Vocabulary

I was amused this morning as I was sat by the river. Two mothers went past with their young children in pushchairs; these were cunning pushchairs with a front and a back seat. As they approached, one mother said `look, the black swan; who can see the black swan?' Then as they got closer to the black swan, she said 'It's an antipodean swan; it comes from Australia or New Zealand'. I smiled and thought `yes, that's the way to do, use long words and they'll learn them and not be scared'. It's like Beatrice Potter and Soporofic!

Language confusion

Discussion of pronouncing LJ names on atreic's journal reminded me of this odd snippet from my weekly phonecall home!

Dad told me that he'd been writing something and had started by saying `I am married' but when he'd finished he looked back having finished it said `I am period'. So he said to me `take the ee(/i:/) out of period and what do you have' to which I answered `perod' and sounded confused. He meant the letter e which leaves you with priod which is the Welsh for married whereas I'd removed the i (ee-dot in Welsh)! I'm not sure now whether I was thinking of the Welsh letter names (which like the Spanish ones make much more sense) or whether I was thinking in terms of sounds not letters so I took the /i:/ sound out of period, but it was just a very strange language confusion as the point was he'd got the wrong language and Word had auto-corrected him!