¤ milky moon ¤

I know this is off-topic, but since someone else brought it up here...

I'm fascinated with the color mixing swatch books that some art teachers have their students prepare. They range from small and fairly simple, to huge and complex, depending on the number of colors in your palette and the number of steps you take in your shades, tints, and mixes. The book I made in school years ago is packed away somewhere, but my color palette (for when I eventually start painting again) has changed considerably since then. So, the new book I want to make will be several inches thick, painted on canvas pages roughly 6 by 18 inches. If you don't know exactly what such a book might look like, I found of some pages when I googled "color mixing swatch book".

That poem, as read by me!

I'm so envious of your being able to learn languages such as Swedish at your school! My school is an 'International Language College', but only offers French and German to most pupils.

I didn't learn Swedish at my school! I started learning Swedish when I was 11, I had Rosetta Stone. When I was 13, my dad found a summer camp that offered language immersion, so I went there for 2 weeks. When I was 14, we spent a summer living in Sweden, and I went back for another 2 weeks at camp. For the last two years, I went to camp for one month. They have a program where one can earn a high school language credit in four weeks, so I did that twice.
I plan on going to university in Sweden, too.

That's fascinating; there is nowhere near the same level of opportunities of that sort near me. (Or at least, none that are also affordable to me.) I suppose I have had similar experiences with visiting Francophone countries though.

And here's my contribution to the theme of the thread:
"And I don't wanna make a scene - I don't wanna think about the 3rd world hunger or whatever - Cos thinking always comes across - a little..."
Schoolin' by Everything Everything

I want to visit Ancient Rome. "Lentius loquere, si vis. Non intellego. Ne, Britannicus sum. Ne, liber sum! Liber! Consultus meus colloqui posco!"

I want to get as many languages as possible. I want to learn Icelandic, Finnish, Polish, Russian, and Japanese.

Good luck with Icelandic ... I actually bought the Linguaphone many years ago, and it's far from easy and will take quite a bit of study, I am sure (much more than I had the patience for). But if you master it, it's THE most wonderful language to listen to, or even to see written down.

I also have a lovely Faroese dictionary ...

My Norwegian friend has a Faroese friend called Morten whose name is pronounced Mushtan.

As well as a number of accented vowels and a digraph (æ), Icelandic has two beautiful additional consonants which have long since died out in English:
and (upper case), or and (lower case).
They are called thorn and eth respectively, and they make a hard and a soft 'th' soubd.

Faroese also has the eth, but for some reason it is silent.

Middle Scots had thorn and eth, too, and also yogh and a ligature of long and short s similar to .

Is the yogh the antecedant of the 'false z" that appears in words and names such as "Menzies", "Dalziel", and "capercailzie"? I recall years ago that we were taught that it should really be pronounced "y", and a former player at my club preferred us to type his name as "Dal3iel".

It is! Yogh was pronounced /ɲ/, which is sort of like "ny" but only one sound. It changed to an "ng" sound and a "ny" sound and was used interchangeably with z and y by printers (because they look/sound similar, respectively), hence Menzies (pronounced "Mingis"). It's the same as what happened with thorn and y: thorn and y were used interchangeably due to their similarity, hence "ye olde" instead of "þe olde".

I don't know why, but I am fascinated by these remnants of old forms and languages that just about cling on in dusty corners of our language!

A bit of googling has turned up the following advertsiing poem for the (originally Scottish) chain of newsagents, John Menzies, which emphasises how the company likes its name to be pronounced:

A lively young damsel named Menzies
Inquired: "Do you know what this thenzies?"
Her aunt, with a gasp,
Replied: "It's a wasp,
And you're holding the end where the stenzies."

I love swedish because we have ɧ. It's such a cool sound. I don't really know how to describe it, though. And I love they way that 'öj' sounds. And the swedish 'y'. I am debating sbetween studing evolutionary linguistics or sociolinguistics. They are both so fucking fascinating!

I was under the impression that thorn and eth were essentially the same sounds as we still have in English with "the" and "thesis". How are they different?
Hmm so is this a common trait among Milky Moon users? I am also interested in linguistics but unfortunately have made decisions that meant I couldn't really pursue it at degree level. I'm happy to be an amateur. Here's a great blog I read on language and linguistics:

Thorn is like 'pith' and eth is like 'the'.