The Bluestocking Inn, cocktails and cocoa and all

[DeanElderberry]

Opening soon in a salubrious location.

And thanks to the miraculous qualities, although we will indeed have

One-steps and two-steps and the divil knows what new steps
We know that we never would be dull again, bedad
We'll have wine, porter and lemonade.
We'll have cocktails and cocoa and all
We'll have champagnes tonight
But NO real pains next morning
Tonight when we dance at the Bluestocking Ball

slight apologies to Frank Harte

That's brilliant! I was expecting an explanation that you'd got the grading scale the wrong way round, but no. I'm with your school on this.

Congrats! I did similar with our local Labour candidate the other day - talked about how when I was young we were pushing for, and getting to, the understanding that anyone could wear any clothes and love anyone and have any interests, regardless of their sex, and how backwards today's "you like wearing dresses and not sports, maybe you're a girl" seems. "That's actually quite thoughtful," he said, in apparent surprise... Seemed like quite a good bloke otherwise, first time standing to be an MSP, decent background. I'd like to be able to vote Labour again, so fingers crossed.

Well done you! That was a good response to get out of the candidate, and I like the idea of a politician who listens and acknowledges that he may have to re-think things...
Retrospective award of the coveted rosette to you😄

Actually, on 'the day that's in it' as we say in Hiberno-English, I think anyone here who wants one gets a Terf of the Day rosette to wear today💜💚

It just makes it impossible to find someone to actually vote for.
I mean how ridiculous political parties not accepting men and women are different.

Congratulations 🎊 on TERF of the Day award

I still haven't seen a canvasser, but flipping through the travel pages I found a nice piece today on Fredericksburg, TX, where the German heritage runs deep and older locals still speak the Texasdeutsch dialect.
I found a slice of Germany in the heart of deepest Texas

I've heard Texasdeutsch on YouTube and I can understand it pretty well, while Pennsilfaanisch stumps me a bit. I suppose it depends what part of Germany the ancestors came from, a bit like the Italian Americans who think they know Italian from the language their grandparents spoke, then visit Venice or Florence and find that they can't get very far with antiquated Sicilian.

These quirks of diaspora language interest me, like Cape Breton Gaelic in Canada, or that village in Alaska where they still speak 19th century Russian.

In Pennsylvania I got talking to a woman ['I got talking to...' could be a summary of my life story, I love talking to new people] about the cultural heritage of the area - which had a very English name like 'Suffolk County' or something like that, but she said that the community was mostly German - but, she hastened to add, 'We're not Amish, we're the Gay Dutch' [Deutsch]
I've also seen them referred to as 'The Fancy Dutch'. 'Fancy' because they are Lutherans - it's all relative, isn't it?😄

What about the Welsh that has survived in Patagonia, I wonder is it also an antique version?

The only Heinrich Boell book I would ever recommend reading is his Irische Tagebuch but it might be out of print. I have a very tattered paperback of it.

Wiki tells me, and this is really interesting, that Welsh traditionally has a vigesimal (base 20) counting system, which is unusual in modern European languages but not unique - I think you get it in Danish and maybe Basque.

Apparently Welsh decimal counting originated in Argentina and was then imported back to Wales.
Welsh numerals - Wikipedia

There are traces in other languages of vigesimal counting. In English the traditional life expectancy of three score years and ten, for instance. And in the French of France from 70 to 99 (the French of Belgium and Switzerland are a bit different). Also Danish from 60 to 90. It's not just Celtic and Germanic languages, or those influenced by Celtic or Germanic, and Basque either - apparently Yoruba uses base 20.

The theory is that the decimal system relies in the (usual) number of fingers, and the vigesimal system on fingers and toes. Makes sense really - humans haven't been wearing shoes for that long, certainly not as long as language has existed.

It's interesting the number of languages that have a special word for twenty that's not just "two tens". Just off the top of my head, fiche in Irish or besh in Romani (which might, though I'm not sure, be a loan from Persian).

Slavic and Baltic, which are pretty archaic by European standards, are firmly in the "two tens" camp.

That made me go and look up the etymology of “twenty” :
twenty(num.)
"1 more than nineteen, twice ten; the number which is one more than nineteen; a symbol representing this number;" Middle English twenti, from Old English twentig"group of twenty," from twegen "two" (from PIE root *dwo- "two") + -tig "group of ten" (see -ty (1)).

In Albanian you get njëzet for twenty and dyzet (two twenties) for forty.

In the standard language that's it, but in the dialect of the Albanian minority in southern Italy you also get trezet (60), katërzet (80) and pesëzet (100), which is a good example of how isolated dialects can preserve archaic forms.

Well fancy that - Dyzet in Albanian is daichead in Irish, which also means two twenties, dá fhichead ! what an unexpected connection.

And it's daeed in Manx, which is the same thing in different spelling!

I know Romani uses the Greek saranda, which is one of the features of Romani I like - there's the Indian base, then there are layers of Persian and Armenian and Greek tracing the journey to Europe, then a topping of whatever the surrounding European language is. It's a bit like a linguistic cheesecake.

And then there’s sheep counting which is in twenties though with an underlying 10 and 15 in most of them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yan_tan_tethera

good for counting, not so much for mathematics.

I wonder about the German-minority German in New Zealand. I'm not sure if it's even spoken any longer.

As for 'I got talking to...', I also tend in this direction. As an adolescent, I discovered the existence of French Canadians by talking to some poor unsuspecting women on a bus.
'Where are you from, then?'
'Canada.'
'You sound French.'
'Yes, I am French-Canadian. I am from Quebec.'
'Wot?'
'There are many French speakers in Quebec.'
'There are?'

I sometimes do a bit of that myself. I remember bumping into a couple of lads in Lübeck who looked vaguely Middle Eastern, but I couldn't figure out what language they were speaking. I could tell it wasn't Turkish or Arabic or Persian - I don't speak any of them but I know what they sound like and this sounded like nothing on earth. It turned out they were Chechen. For all I knew they could have been Trekkies speaking Klingon.

It's a bit dodgy asking people 'Where are you from?' these days 😬
but I think a friendly face and a 'D'you mind me asking, because I'm interested in places and languages....' makes it OK.

I did make an eejit of myself once by asking a hairdresser if she was speaking Moldovan to her colleagues... there's no such thing, they speak Romanian!

We live and learn, and the next Moldovan I got talking to was very impressed that I knew that

Scottish gaelic also had a base 20 counting system. They decimalised it for Gaelic medium education.

I did not know about Scotland and Wales having used base 20 number systems. Very interesting.

When I first started teaching different numbers bases were on the syllabus for middle school students, but that was a long time ago. The people who wrote the curriculum can’t have known about the Scots and the Welsh, but it was much more GB (or the UK) = England then, anyway.

I think it's a bit misleading to say the modern Celtic languages use a base-20 number system, as it really only makes a difference in the words we use for numbers. It's not like it's hexadecimal or binary or something like that.

So although we call 'forty' daichead in Irish, which comes from dá fhichead , 'two twenties', it's only the etymology that refers back to counting in 20s, centuries ago.

When Ireland was a centre of learning, 'The Island of Saints and Scholars' around the 5th-9th centuries [the alleged 'Dark Ages'!] mathematics was one of the areas of scholarship, and it was the same maths as used by scholars across Britain and continental Europe.

I'm not sure, but I think you'd have to go back to Roman times to find the vigesimal system being used by the Celts in calculations, rather than in the words used for numbers.

Interesting about Canadian French. I was once interpreting into English at a bilingual church meeting when a French Canadian was preaching. My very French friend said that she understood my translation better than the original French because she considered Canadian French to be so different. Personally I found it easier!

That's interesting. The German speakers I met in Pennsylvania were Mennonites and Amish (not that many Amish spoke to us) with their Pennsylvanian Dutch/Deutsch.

I can't even join in with edges of this erudite conversation.
Yesterday wrecked me...and I wasn't drinking. Boo to chronic conditions.