“This could be heaven for everyone” by Queen – Karaoke version
Languages used:
English and Xhosa
Animals featured:
None
A very nice lady helps me to get an idea of what the click consonants of Xhosa sound like.
This video managed to get a share of silly comments from people who don’t really get it. Never mind. Tidak apa apa.
This series, possibly beginning with this one, even though it is the 102nd video uploaded to YouTube, marks a certain development in the way I presented the video material. The cutting in of background music, the use of a common intro for series, the gallery shots with background music. This is an early prototype of about 2 or 3 hundred similarly style films from travel to different places. It’s not exactly the mode I settled into, but it’s well on the way there.
One thing I quite like about this one looking back is the attempt to use music in the backing track together with the ambient noises, like the drums of the waterfront performers here on the Victoria and Albert Waterfront in Cape Town. I have great memories of this place and would be happy to go to Cape Town again if ever I get the chance.
Apart from anything else, there were friendships made there which gave me a lot of value in my life. Just that alone, even if it had been nothing like the paradise it was, would have been well worth the trip.
This is a video you might like to watch if you are interested in the sorts of things that might happen if they lose your luggage on an intercontinental flight.
We have a look at the room I got at the Arabella Sheraton in Capetown. They managed to lose my luggage (that was my first time so far for lost luggage, first of many) and so we have a look at KLM‘s so-called “care collection”. I had lost luggage with Lufthansa and with KLM and both of those companies behaved properly. I had lost luggage with SAS and they were hopeless and impossible. When the luggage finally appeared it had been plundered and no compensation was available as it was only one day before the 14 days they say.
The upshot is I never flew SAS again, but I still fly Lufthansa and KLM with confidence.
In this seventh lesson in the 10 lesson course on the Russian alphabet known as RL-101 series, we find ourselves in the Arabella Sheraton in Cape Town South Africa, with table Mountain looming behind my head. This is the perfect setting to place a new set of consonants on the table, namely the sibilants.
The problem with the sibilants as far as Cyril and Methodius and their acolytes were concerned is that that is a group of consonants which you simply would not find in either Latin or Greek. To this day these sounds present difficulties to people transcribing Russian sounds into Western European languages. So whereas the sounds that we have met until now have come from Greek into the Cyrillic alphabet, the missionaries to the Slavs had to look for another source in order to render these sounds in Slavonic.
Hebrew was the next choice, being another biblical language. The letter shin and the letter tzaddi are both sibilants in Hebrew, so they were brought in and also amended, so that from shin we derive three sibilant letters in Russian, and from tzaddi we derive two.
The words introduced in this lesson are as follows:
You possibly noticed a couple of changes going on around here today, so, since I rarely do anything without appending several paragraphs of justification in true Calvinist fashion, I thought I’d give you the lowdown on what is going on and why, just in case you’re remotely interested.
First off, I got a bit tired of using Quoracy Blue as the background to this blog. I couldn’t get any of the tag colour schemes in WordPress‘s “Mystique” template (which is what I’ve been using for nearly a year now and like it a lot) to work with it, it certainly clashed with many of the header images and on top of that it kind of distracted the eye from the main content. So I decided to exchange it for another of the colours I bought from the Unicef site www.ownacolour.com, namely my wife’s Christmas present (she didn’t use the malaria tablets and water the purchase funded personally, by the way, I believe they went to a village in India) which I called Elena James’ Dark Silver . At the same time I put my tabs to grey, which is one of the six colour options, and unsurprisingly they don’t clash, and even the way most of the header pics look doesn’t clash and also it is a more discrete and elegant colour all round, rather like the woman it is named for.
Anyway, since my wife owns, under the full rigour of international law that an august institution like Unicef represents, the colour with the hex code #505050, I hope people will respect that and not use the colour themselves without remembering to pray to God for her relief from her condition Multiple Sclerosis, and the additional disadvantages of having two autistic children, another child who is pathologically lazy and a fat eccentric workaholic husband who spends too much time goldlisting or messing around on the internet and whose sentences structures are far too long.
Second off, I changed the fonts again today. This one’s called Eigerdals or something. I had FF Dax before. I put both Quoracy.com and Huliganov.TV on the same look just for simplicity and a kind of commonality, as it were, but in the end that’s pretty boring and whilst FF Dax is OK, I think that this is a bit more original looking. Probably it will have difficulties with some of the foreign diacritics and I’ll have to improvise. I hope everyone can read it ok, as one size up from this looks less good – the dot on the i runs into the stalk and makes it look like the hard i in Turkish. Your feedback more than welcome.
Third off, as you can see I’ve been doing a post a day for the last ten days or so. That is made easier now by the use of scheduling, so I have started using this feature to spread out the content more evenly, so that subscribers don’t get indundated with posts on a productive day and then nothing for weeks when I’m busy with other things. I would be adding unscheduled ones like this one is on top anyway, and also I’ll be monitoring and answering comments in the same way as I was doing before.
That’s basically it. Hope you enjoy these changes.
