Poe

The Poetry Station

2011-03-27T20:08:00.005+02:00

The Poetry Station website shows a collection of video recorded poems. Browsing through it for a while in the late hours of this Sunday evening, I've listened to some poems of varied styles and topics that, for some reason or other, have drawn my attention. These are three of them:

Listen Mr Oxford Don. I had read the poem before in Evolving English by David Crystal. This linguist chose this text to comment on the "ownership" of English.

"The reality is that anyone who has taken the trouble to learn English can be said to have a stake in it -- and that means around a third of the world's population."

The Rain It Raineth. I knew the song from an old record I bought years ago but I had never thought of its meaning. The Wikipedia interprets that the line "The rain it raineth every day" suggests that "every day brings some kind of misery". Other people read Feste's song as a statement that "even as a person goes through life, with its various ups and downs, he or she must remember that at any time one can end up in an unfamiliar place with a completely different life". Harold Bloom gives a slightly different explanation when he comments it from a popular and erotic point of view.

A Lecture Upon the Shadow was entirely new to me. I liked the poem and the reading.

Lit2Go: stories and poems to be read or listened to

2011-03-26T16:13:00.001+01:00

Lit2Go is a collection of texts that can be read online or from a downloaded pdf document as well as listened to on the computer or from another type of mp3 player (all the audio files can be downloaded).

MAP YOUR VOICE

2011-02-28T21:31:00.003+01:00

The British Library fosters a project to collect audio recordings of a story and a set of six words in English from speakers all over the world. Map Your Voice allows visitors to listen to a variety of accents and to record their own version if desired.

Controversy Garage Neither Scone Schedule Attitude

BOOKDRUM

2011-01-27T22:08:00.002+01:00

Bookdrum provides background information about a good number of books. It is possible to find images and descriptions of the setting, summaries of the stories, reviews, biographical data of the authors, quotes, etc.

LITERARY WORKS TO BE READ AND/OR LISTENED TO

2011-01-12T15:30:00.004+01:00

LoudLit collects some public domain literary works that can be read page by page online while listening to its recording.

This is an example:

A Dream within a Dream

JANE AUSTEN'S 235TH BIRTHDAY

2010-12-16T13:58:00.004+01:00

Google reminds us today of Jane Austen's 235th birthday. A curious number to celebrate but nevertheless a good pretext to post this short entry.

"Vanity and pride are different things, though the words are often used synonymously. A person may be proud without being vain. Pride relates more to our opinion of ourselves; vanity, to what we would have others think of us."

Pride and Prejudice, Chapter 5

EVOLVING ENGLISH

2010-12-10T16:26:00.008+01:00

Evolving English is an exhibition on the English language (history, accents, influences, evolution...) open from 12th November 2010 to 3rd April 2011 at the British Library in London. Its website includes pictures and descriptions of some exhibits, a blog with additional information, and a quiz that can be useful for recalling some issues studied in Historia de la lengua inglesa, for testing our intuition regarding English etymology, or just for fun.

QUIJOTE INTERACTIVO

2010-11-10T22:34:00.003+01:00

La Biblioteca Nacional ha creado un sitio web dedicado al Quijote en la que se puede hojear una versión virtual de la primera edición de esta obra. Aquí se puede encontrar más información sobre el proyecto y desde este otro enlace entrar directamente en la página.

Vídeo de presentación:

Pero esta no es la única iniciativa para acercar el Quijote a través de los recursos de la Red. La Real Academia de la Lengua anima a hacer grabaciones en vídeo de pequeños fragmentos para completar la lectura de la obra completa. Se puede acceder a la presentación, modo de participar y galería de vídeos desde este enlace.

A NEWLY FOUND POEM BY TED HUGHES

2010-10-19T19:33:00.005+02:00

Last Sunday I heard about "Last Letter" for the first time. Browsing through the Internet for a while, I realise that the discovery of this unpublished poem by Ted Hughes has been a media event in the literary circles of the English speaking world, especially in the UK. The dramatic relationship of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath together with the charm of their two somehow dark and powerful personalities, some aspects of their lives and the quality of their works have the power to make a poem worth reading by many people who otherwise are not too fond of poetry.

HOWARD JACOBSON WINS THE BOOKER PRIZE

2010-10-13T07:56:00.006+02:00

Howard Jacobson is the winner of this year’s Man Booker Prize for Fiction for The Finkler Question.
The Finkler Question is a novel about love, loss and male friendship, and explores what it means to be Jewish today.
Said to have ‘some of the wittiest, most poignant and sharply intelligent comic prose in the English language', The Finkler Question has been described as ‘wonderful' and ‘richly satisfying' and as a novel of ‘full of wit, warmth, intelligence, human feeling and understanding'.
Sir Andrew Motion, Chair of the judges, made the announcement yesterday, 12th of October, from the awards dinner at London's Guildhall.

Andrew Motion comments "The Finkler Question is a marvellous book: very funny, of course, but also very clever, very sad and very subtle. It is all that it seems to be and much more than it seems to be. A completely worthy winner of this great prize.'
Howard Jacobson has been longlisted twice for the prize, in 2006 for Kalooki Nights and in 2002 for Who's Sorry Now, but has never before been shortlisted.

FRANK KERMODE DIED LAST AUGUST

2010-09-20T16:43:00.005+02:00

Acclaimed British literary critic Sir Frank Kermode, the author of Shakespeare’s Language, died last august at the age of 90 in Cambridge.
Prominent in literary criticism since the 1950s, Kermode held "virtually every endowed chair worth having in the British Isles", according to his former colleague John Sutherland, from King Edward VII professor of English literature at Cambridge to Lord Northcliffe professor of modern English literature at University College London and professor of poetry at Harvard, along with honorary doctorates from universities around the world. He was knighted in 1991.
A renowned Shakespearean, publishing Shakespeare's Language in 2001, Kermode's books range from works on Spenser and Donne and the memoir Not Entitled to last year's Concerning EM Forster.
Another two of his books that will be probably well remembered are The Sense of An Ending, his collection of lectures on the relationship of fiction to concepts of apocalyptic chaos and crisis, first published in 1967, and Romantic Image, a study of the Romantic movement up until WB Yeats.
The range of Kermode's gaze is shown by his book Pleasing Myself, which pulls together his literary journalism, reviewing everything from Seamus Heaney's new translation of Beowulf to Philip Roth's "splendidly wicked" Sabbath's Theater.
He fundamentally changed the study of English literature in the 1960s by introducing French theory by post-structuralists such as Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault, and post-Freudians such as Jacques Lacan, into what Sutherland described as "the torpid bloodstream of British academic discourse".

CAREY HEADS UP BOOKER SHORTLIST

2010-09-14T13:26:00.008+02:00

Australian author Peter Carey, who has won the Man Booker prize twice, has been shortlisted again for this year's award. If victorious, Carey will be the first author to win three Man Bookers.

He is joined in this shortlist by Andrea Levy, Emma Donoghue, Damon Galgut, Howard Jacobson and Tom McCarthy.

Carey is nominated for Parrot and Olivier in America.
He previously picked up the prestigious literary prize in 1998 for Oscar and Lucinda and again in 2001 for True History of the Kelly Gang.
Parrot and Olivier in America is set during the 19th century - Olivier is a French aristocrat sent to the New World, ostensibly to study its prisons, but in reality to save his neck in a future revolution.Parrot is the son of an itinerant English printer, who must spy on and protect him.
The other titles to make the shortlist are Levy's The Long Song, Donoghue's Room, Galgut's In a Strange Room, Jacobson's The Finkler Question and McCarthy's C.

Insulting in English

2010-08-31T23:01:00.003+02:00

David Crystal writes about insults in English in his blog post On Insulting Brits. In it he mentions flyting, a type of contest based on insult exchange, and Shakespeare's work as sources of inspiration for unimaginative angry heated people. The Web facilitates this second task by providing lists of Shakespeare's expressions. These are some examples:

Shakespeare's insults sorted out by plays.

A Shakespearean Insulter presenting one sentence at a time.

Shakespearean Insults Generator produces new insults by combining Shakespeare's words and expressions at random.

LITERARY LANDSCAPES

2010-07-28T11:06:00.004+02:00

In London it is not difficult to come across some reference to writers studied in the literature subjects of English Philology through nameplates indicating the relationship of a particular writer with a building, exhibits in museums and libraries, statues, etc. In my last visit to this city the “familiar encounter” took the shape of a sculptured John Betjeman looking up at St Pancras Station roof. The reason for this honour is the fact that Betjeman fought against the plans for the demolition of St Pancras Station in the 1960's.

EL LIBRO TOTAL

2010-06-29T12:28:00.005+02:00

El libro total ofrece acceso a textos clásicos, principalmente de la literatura española e hispanoamericana, en un formato interactivo (permite pasar hojas, escuchar audiciones, comparar algunas traducciones...) con apariencia de libro antiguo. En cuanto a literatura literatura inglesa incluye las obras de Shakespeare y alguna de Carrol.

ON THE USEFULNESS OF LITERARY CRITICISM

2010-06-21T22:01:00.001+02:00

Yesterday I attended a book club session on The Art of Fiction, by David Lodge. Apart from commenting on several novel excerpts and literary devices, we discussed the convenience, usefulness or even influence of previous study on the act of reading. To what extent does acquaintance with literary criticism and text analysis help us enjoy a book?

Probably understanding and therefore appreciating some kinds of works requires prior or subsequent access to guides and essays but most readings can be better 'digested' if we allow ourselves discovery and personal interpretation without feeling prejudiced in some way by brainy pieces of literary criticism.

Related to this issue, I found amusing a short essay by Juan Marsé in which he mocks the triviality of some studies by imagining titles of theses.

“ Por un breve instante, horribles fantasmas de posibles tesinas pasadas y futuras desfilan por mi mente con extravagantes títulos: El significado de los toros y de la humilde patata en la poesía de Miguel Hernández - Estructura, calor y sabor de las magdalenas en la obra de Proust - El Pijoaparte hijo natural semiótico de Henry James, con permiso de Félix de Azúa - Los silencios de Moby Dick y su relación metalingüística con la pata de palo de John Silver y con el mezcal y los barrancos de la prosa de Malcolm Lowry - Madame Flaubert soy yo, dijo Federico García Lorca”.

From “La isla del libro y el día del tesoro”

LANGUAGES

2010-05-09T16:33:00.006+02:00

The Subject Centre for Languages, Linguistics and Area Studies (Southampton University) includes in its website different kinds of resources, among them a list of 700 reasons for studying languages, all of them quoted from diverse sources such as linguists' works, surveys done to sixth form students, EU documents, and many more. After a bit of browsing, I have chosen this reason in order to provide an example:

"Languages give us access to other "countries of the mind", and help us to look back at our own country and culture from a different and more healthily critical perspective"

Reference:

Footitt, H. (2001) 'Lost for words' in the Guardian, Tuesday October 23 2001

Another section of this website contains the Power Point presentation Why Study Linguistics?, an informative and entertaining slide show aimed at encouraging people to study linguistics.

I've stopped at the following slide:

"What makes a word beautiful?" When reading it I have recalled an evening among friends when someone proposed us to say our favourite words. I found it curious the possible reasons that could make us select words. I'm not saying them here before inviting readers -anyone around here?- to share their favourite word in any language.

JABBERWOCKY

2010-04-30T23:36:00.004+02:00

This blog does not update too often these days -too much work? other interests? lack of ideas to share? - it does not matter but ... not a single post in April? I still have some minutes left before May starts and, not finding anything more informative or serious, I will allow a bit of nonsense to fill this entry.

Last week I saw Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland and enjoyed it. The story was not Carroll's and this time the script contained allusions to a 'real world' which somehow explains and is influenced by the actions underground as well as a conventional plot of struggle between good and evil with a heroine. Anyway it still keeps part of the nonsensical and dreamlike atmosphere of the original.

Alice's stories contain plenty of nonsensical images or dialogues to choose from, among them the poem Jabberwocky.

Here I leave a link to some translations of the poem.

DO YOU SPEAK ENGLISH?

2010-03-29T11:58:00.001+02:00

Just a joke for the holidays!

ELMORE LEONARD'S RULES FOR WRITERS

2010-03-02T18:16:00.003+01:00

During this month of March, Elmore Leonard, the well known crime writer, is publishing a new book, "10 Rules of Writing". The following is a brief summary of his advice that I have taken from The Guardian.

1. Never open a book with weather. If it's only to create atmosphere, and not a character's reaction to the weather, you don't want to go on too long. The reader is apt to leaf ahead looking for people. There are exceptions. If you happen to be Barry Lopez, who has more ways than an Eskimo to describe ice and snow in his book Arctic Dreams, you can do all the weather reporting you want.

2. Avoid prologues: they can be annoying, especially a prologue following an introduction that comes after a foreword. But these are ordinarily found in non-fiction. A prologue in a novel is backstory, and you can drop it in anywhere you want. There is a prologue in John Steinbeck's Sweet Thursday, but it's OK because a character in the book makes the point of what my rules are all about. He says: "I like a lot of talk in a book and I don't like to have nobody tell me what the guy that's talking looks like. I want to figure out what he looks like from the way he talks."

3. Never use a verb other than "said" to carry dialogue. The line of dialogue belongs to the character; the verb is the writer sticking his nose in. But "said" is far less intrusive than "grumbled", "gasped", "cautioned", "lied". I once noticed Mary McCarthy ending a line of dialogue with "she asseverated" and had to stop reading and go to the dictionary.

4. Never use an adverb to modify the verb "said" . . . he admonished gravely. To use an adverb this way (or almost any way) is a mortal sin. The writer is now exposing himself in earnest, using a word that distracts and can interrupt the rhythm of the exchange. I have a character in one of my books tell how she used to write historical romances "full of rape and adverbs".

5. Keep your exclamation points under control. You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose. If you have the knack of playing with exclaimers the way Tom Wolfe does, you can throw them in by the handful.

6. Never use the words "suddenly" or "all hell broke loose". This rule doesn't require an explanation. I have noticed that writers who use "suddenly" tend to exercise less control in the application of exclamation points.

7. Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly. Once you start spelling words in dialogue phonetically and loading the page with apostrophes, you won't be able to stop. Notice the way Annie Proulx captures the flavour of Wyoming voices in her book of short stories Close Range.

8. Avoid detailed descriptions of characters, which Steinbeck covered. In Ernest Hemingway's "Hills Like White Elephants", what do the "American and the girl with him" look like? "She had taken off her hat and put it on the table." That's the only reference to a physical description in the story.

9. Don't go into great detail describing places and things, unless you're Margaret Atwood and can paint scenes with language. You don't want descriptions that bring the action, the flow of the story, to a standstill.

10. Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip. Think of what you skip reading a novel: thick paragraphs of prose you can see have too many words in them.

My most important rule is one that sums up the 10: if it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.

THE GLOBE STAGES FIRST PLAY WRITTEN BY A WOMAN

2010-02-17T08:03:00.003+01:00

The Globe theatre is to stage the first play in its history by a female playwright. It will be the premiere of a new work by Nell Leyshon.

The original Globe where many of Shakespeare's works were first performed - by all-male companies - has no records of plays by women and, until now, none has been programmed in the modern reconstruction in the 13 years since it opened.

Leyshon is working on Bedlam, a "funny and bawdy" story of a beautiful woman inmate in the London hospital for the insane in the 18th century.

When interviewed by the media, she said she was excited but it did seem "shocking" to be making such a gender breakthrough as late as 2010. "It made me really think about all the women who are in graveyards with their talent for writing unfulfilled. But it's luck for me. I was the first person to come along with an idea that was right for the Globe."

Leyshon, 48 years old and a mother of two, originally made television commercials before turning to writing. She won the Evening Standard award for Comfort Me With Apples only five years ago.

Her work is part of a season that includes a new Howard Brenton play on Anne Boleyn, Dominic Rowan playing Henry VIII and Lucy Bailey directing Macbeth in collaboration with Venezuelan choreographer Javier de Frutos. Bedlam will run from 5 September to 1 October as part of the Globe season from 23 April to 3 October. It is a “must” if you visit London during those months.

LOST CONSONANTS

2010-02-15T20:22:00.006+01:00

Yesterday I read a mention about Lost Consonants cartoons in Language Play by David Crystal. Their author, Graham Rawle, bases the wit of his pictures and captions on the simple fact of altering the meaning of one word by leaving out one of its letters. Crystal tells in his book about the need to know the norm, the correct form of any linguistic form, when they are purposely modified in order to produce a humorous effect in the reader or listener. This can be a good exercise to test our lexical knowledge: to try and identify the original word and compare sentence meanings.

EXÁMENES EN LA UNED

2010-02-02T22:02:00.004+01:00

En estos días previos a los exámenes de la UNED, una amiga me pasa la referencia de este vídeo:

No sé qué efecto tuvieron, pero seguro que endulzaron el trago de "reconcentrarse" delante del papel en blanco.

¡Suerte a cualquiera que pase por este blog y tenga exámenes a la vista!

DIALECTS OF ENGLISH

2010-01-02T22:49:00.003+01:00

Once again a post from David Crystal's blog leads me to an interesting Internet resource. This time I will comment on International Dialects of English Archive (IDEA), an online archive of dialect and accent recordings for the performing arts created by Paul Meier, author of Accents and Dialects for Stage and Screen.

This website contains a well structured bank of recordings by speakers of English from around the world. Each of them reads out a short passage provided by the organisers and, after that, the participants add some free speech, usually talking about their experience as English learners and their countries, which is transcripted.

SAYING YEARS IN ENGLISH

2010-01-01T17:20:00.005+01:00

I've just read an interesting entry in David Crystal's blog about the way that speakers of English will opt for to call the years from 2010, On tens, teens, or whatever.

I thought that the option of naming the years after 1999 in units, e.g. "two thousand and nine", was something fixed but I see that usage spread will definitely determine the standard form.

In the thread of comments following the post, Crystal adds that "rhythm is an important factor (...) The more that expressions conform to an iambic pattern, the more people like it".

HAPPY NEW YEAR

2009-12-31T11:32:00.003+01:00

Looking for something to mark the end of the year in a blog post, I've come across this video clip. As I have not seen the film summarised in it before, I've found it amazing the way in wich a story can be told in less than five minutes and with no words.

I'd like to wish a HAPPY NEW YEAR to all the regular or occasional readers of this blog.

COSMOLEMA

2009-12-22T10:08:00.002+01:00

A través de esta entrada del blog de Leer.es, tengo noticia de Cosmolema, una utilidad para explorar, aprender y jugar con el léxico del castellano. Cito a continuación el listado de posibilidades que ofrece:

"Cosmolema permite explorar las relaciones entre las palabras por medio de estos operadores:

- Bifronte. Cuando una palabra es igual a la otra leída en sentido contrario: raza-azar.
- Anagrama. Cuando dos palabras usan las mismas letras en diferente orden: bestializar- estabilizar
- Letra cambiada. Cuando dos palabras se diferencian en una única letra: casar-cantar.
- Añade letra: casar-cansar.
- Elimina letra: cansar casar.
- Contenedor: norma-paranormal.
- Contenido: paranormal-norma."

JONATHAN LITTELL WINS THE BAD SEX IN FICTION PRIZE

2009-12-11T11:40:00.002+01:00

Author Jonathan Littell has won the 17th annual Bad Sex In Fiction Award, for his novel The Kindly Ones.
The book, which was originally published in French, won the Prix Goncourt in 2006 and has sold over a million copies in Europe.
Judges at The Literary Review gave him the bad sex prize for a passage that begins: "This sex was watching at me, spying on me, like a Gorgon's head".
In one excerpt, the author describes a sexual encounter as "a jolt that emptied my head like a spoon scraping the inside of a soft-boiled egg".
The Literary Review said Littell's book was "in part a work of genius", adding they hoped the author would take their dishonour "in good humour".
The shortlist for the prize also included works by Paul Theroux and musician Nick Cave

RAP, HIP-HOP AND CLASSICS

2009-12-04T20:22:00.004+01:00

The other day I read this post by David Crystal in which he commented a project led by hip-hop artist Akala to work on Shakespeare with young people.

After watching the video below, I also think that the activity can be really positive to approach classic literature to the youth apart from the opportunity to practise reading, pronunciation, rhythm... in a fun way.

By chance, I have also come across a video recording where two Secondary students recite "Lo que puede el dinero" written by Juan Ruiz, Arcipreste de Hita. The video can be watched from the bottom of Leer.es website.

ROBERT DE BEAUGRANDE

2009-11-29T20:37:00.005+01:00

I knew almost nothing about Robert de Beaugrande until today. He was just a name related to different linguistic concepts in a book of Análisis del discurso that I studied a couple of years ago. Today I came across this post in Vanity Fea blog that led me to browse through Beaugrande's website. The site collects many of this linguist's works and I'm sure it can allow the reader to discover lots of interesting studies and reflections on language.Just to illustrate this post, I have chosen the three quotations he included in his introduction to A Friendly Grammar of English:

Grammarians would perhaps differ less, if they read more.
-- Goold Brown, 1851

As the grammarians […] began quarrelling, they lost the power of discovering.
-- Charles Kingsley, 1854

It is a capital mistake to theorise before one has data.
-- Sherlock Holmes, 1892

MICROPOEMAS

2009-11-21T13:21:00.002+01:00

Una amiga me envía una serie de referencias sobre micropoemas, entre ellas este video que recoge unos cuantos, adecuado para pausas breves cuando no hay mucho tiempo para la poesía.

RECORDED POETRY

2009-11-13T18:52:00.004+01:00

A friend has sent me the following references to websites that include recorded poetry:

Lyrikline website collects poems recorded by their authors. They are organised according to language or author. Poems can be listened to and read at the same time. Many of them include translations to other languages.

PennSound is a project developed at the University of Pennsylvania, "committed to producing new audio recordings and preserving existing audio archives". The section about Classics helps us recall the works and authors we studied in the first years of English Philology.

Poetry Foundation also displays an organised array of recordings both through podcasts and videos.

Photo source: www.flickr.com/photos/8418112@N04/3526002850

CATCH PHRASES

2009-11-13T18:45:00.002+01:00

When reading about kinds of dictionaries, I have come across the term "catch phrase" and had to look it up. I read in Wikipedia that a catchphrase "is a phrase or expression recognized by its repeated utterance. Such phrases often originate in popular culture and in the arts, and typically spread through a variety of mass media (such as literature and publishing, motion pictures, television and radio), as well as word of mouth".

This entry also includes a link to a list of political catch phrases. I have found a good number of familiar expressions, especially in the Spain and United States sections.

GROUSE-BEATER

2009-11-08T22:01:00.002+01:00

After reading today's Quote of the Day (see below), I followed the recommended link and read about Kazuo Ishiguro having worked "as a as a grouse-beater for the Queen Mother at Balmoral before enrolling at the University of Kent". I had no idea about the meaning of that word and tried to look it up by googling the expression.

It has not been an easy task. I can find what a grouse and I understand the general meaning of beater but I have to rely on my "knowledge of the world" to imagine that a grouse-beater's job is to harass birds so someone hunts them easier when moving. Is it like that? Anyway, a curious job for a future writer and a curious employer for the activity.

" I couldn't speak Japanese very well, passport regulations were changing, I felt British, and my future was in Britain. And it would also make me eligible for literary awards. But I still think I'm regarded as one of their own in Japan."

Kazuo Ishiguro

FREE RICE

2009-11-03T22:47:00.001+01:00

From this post in Palabras Tendidas blog, I learn about Free Rice, a non-profit website run by the United Nations World Food Program together with the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University.

The programme works like this: you choose a topic from a selection of subjects (Geograhy, Art, English, Spanish, etc...) and start to answer questions in a quiz. For every right answer, ten grains of rice are donated by the UN World Food Program to help fight hunger in the world.

Why not try the English Grammar or the English Vocabulary sections and practise language while participating in this project.

ENGLISH LANGUAGE DAY

2009-10-13T08:18:00.006+02:00

Via this post from David Crystal's Blog, I get to know about an incipient initiative to celebrate the English Language Day. The focus for this year is legal English. Among other things, the organisers suggest a set of ideas for celebrating this event. One of them is to find instances of legal gobbledegook.

The Plain English Campaign fosters the identification of bad examples of language use by issuing awards on various categories, e.g. the Golden Bulls, given for the year's 'best' examples of gobbledygook. Let's choose this example to celebrate the event!

Eastleigh Borough Council for a Notice given under the Building Act 1984

'Hereby in accordance with the provision of the Building Act 1984, Section 32 declares that the said plans shall be of no effect and accordingly the said Act and the said Building Regulations shall as respects the proposed work have effect as if no plan had been deposited.'

AND THE BOOKER GOES TO…HILARY MANTEL

2009-10-10T16:53:00.002+02:00

Author Hilary Mantel has been named 2009 Man Booker Prize winner for her historical novel Wolf Hall, based on Henry VIII's adviser Thomas Cromwell.
Chairman of judges James Naughtie said: "Our decision was based on the sheer bigness of the book. The boldness of its narrative, its scene setting".
"The extraordinary way that Hilary Mantel has created what one of the judges has said was a contemporary novel, a modern novel, which happens to be set in the 16th Century.We thought it was an extraordinary piece of story-telling.”,added Naughtie.
Mantel saw her first novel, Every Day is Mother's Day, published in 1985.
Its sequel, Vacant Possession, followed a year later.
In 1989 she won the Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize for Fludd. Then A Place of Greater Safety scooped the Sunday Express Book Of The Year award in 1993.
Three years later Mantel was presented with the Hawthornden Prize for An Experiment in Love.She was also shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers Prize and the Orange Prize for Fiction, both in 2006, for the novel Beyond Black.

EL SILBO GOMERO

2009-10-04T12:48:00.002+02:00

Los noticiarios de los últimos días nos informan que el Silbo Gomero, practicado por algunos de los habitantes de la isla canaria La Gomera, ha obtenido el reconocimiento de Patrimonio Inmaterial de la Humanidad, por la UNESCO. Una buena noticia, sin duda, pues ayudará a que se reconozca su valor cultural, se extienda su uso y evite su desaparición. Sin embargo, y tras leer varios artículos referidos al mismo, no he conseguido hacerme una idea clara de su mecánica. En muchos escritos se refieren al Silbo Gomero calificándolo de ‘lenguaje’, mientras que al mismo tiempo se transmite la idea de que mediante este sistema de comunicación es posible transmitir frases del español ‘traducidas’, por así decir, al Silbo. Si este es el caso, no se trataría de un auténtico lenguaje, sino de un ‘código’ que permite transmitir (o incluso encriptar) cualquier idioma, francés, inglés, alemán…

Agradecería que algún lector me ayude a aclarar esta cuestión.

Y mi enhorabuena a todos los silbadores gomeros, por supuesto.

TEXT RECONSTRUCTION

2009-10-03T00:11:00.004+02:00

Benjamin Franklin used the following strategy to improve his writing: when he liked how a text was written, he noted down several words from each sentence. Next, he mixed them and set them aside for a time. Some weeks later, he tried to reorganise the text by placing the words in the logical order and completing it.

Similar ideas lie under the design of exercises used in language learning. They are particularly useful to practise logical order, coherence and cohesion in a text.

This website collects some activities of the kind.

Other types of text reconstruction exercises are based on the learner’s capacity to guess the words in a text and test their knowledge about word frequency, collocations and vocabulary.

We can see some examples here.

INTERNATIONAL OLYMPIADS IN LINGUISTICS

2009-10-01T11:00:00.001+02:00

Just a few months ago, the 7th edition of the International Olympiads in Linguistics was held in the beautiful city of Wroclaw, Poland. This competition belongs to the International Science Olympiads that is composed by twelve disciplines, such as physics, biology, astronomy, mathematics and the like.

In the International Linguistics Olympiad, the competitors, all of them students of secondary school, must face problems in theoretical and descriptive linguistics (phonetics, morphology, semantics, etc.) The young competitors must try to figure out the inherent patterns and structures of languages that they don´t know. For example, in last edition, they were given ten short texts in Vietnamese and a short list of the most frequent words in such idiom. Then, they had three hours to translate the texts, without a dictionary, of course. In other problem, they were given a list of words in a certain language and asked to find patterns of how endings work and what the endings might mean. That is, they had to figure out how verb inflections or plurals are formed in such a language.

This kind of problems is very good for developing the sense of logic and analytical skills.

The aim of the organizers of these competitions is to promote a career in science and to challenge the brightest students from around the world. And the competition is really hard; actually, in several countries, those who achieve a high ranking in any ISO are granted access to a university of choice. Most of countries sent a team of three of four children, but this year India took part with a very special competitor. One of the organizers, Dominique Estival, trainer of the Australian team explains it: “The Indian team had three students, but one of them was quite an extraordinary girl. She went out by herself to study the past International Linguistic Olympiad (ILO) problems, and told her mother that she wanted to participate in the ILO. But there is no organisation in India comparable to ours where we foster the competition, so the mother wrote to the organisers of the ILO and asked whether they could bring a team without the competition in India. And the organisers allowed her to bring a team, and so she came with her brother and her friend and the mother was coming with them. The others did okay, but she won a silver medal. She's a very determined student.”
This year, the USA team came in first place, Korea won the second price and Russia came third.

Oh, and just in case you were wondering: No, our country has never been represented in this Olympiads. Funny, isn´t it?

¡PELIGRO!

2009-09-29T16:57:00.004+02:00

Los seres humanos compartimos ideas, conceptos y experiencias, sin embargo comunicarlas es mucho más difícil de lo que podría parecer a simple vista. Al menos comunicarlas de forma comprensible e inequívoca.

En los Estados Unidos de América un grupo de expertos en antropología, lingüística, astronomía y otras ciencias han pasado años intentando en vano encontrar la forma de transmitir un concepto simple y universal: ‘peligro’. El gobierno de este país les asignó la tarea de encontrar la forma de señalizar una zona que alberga desechos nucleares, pero teniendo en cuenta que estos desechos permanecerán activos al menos durante 10.000 años y que estas señales deberían ser comprensibles para quienes se acerquen al lugar por ese entonces. Los expertos, divididos en dos grupos que han trabajado independientemente, no solo no han sido capaces de encontrar un símbolo con el que transmitir esta idea, sino que ni siquiera han coincidido en sus conclusiones. Mientras que unos proponen una serie de ‘señales’ o ‘inscripciones’ informativas, otros consideran que los símbolos empleados deber producir ‘horror’, de forma que disuadan a quien se acerque al lugar de excavar o tontear en la zona. Finalmente, han optado por recomendar que diversos paneles escritos en distintos idiomas transmitan la naturaleza del peligro, con la esperanza de que puedan ser así descifrados y entendidos claramente.

En cualquier caso, lo que parece claro es que, si bien una serie de conceptos elementales comunes se encuentran presentes en la mente de todo ser humano, la forma de expresarlos varía en función de las distintas culturas, sin que sea posible encontrar ningún símbolo cuyo significado trascienda el tiempo y el espacio.

NEWSPEAK

2009-09-27T20:11:00.000+02:00

These days I’m reading George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and I’ve found it interesting the author’s criticism of political manipulation of language. To do so, he admits the power of language to shape ideas and thought by creating a fictional situation where a totalitarian regime fosters lexical impoverishment. These are a couple of quotes from Chapter 5:

'It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words. Of course the great wastage is in the verbs and adjectives, but there are hundreds of nouns that can be got rid of as well. It isn't only the synonyms; there are also the antonyms. After all, what justification is there for a word which is simply the opposite of some other word? A word contains its opposite in itself. Take "good", for instance. If you have a word like "good", what need is there for a word like "bad"? "Ungood" will do just as well -- better, because it's an exact opposite, which the other is not.

'Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every concept that can ever be needed, will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten.

But the work of Orwellian lexicographers does not limit itself to reduction. New words still emerge as new concepts gain protagonism.

The smallest thing could give you away. A nervous tic, an unconscious look of anxiety, a habit of muttering to yourself -- anything that carried with it the suggestion of abnormality, of having something to hide. In any case, to wear an improper expression on your face (to look incredulous when a victory was announced, for example) was itself a punishable offence. There was even a word for it in Newspeak: facecrime, it was called.

In fact Orwell had often shown his concern about the use of language. In his essay 'Politics and the English Language', he criticises inflated and rhetorical discourse as a kind of euphemism to conceal truth. He also contributed to broaden the English lexicon in an involuntary way: expressions such as “Big Brother”, “doublethink” or “Orwellian” itself are part of current usage.

SEVEN DIDN'T ARRIVE TO THE SHORTLIST

2009-09-22T16:16:00.004+02:00

The Booker Prize organizers published last week the shortlist for this year’s awards. You can find it in a previous post in this blog. In the way to this shortlist seven other books have fallen from the initial longlist where 13 books were initially chosen. Here you have the seven that never arrived to the shortlist:

Me Cheeta by James Lever
The ‘autobiography’ of the chimpanzee who co-starred with Johnny Weissmuller in the Tarzan films.

Heliopolis by James Scudamore
The book is told from the perspective of a 27-year-old who was born in a Sao Paolo shantytown but now lives on the other side of the city’s social divide.

The Wilderness by Samantha Harvey
It is the story of a man in his early 60s who is struggling with the onset of Alzheimers and trying to keep his memories and identity as the debilitating disease takes hold.

Love and Summer by William Trevor
This story is set in a small Irish town over the course of one long summer, when a stranger arrives on his bicycle and falls for a young married girl.

Brooklyn by Colm Toibin
A young Irish woman leaves 1950s Ireland for a life in Brooklyn.

Not Untrue & Not Unkind by Ed O’Loughlin
The book follows the story of journalist Owen Simmons who finds a dossier on the desk of his dead newspaper editor which leads him to Africa and a woman he once loved.

How to Paint a Dead Man by Sarah Hall
This book weaves together four stories spanning half a century, from an elderly Italian painter to the young blind girl he teaches.

RECOMMENDING BOOKS

2009-09-20T22:08:00.007+02:00

Today I participated in a first session of a book club in English. It's been a kind of introductory meeting where the participants have commented on one or more books that we've read and enjoyed sufficiently as to recommend them to others.

These are some of the titles mentioned in the evening:

Possession by A.S. Byatt.
Experience by Martin Amis.
Bleak House by Dickens.
The Queen of Whale Cay by Kate Summerscale.
Dreams and Shadows by Robin Wright.
The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters.
A Long Long Way by Sebastian Barry.
The Secret Scripture by Sebastian Barry.
Deaf Sentence by David Lodge.
The Help by Kathryn Stockett.
Why Men Want Sex and Women Need Love by Allan Pease & Barbara Pease.
Some books by Laurie Graham.
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows.
The Cellist of Sarajevo by Steven Galloway.
What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami.
Wild Nights by Joyce Carol Oates.

NO COMMENTS

2009-09-12T10:36:00.001+02:00

BOOKER PRIZE 2009 SHORTLIST ANNOUNCED

2009-09-09T15:16:00.006+02:00

A S Byatt, J M Coetzee, Adam Foulds, Hilary Mantel, Simon Mawer and Sarah Waters have been announced as the shortlisted authors for the 2009 Man Booker Prize for Fiction.
The six books are: A S Byatt The Cildren's Book; J M Coetzee Summertime ; Adam Foulds The Quickening Maze ; Hilary Mantel Wolf Hall ; Simon Mawer The Glass Room and Sarah Waters The Little Stranger.
Having previously won in 1999 with Disgrace and 1983 with Life & Times of Michael K, South African writer J.M. Coetzee would be the first author to win the Man Booker Prize three times if successful this year. A.S. Byatt is in the running for a second win - her novel Possession won the Booker Prize in 1990. Hilary Mantel's Beyond Black was longlisted in 2005. Sarah Waters has been shortlisted twice for Fingersmith (2002) and The Night Watch (2006). The youngest on the list, at 34, is Adam Foulds and Simon Mawer is shortlisted for his eighth novel, The Glass Room.
The winner of the 2009 Man Booker Prize for Fiction will be revealed on Tuesday 6 October 2009 at a dinner at London's Guildhall and will be broadcast on BBC News across television, radio and online. The winning author will receive £50,000 and can look forward to greatly increased sales and worldwide recognition.

CRUZADAS ORTOGRÁFICAS

2009-09-07T17:02:00.006+02:00

Stefan Gatward, un jubilado inglés de Tunbridge Wells, ha comenzado una campaña particular en contra de la ausencia de apóstrofos en los carteles de su localidad. Esta acción ha provocado tanto apoyo como rechazo. El Daily Mail lo califica de 'héroe de la puntuación' y el Telegraph de 'apostrofista', mientras algunos de sus vecinos lo consideran simplemente un vándalo.

Asimismo me entero a través de la entrada GUERRILLA ORTOGRÁFICA del blog Palabras Tendidas de la iniciativa de Pablo Zulaica, que consiste en añadir en carteles y rótulos públicos unas grandes tildes de papel en aquellas palabras en las que faltan. Pablo tiene además un blog, Acentos perdidos, en el que explica, desarrolla y anima a expandir esta campaña.

Inserto aquí también este vídeo de la televisión argentina que ilustra la actuación de Pablo:

QUOTATIONS IN CITY BUILDINGS

2009-08-17T01:39:00.005+02:00

I’m back from a recent trip to the United States. Although it was my first stay in that country, it was really easy to find familiar places and names. While visiting different buildings, I came across different quotations by well known American writers and politicians. These are some examples:

The cathedral of Saint John the Divine displays a set of American writers’ quotes in its Poets’ Corner
Both in the Franklin Institute and the Underground museum at Franklin Court in Philadelphia, lots of wise and witty sentences by Benjamin Franklin were displayed. These are just a few of the many I read:

"An investment in knowledge always pays the best interest"
"God heals, and the doctor takes the fees"
"You may delay, but time will not"
"Fish and visitors smell in three days"

I'll finish this post with an inscription shown in big letters at the Entrance hall of the American Museum of Natural History in New York. It displays a piece of advice addressed by Theodore Roosevelt to young male people. I think it reflects well the ideal that underlies in many fields of the United States society.

Transcription:

"I want to see you game, boys, I want to see you brave and manly, and I also want to see you gentle and tender.

Be practical as well as generous in your ideals. Keep your eyes on the stars and keep your feet on the ground.

Courage, hard work, self-mastery, and intelligent effort are all essential to successful life.

Character, in the long run, is the decisive factor in the life of an individual and of nations alike".
Further quotes in the same room

QUIZZES

2009-07-23T22:16:00.004+02:00

Quizicon web site offers a collection of more than one hundred quizzes about a variety of topics.

Some of them are related to language and literature:
- 10 most common English words.
- 10 most common Spanish words.
- Authors of classic novels.
- Punctuation symbols.
- Cockney alphabet.
- Shakespeare's plays.

Why not try one of them as a means of revision, a mental challenge or just for fun?

Image source: Flickrcc
www.flickr.com/photos/83073875@N00/2291816634

GOOD BYE SERIOUSNESS; HELLO WEIRDNESS

2009-07-19T11:09:00.007+02:00

It had to happen, sooner or later. The classics revisited by the most disrespectful writers. Are these versions right? Or should literary classics be untouchable? Maybe they should, but then, which classics exactly? How we would tell which one should remain unblemished by these blasphemous versions? This time have been Austen´s Pride and Prejudice (now Pride and Prejudice and Zombies) and Sense and Sensibility (Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters), but what comes next?
Anyway, I dare to predict a wave of weird versions of classics for the next months. Or maybe it´ll be a tsunami.

LANGUAGE BLOGS

2009-07-10T09:18:00.003+02:00

From this post in Lexiophiles we can access the four sections of a language blog competition (language learning, language teaching, language technology and language professionals). It is still possible to vote for your favourite one in each category by marking your choice among selections of one hundred blogs.

DOG DAYS OF SUMMER

2009-07-01T08:32:00.001+02:00

The term Dog Days refer to the period between July and September when the hottest days of the year usually occur in the northern hemisphere. It also extends its meaning to a period of stagnation and inactivity.

The term "Dog Days" was used by the ancient Romans, who called these days caniculares dies after Sirius, "the dog star", which rose just before or at the same time as sunrise and was believed to increase the heating power of the Sun.

Summer days are an invitation to go strolling, to travel... and, especially, to lazy around. I know that this blog has not as many readers as we liked but I still think that it is worth it, a friendly place for practising English writing a bit, for jotting down interesting resources related to language and literature, for sharing thoughts, news, selected quotes, etc. Summer holidays are near and I will probably keep quiet regarding this blog for the coming two 'dog' months.

Some English idioms related to summer:

An Indian summer
1. A period of warm weather which sometimes happens in early autumn Both the UK and Ireland have been enjoying an Indian summer over the past few weeks.
2. A successful or pleasant period in someone's life, especially towards the end of their life

One swallow doesn't make a summer.
You cannot be certain that more good things will happen and the whole situation will improve just because on good thing has happened.

To make hay while the sun shines.
To do something right away while the situation or conditions are right, with no delay.

LA INGLATERRA ISABELINA

2009-06-25T22:52:00.003+02:00

La profesora Gabriela Zayas incluye en su blog Arte y Literatura una sección sobre lecturas y comentarios acerca de personajes y eventos de la Inglaterra isabelina. Merece la pena echar un vistazo a alguna de estas entradas o a otras muchas que tienen relación directa con autores de la literatura anglosajona.

THE SECRET GARDEN

2009-06-22T23:10:00.007+02:00

Today I came across this post in one of the blogs I follow, showing a slide presentation of the process and some productions in a sequence of class activities on the narrative aspects of The Secret Garden, a film based on the homonymous novel by Frances Hodgson Burnett

I’ve never read the original work but I still have an abridged version of this story in a book for children I bought in England many years ago. I liked the story regardless a certain sentimentality characteristic of the Victorian period because of its positive and encouraging message, with Nature, friendship and perseverance as healing factors of both body and mind.

The novel has been transferred to the cinema screen on several occasions. This is a trailer for the 1993 adaptation directed by Agnieszka Holland.

LA IMPERFECCIÓN DEL LENGUAJE

2009-06-17T13:15:00.006+02:00

El pasado domingo Eduardo Punset entrevistó a Gary Marcus en un programa de la serie Redes, titulado El cerebro es una chapuza. Entre otras reflexiones acerca de la imperfección del cerebro, se trató el tema de los problemas de comunicación por limitaciones propias del lenguaje al final del programa. Para ello se aludió a la cuestión de la ambigüedad.

La ambigüedad lingüística puede tener su origen en estructuras sintácticas que admiten más de un agrupamiento de sus elementos para formar sintagmas, así como en cuestiones de otro tipo, generalmente semánticas, a menudo relacionadas con la polisemia o la homonimia. La reducción de fonemas en el habla de una comunidad determinada puede aumentar considerablemente el número de términos homófonos, aumentando con ello la necesidad de contexto para entender qué se quiere realmente decir.

He aquí un ejemplo de situación cómica que basa su componente humorístico en malentendidos provocados por variantes fonéticas entre hablantes de la misma lengua:

TO GET MORE COMMENTS

2009-06-09T23:56:00.002+02:00

I´ve always wanted to know how to get more comments to my submissions. Sadly, only recently I found the key:

MERECE LA PENA

2009-06-06T16:31:00.002+02:00

Como siempre me estoy quejando de que los usuarios de lengua inglesa disponen de más y mejores sitios en internet, es una satisfacción meter este vínculo con la página Wikilengua del español. Para los interesados en el estudio, análisis o simplemente en el uso correcto del idioma en que escribo estas líneas resultará útil y provechoso darse un vuelta por esta amena página, en la que colaboran, entre otros organismos, la RAE, el Instituto Cervantes o la Fundación San Millán de la Cogolla.

SUBTITLING VIDEOS

2009-06-04T10:00:00.002+02:00

dotSUB is a tool that allows anyone to translate and subtitle video content into multiple languages. It can be helpful and fun for those who may like to practise translation while creating something useful for others at the same time.

The example below shows Claude Piron making a spirited defense of Esperanto as the best international language:

Extensiones

2009-06-03T10:45:00.002+02:00

Por favor, que alguien le explique a los redactores de las bases de los concursos literarios que la mejor forma de medir la extensión de un texto es contando el número de palabras que contiene. Así de simple.
Pues no. En este país, en el 99% de los casos, al llegar al apartado de la extensión que deben tener los relatos, cuentos o novelas siempre aparece algo así como: “Los relatos tendrán una extensión mínima de 5 páginas y máxima de 10, escritos en letra Times o similar, por una sola cara y en hojas A4, cuerpo 12, a doble espacio y no más de 32 líneas por página ni 70 caracteres por línea.” (ejemplo tomado de la Convocatoria II Premio BizkaIdatz, de la Diputación Foral de Bizkaia). Señores: eso son “entre 3.000 y 6.000 palabras”. Así de simple. Que ya solo les falta indicar también la marca del papel en que deben estar impresos los relatos…

JUNE CUCKOOS

2009-06-01T07:45:00.007+02:00

Looking for something related to June and linked with the English language or literature, I’ve come across this quote by Shakespeare:

"Was but as the cuckoo is in June,
Heard not regarded". [1st Henry IV – III, 2]

According to Archibald Geikie in his book The Birds of Shakespeare, this is the context and meaning of this sentence:

"As summer advances, the cuckoo’s note, having grown familiar, no longer attracts the notice of the country-folk, as it did when the bird first appeared in April. King Henry IV avails himself of this common observation when he lectures his son on his misdoings, and compares the Prince’s career to that of “the skipping king” of the previous reign, who lost the respect of the people".

THIS BLOG displays Lord Archibald Geike’s text in a clear and orderly manner.

Picture: www.flickr.com/photos/7457894@N04/2677923655

ALICE MUNRO WINS MAN BOOKER INTERNATIONAL PRIZE

2009-05-28T12:43:00.004+02:00

Canadian short story writer Alice Munro is the new winner of the Man Booker International Prize for her lifetime body of work.
Munro is one of Canada’s most famous writers, well known for her short stories.
The judging panel for the Man Booker International Prize made the following comment on the winner:
“Alice Munro is mostly known as a short story writer and yet she brings as much depth, wisdom and precision to every story as most novelists bring to a lifetime of novels. To read Alice Munro is to learn something every time that you never thought of before”.
Alice Munro's first collection of stories, Dance of the Happy Shades (1968), was highly acclaimed and won that year’s Governor General’s Award, Canada’s highest literary prize. This success was followed by Lives of Girls and Women (1971), a collection of interlinked stories that was published as a novel.
Many of Munro's stories are set in Huron County, Ontario. Her strong regional focus is one of the features of her fiction. Another is the all-knowing narrator who serves to make sense of the world. Many compare Munro's small-town settings to writers of the U.S. rural south. As in the works of William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor, her characters often confront deep-rooted customs and traditions.
A frequent theme of her work—particularly evident in her early stories—has been the dilemmas of a girl coming of age and coming to terms with her family and the small town she grew up in. In recent work such as Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage (2001) and Runaway (2004) she has shifted her focus to the travails of middle age, of women alone and of the elderly.
Other recent works are: No Love Lost (2003), Vintage Munro (2004), and The View from Castle Rock (2006). Her latest collection of short stories, Too Much Happiness, will be published in October 2009.

ESTUDIOS INGLESES

2009-05-17T21:49:00.005+02:00

Echando un vistazo a la oferta de grados y másteres de la UNED para el próximo curso 2009-2010, he llegado a la Propuesta de Plan de Estudios de Grado en Estudios Ingleses: Lengua, Literatura y Cultura y me he parado un momento para comparar cuáles serán los cambios en relación al currículo que ha conformado estos años (se implantó en el curso 2001-2002, creo) la licenciatura de Filología Inglesa en esta universidad.
A primera vista, llama la atención el reparto de tiempo que favorece la organización en asignaturas cuatrimestrales. Al dejar los estudios en cuatro años y leer tantos nombres de materias, parece todo más condensado. Sin embargo, es fácil establecer paralelismos entre las nuevas denominaciones y las antiguas.

Estos son algunos ejemplos: Inglés Instrumental, por Lengua Inglesa; Comunicación oral y escrita en lengua española, por Lengua Española; Mundos anglófonos en perspectiva histórica y cultural, por Historia y Cultura de los Países de Habla Inglesa; o Pronunciación de la lengua inglesa, por Fonética Inglesa.

Desaparece el término ‘troncal’ aplicado a las asignaturas obligatorias comunes a todas las universidades españolas y se añade el de ‘básica’, que supongo será su equivalente.

La segunda lengua extranjera (francés, alemán o italiano) puede sustituirse por una clásica (latín o griego) y se reduce a un año académico.

Hay también cambios en la obligatoriedad de cursar algunas asignaturas: Pragmática y Sociolingüística dejan de ser optativas y se unen a la hasta ahora preceptiva Análisis del Discurso que se queda en un cuatrimestre. También sube de estatus Traducción de textos generales y literarios inglés-español, que supongo reemplaza a Análisis Contrastivo de Textos.

No termino de hacerme idea de qué supondrá en la práctica la adecuación de la Universidad a los requisitos del Plan Bolonia. Tanto desde mi experiencia personal (en universidad presencial y a distancia) como de lo que percibo en los estudios actuales de mi hija o de gente conocida, creo que la Universidad necesita reformas en varios aspectos. Así, en general, se me ocurre mencionar la metodología y los medios de evaluación.

I´M JUST PRACTICING MY ENGLISH

2009-05-12T16:30:00.002+02:00

Practicing English is a nice excuse to listen to Neil Young. Although to be true, who needs excuses to listen to Neil Young (others than remember the Golden Years)?

Come a little bit closer
Hear what I have to say
Just like children sleeping
We could dream this night away.

But there`s a full moon rising
Lets go dancing in the light
We know where the music`s playing
Lets go out and feel the night.

Because I´m still in love with you
I want to see you dance again
Because I´m still in love with you
On this harvest moon.

When we were strangers
I watched you from afar
When we were lovers
I loved you with all my heart.

But now it`s getting late
And the moon is climbing high
I want to celebrate
See it shining in your eye.

Because I´m still in love with you
I want to see you dance again
Because I´m still in love with you
On this harvest moon.

SIX WORDS STORIES

2009-05-09T17:41:00.002+02:00

Wait! There is another peculiar literary genre (genre? Maybe ‘variety’ fits better) in English language literature. The creator it is said to be Ernest Hemingway. It seems that, back in 1920, Hemingway´s friends bet him that he couldn´t write a complete story in just six words. He won and the legend says that Hemingway considered it his best work. Here is the result:

“For sale: baby shoes, never used”

There exists another version of the story that goes like this:

“For sale: baby shoes, never worn”

I couldn´t find relevant information that confirm any of them as the original one, but it would be interesting to know the opinion of the scholars of Hemingway´s work.

Anyhow, I´ll post here a bunch of samples of six words stories:

“Computer, did we bring batteries? Computer?” William Shatner

“Longed for him. Got him. Shit.” Margaret Atwood

“Starlet sex scandal. Giant squid involved.” Margaret Atwood

“With bloody hands, I say good-bye.” Frank Miller

“The baby´s blood type? Human, mostly.” Orson Scott Card

“TIME MACHINE REACHES FUTURE!!! …nobody there…” Harry Harrison

“Easy. Just touch the match to” Ursula K. Le Guinn

And I´ve left my favorite for last:

“Five zombies. Four bullets. Two zombies.” Brian

(HYPER) FLASH FICTION

2009-05-07T10:27:00.002+02:00

Las elaboradas ceremonias y rituales se extendieron a lo largo de toda una semana. La ciudad se llenó de visitantes llegados de los más remotos confines del continente y las calles se convirtieron en un abigarrado arcoíris de rasgos, ropas y animales exóticos. El bullicio no disminuía ni siquiera por las noches, cuando se encendían los fuegos sagrados, y la gente se mantenía despierta masticando hojas de khat. La mayoría ignoraba que en el último día, el día del solsticio de verano, tendría lugar la inmolación comunal.

(Flash Fiction: a complete story in one thousand or fewer words. See Hobart, Jucked, SmokeLong)

REDUPLICATED EXPRESSIONS

2009-05-06T20:08:00.002+02:00

When reading about this week’s phrase, la-di-da, I’ve followed the link to reduplicated expressions, i.e. those which are usually made up of two words, “one that supplies the meaning and a secondary rhyming word, which is added for emphasis”.

According to the kind of sound repetition, these expressions are categorised in three groups: rhyming (e.g. willy-nilly), exact (e.g. chop-chop), and ablaut, that is, when there happens a vowel alternation (e.g. knick-knack).

Chop-chop!

A funny poem using quite a lot of reduplicated expressions can be read in this blog entry.

Source of the picture: http://static.flickr.com/190/446296088_c98a8c168e.jpg

MAYDAY ON MAY DAY

2009-05-01T07:00:00.001+02:00

I could have chosen May Day traditions and celebrations on this first day of May as the topic for a first post in this new month, but I will write about the origins of its homophone, the distress expression ‘mayday’, and other similar signals, instead.

According to the Wikipedia entry on this term, “Mayday is an emergency code word used internationally as a distress signal in voice procedure radio communications. It derives from the French venez m'aider, meaning 'come help me'. It is used to signal a life-threatening emergency by many groups, such as police forces, pilots, firefighters, and transportation organizations. The call is always given three times in a row ("Mayday Mayday Mayday") to prevent mistaking it for some similar-sounding phrase under noisy conditions, and to distinguish an actual Mayday call from a message about a Mayday call.”

But mayday is not the only alert signal of that kind. In fact, that is the one which indicates closer danger and biggest urgency. Pan-pan (from the French: panne - a breakdown) is used for urgent situations of a lower order , such as a mechanical breakdown. Finally, Securite (from French sécurité — safety) introduces an important safety information, such as navigational warnings or the approaching of meteorological adverse conditions.

These three signals have Morse equivalents in SOS (• • • — — — • • •), XXX (— —••— — — —••— — — —••— — ) TTT ( — — —)

Regarding SOS, I read that its association with phrases such as "Save Our Souls" were developed after the signal, most likely as a means to help remember the correct letters (something known as a backronym).

CULT AUTHOR JG BALLARD DIES AT 78

2009-04-28T18:41:00.004+02:00

The author JG Ballard, famed for novels such as Crash and Empire of the Sun, passed away last 19 April in London after a long illness. James Graham Ballard (1930 – 2009) was an English novelist and short story writer who was one the most famous members of the science fiction New Wave movement.
His best-known novels are the controversial Crash (1973), an exploration of sexual fetishism connected to traffic accidents, and the autobiographical Empire of the Sun (1984) based on his childhood in a Japanese prison camp in China during World War II.
Both books were adapted into films, by David Cronenberg and Stephen Spielberg.
His early novels include The Drowned World (1962), The Wind from Nowhere (1962), The Drought (1965) and The Crystal World (1966). These were followed by more experimental novels, such as The Atrocity Exhibition (1970), Concrete Island (1974) and High-Rise (1975).
More recently he has published novels like Cocaine Nights (1996), shortlisted for the Whitbread Novel Award, Super-Cannes (2000), Commonwealth Writers Prize and Millennium People (2003), a tale of violent political protest and social change.
J. G. Ballard's last novel was Kingdom Come (2006). In 2008, his autobiography, Miracles of Life, was published.
His friend and fellow author, Iain Sinclair, said Ballard had developed into a major literary figure:
"He was one of the first to take up the whole idea of ecological catastrophe. He was fascinated by celebrity early on, the cult of the star and suicides of cars, motorways, edge lands of cities. All of these things he was one of the first to create almost a philosophy of. And I think as time has gone on, he's become a major, major figure."
His work had such a strong personality that the adjective "Ballardian" entered the language, defined by the Collins English Dictionary as "resembling or suggestive of the conditions described in J. G. Ballard's novels and stories, especially dystopian modernity, bleak man-made landscapes and the psychological effects of technological, social or environmental developments."

PROPERCIO

2009-04-26T12:30:00.005+02:00

Un paseo reciente por los cañones del Ebro y Rudrón me llevó a leer esta inscripción en la pared de una casa en Valdelateja.

"Tú sola eres mi casa, Cintia,

tú sola mis padres;
tú, todos los instantes de mi dicha"

Recordaba poco de Propercio, apenas lo suficiente para situarlo en la poesía amorosa de la época de Augusto, y he decidido hacer un repaso rápido a base de algunas páginas de Internet.

Se sabe poco de la vida de este poeta latino aunque su nacimiento se sitúa alrededor del 45 a.C. en Asís y su muerte en el año 15 a.C. Estudió en Roma y participó en la vida social de la gran ciudad, aunque sin comprometerse en la vida pública. A los 19 años conoció a la cortesana Hostia, la Cynthia de una buena parte de sus elegías, con quien vivió una relación apasionada y tortuosa. Perteneció al círculo de Mecenas y quizás por ello apoya la política del Imperio públicamente a través de su cuarto libro, dedicado a celebrar la Roma de Augusto.

Entre otros documentos, me he encontrado con Las elegías de Propercio y sus lectores áureos
un estudio de Lía Schwartz Lerner, sobre la influencia de la poesía de Propercio en poetas posteriores, en especial Garcilaso, Herrera, Lope de Vega, Quevedo y Góngora. Curiosamente la autora introduce el tema a partir de una obra de teatro inglés contemporáneo, The Invention of Love, de Tom Stoppard, donde este dramaturgo reúne en escena al ensayista Walter Pater, el crítico de arte John Ruskin, el escritor Oscar Wilde, profesores de lenguas clásicas de la universidad de Oxford y varios periodistas y escritores contemporáneos de aquellos. Las siguientes citas dan idea de la presencia de Propercio en la obra:

“Su protagonista es el filólogo inglés Alfred E. Housman, que aparece desdoblado literalmente en dos personajes: un Housman ya muerto a los 77 años, al que se designa con sus iniciales: AEH, y el mismo Housman, cuando entre sus 18 y 26 años estudiaba en Oxford”.

“Cuando se inicia la obra, Housman está de pie en la ribera de la laguna Estigia esperando la llegada de la barca de Carón (…) En el acto I, Housman se enfrenta con su alter ego, que llega cargado de libros: son diversas ediciones de Propercio, que el joven alumno critica. Su intención es volver a editar las elegías, resolver los problemas de un texto corrupto que resultaba aun incomprensible en esos años. Gran parte del diálogo entre AEH y Housman gira en torno a cuestiones textuales o a los problemas que suscita la traducción de la poesía de Propercio, de Catulo o de otros autores latinos y griegos”.

“A pesar de este tema tan poco propicio en apariencia, la obra tuvo un éxito notable en Londres y en Nueva York. No poco debe haber contribuido a ello la dramatización de un caso de frustrado amor homosexual en la Inglaterra victoriana. Sin embargo, el texto de Stoppard es atrevidamente culto y está construido en torno a citas latinas y griegas que permiten también leerlo como reivindicación del valor e interés de la cultura clásica en estos tiempos que parecen serle tan hostiles”.

ALAN SILLITOE

2009-04-21T20:16:00.004+02:00

Last week I attended some talks, readings and other events related to poetry within the programm of Cosmopoética in Córdoba. There, I had the opportunity to listen to Alan Sillitoe and his wife, Ruth Fainlight. Up until then I had little knowledge about Sillitoe, just an association of his name with the story The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner.

When talking about his approach to poetry, he told us that he started to write due to an 18-month-long convalescence when hospitalised with tuberculosis at the age of 19. After that experience, he decided to read what he considered important such as the Bible or Shakespeare in order to fill a gap in his literary knowledge. He stressed the importance of reading previous to writing.

His first volume of poetry, Without Beer or Bread was published in 1957. He also published Poems (1971), with Ted Hughes and Ruth Fainlight, Storm and Other Poems (1974) and Barbarians and Other Poems (1973).

Regarding his fiction works, Alan Sillitoe is grouped among the "angry young men" of the 1950s, with John Osborne, John Braine, John Wain, Arnold Wesker, and Kingsley Amis.

Among some other few poems, he read ‘The Morse Machine’. A recording of that reading can be seen at the end of this video.

In fact, Sillitoe trained as a wireless operator in World War II and still practises taking Morse code.

“I keep up my skill with Morse by taking messages from the radio now and again. It's a kind of therapy. When I can't write I tap out a few words to get me going, or sometimes as a plea to the gods to send another poem or novel”

Extract from The Guardian

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in Madrid

2009-04-19T18:18:00.011+02:00

Francis Bacon is not the only opportunity the Museo del Prado is offering this season to those interested in British arts and culture.
In a smaller format, the exhibition Sleeping Beauty (open until 31 may of 2009), features seventeen works by major artists of Victorian Britain, a little represented school in Spanish museums. They have been lent by the Museo de Arte de Ponce in Puerto Rico.
The exhibition includes works by artists such as John Everett Millais, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Edward Coley Burne-Jones, dating from different phases of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.
The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was formed in 1848 by William Holman Hunt, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and John Everett Millais in an attempt to rediscover the authenticity they felt painting had lost since the time of Raphael. Their works were often inspired by literary and historical themes, approached with a high degree of seriousness and representing moments of intense emotion.
Among the paintings featured in this exhibition I would like to underline The last sleep of Arthur in Avalon by Edward Coley Burne-Jones, a painting of big dimensions, inspired by the last scene of Thomas Malory's Morte d’Arthur.
The encounter with the Arthurian cycle, in Thomas Malory’s version of Morte d’Arthur, proved a real revelation for the members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and it impressed its literary and romantic seal on many of their works.

IN CASE YOU DIDN´T SEE IT YET…

2009-04-19T11:15:00.004+02:00

Yes, we have surrendered to trash TV. But, well, at least this is British trash TV, so we can always say: ‘Hey, I´m practicing my English!’ I don´t even know if it´s for real (with these shows you never can tell), but wouldn´t it be nice if it were? After all we all need to dream…

I´m sorry, I´ve tried to upload here the clip, but it doesn´t work, so here is the link to see it in Youtube.

VISUAL LEARNERS, LINGUISTIC LEARNERS

2009-04-16T00:01:00.000+02:00

A recent study carried out by the Center of Cognitive Neuroscience, at the University of Pennsylvania, reveals that those who consider themselves as visual learners convert linguistically presented information into a visual representation of such information.
On the contrary, verbal learners tend to convert visual information into linguistic representations.

By means of magnetic resonance imaging technology, professor Sharon Thomson-Schill and her team scanned the brains of 18 subjects while performing several tests that involved both word-based and picture-based feature matching conditions. The results demonstrated that modality-specific areas of the brain were activated depending on how the subjects consider themselves: visual or linguistic learners.

So, once again, science confirms what everybody knows intuitively. Now investigators expect that further research will be useful for educators in helping them to determine the most effective way to learn for each individual.

I think it would be also interesting to determine if one learning system is more effective than the other and –as a mere curiosity- if there are more visual learners than linguistic learners or vice versa.

THAT´S A THESAURUS!

2009-04-13T00:01:00.000+02:00

It is really difficult to determine how important internet has been for linguists in our age: very important, awfully important, overwhelmingly important… Probably it will never be exactly pondered the astounding amount of language resources available on line. Never before the students, the scholars, the writers both the amateurs and professionals, have had so many dictionaries, so many thesaurus, so many corpus and data at their disposal.

We could probably be surfing on the net 24 hours a day for a whole year and we wouldn´t stop finding new interesting word related places. My most recent discovery has been a device called Visual Thesaurus. The site defines itself as “an interactive dictionary and thesaurus which creates word maps that blossom with meanings and branch to related words”, and the New York Times describes it as “imaginative, ingenious and fanciful”, adjectives that I subscribe enthusiastically.

Some ago I said that the English speaking world pays much more attention to their language that we, the Spanish speaking people, do. Everyday I´m more persuaded of it. We are at a distance that can be measured only in astronomical units. I would love to have in Spanish language something similar to Visual Thesaurus.

The only flaw I can see in it is that you have to pay for use it, but nothing´s perfect! Take a look at it, at least to peek is for free!

PRACTISING PHONETICS

2009-04-10T23:53:00.000+02:00

Phonetic Flash is a section in the UCL Phonetics & Linguistics website which includes some activities useful to practise and revise English phonetics.

There are four kinds of exercises:

Labels. Choosing the correct voice, place, and manner labels for a given symbol.
Symbols. Choosing the appropriate symbol for a given label.
Words. Choosing the appropriate symbol for the vowel in a word.
Hit and miss. Choosing the words which contain the sound symbolised.

BE POLITE, STUPID!

2009-04-09T00:01:00.000+02:00

Once again The Engine Room calls our attention to a linguistic oddity. This time JD, the author of this blog, exposes his perplexity in dealing with what is and what is not polite according with the BBC guide of style. We may agree or not with the British broadcasting channel, but what is sure is that the joke is funny:

Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson go camping and pitch their tent under the stars. In the middle of the night, Holmes wakes his companion up and says: "Watson, look up at the stars and tell me what you deduce." Watson says: "I see millions of stars and maybe quite a few planets among them. It may be true that a few of the planets are quite like Earth and there might be life on them." Holmes replies: "Watson, you bloody fool*! Somebody has stolen our tent!"

Well, the guys at the BBC consider that:

*Bloody is a medium-strong swear word, used to give emotional emphasis to something that you are saying. It should not be used in polite situations. For polite conversation, substitute: You stupid idiot!

No doubt politeness is a great thing!

CATCHER AND PHRASEMAKER

2009-04-07T13:46:00.011+02:00

Yogi Berra (born May 12, 1925, in St. Louis, Missouri) is a former Major League Baseball player and manager. He played almost his entire career for the New York Yankees (in the picture with his teammates he is the second from the left).
Berra is widely regarded as one of the greatest catchers in baseball history. Berra, who quit school very young, is also well known for his pithy comments and witticisms, known as Yogiisms.
Through the years, Berra’s language skills made him famous. Simultaneously denying and confirming his reputation, Berra once stated, "I didn't really say everything I said.".

Here you have some of his most famous examples:

"Baseball is ninety percent mental. The other half is physical."

"You can observe a lot by watching".

"If the world were perfect, it wouldn’t be".

"If you can’t imitate him, don´t copy him".

On why he no longer went to a popular St. Louis restaurant: "Nobody goes there no more; it's too crowded!" .

When giving directions to his New Jersey home, which was equally accessible via two different routes: "When you come to a fork in the road, take it."

On being the guest of honor at an awards banquet: "I'd like to thank all those who made this night necessary."

"You can observe a lot by just watching."

"Always go to other people's funerals; otherwise they won't come to yours."

As a catcher and phrasemaker, Yogi Berra has had no equal.

WHAT WE SAY AND WHAT WE MEAN

2009-04-04T16:30:00.000+02:00

Cinema and language. Scene 9

In this scene from Mary Poppins, we find an instance of a speech act where the conventional meaning of the utterances and the speaker’s intention conflict. In this case, the hearers are requested to do just the opposite of what the speaker desires. It is also a nice example of reverse psychology, something that often works with children and teenagers.

1ST APRIL

2009-04-01T19:38:00.006+02:00

This morning I received an email from a workmate, which the antivirus tool in my computer immediately labelled as ‘hoax’. That was the first time I found this category in the mail classification provided by anti-spam filters and wondered what hint could the programme have read in order to consider it false information. Probably that came from the explicit request to spread the news and send the message back to as many people as possible.

These kinds of messages include different pieces of advice regarding computer security, health, solidarity and even luck. Although some of them sound really suspicious, many people decide to obey without thinking too much about their reliability or intention.

The medium for distributing hoaxes is not restricted to emailed texts. It also can be found in slide presentations, videos, websites, etc. A recursive topic for this sort of disinformation is the attribution of poems written by unknown writers to recognised poets, as it is explained in this article regarding some texts not precisely created by Pablo Neruda.

Snopes website collects a series of true and false statements, news, quotes… widely spread through different media. Among them, I read that the famous sentence “Elementary, my dear Watson” was never recorded in Conan Doyle’s novels and also find this collection of statements attributed to John Kerry and George Bush.

The British Library website also includes a section on disinformation and lies. The activities are aimed at students but some videos are really funny. A nice treat for this April Fool’s Day

.

SOME JOKES FOR THE WEEKEND

2009-03-27T23:22:00.003+01:00

A sample of humour based on phonetics and spelling:

Ode to a Spell Chequer
I have a spelling chequer
It came with my PC
It plainly marks for my revue
miss takes I cannot see
I've run this poem threw it
I'm shore your pleased two no
its letter perfect in its weigh
my chequer tolled me sew.

Source: http://www3.sympatico.ca/srajano/jokes.html#two

Humour based on lack of pragmatic competence (some sentences found in labels and packages):

On a bag of Fritos:
You could be a winner!
No purchase necessary.
Details inside.

On Boot's Children Cough Medicine:
Do not drive a car or operate machinery after taking this medication.
On some Swanson frozen dinners:
Serving suggestion: Defrost.

Source: http://efl.htmlplanet.com/humor_linguistic.htm

Humour based on change of register and literary knowledge:

A woman was out shopping one day with her son. The boy spotted a man who was bowlegged.
The boy pulled on Mom's hand and said, "Momma, look at the bowlegged man!"
Mom was mortified and told her son that it was not polite to point to a person and make that sort of comment.

For punishment, the boy had to read a play by Shakespeare. He couldn't go shopping again until he finished reading the play. Finally, he finished and his mom took him once again to the mall.
Again he spied a bowlegged man, but remembered what happened the last time. So he pulled on his mother's hand and said, "Lo, what manner of men are these, who wear their balls in parentheses?"

Source: http://www.threesources.com/archives/005151.html

TÍTULOS UNIVERSITARIOS

2009-03-26T16:02:00.004+01:00

No he podido resistirme a hacer una entrada sobre el aragonés José Luis Iborte que con 83 años opta al título Guiness por tener 17 títulos universitarios.

"Geografía e Historia, Historia del Arte, las Filologías Románica, Inglesa, Francesa, Clásica en griego y latín, Italiana, Humanidades, Económicas, Empresariales y Medicina. A eso se suman sus tres doctorados, recibidos cada uno con apto cum laude."

Y sigue estudiando. Su próxima licenciatura será Filología Semítica con asignaturas como hebreo, griego bíblico, árabe, arameo y sánscrito.

A pesar de ser un hombre de letras hizo Medicina aceptando un desafío:

"Lo de estudiar medicina ha sucedido anecdóticamente. Cuando trabajaba de abogado en un hospital en Bilbao, yo hablaba con los médicos acerca de los informes que me entregaban para reclamar a las compañías de seguros. Una vez, en un diagnóstico, discutimos otro médico y yo y él me dijo: 'Tú me hablarás de esto a mí cuando tengas tu título de medicina en la mano'".

"Reto desde aquí a todos los que tengan más carreras que yo", dice José Luis.

Increíble!!

http://www.elpais.com/articulo/gente/83/anos/titulos/universitarios/Guinness/vista/elpepugen/20090323elpepuage_5/Tes

PANTOUM

2009-03-26T00:01:00.001+01:00

The pantoum is an unusual and curious verse form. Although its origins are in Malaysia, in 15th-century, it has been translated and adapted by western poets, such as Victor Hugo or Charles Baudelaire. More recently John Ashbery, Thomas Lux (“All the Slaves”) or Peter Meinke (“Atomic Pantoum”) have cultivated this exotic kind of poetry.

In the pantoum each stanza has four lines and the poet links consecutive stanzas with a simple device: the fourth and second lines of a given stanza are used as the first and third lines of the next one.

The interlocking pattern of repeated sounds provides an echoing effect that is reinforced by the fact that in the last stanza there are no new lines at all. Here, lines first and third are the second and fourth from previous stanza and the second and fourth lines are the third and first ones of the first stanza. So the first and last lines of the poem are the same.

In this sample of pantoum verse we may see how the poet avoids monotony by employing movable punctuation and homophones:

We live in this house.
It fits right in.
Its windows face
The long afternoons.

It fits right in,
And no one would guess
The long afternoons
Mean nothing to us

And no one would guess
That the other houses
Mean nothing to us-
Except for the little boys

That the other houses
Gather in a dusk.
The little boys
Think we´re gosts

Gathering at dusk
To frequent their dreams.
They think we´re ghosts
When our night visits seem

Too frequent. Their dreams
Make them shudder-
Our night visits seem
Like shadows, wavering by persistent.

Make them shutter
Their windows, face
Their own shadows. Wavering but persistent,
We live in this house.
Marilyn Taylor

GRAN TORINO

2009-03-23T11:52:00.006+01:00

Gran Torino is a good film. I would even say that it is a very good film. It is full of significances and hidden meanings and I dare to predict that in the years to come Gran Torino will become a ‘cult movie’ and they will write about it more than about all the previous Eastwood´s films. People will find in it metaphors, allegories, homages and all that kind of things.

However, as a linguaphile, I want to mention one aspect of this remarcable film: the language as it is supposedly used by middle-class men in U.S.A. The main character, Walt Kowalski, teaches the Hmong kid, Thao, the way he has to talk to be accepted by men as one of them. It is one of the funniest parts of the film.

As I said before, it is a very good film. Thank you, Mr. Eastwood!

(For some reason I can´t post a clip with the aforementioned scenes of Gran Torino, but you can see them here.)

LEARNING AND REVISING PHRASAL VERBS AND IDIOMS

2009-03-17T16:46:00.008+01:00

Face Up to Phrasals is one of the many sections in the BBC Learning English website. Its structure is nice (three sets of short spoken dialogues, each of them showing a particular phrasal verb in context) and allows learners to measure out the number of phrasal verbs they want to learn or revise at a time.

Other sites, such as English Idioms & Idiomatic Expressions provide explanations and examples of a good number of idioms sorted out according to topic.

In case we just want to test our knowledge on these items, we can try some of the exercises collected in Self-Study Idiom Quizzes.

There are even videos to help students widen their range of idiomatic expression, such as this one about ‘dog idioms’.

ENTREVISTA A JON BASTERRA

2009-03-12T19:19:00.001+01:00

He aquí la entrevista que hemos hecho a Jon, estudiante de Filología Inglesa y reciente colaborador en este blog.

1. ¿Dónde estudias Filología Inglesa?
En la UNED. A través de su centro asociado de Bergara (Gipuzkoa).

2. ¿En qué curso estás?
En realidad he comenzado estos estudios este mismo curso 2008-2009. Y me he matriculado en tres asignaturas. La vida no me da para más. De momento he escogido Lengua Inglesa (I), Literatura Inglesa (I) y Análisis Contrastivo de Textos.

3. ¿Qué otros estudios has realizado?
Soy periodista de profesión y de estudios. En su día me licencié en algo que por entonces llamaban Ciencias de la Información, rama de Periodismo.

4. ¿Por qué te decidiste a iniciar estos estudios?
En primer y principal lugar por pura pasión anglófila. Y, también, porque soy eso que los catalanes llaman un “lletraferit”. Llevo años leyendo principalmente autores británicos en todas sus variedades. Si se unen estas dos “manías” con la “crisis de los cincuenta” se puede estar bastante cerca de entender mi motivación.

5. ¿Qué asignaturas prefieres: las de literatura o las de lenguaje?
Aunque acabo de empezar y no conozco con detalle el conjunto de asignaturas de la carrera creo que voy a disfrutar más con todas las relacionadas con la literatura, con todo tipo de literaturas, y también con las que me aporten mayor conocimiento y dominio de la lengua inglesa. Me temo que las que sean más del ámbito de la lingüística o de la enseñanza de lenguas me resultarán más áridas y lejanas.

6. Teniendo en cuenta tu experiencia, ¿qué opinas de la metodología de los estudios universitarios?
Desconozco completamente cómo funciona hoy en día la universidad convencional o presencial. En cuanto a la UNED me ha sorprendido muy agradablemente el desarrollo que tienen en Internet tanto los cursos virtuales como los aspectos de secretaría o información general, así como la calidad y cantidad de las publicaciones y libros de texto.
Lógicamente por esa vía de las nuevas tecnologías hay mucho recorrido por hacer todavía.

7. ¿Qué consideras lo más positivo que te han aportado hasta el momento estos estudios?
Varias cosas. Quizás la más íntima es que me ha despertado una nueva ilusión, el arrancar un proyecto personal que me está resultando muy motivador. Es cierto, como me dicen algunos amigos, que no tengo necesidad ni de títulos ni del “stress” de tener que pasar exámenes. Pero todos sabemos que sin esa exigencia y ese método, el día a día y las mil obligaciones impiden hacer algo de manera sistemática.

Estudiar de manera organizada tanto Lengua Inglesa como Literatura, me están permitiendo, por una parte, refrescar y mejorar mi inglés, que es una pelea que me acompaña a lo largo de toda la vida, y, por otra parte, profundizar de una manera ordenada y metódica en el mundo de la literatura inglesa, tanto de la teoría como en el conocimiento de los propios textos (Beowulf, Chaucer, Shakespeare…). Para mí está siendo un verdadero placer. Y eso que sólo llevo cinco meses.

8. ¿Qué recomendarías a alguien que quiere empezar esta carrera?
Un primer consejo sería de orden práctico: hacerlo con el mayor nivel posible de dominio de la propia lengua inglesa.
Y, luego, en la medida de lo posible, no limitarse a realizar unos estudios universitarios. Hay que enamorarse de todo lo inglés. Para algunos será el comienzo de una historia de amor. Para otros, como en mi caso, es la culminación de un enamoramiento, que dura ya décadas, con una lengua, una historia, una cultura y un modo de vida.

KEEP INFORMED

2009-03-12T12:17:00.003+01:00

I just wanted to share with you this very good link I got from a friend to keep us well informed with newspapers front pages from all over the world.

http://kiosko.net/

Beatriz.

“I find no peace”

2009-03-11T16:53:00.003+01:00

The text that we - students of “Literatura Inglesa-1” - have had to comment for the second exam in last February exam has been one of Wyatts’s sonnets.
Wyatt, along with Surrey, was the first to introduce the sonnet into English. He wrote extraordinarily accomplished imitations of Petrarch's sonnets, including “Whoso List to Hunt” and the one we had to identify and comment at the exam: “I find no peace”'.
Although I was not able to remember the author’s name at the exam, I think that it is a lovely and moving poem that deserves to be copied here for the pleasure of all the blog’s readers.

I find no peace, and all my war is done ;
I fear and hope, I burn, and freeze like ice ;
I fly aloft, yet can I not arise ;
And nought I have, and all the world I seize on,
That locks nor loseth, holdeth me in prison,
And holds me not, yet can I scape no wise :
Nor lets me live, nor die, at my devise,
And yet of death it giveth me occasion.
Without eye I see ; without tongue I plain :
I wish to perish, yet I ask for health ;
I love another, and thus I hate myself ;
I feed me in sorrow, and laugh in all my pain.
Lo, thus displeaseth me both death and life,
And my delight is causer of this strife

It wasn't until 1557, 15 years after Wyatt's death, that a number of his poetry appeared alongside the poetry of Surrey in printer Richard Tottel’s anthology, generally known as Tottel's Miscellany. The rest of Wyatt's poetry, lyrics, and satires remained in manuscript until the 19th and 20th centuries "rediscovered" them. Wyatt and Surrey often share the title "father of the English sonnet."

Indie Writers Deathmatch 2009

2009-03-10T01:48:00.003+01:00

Literature and competition, why not? After all literary contests have been in vogue since long ago. We all know how they work: an institution, both public or private, convokes a literary contest, publishes the rules and writers send their work. Then a jury, often composed by a heterogeneous group of literary experts, select the best piece and this one is declared the winner. Don´t ask about how they decide which is the best one.

Well, in these cases writers compete among all of them at the same time. Exciting, but not very exciting. Now, what is really exciting is when two people fight one against each other. Like in tennis. Or boxing. I know that literary ayatollahs would hate me comparing a boxing match with a literary contest, but… take a look at what the people of Broken Pencil have launched! They call it Indie Writers Deathmatch 2009. And if you click in the link you will attend just at the final round, between Natalie Pendergast and Chris Illuminati. Here the readers are the jury and they vote for the short story they like more. I´ve already made my choice.

FAMOUS WOMEN

2009-03-08T22:00:00.012+01:00

Looking for something to celebrate International Women's Day before it ends, I've come across the Encyclopaedia Britannica section 300 Women Who Changed the World.

Browsing through the list of biographies, I find these historic personalities, thinkers and writers we learnt about in different subjects when studying English Philology at the UNED:

Jane Austen, Boudicca, Anne Bradstreet, Charlotte Brönte, Emily Brönte, Hélène Cixous, Emily Dickinson, Eleanor of Aquitaine, George Eliot, Elizabeth I, Zora Neale Hurston, Julian of Norwich, Margery Kempe, Mary, Queen of Scots, Toni Morrison, Emmeline Pankhurst, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Phillis Wheatley, Mary Wollstonecraft, Virginia Woolf

Women

WORD CLOUDS

2009-03-04T21:54:00.004+01:00

WORDLE is a web tool to generate “word clouds” from a given text. The picture below shows the outcome of typing this blog URL.

It is amazing to see how many people test it and create these 'web graffiti'. It is also curious to observe the kind of texts they choose to do it. These are some examples:

AS MAD AS A MARCH HARE

2009-03-02T17:59:00.004+01:00

Yesterday we started a new March, a month with two thirds of winter and the other third of spring. Maybe that changing feature provides the idea of instability attributed to hares in the phrase as mad as a March hare. Although the origin of the expression is dated in 1529, in Sir Thomas More's The supplycacyon of soulys: "As mad not as a march hare, but as a madde dogge", our immediate source of reference takes us to Alice in Wonderland's March Hare.

A 'mad' way of celebrating the beginning of this month can be to visit Alice in Wonderland: an Interactive Adventure website and browse through some of its simple funny activities based on Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. A mad tea party, for instance, allows the visitor to read crazy dialogues made up of quotes from Carroll's books just by placing the mouse on the three characters in the picture.

THE SPIRIT OF CARNIVAL

2009-02-24T22:26:00.005+01:00

An English Philology student at the UNED sends us this contribution to our blog:

Ahora que ha finalizado el Carnaval, y que los estudiantes de Literatura Inglesa (I) comenzamos el cuatrimestre donde reina Shakespeare, no está de más recordar la figura carnavalesca por excelencia de la literatura inglesa, sir John Falstaff, el rubicundo amigo del príncipe Hal, en sus correrías tabernarias de juventud, antes de convertirse en el “ejemplar” Henry V.

Tal como aparece en la Unidad Didáctica, traslado aquí la descripción que Graham Holderness hace de la función de este personaje:

“Falstaff clearly performs the function, in Henry IV Parts I and II, of carnival. He constitutes a constant focus of opposition to the official and serious tone of authority and power: his discourse confronts and challenges those of king and state. His attitude to authority is always parodic and satirical: he mocks authority, flouts power, responds to the pressures of social duty and civic obligation by retreating into Bacchanalian revelry. His world is a world of ease, moral license, appetite and desire; of humour and ridicule, theatricals and satire, of community, freedom and abundance; a world created by inverting the abstract society, the oppression and the hierarchy of the official world. In the tavern the fool reigns as sovereign; on the high road the thief is an honest man; while in the royal court the cares and duties of state frown an the frivolity and absurdity of saturnalian revelry. To this extent Falstaff can be located in that popular tradition of carnival and utopian comedy defined by Bakhtin”.

Termina, pues, el carnaval. Y arranca la Cuaresma. Ash Wednesday. Pero con T.S.Eliot no me atrevo. Todavía.

Thank you very much!

THREE BLOGS ON ENGLISH LANGUAGE

2009-02-21T22:13:00.009+01:00

Today I spent some time browsing through some blogs related to English language. This is a small selection:

David Crystal's blog mainly focuses on English usage. As the author states in his initial post, the blog is intended to create a public space where the questions people address him can be accessed by anyone interested in the topic, allowing readers to participate and sparing the writer repetition.

The Engine Room deals with language use, publishing and the media in general. Posts are usually short and light to read. It contains a section on rare 'words of the day'

Literal-Minded provides linguistic analyses based on samples of real speech or written texts.

POESÍA AMOROSA

2009-02-14T07:01:00.001+01:00

En un día como éste, parece propio hacer alguna referencia al amor y qué mejor que alguna selección poética. Revisando algunos libros de literatura inglesa, he terminado recurriendo otra vez a Shakespeare, esta vez en su Soneto número 29. La verdad es que no se me ocurrían muchos más poemas que tuvieran tanta fuerza. Al pensar qué seleccionaría en castellano, me venían más ideas aunque me haya vuelto a quedar con un clásico, con este otro soneto de Quevedo. ¿Son las literaturas en lenguas romances más proclives a tratar el tema del amor? ¿no hay diferencia notable entre las tradiciones europeas?

Resultados -

EVOLUTION

2009-02-12T21:28:00.008+01:00

A bit late, but still in time to celebrate Charles Darwin's 200th birthday, I'd like to devote a post to this influential scientist.

Although Darwin's work did not constitute an object of study in Filología Inglesa, at least at the UNED, the effect of his theories on literature, especially in the first half of the 20th century, were part of the syllabus for PENSAMIENTO Y CREACION LITERARIA INGLESA EN EL SIGLO XX. Defenders and opponents to Darwinism raised a social debate that permeated different spheres of culture. The ideas of 'evolution' and 'degeneration' took shape in literary works such as H.G.Wells's The Time Machine.

Having a look at some websites with contents related to Darwin, I've come across this Open University page, which among facts and other kinds of information, invites us to "monkey around a little". I've followed their advice and saw my (d)evolution!

THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON

2009-02-11T23:09:00.004+01:00

The recently released film The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is based on the short story of the same name written by F. Scott Fitzgerald . I intend to watch the movie after reading it and then write something about the comparison. Meanwhile, I leave here a link to the text:

A review of the film can be read in Vanity Fea.

CATALECTIC

2009-02-10T11:48:00.002+01:00

Some ago I wrote about the book The Know-It-All, by A. J. Jacobs, a story about a man who imposed himself the task of reading the whole Encyclopedia Britannica. Well, after this I started myself to read two dictionaries: the Oxford Concise Dictionary of Linguistics and the O.C.D. of Literature (What? You know that even the most stupid idea gets a bunch of followers. Besides, it´s not that bad!) It is not as boring as you may think and once in a while I find some pearls, like this one,

Catalectic: Lacking the final syllable expected in the regular pattern of a metrical verse line. The term is most often used of the common English trochaic line in which the optional final unstressed syllable is not used. Of these lines from Shelley´s ‘To a Skylark’, the second and the fourth are catalectic:

In the golden lighting
Of the sunken sun.
O’er which clouds are bright’ning.
Thou dost float and run

WARNING!

2009-02-08T00:01:00.000+01:00

Is there anybody really out there? And I´m not talking about you, José Ángel. You are the only one (God bless you!) who takes the time to write some comments. This blog has only two contributors, Maite and me. Most of my entries are bad written, academically incorrect (don´t miss my next entry about linguistic diversity!) or both and nobody says ANYTHING! Does anybody care? Take part, guys! Get involved! If you don´t want to risk your reputation, you can do it anonymously or using a pseudonym (and spend a good time inventing funny nicknames, such as “The Shadow Student”, “A bored reader” or “The Angry Scholar”). Now seriously, if the participation in this blog doesn´t increase, I´ll start writing about ‘low culture’: comic books, Tele 5 tv programs and Dan Brown´s best sellers. You´ve been warned!

WHO WROTE...?

2009-02-07T09:03:00.000+01:00

This is a memory exercise for all those of us who studied English Literature I (From the Anglo-Saxons to the 17th century) and need to refresh the authors and works we learnt about.

¿ENSAYOS ININTELIGIBLES? ¡NO! ¿DE VERDAD?

2009-02-06T03:53:00.000+01:00

El biólogo danés Kaj Sand-Jensen ha proporcionado una posible respuesta para el que bien puede ser uno de los grandes enigmas de la ciencia moderna, junto con el motivo de la desaparición de los dinosaurios: la razón por la que muchos de los ensayos escritos por los académicos de nuestra era son prácticamente incomprensibles.
Sand-Jensen, profesor de biología en la Universidad de Copenhage, ha resuelto este misterio popular analizando la prosa de sus colegas y aislando sus fallos estilísticos. En un artículo publicado por la revista ecológica Oikos, Sand-Jensen señala los rasgos que vuelven aburridos este tipo de ensayos y las razones para que sean así, la primera de las cuales es desviar la atención de ellos mismos: “Estas tácticas evitan que el lector tenga una idea clara de cuál es el objetivo del ensayo y de la dirección que sigue su línea de pensamiento, permitiendo, al mismo tiempo, al autor ocultar su ausencia de ideas originales”, dice Sand-Jensen.
Albert H. Teich, director de la Academia Americana para el Progreso de la Ciencia, considera que la capacidad para aburrir es una adaptación evolutiva para la auto-preservación. “Si tu artículo es aburrido nadie lo lee, y si nadie lo lee no puede ser criticado o rebatido, pero a pesar de todo, una vez que ha sido publicado, puede figurar en tu CV. Y cuanto más larga es tu lista de publicaciones, más oportunidades se te presentan”, dice Teich.
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