tbh I doubt) then French, German and Spanish results should be on the up at those schools.
There's some research I think which confirms that. I believe teaching of foreign languages in British schools is declining generally, though. Or is it just European languages?
We don't even teach English in our schools. I went to a grammar school in the 1970s and was never taught English grammar. And if you don't know how your own language works, how on earth are you going to be able to learn other ones?
Didn’t, not don’t.
That’s the past tense by the way.
It may surprise you to know that teaching is different now to how it was when you were at school.
Mr Johnson, though, was said to have been stubborn. “It was only when he was faced with a scenario that looked like armageddon that he actually changed his position,” a source said. “He’s been told about this for weeks but he’s been in denial about this."
No 10 had been caught off guard by the ban on freight, which the government had expected to apply only to passengers.
Voters wanted to eject Trump but don't trust the Democrats with power of all the wings of federal Government.
And for very good reason, in my view.
This is mis-interpreting the views of voters.
The two biggest groups of voters by far are want Trump with all the wings of federal govt, and want Biden with all the wings of federal govt. The outcome is a quirk of the system, and could have been very different with just a 1% swing either way, not something that gives a clear interpretation of what "the voters" wanted.
A Sinn Fein politician wants and looks forward to a united Ireland by peaceful means, acknowledges the troubles but emphasises those days are in the past. It seems uncontroversial and certainly unsurprising.
Either her Gaelic isn't very good, or Google Translate isn't!
Both are probably true. Irish is taught in schools but no-one speaks it, so there is not much of a corpus for Google Translate to learn from. Ireland is no Israel, where Hebrew was successfully resurrected.
Ireland (most of it anyway) is independent but it's language doesn't appear to be doing so well. There's little prospect of Welsh independence but the language seems to be coming back. Scots Gaelic is on it's last legs, apparently.
Why any parent would want to impede their child's education in this way escapes me completely.
Surely the language teaching lobby has always told us that learning one foreign language helps with others. If true (which tbh I doubt) then French, German and Spanish results should be on the up at those schools.
There's some research I think which confirms that. I believe teaching of foreign languages in British schools is declining generally, though. Or is it just European languages?
We don't even teach English in our schools. I went to a grammar school in the 1970s and was never taught English grammar. And if you don't know how your own language works, how on earth are you going to be able to learn other ones?
Well they teach you it in those other languages. I learned most of my grammar from Latin, for example.
But English is a catastrophic subject at school. It teaches you almost nothing useful at all. No grammar, not how to write in different styles, not how to impart information clearly and succinctly, nothing. Time is wasted studying tedious poetry of little merit where the only correct answer is how wonderful it is. My son managed to get an A in his Higher last year without ever studying a Shakespeare play. As a subject it has completely lost its way.
It’s got no academic rigour at university level either. There is a Cambridge professor in English with just three books, two of them not peer reviewed. For History, that might be enough for a temporary contract at the University of Gloucestershire.
Does explain Richard Burgon, of course...
If you are going to fire an assault at people for their use of language you'd better be on bloody rock solid ground yourself.
"It's" is not a contraction of "it has" ...
G'day to y'all.
That genuinely is an autocorrect error. For some reason every time it sees ‘it’ and ‘s’ near each other it corrects them to ‘it’s’ regardless of what I’m trying to type.
Similarly it is almost impossible to type ‘Liberal Democrats’ as it will always correct it to ‘Liberal Democrat’s.’
Its weirdest trick though is every time I type a capital letter in the middle of a sentence for a proper noun, it will change to lower case and put ‘a’ in front of it.
I don’t think Apple’s engineers speak a single word of English, even that weird barely comprehensible bastardised dialect they use Yankeeside.
I think there are 2 keys to good language learning. One is a good knowledge of grammar and the second is reading - especially the classics and at a level a little above where you start from. The latter will expand your vocabulary and give you an enduring love for both language and literature.
Grammar pedants can be a pain in the ass. Tbh I'm pretty chilled about some rules which once should have been obeyed in the kind of latin driven crap in which Michael Gove believes. And having studied latin for years at school I'm very grateful it is now given the boot. Language should be alive and literature should thrill. That's why I often take to task fellow authors who diss J.K.Rowling (usually out of pure jealousy).
A bestseller friend of mine, who was also a very good writer, the words 'bestseller' and 'good writer' often not being synonymous, once pointed out to me that we should always remember that English serves us, not the other way around.
Shakespeare invented some 300 words.
If you actually identified what you yourself author and bestsell, we'd all have a much clearer idea of where you were coming from. Might help your sales figures too; I have bought books by other authors on here.
Teaching languages in school has been a mess for an awfully long time.
I agree that English is pretty strange - it is no accident that the most impressive modern writers do not have an English degree.
In the 70's I didn't take French or Spanish to A Level because they seemed to consist of reading texts from simple writers rather than any lingusitic analysis of the languages or improved fluency.
As life has happened I have gained some knowledge of English as she is taught in French Universities. At least they don't spend too much time on Shakespeare but they have their own pronunciation - they are or were actually taught to speak English like the Frogs in Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
Now don't get me wrong Shakespeare was indeed great, Dickens less so, Emily Bronte more so. BUT, because of a lifetime researching early modern local history I read a lot of things written in the 15th to 18th centuries. The fact is the style used by Shakespeare was virtually obsolete by the end of the 16th century. He was writing in a deliberately archaic style. The idea you can progress English fluency by reading the artificial writing of the 16th c imitating fairly badly the late 15th c is not a good one.
And don't get me started on Shakespear giving his wife his second best bed in his will - anyone who disparages that knows nothing about 16th and 17th c wills - I have read and analysed several thousand. The general form was that 2/3s of the estate and the best of things was given to the heir - Shakespeare's male heir had just died - the other third and the second best of everything was given to the widow, the Widow's Third.
We decline verbs of course. You just have to teach people that's what they're doing, and that foreigners (except for Scandinavians) do more of it. I think people will always experience their mother tongue differently to learned languages.
Oh no we don´t. If we did anything, we would conjugate verbs. But we don´t even do that, except in the present tense in the third person singular. In practice, in English, there is no grammar to teach. This is why other people speak it so well.
A friend of mine is away in Barbados. She appears to be having a lovely time! I’m rather jealous!
I went to Barbados last year and didn't really enjoy it. This has convinced me that I'm an incurable grouch, because if I can't have a good time at a tropical resort then it's not the setting but the subject of the experiment which is causing the problem.
Actually, I rarely enjoy holidays. They are expensive, require planning, and while I get to see new places I lose the convenience of home. I can't work 52 weeks a year for my whole life, so I ask you:
What are good holidays for people who don't really like holidaying?
A week's self catering in rural England or Scotland/Wales etc.
You can take all the conveniences of home with you, and you have your own place in a familiar environment, but you are also somewhere different.
I hope this comes out right, but I am concerned about Philip Thompson. He seems to spend an inordinate amount of time on Political betting. I dip in and out these days, but he seems to be on the site literally every time I come on, except first thing in the morning. I am pretty sure he is not some kind of group effort but a genuine human, so I can't help wondering whether spending so much time on here is good for him. We frequently joust, so this may seem like point scoring, but it genuinely isn't. I hope he's OK.
I once asked the same question of you - about five years ago.
Comments
But English is a catastrophic subject at school. It teaches you almost nothing useful at all. No grammar, not how to write in different styles, not how to impart information clearly and succinctly, nothing. Time is wasted studying tedious poetry of little merit where the only correct answer is how wonderful it is. My son managed to get an A in his Higher last year without ever studying a Shakespeare play. As a subject it has completely lost its way.
You want those results to go up? Start teaching Latin in primary schools.
Yes, I mean that.
Mr. L, quite agree. I learnt far more about English in both French and German than I did in English.
English and maths were well taught in Georgia, the rest of the subjects much less so.
The brutal arithmetic is that if the GOP retains at least one of the Georgia seats, then McConnell, and this is the crucial part, retains control of what appears before the Senate. McConnell, like an increasing number of Republicans in particular, is highly partisan. If McConnell does not fancy Obama's choice of Supreme Court Justice, then his nomination will never be called. Conversely, McConnell has broken convention to have the Senate rubber-stamp Trump's choices even since the election of Biden.
It does not matter how many Republican Senators are charmed by Joe Biden if McConnell will not let them vote.
Both my parents and their parents were first language Welsh speakers. Being born and raised South of Birmingham it was not a skill that a 1960s baby boomer was seen to require. On our school holiday trips to Burry Port the local children also appeared to have little or no Welsh. The resurgence of the Welsh language I believe is largely down to Gwynfor Evans, his hunger strikes demanding Welsh Language TV and ultimately S4C. For some bizarre reason I have a picture in my mind's eye of Gwynfor Evans protesting half way up a tree...whatever?
I think your dialects point is interesting. Gog dialects are certainly different from counties down South that naturally retained Welsh as a living language, namely Carms. and Ceredigion, but I would hazard everywhere else is predominantly S4C Welsh, which is also taught in schools. The Welsh spoken as a second language by schoolchildren outside the areas where Welsh survived naturally, I would contest is a (post 1980) modern construct.
I have Russian O Level and it has stood me in great stead. Not only for countries that used to be in the Soviet Union, but it gives you a head start for other Slavic languages as well, which are closer to each other than say the Romance and Germanic languages are.
Besides which, it is a fascinating and subtle language.
It will be a good thing for America to demonstrate that pulling together and finding compromise in the middle can work and can be a really good thing. As Robert pointed out, all the best Presidencies have worked with minorities on the hill.
And Alex is right: The runoffs are the worst possible thing for America right now. Thankfully they will be out of the way before inauguration. Biden will work brilliantly with the Senate even on a 52-48 or 51-49 split which is notionally against him.
Does explain Richard Burgon, of course...
Regardless of the results of the election, real power in the Senate will lie with Romney, Lee, Murkowski, Paul, Collins, Manchin and Sinema (plus possibly some of the new intake) who are willing to vote against their parties. The Warren Sanders wing likely have enough for blocking but not passing bills.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-55408444
When we have to repay the credit card bill its going to be painful.
And as I pointed out, even McConnell and Biden can do business together. They're friends.
It's worth noting that we call Turin by the correct Piedmontese name, it's the Italians that get it wrong.
Actually it's worse than that. I am genuinely not as incompetent as these guys and I doubt you are either.
Have a good day everyone.
The evidence that we are hard-wired from birth not just to learn languages by listening, but also to their structure, is fascinating. I remember reading one of Trask's books that contained an anecdote about some deaf and dumb children who had been abandoned together in some assylum - in Venezuela or Colombia as I recall - and apart from someone dropping off food had grown to teenage with next to no external human contact. When they were 'rescued' it was discovered that they had developed among themselves a form of sign language that was unique - but which contained many of the grammatical twiddles (concerning tense etc.) and conventions of languages more generally, including sign.
It isn't just animals that appear hard-wired from birth for certain tasks, with no prior experience or training.
https://twitter.com/NigelpMorris/status/1341295914061848581
That’s the past tense by the way.
It may surprise you to know that teaching is different now to how it was when you were at school.
By the early 40's my family was all in S Essex but my grandmother sometimes used Welsh, and they subscribed to a, partially at least, Welsh language weekly newspaper.
"It's" is not a contraction of "it has" ...
G'day to y'all.
Currently trying to re-familiarise myself with it.
"McConnell is a reasonable human being who will work with Biden" is the worst take I have ever seen on this site.
Quite astonishing.
https://twitter.com/Steven_Swinford/status/1340230120632692737
https://twitter.com/thetimes/status/1341300826598477825
I checked because his formulation is common in spoken English, and sounds naturally right.
A bestseller friend of mine, who was also a very good writer, the words 'bestseller' and 'good writer' often not being synonymous, once pointed out to me that we should always remember that English serves us, not the other way around.
Shakespeare invented some 300 words.
Voters wanted to eject Trump but don't trust the Democrats with power of all the wings of federal Government.
And for very good reason, in my view.
Shouldn’t that be ‘different from?’
No 10 had been caught off guard by the ban on freight, which the government had expected to apply only to passengers.
The two biggest groups of voters by far are want Trump with all the wings of federal govt, and want Biden with all the wings of federal govt. The outcome is a quirk of the system, and could have been very different with just a 1% swing either way, not something that gives a clear interpretation of what "the voters" wanted.
Similarly it is almost impossible to type ‘Liberal Democrats’ as it will always correct it to ‘Liberal Democrat’s.’
Its weirdest trick though is every time I type a capital letter in the middle of a sentence for a proper noun, it will change to lower case and put ‘a’ in front of it.
I don’t think Apple’s engineers speak a single word of English, even that weird barely comprehensible bastardised dialect they use Yankeeside.
You need 52/48 for the settled will of the people.
I agree that English is pretty strange - it is no accident that the most impressive modern writers do not have an English degree.
In the 70's I didn't take French or Spanish to A Level because they seemed to consist of reading texts from simple writers rather than any lingusitic analysis of the languages or improved fluency.
As life has happened I have gained some knowledge of English as she is taught in French Universities. At least they don't spend too much time on Shakespeare but they have their own pronunciation - they are or were actually taught to speak English like the Frogs in Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
Now don't get me wrong Shakespeare was indeed great, Dickens less so, Emily Bronte more so. BUT, because of a lifetime researching early modern local history I read a lot of things written in the 15th to 18th centuries. The fact is the style used by Shakespeare was virtually obsolete by the end of the 16th century. He was writing in a deliberately archaic style. The idea you can progress English fluency by reading the artificial writing of the 16th c imitating fairly badly the late 15th c is not a good one.
And don't get me started on Shakespear giving his wife his second best bed in his will - anyone who disparages that knows nothing about 16th and 17th c wills - I have read and analysed several thousand. The general form was that 2/3s of the estate and the best of things was given to the heir - Shakespeare's male heir had just died - the other third and the second best of everything was given to the widow, the Widow's Third.
You can take all the conveniences of home with you, and you have your own place in a familiar environment, but you are also somewhere different.
Change is as good as a break.