TIDE and CANUTE

I’ve been taking Desketa’s free online course in the Breton language.

At first, I thought Desketa was a bit old hat compared to interactive apps like Duolingo. It’s a website, and it certainly doesn’t adjust itself to fit your individual needs. Now that I’m more familiar with it, I’ve changed my mind. Desketa’s method is straightforward but effective.

The exercises include pairing words or phrases with pictures, audio recordings, or other words and phrases. There are gap fills with audio too. My least favourite exercises ask you to unscramble mixed-up words or phrases. They’re a real test of Breton spelling!

I’m just about to start Unit 10 of the course. It follows on from a fairly tough Unit 9, which introduces the negative of “to be” and shows you how to use prefixes to create antonyms. My favourite words from Unit 9 are skuizh (tired) and diskuizh (rested).

I’m surprised by how much I like Breton. From the little I know, it’s a very attractive language. You might be interested in this Breton music video:

Breton is spoken in Brittany in France. It’s a Brittonic language, closely related to Welsh and Cornish. The first Bretons left Britain for Brittany in the fifth and sixth centuries, just as Angles, Saxons, and Jutes from Northern Europe were settling in England.

Some people used to think that all speakers of Brittonic languages left England during this period (apart from Cornwall, of course). The evidence suggests that many stayed, surrounded by the first speakers of Old English.

As someone who grew up in England, I’m fascinated by the Brittonic languages. They’re a living link to England’s pre-English history. And, of course, they’re modern languages still spoken today in Northwest Europe.

I’ve studied Welsh to a basic level. I can see that Breton vocabulary has a lot in common with Welsh. To me, the two languages also feel quite different. I think I might find Breton slightly easier than Welsh, but time will tell. Here’s a Welsh music video that might interest you:

I’ve recently started an online course about ferns. The first week focuses on the variety of fern species. I didn’t know that you could tell them apart by looking at the number of divisions on the frond. You can see examples in the photographs below. They all look quite different. I took the pictures on Sunday at a botanical garden, so at least two of plants shown are from outside the UK.

The botanical terms for these different forms are undivided, pinnate, bipinnate, and tripinnate. Some fern fronds look like a single leaf, rather like a tongue. These are the undivided ones.

I’ve found it really helpful to know these distinctions. Before, I could walk past a mass of ferns and assume they were all the same. Now, by looking carefully as I go, I can spot whether an area is 90% one species and 10% another.

I’ve fallen into the habit of doing this quite a lot. It feels like an extension of my work as a proofreader, where I read through a document with my eyes peeled for potential problems.

It’s awesome to think that ferns were around in the time of the dinosaurs. In fact, they were part of the vegetable matter that eventually became coal.