Progress report
Now that the convention is over, I can get on with the other things that have been demanding my attention (like work, but that’s too boring to mention here). In particular, I’ve been focussing on getting the knight and lady embroidery finished for MrPloppy‘s brother’s wedding. I’ve only got a few weeks until MrPloppy leaves for the UK, so I’ve been spending as much time as possible working on it.
Progress pictures:
[album 128913 knight9.JPG thumblink] [album 128913 knight10.JPG thumblink] [album 128913 knight11.JPG thumblink] [album 128913 knight12.JPG thumblink]
The bottom section is half-finished now, and then I’ve only got the top section to do (which I’ve left until last because I need to rearrange the pattern slightly to fit their names in). So hopefully I’ll get it finished in time…
The other thing I should be concentrating on is studying for my Historical Linguistics test in a week’s time. The actual techniques of historical linguistics that we’ve learnt aren’t so much of a problem – I’ve pretty much got the hang of them – but I’ve discovered that I’ve forgotten most of the IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet – a system of symbols used for writing words phonetically, so that every symbol stands for only one sound (unlike say English, where the same letter can stand for several different sounds – e.g. think of the sound of “c” in “city” and “cat”, or “g” in “goat” or “enough”) – it’s very useful for comparing words from different languages). I’ve learnt it before, of course, for other linguistics courses, but the problem with studying part-time is that I tend to have a couple of years’ gap between learning things in one course, and having to reuse them in another course, while for my classmates the preceding course was only last year. So it’s actually about 3 years since I last had to seriously use the IPA, and I’ve found to my dismay that I’ve forgotten huge chunks of it. So guess what I’ll be spending the rest of my day doing? Yep, sitting in the sun with my textbook, going over and over the IPA chart and trying to remember that /j/ is a voiced palatal approximant (what normal people would call the “y” in “yellow”) and /x/ is a voiceless velar fricative (the “ch” in the Scottish pronunciation of “loch”)…
Currently reading (apart from my textbook): The Case of the Cottingley Fairies by Joe Cooper