Today is St David's Day, the patron saint of Wales, and arguably the easiest of the 4 British saints' days to remember, as it's the first of the month, the others being St George, St Andrew and St Patrick. My late mother was Welsh, and today Steve, my American brother-in-law, sent me a virtual St David's Day card online, to commemorate my mother's national saint's day.
Happy St David's Day !
Although my father was English, my mother's family was Welsh for as far back as I could discover. About 15 years ago I traced her own mother's ancestry back a few generations through ancestors who were all primarily Welsh-speaking. I got back as far as my mother's maternal great-great-grandfather, Richard Howell, who was born on March 30th 1761 in the little village of St Donats, Glamorgan.
Richard was almost certainly baptised in the Norman font in the church of St Dunwyd's in the village.
St Dunwyd's Church, St Donat's
the church's Norman font
It's thanks to my mother that I can claim to be related (by marriage) to the well-known film actors Rex Harrison and Richard Harris.
But fascinating stuff!! [If you say so! - Ed]
Fascinating stuff !!!!!
14:30 Lois and I happen to run the local U3A Intermediate Danish Group, the only one in the UK we believe. And at 2:30 pm it's time for our fortnightly group meeting on skype. This meeting was postponed from last Thursday, a day when Lois and I had appointments at our dentist's surgery.
I settle down on the couch and listen to the radio, last week's edition of "Word of Mouth", where each week author Michael Rosen invites a guest into the studio to discuss one or other language issue. In this programme Michael's guest is UK-based American author and journalist Lane Greene, and the topic is machine translation and speech recognition.
At the moment I'm reading an intriguing book on Viking London by Thomas Williams, which Lois gave me as a Valentine's Day present this year.
flashback to February 14th: I discover that Lois
has given me a nice book for a Valentine's Day present
In the chapter I'm reading at the moment, the author is describing the ramshackle process by which King Alfred the Great (reigned 886 to 889 AD) set about moulding the disparate Anglo-Saxon tribes into all thinking of themselves as "English", i.e. as one people.
Alfred started out by defining the fact of "being English" as a couple of negatives: the English were the people who lived in these parts but who weren't Welsh and who also weren't Danish, or at least "not Scandinavian".
Well it's a start isn't it haha!
Another fun session, but dominated again by lots of chit-chat - in English - about the things old codgers and old crows are mostly interested in: i.e grandchildren, holidays, aches-and-pains and the like.
We do however, manage also to read another 5 pages of our Danish crime novel. We're now getting close to the book's climax, which is another 10 pages away, so another two meetings should see it "done and dusted".
the Danish crime novel we've been reading in our group
I've got a few short stories lined up to do after we finish our current crime novel, which has taken about 2 years to complete. After all this time now few of us can even remember the beginning of the book, and the grisly murder that kicked it all off. What madness !!!!!!
18:00 Although it's Pancake Day today, we have a fish meal. We've decided to put the pancakes off till tomorrow, due to pressure of zooms. Our Danish group zoom only finishes at 4:15 pm, and Lois has two further zooms tonight, her yoga and her Bible seminar. Yikes !!!!!
19:00 Lois disappears into the dining-room for her yoga zoom session with her great-niece Molly, followed by her sect's weekly Bible seminar.
Lois's zoom yoga teacher, her great-niece Molly
UK-based American "Economist" journalist Lane Greene,
author of books such as "You Are What You Speak"
I know I became dimly aware a few years ago that machine translation software like Google Translate, which for years used to be quite rubbishy, had suddenly smartened up and become not far off perfect most of the time.
Yesterday, Steve, my American brother-in-law sent me some Venn diagrams that I had a bit of trouble with.
I was only dimly aware of "wordle" puzzles, and I had never seen "Love is Blind", the dating show where people commit to marry somebody they haven't seen, just on the basis of conversations they have had with them.
And in a Gogglebox segment literally only 10 minutes apart from this "wordle" conversation, we see the Goggleboxers watching the American dating show, "Love is Blind".
Spooky, or what???!!!!!!
What madness !!!!!
Greene reveals that, apparently for years (or decades, even), starting from the 1950's, the software developers had made the mistake of trying to teach the computer a dictionary of words and a grammar book or rules, just like you might do in a foreign language classroom. And the results were appalling, as I and millions of other users had found out.
Eventually - and now we're talking well into the 2000's - the software developers realised that a different approach was needed: to just "hit" the computer with as many millions or billions of examples of previous human translations as possible - that is, examples of text written in one language and translated - by humans- into the other language, all the examples which were stored online. This approach provides the computer with the main thing that the previous approach lacked: a sense of context.
See???? Simples !!!!! And it works, as I've found out time and time again over the last 10 years or so.
So why bother to learn a foreign language? Well English-speakers are lucky because our language is the most widely known and spoken language in the world, for a start. And now we also have Google Translate and similar software, which will also allow you to fulfil the average tourist's needs, going into shops or hotels, or asking the way etc.
But there's one thing computers can't do, and Greene doesn't see it happening any time soon: and that's to have a meaningful and satisfying conversation with somebody in another language. A computer doesn't pick up on moods, irony, humour, anger, flirtatiousness etc. So maybe it's conversation that we should be concentrating on when we teach children languages at school.
Also Google Translate doesn't open your mind to the fascinating intricacies of language itself and how they all differ sometimes fundamentally and sometimes quite subtly, an interesting topic in itself.
Fascinating stuff !!!!!
20:00 I switch off the radio and watch a bit of TV, last Friday's edition of Goggle Box, where ordinary viewers are filmed watching, and reacting to, some of the week's TV programmes.
Now tonight on Gogglebox, both of these subjects come up. What are the chances of that happening, eh? Does it prove the existence of God? However, as Steve tells me, the late jazzman Humphrey Lyttleton doesn't think so, however, so the jury is still out on that one!
First, we see best friends Jenny and Lee, speaking from Jenny's park home in Hull, discuss the day's "wordle" puzzle.
21:00 Lois emerges from her double zoom session, and we have a phone conversation with our daughter Alison, who lives in Headley, Hampshire, with Ed and their 3 children Josie, Rosalind and Isaac.
Amongst other news we hear about Ed's half-marathon over the weekend, where he clocked up 1 hour 54 minutes. Also we hear that the family's Danish dog Sika has been to his "stylist" today, and he is now reported to be extremely "fragrant". Last week, when Lois and I were staying with the family, Sika was found to have been indulging in one of his occasional "hobbies", rolling in "fox poo", and the poor dog had had to be given a bit of a hose-down outside in the garden under the light of electric torches.
flashback to last Tuesday: Sika, the family's Danish dog,
was found to have been rolling himself in "fox poo",
and had to be hosed down outside under electric torchlight
21:30 We watch an old episode of the 1990's TV sitcom May to September, and then go to bed - zzzzzzzzzzz!!!!!
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