Saturday 18 June 2011

Open Days

OK. Wow. I made it. Sheffield @ 10am - Manchester @2pm without being late or missing anything. We got lost everytime we turned a corner but...you know...we survived...

Overall, I was much more impressed with Sheffield than Manchester. The lady who gave us the talk at Manchester just went on about how amazing the university as a whole is and barely spoke about the courses at all, in fact, she only mentioned 'Single Honours', 'Dual Honours', another that I can't remember and one that doesn't exist at the moment. Hmm. Great. Good job I didn't want to go there anyway really.

Sheffield was a lot more impressive as I learnt that I could study three different languages, yay :) I'm thinking Spanish and Portuguese for sure and pondering about the third if I decided to apply for Sheffield. I have Leeds next Saturday, York on the 6th (I think) and I need another really, but none of the registration forms worked when I tried booking. Grrrr.

And now...

GRAMMAR ALERT!

This evening I've been reading 'The English Language' by David Crystal for English Language. Yes, it's dull. No, it probably won't be of any use in class. Yes, I have Jonathan for making our class read language books when none of the other classes have been forced to. Anyway, there were three bits that caught my attention, I considered photocopying them all but I couldn't be bothered so you're all going to get a quick grammar lesson 'cause I wanna document the bits from the book somewhere to later add to my languages file (because I'm strange like that).

From, the book, I gathered a bit about pidgin and creole languages. Apparently, a creole is evolved from a pidgin. Yeah, I didn't understand to begin with either. Google it or something... There was a little grammatical explanation of how Tok Pisin (pidgin language spoken in Papua New Guinea) use pronouns...
Tok Pisin                English Origin               Modern Meaning
mi                          me                               I, me
yu                          you                               you 
em                         him, 'em (them)            he, she, it, him, her
yumi                       you + me                      we, us (inclusive)
mipela                    me + fellow                  we, us (exclusive)
yupela                    you (plural)                    you
ol                           all                                they, them
mitupela                                                    the two of us (excluding you)
mitripela                                                   the three of us (excluding you)
yumitripela                                                the three of us (including you)
yutupela                                                    the two of you


See the similarities to English? I was surprised too.


And if you're interested in conjugating verbs in Latin, the book also featured this...
amo - I love
amas - you love
amat - he/she loves
amamus - we love
amatis - you love
amant - they love


There was also a section on English words with foreign origins that most people are probably unaware of (except things like sauna being Finnish, quite a lot of people I know seem to know that). However, I'll avoid posting all of those for you ;P
 
Besos  
Rachel

1 comment:

  1. Yay for Latin!

    That really is all I have to say. :P

    ReplyDelete