A Rose In Any Other Language?

All bloggers need a language and mine, is English, obviously ... I mean if this was Spanish, you probably wouldn't be reading this .... err anyway, with English you get a lot of words to play with, as it is generally stated (within a very wide range), that English has around 250,000 to 300,000 words (when obsolete words, which still exist in some unabridged dictionaries aren't counted), and other languages such as Spanish, may have only approximately half that number.

However all languages have an ancestral beginning, such as Indo-European, and recent advances of super-computer power have allowed some of the oldest surviving words in English to be identified.

According to the University of Reading researchers, the words "I" and "who" are among the oldest, not only in English, but across all Indo-European languages, along with the words "two", "three", and "five". The word "one" is only slightly younger whereas the word "four" experienced a sort of linguistic evolutionary leap, that makes it significantly younger in English, and completely different from other Indo-European languages.

The oldest words we use today have been in existence for at least 10,000 years, but "50% of the words we use today would be unrecognisable to our ancestors living 2,500 years ago. If a time-traveller came to us, and told us he wanted to go back to that period, we could arm him with the appropriate phrase book, and hopefully keep him out of trouble" explained Mark Pagel, Professor of Evolutionary Biology at the University of Reading.

So there you are then, time travel would be much trickier than you thought!

Doing the "Time Warp" East German style

Quirky little story ..... a developer opened up a flat in East Germany and found that it was a time capsule of East German life.

Littered around the flat were long-forgotten East German relics such as "Vita" cola, "Marella" margarine, "Juwel" cigarettes, and an empty bottle of "Kristall" vodka, colloquially referred to as the "Blue Strangler." The rooms were decorated with furnishings dating from the 1950s to 1980s, and the toilet was located on the communal landing, as was common for East German tenement blocks. A wall calendar showed August 1988 and that's when the flat was last believed to have been entered.

Mr Aretz said he had found documents in the flat showing that the occupant was a 24-year-old man who had been in trouble with the police. “It’s unclear if his offences were political or if he was a petty criminal. He had spent two terms in jail and he was definitely someone who didn’t fit in with the system. I’ve kept his documents. So far, he hasn’t got in touch with me.”

They don't make em like they used to!

Homer Simpson is constantly knocking US Technology …. US made cars that break down, electric gates that don’t close etc etc, well two stories broke today that made me laugh; they both concerned “time” capsules.

In the first story, it appears that 50 yrs ago, the residents of Tulsa buried a car in a concrete vault with articles that would be a mirror of the times, such as a ladies handbag with lipstick and tranquillisers (and that says something in itself!) with the intention that it be dug up 50 yrs later, and whom ever had guessed the population of present day Tulsa would win the car and contents, or at least their heirs would.

Anyway, the car had been encased in a concrete vault said to be strong enough to withstand nuclear attack, but when it was dug up and opened, it and its contents were a complete mess, water sodden and rusted beyond use. So much for the nuclear bunker and American 1950’s ‘know how’.

The second story was of a time capsule set up by Victorian school children who buried some newspapers and coins under the foundation stone of the school in 1893. This was accidentally uncovered when an extension was being added and the contents, newspapers and coins were found to be in perfect condition. Score one for the Victorians! The school plans to rebury the time capsule with modern equivalent items added.

However, if as I suspect, standards of workmanship have fallen since the Victorian days, as evidenced by the non water tight “nuclear bunker” built in the 1950’s, then I would bet that the reburied time capsule will be useless junk when next its opened!

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