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Showing posts from February, 2020

Language lessons from my fridge

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Remember the fad for fridge poetry ? Quite a while ago now. I think you can still get packs of words here and there but you have to hunt for them these days. Well, I picked up 3 or 4 packs around ten years ago in Finland , not so much to create masterpieces in verse, as to help with learning the language . At first I got a board suitable for moving the words around on, but I quickly found trying to make sentences was a non starter . Although I had a lot of words, they were designed for use in verse which was too restrictive; and the packs I had were limited in theme - I think one was for children, another for romance, and so on. Furthermore, Finnish as a language doesn't easily lend itself to this activity. It's not just the 17 cases , affecting the word endings, but consonant gradation , which can massively change the internal spelling of words. Here's my fridge today (it may help to click on the image, if it's unclear) . As you can see, the front is entirely devo

Soldier of Sidon, by Gene Wolfe

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Soldier of Sidon is the third and last volume in Gene Wolfe's Soldier of the Mist series. It was published in 2006, some time after the previous two, which date from the early-mid Eighties. I confess I read Soldier of the Mist so long ago that I've forgotten almost everything about it; but perhaps that's a nice reader's tribute to the series, which tells the tale of a soldier of the ancient world who forgets everything from the day before, and so relies on what his supposed friends tell him and also on what he writes in these scrolls, which in the shape of 'translations' forms the substance of these books. Many other writers have written stories set in the ancient world; and Wolfe is certainly not the first to use the device of a 'translated' ancient text (in Soldier of Sidon   a papyrus scroll found in a sealed jar under the waters of Lake Nasser). But there's something distinct about Wolfe's writing which produces a sense of originali