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

I've seen some sources referring to the language as Moldovan, though it's basically the same as Romanian. I wonder whether all the Moldovans refer to it as Romanian?

You see folk from former Yugoslavia joking about their prowess in languages: they used to speak Serbo-Croatian; now they speak Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin and Serbian. (There are some lexical and grammatical differences.)

Melania Trump used to speak Slovene and Serbo-Croat; now she speaks Slovene plus B/C/M/S.

There are still arguments about [North] Macedonian - you get Bulgarians claiming that it's just Bulgarian.

But was it a goo party?
It was the post-wedding one, wasn't it?

Or I am just hopelessly confused...

I have a French Canadian FB friend who gets really irritated when French people claim not to be able to understand the Canadian variant.

I saw this at work one time - two of our French teachers being worried that a Canadian lady was coming to work in our faculty. It turned out that she actually spoke French French [IYSWIM].

I didn’t know about base 20 having been used, I wonder if that happened elsewhere?
Of course the ancient Babylonians outdid everyone else with base 60 - which persists in our time and geometrical measurements.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babylonian_cuneiform_numerals

I do think they push the point a bit - putting french subtitles on french Canadian films at the cinema seemed a bit OTT to me when I had no trouble understanding them.

Having said that, they do use some words quite differently!

I always assumed that French Canadian was to French as American English is to British English.

Perhaps less so now since so many Americanisms have crossed the ocean. There still seem to be lots of different words in Canadian French.

One example was the time a french Canadian came to dinner and pronounced the food to be "écoeurant" - delicious to a Canadian but sickly/ disgusting in french french!

Crumbs!

The nearest that I can think of in English is the way that some young people use 'sick'.

I did live in Canada as a teenager in the late seventies. The first place i lived had a large french Canadian community. I could speak traditional french but the Canadian version was incomprehensible to me.

After that It was in a place called Aylmer Ontario.

It was a tobacco growing area but was also known for tomatoes. It was a rural community. We were surrounded by Amish communities. But what people do not realise is there is more than one group.

There were the Amish who used horse and traps and did not own anything shiny, lived in their own homesteads but mingled to sell their wares.

But there were also the Mennonite’s, who the Amish split from i think a very long time ago but they were all anabaptists.

The Mennonites were stuck in 50’s style dress and migrated back up from Mexico at some point in history.

I could speak some German as well, neither group spoke a German I knew.

and we had Dutch groups who i had no understanding of.

Canada claimed to be a cultural melting pot who provided sanctuary for marginalised groups the reality was cultural silos

They speak Welsh in Patagonia. Settled in 1865 by 153 settlers on the Mimosa to preserve their language and culture.

They say that penguins are so-called from the Welsh pen, meaning head and gwyn meaning white. But penguins' heads aren't white, I hear you say. That is true. They are named for the great auk. But the great auk's head isn't white either! you exclaim. Also correct. But great auks were found on Pen Gwyn, White Head Island. Oh, that explains it...

I was taught different bases in First School (5-8 then up to Middle School 9-12, replaced by Infants to 7 and Junior School, 8-11 to match Primary).

Binary and base 10 were useful but nothing else. I have no idea why they taught it or if it's still taught.

Job applications submitted.
Diagrams for tomorrow's meeting not done but may not be necessary.
Second knitting square begun, but frogged back completely because I caught the right thread colour but the wrong thread section in a colour change. I tried to fix it but made it worse.
Start again tomorrow.

In the 1966 Batman movie with Adam West, there's a scene where Batman calls the Navy to ask if they've recently sold any nuclear submarines, and the admiral replies that, yes, they sold one last month to a Mr P.N. Gwynne.

When it comes to military bureaucracy, some things never change.

@MyrtleLion I was taught different bases…
Binary and base 10 were useful but nothing else. I have no idea why they taught it or if it's still taught.

Ha. Binary was meant to be useful because computers were coming in and they used binary… That was several decades ago.

Roman numerals were taught for much longer, and may still be. I used to do it as a diversion for year 7 if they hadn’t met it before.

It depends what you think are the main purposes of education are, and of learning Maths. I remember researching and writing an essay at college about whether it was worth knowing anything other than addition. (Subtraction is reverse addition, multiplication is repeated addition, division is repeated addition or subtraction, or reverse multiplication).

With so much about life it can be good to know there are alternative ways of thinking. It was why, at least until I retired ten years ago, I was pleased that the primary school curriculum seemed to include several methods of doing an arithmetic problem: the children were encouraged to choose the way which best suited any particular set of numbers.

That sounds brilliant.

I loved learning about bases but wondered why they taught it and then never returned to it. Mind you it was the 70s.

Purely my guess, back in the 70s metric was still fairly new.
Money went decimal in 71
Weights and measurements probably not long after.

LSD, would have been hard to teach along side the 16oz to a pound, 14 lb to a stone, and whatever number of stone to hundred weight (might be 88) then tons - all just to confuse
And then 20 fluid oz to a pint.

Taking all that confusing maths out the curriculum meant they had time to fill with other potentially useful stuff.

Btw when I said Scots Gaelic traditionally used 20s remember there are few Scots actually speak it. Mainly the Western Isles

There's a fascinating paper here from veteran linguist Bernard Comrie giving examples of how eccentric numbers can be in different languages.

He says the Chukchi language of the Russian Far East has a base-20 counting system, but I'm not sure I believe that. There are about 15,000 Chukchi people who herd reindeer in the middle of nowhere, and they have a reputation for pulling the legs of Russian academics who travel out there to study them.

<a class="break-all" href="https://web.archive.org/web/20210622052221/mpi-lingweb.shh.mpg.de/numeral/TypNumCuhk_11ho.pdf" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Wayback Machine

My recollection is that arithmetic referred to non-decimal currency and imperial measurements until about 1970. I was still at primary then - must have been P5. I recall our headmaster coming into class and teaching us how to convert shillings and pennies into 'new pence'.

I recall having to add up pounds, shillings and pennies in class and that this included carrying over the pennies into shillings by dividing by 12 and carrying the shillings over to pounds by dividing by 20.

Doing all that along with Imperial weights and measures didn't seem that confusing at the time, but I suppose that we were used to it. I recall that our exercise books had tables of weights and measures on the back.

ETA By the time I started high school in '72, we were only using the metric system in maths problems, but in the real world we were still using imperial.

I still think of my height and weight using imperial units.

@SionnachRuadh He says the Chukchi language of the Russian Far East has a base-20 counting system, but I'm not sure I believe that. There are about 15,000 Chukchi people who herd reindeer in the middle of nowhere, and they have a reputation for pulling the legs of Russian academics who travel out there to study them.

I love that.

I can still remember my 14 and 16 times tables. We didn’t learn the 13 and 15, although 15 is quite easy.

Those of us who grew up in the era of pre-decimal coinage were familiar with base 12 (pennies in a shilling) and base 20 (shillings in a pound) as well as base four (farthings in a penny) and binary (halfpennies in a penny). I remember doing arithmetic at least with adding and subtracting of pre-decimal coinage, possibly also multiplication.

My mum always used to say that she might have been quite good at maths if she had not had to keep so much space in her head for trying to remember how many whatevers were in a whatever else. I learnt decimal/metric from the start of primary school, one of the first years to do so, and she was very jealous of the simplicity of it all.

Yes!

@AsWithGlad Roman numerals are still taught. I used to enjoy showing the kids how V is the shape of the hand (5 fingers) and X is crossed arms (10 fingers).

Some of them loved the challenge, some (mostly the ones who struggled to count in 2s or 5s) never moved beyond completely baffled.

I still wonder how the Romans designed huge buildings, built long roads and ran an empire with such a cumbersome numerical system.

I was taught about bases in the first year of secondary in the early 70s. I think it was useful, in part to appreciate properly what decimal is iyswim. But it genuinely is useful if you do computing stuff- I did need to be familiar with binary and hex.