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This is the sound at the very beginning of Hancock's Half Hour, isn't it?

posted at: 20:44 | path: /baltism/redwhitered | permanent link to this entry

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This Key is for the use of Teachers only and is issued on the understanding that it shall not get into the hands of any Pupil.

Hee hee. But there are no macrons in the answers. Qualitative, not quantitative, I suppose.

posted at: 21:55 | path: /baltism/redwhitered | permanent link to this entry

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I don't want to suggest that the considerable age of some of my Latin and Greek textbooks meant that I learnt either language properly. I've just tried to guess the length of the vowels in vir, femina, canis and feles and got half of them wrong. And the short -a in femina I only managed because it was nominative, not ablative, a fact I picked up at university.

posted at: 21:42 | path: /baltism/redwhitered | permanent link to this entry

If you had school textbooks with introductions referring to the "Four Concords" and "boys" to the exclusion of "girls", then you'll be as disappointed as I was to learn that the Latvian words for "sailor", jūrnieks and matrozis, are masculine in form as well as masculine in gender.

Mathiassen's A Short Grammar of Latvian got my hopes up by declining māsa, "sister" (fourth declension), and then saying

Care should, however, be taken for nouns designating males. They are of masculine gender (cf. p. 40) and have the ending -am (not *-ai) in the dative sg., e.g. puika : puikam boy...

Not a nauta to be seen.

The fifth declension is better value, though. Bende, a hangman, is epicene.

posted at: 21:30 | path: /baltism/redwhitered | permanent link to this entry

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Beware pie, nest, ogle, bite, ass and logs, because they aren't what they seem.

Apelsīns, ķiploks, ļaudis and gurķis, on the other hand, are.

posted at: 21:55 | path: /baltism/redwhitered | permanent link to this entry