How many tenses are there in English?
August 17th, 2014 by Roger Darlington
As a native English speaker, I had no idea how many tenses there are in my language because I am just so familiar with it. So I was surprised this week when a colleague of mine, who is trained as a teacher of English as a foreign language, told me that there are 13 tenses. Surprised? You can see what they are here.
13 tenses seems like a lot to me. But, so far as I can work out, French and Spanish have 17 tenses. In contrast, German seems to manage with only four (there are two past tenses). And then there is Mandarin Chinese which has no tenses (if only it was not tonal and used the Roman alphabet).
How many tenses are there in your language or the language you are learning?
Posted in Cultural issues | Comments (0)
What are the most popular names for new babies in Britain?
August 16th, 2014 by Roger Darlington
According to the data compiled annually by the Office of National Statistics (ONS), the most popular names for children born in England & Wales during 2013 – published this week – were as follows:
| Position | Boys | Girls |
| 1 | Oliver | Amelia |
| 2 | Jack | Olivia |
| 3 | Harry | Emily |
| 4 | Jacob | Ava |
| 5 | Charlie | Isla |
| 6 | Thomas | Jessica |
| 7 | Oscar | Poppy |
| 8 | William | Isabella |
| 9 | James | Sophie |
| 10 | George | Mia |
| 11 | Alfie | Ruby |
| 12 | Joshua | Lily |
| 13 | Noah | Grace |
| 14 | Ethan | Evie |
| 15 | Muhammed | Sophia |
| 16 | Archie | Ella |
| 17 | Leo | Scarlett |
| 18 | Henry | Chloe |
| 19 | Joseph | Isabelle |
| 20 | Samuel | Freya |
There are some patterns here.
First of all, astonishingly the most popular boys’ name and the second most popular girls’ name are essentially the same (Oliver and Olivia) – what is technically known as cognates – and these names have been in the top two for their gender for the last five years. Is this the case in any other nation? Second, it is striking how traditional most of the names are for both boys and girls, although for the boys it is interesting that the familiar form of names rather than the original version is often preferred – Jack instead of John, Harry instead of Harold, Charlie instead of Charles, Alfie instead of Alfred, Archie instead of Archibold. Third, in the case of boys, five of the top 20 names begin with the letter ‘J’ while, in the case of girls, 10 of the top 20 names end with the letter ‘a’, seven of the top 20 names end with the sound ‘ee’, and ten of the top 20 names contain the letter ‘l’ (in three cases, twice).
On the other hand, the name John, which is the most common male name in the Britain, is at a mere 107th place in the 2013 listings, while David – which is the second most common name in Britain – slipped out of the top 50 of names chosen for baby boys born in 2004 and has only just come back (it is currently 50th). Similarly Margaret – the most common female name in the population as a whole – does not even appear in the top 100 names chosen for girls these days, while Susan – the second most common name in Britain – is not even in the top 100.
These observations underline how much fashion shapes the popularity of different names. Fashion is a stronger influence with girls’ names than those of boys. So, for example, in the last 10 years (2003-2013) Ivy is up 733 places to number 66, Lexi is up 729 places to 42, Bella is up 563 places to 56, Sienna is up 405 places to 22, and Elsie is up 361 places to 47.
It should be noted that the Office of National Statistics (ONS) produces its ranking of the popularity of names using the exact spelling of the name given at birth registration. If one combines the numbers for names with very similar spellings, a very different picture is revealed. For boys, combining the occurrence of Mohammed, Muhammad, Mohammad & Muhammed plus eight other spellings of the names would put it in first place – a reflection of the changing ethnicity of the British population. Similarly, if one combines the occurrence of Isabella, Isabelle, Isabel and Isobel, one would find the name top of the girls’ list and, if one took Lily and Lilly together, the name would come three.
You can find the top 100 boys and girls names in 2012 click here.
You can find my comprehensive guide to naming practices around the world here.
Posted in British current affairs, Cultural issues | Comments (2)
How worried should we be about the growing number of potholes on the Information Superhighway?
August 15th, 2014 by Roger Darlington
It’s amazing how well the Internet performs considering that so many different organisations supply the infrastructure and that so many different demands are made on the network and that so many individuals and companies all around the globe are using its services.
But, on a typical day, outages normally affect 6,000 routes and, earlier this week, the number doubled to 12,600. The number of routes mapped by the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) has just passed 512,000 which presents its own technical problems.
Then there is the issue of Internet addresses. The standard version 4 of the Internet Protocol (IPv4) ‘only’ provides 4.3 billion potential addresses but we are now running out of addresses and some infrastructure companies have been slow to roll out IPv6 which provides access to vastly more addresses.
You can read an article on the current problems, carried by today’s “Guardian”, here.
Now, as long as ten years ago, I first wrote a column about the technical challenges faced by the Internet. Seven years ago, I devoted a column to the capacity problems faced by the Net. Five years ago, I produced a column explaining the need for IPv6. A year ago, in a column, I detailed a series of breakdowns on the Net.
So we have seen these problems coming for a long time …
Posted in Internet | Comments (0)
A listicle of the new words to enter the dictionary
August 14th, 2014 by Roger Darlington
How many of these new words have you come across?
Posted in Cultural issues | Comments (0)
Where did ISIS or the Islamic State come from?
August 14th, 2014 by Roger Darlington
The BBC explains in the short video and timeline here.
Posted in World current affairs | Comments (0)
The Imperial War Museum and the First World War
August 13th, 2014 by Roger Darlington
I have visited the Imperial War Museum in London many times but, on 19 July 2014, the museum reopened with new First World War Galleries to mark the centenary of the outbreak of what used to be called the Great War. So today I revisited the museum with my Sloval friend Ivan to see the new galleries and we spent three hours studying the fascinating texts and exhibits.
I always learn so much from these exhibitions. For instance, I had not fully appreciated the nature of the German atrocities in Belgium in the first days of the war (whole civilian communities were massacred) or the use of gas by the Allies as well as the Germans (neither side found it effective) or the extent of the hostility towards British men who remained on the Home Front (employers had to issue those needed for war work in manufacturing with special badges).
At the end of the galleries is a wall with various statistics on the casualties of the war, such as:
- Taking the four years of the war, on average over 6,000 soldiers were killed every day.
- One in every six British families suffered a direct bereavement.
- Some 750,000 British solders were killed.
- Almost 250,000 soldiers from other nations in the British Empire were killed.
- Almost 1.4 million French soldiers were killed.
- Over 2 million German soldiers were killed.
- Some 1.8 million Russian soldiers were killed.
- Over 16% of Serbs died – proportionately the greatest loss of any nation.
Posted in History | Comments (1)
A tribute to the actor Robin Williams
August 12th, 2014 by Roger Darlington
Susan Schneider, the widow of the acclaimed actor Robin Williams, has said of his death: “As he is remembered, it is our hope the focus will not be on Robin’s death, but on the countless moments of joy and laughter he gave to millions.”
In that spirit, I encourage you to revisit some of his many wonderful performances in so many films and offer brief reviews of just four of his more recent movies:
- “Good Will Hunting” – my review here.
- “Insomnia” – my review here.
- “Night At The Museum” – my review here.
- “Night At The Museum 2” – my review here.
Posted in Cultural issues | Comments (0)
So is fruit really good for you or it is actually bad for you?
August 11th, 2014 by Roger Darlington
I had a long conversation recently with a relative who told me that most fruit is not good for you because of the sugar content. There’s a lot of conflicting information on the Internet, but this advice from an Icelandic guy seems sensible to me.
So it seems that I can keep eating a banana with my granola cereal, but I have to give up my concentrated orange juice. What do you think?
Posted in Miscellaneous | Comments (0)
“Hard Choices” (4): my review of the memoir
August 10th, 2014 by Roger Darlington
I have now finished reading the 600-page memoir by Hillary Clinton of her four years as America’s Secretary of State. You can read it here.
Posted in American current affairs, History, World current affairs | Comments (0)
American presidents (7): Bill Clinton
August 9th, 2014 by Roger Darlington
The final session of my City Lit course on post-war US presidents covered two: the elder Bush and Clinton. This session saw a return of the lecturer Paul Hadjipieris who had previously covered Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter. He is a personable and able lecturer and we all learned a lot.
Bill Clinton was the 42nd president and served from 1993-2001.
There is no doubt that the guy is super bright – according to a table shown us by our lecturer, his IQ is 182, the highest of all the post=war presidents. There is no doubt that he was hugely ambitious and a terrific political campaigner – he was the youngest ever governor of Arkansas at the age of just 32 and, when he was first elected president, he was 47. In spite of the Republicans taking both houses of Congress in 1994, he managed to win re-election in 1996.
He was not a traditional Democrat, believing in stable taxes and balanced budgets. Indeed he produced the first balanced budget for 24 years and the Congressional Budget Office reported a budget surplus between the years 1998 and 2000, the last three years of Clinton’s presidency. Yet he also presided over the longest period of peacetime economic expansion in American history. By contrast, he failed to achieve his desired reform of health care because of Congressional opposition.
In terms of foreign affairs, he avoided ‘boots on the ground’ but his time in office saw both the Oslo Accords on the Arab-Israeli conflict and the Dayton Accords on the Bosnian-Serb conflict.
Sadly Clinton’s tenure of the White House was mired in scandal from the start with first the Whitewater real estate allegations, then the Paula Jones sexual harassment case, and most imfamously the Monica Lewinsky case. The House of Representatives approved two articles of impeachment against him but the Senate did not manage to achieve the two-thirds majority necessary to convict him. He was forced into making a humiliating public apology.
In spite of all this scandal, he left the White House with the highest end-of-office approval rating of any US president since World War II. Since then, he has been involved in public speaking and humanitarian work and was a fierce campaigner for his wife Hillary when she sought the Democratic nomination for the presidency. What might this man have achieved if he’d kept his penis in his pants? Will his First Lady yet become the first female president?
You can read more about Bill Clinton here.
Posted in History | Comments (1)