09:00 I check my smartphone and look at today's posts on the quora website. I'm surprised to see a map of American counties, represented in various colours according to where most of their residents trace their ancestry to. They are overwhelmingly coloured in orange to indicate German ancestry.
This map surprises me. We often read that German ancestry is dominant over there, but I had not realised the extent of this dominance. How fascinating!
10:50 It's sunny but bitterly cold. Lois and I go for a walk over the local football field, and to check how many old codgers are out on the tennis courts today - it turns out to be 4 when we arrive, a number which swells to 6 by the time we leave - what a crazy world we live in !!!!
four old codgers playing slow-motion tennis this morning,
despite the cold temperatures, bless them !!!!
Lois stops to get us a coffee and a hot chocolate at the Whiskers Coffee stand - I hand her a £10 note so she can get some coins in change - my second coronavirus vaccine appointment is for Sunday afternoon, and it's nice to have some spare coins for the parking ticket machines at the Lido, in case credit cards and the ParkByPhone app both don't work. Unfortunately she forgets what I've said, and accepts a £5 note as her change - but I don't blame her: my own memory is not what it was, to put it mildly!
Lois (right) queues up at the Whiskers coffee stand, at a suitable social distance -
she has to wait behind a man in a pair of unattractive black shorts,
of the kind that seem to be fashionable at the moment - what madness !!!!
By the time we come away, it's sleeting and/or snowing - brrrrr!!!!
15:00 We realise we haven't used the car for 8 days so we take it for a spin to Winchcombe. On the road down to Postlip we see the little lambs in the fields - how sweet they are haha!!
we see baby lambs from the car window - how cute they are haha !!!!
16:00 We come home and have a cup of Earl Grey tea and a muffin on the sofa. I look at one of the 3 books I got for my birthday, "The Horse, the Wheel and Language" by David W. Anthony.
Anthony has established that Proto-Indo-European, the ancestor language of virtually all European, Indian and Iranian languages was only spoken in its pure form in a single "homeland" until about 3500 or 3000 BC. After that, Indo-European peoples started to drift away from the "homeland" and look for their own little patch somewhere in Europe or Asia.
But where exactly was this "homeland" that they drifted away from? There's been some controversy about this in the past, but David W Anthony has sorted it all out for us, which is nice.
When the various groups started dispersing, they took their Indo-European vocabulary with them, which gives us lots of clues about what the homeland was like. The words that survived that indicate flora and fauna all suggest a temperate zone homeland (birch, otter, beaver, lynx, bear, horse). There were originally no words for exclusively Mediterranean, or tropical, plants or animals. This points to the homeland being in a temperate zone.
The original language evidently also had words for bee and honey, which means the homeland could not have been east of the Ural Mountains, in Siberia, where honeybees have never been native.
typical honey bees - the species doesn't like Siberia, because there aren't
enough hard wood trees like oaks and limes.
And bees know what they like, that's for sure!!!
Yes, honey bees knew what side of the Urals their bread was buttered on, no doubt about that! [That's enough about honey-bees - Ed]
In addition, the original language had words for "horse", which means it's unlikely that the homeland would have been in Iran, the Middle East or the Indian subcontinent, where horses were rare.
By process of elimination, that leaves, as candidates for the Indo-European homeland, only temperate Europe, including the Steppes west of the Urals, and the temperate parts of Anatolia and the Caucasus mountains.
This is where proximity with another language family, the Finno-Ugric family comes into play. The homeland of this other family is known to be in the area of the Urals.
As the two language families share a small number of vague similarities, Anthony argues that this adds weight to the theory that the Indo-European homeland was also near the Urals, which probably indicates the Steppe region between the Caucasus and the Urals, north of the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea. Simples!
the probable homelands of the two language families
Hungarian is one of the Finno-Ugric languages still being spoken today. When I first started studying it, I noticed a very small number of vague similarities with other European languages. The word for you (singular), for example, is "te", the same as in French and Latin, or like "thee" in English. Verb forms for when "I" do something end in -m in Hungarian, like "I am" in English, and so on.
Anthony says there are other similarities: and I remember that when you are obligated to do something in Hungarian they use the word "kell". This is apparently related to, for instance, "skal" in Danish, "shall" in English, as in "Thou shalt not steal" etc. Simples! These similarities are either caused by the 2 language families having a common ancestor, or explained by borrowings from between two neighbouring peoples. Either way it suggests the Indo-European homeland was close geographically to the Ural-Altaic homeland.
Fascinating stuff!!!
20:00 Lois's sect's Tuesday Bible Reading Group is taking a week off this week, so we both settle down on the couch to watch a bit of TV, the last episode in the first season of the 1970's sitcom "The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin".
This sitcom is all about a bored, middle-aged, "Sunshine Desserts" middle-manager, Reggie Perrin, who is suffering a mid-life crisis. In previous episodes of the series, a disastrous speech that Reggie makes to the British Fruit Association (BFA) finally precipitates his complete mental breakdown, leading him to fake his own death by drowning.
part of the disastrous speech Reggie made to the British Fruit Association (BFA),
a speech that precipitated his final mental breakdown
here we see BFA officials bundling Reggie off stage
Reggie's eventual final breakdown leads him to fake his own death by drowning, so that he can start a new life, and become "that person that he always wanted be". Unfortunately he has no idea who "that person" is - oh dear!
After some wandering about the country Reggie ends up back in his old neighbourhood in the London suburbs, where under the assumed identity of Reggie's supposedly South American friend, he marries his "widow", Elizabeth, and gets a job with his old firm, "Sunshine Desserts", working for his old boss, the terrifying "CJ".
There must be some deep message in all of that, mustn't there. Answers on a postcard please haha!!!
But before marrying his wife (again) and getting a new job with his old firm, Reggie, disguised with beard and moustache, first has the pleasure of attending his own memorial service, where he takes a seat unobtrusively in the back of the church.
the scene during Reggie's own memorial service - Reggie (ringed) has crept in
and taken a seat in the back of the church to hear the minister's remarks
Surprisingly the minister gives a very inspiring eulogy, also very multi-purpose one. Lois and I notice with approval that it could have been given at almost any funeral or memorial service for a man with a son who's an actor, which is nice.
A moving address, and one we can all take lessons from, we feel!
22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzzzzz!!!!
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