Euronia - Europe in a Parallel Universe

16 one-word anagrams I've found

Here are 16 one-word anagrams I've found on my own. By one-word anagram I mean rearrangement of the letters of one word into another word, with no spaces allowed. I'm sure these ones here have been discovered by others before me, so I'm not claiming them as mine, just sharing them in the form of animations (which I made using Wordsmith.org). Have a click through them. You may have to click Previous and Next a bit to make the gifs play, like they should do.

ocean - canoe cruelty - cutlery battle - tablet destiny - density conservation - conversation garden - danger - gander English - shingle angered - enraged pasta - tapas phantom - Hampton please - asleep Ronald - Roland - Arnold secure - rescue creation - reaction Velcro - clover bedroom - boredom

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Isn't English odd?

English is normal, right? It's all those other languages that are weird, isn't it? Well, it's an easy thing to think, as you've been speaking English from a very young age. I usually think that too, but there are moments when I think, hang on, it's the other way round - English is the odd language. I suppose all languages have their oddities, but I think English has some particularly odd ones. Here are three that I've noticed:

The Great English Vowel Shift

In English we call the letter A “ey”, we call E “ee”, I “eye”, O “oh” and U “you”. And in words, when a vowel is long, it is usually also pronounced like this, as in name (“neym”), spider (“spy-der”), seed, etc. In all other languages that I know of which use the Latin alphabet this is not the case, unless the word is borrowed from English. For example, the Italian town Pisa is not “Pie-za” but “Pee-za”, and the Dutch word for father, vader is pronounced roughly as “faa-der”, not as in the name of the character in Star Wars. It wasn't always this way - about 500 years ago, as Middle English was evolving into early Modern English, the shift to our modern pronunciation of long vowels was underway. Before that English long vowels are thought to have been pronounced in a more European way. I sometimes like to pronounce English in that way - “Ee am not very gohd at speyking, boot ee leek it”.

Silent consonants

*If you carry a k-nife you need p-sychological help.

Of all the languages I know how to pronounce, English seems peculiar in one respect; at the beginning of a word (or morpheme) consonant clusters such as kn, pn, gn, ps and pt are not pronounced as if they were two sounds - for example knight sounds like like night, pneumonia is pronounced "neumonia" and similarly xenon is pronounced "zenon". English-speakers seem to think some clusters are impossible to say.  While I can see that pt is pretty awkward to say as two sounds, speakers of other languages, like German and Greek, have no problems saying the k in Knopf or the p in psychologia.  However, I'm not going to start going round saying "he's a p-sycho", because then I would sound like the one with psychological problems.

'Do' linked to a verb

It's really old-fashioned to ask "Have we any bread?". It's pretty standard to say "Do we have any bread?". And nobody ever asks "Need you any help?" - they say "Do you need any help?". This construction with do and a verb is a distinctly English thing, which foreigners often struggle with when things get complicated, like when it is used in the past tense. In German, for example, they ask "Haben wir Brot?" and "Brauchst du Hilfe?" In the German past tense these would be "Hatten wir Brot?" and "Brauchtest du Hilfe?", and in other languages I know of it is the verbs have and need that are put in the past tense, rather than the do, because there is no do. But often foreigners get confused in English and they put all the verbs in the past tense and come up with "Did we had bread?" and "Did you needed help?". This is wrong, foreigners! You put ONLY the do in the past tense - "Did we have bread?" and "Did you need help?".

My crazy trip to Poland and why airlines suck

This was quite a while ago, but in August 2013 I went on a road trip to Kraków (Cracow) in southern Poland. The problem was how to get there. Easy! Just jump on a plane and go... well, no, there is no way in hell I was going to fly. I last flew in 1998 (I was 14) and with my severely bent spine (scoliosis) it was an absolute nightmare then and I've got a lot weaker since then. If you're in a wheelchair the only way to fly is to be transferred to a normal seat and your wheelchair and other equipment put in with the luggage. I can't really sit without my special seat, but that was in the hold, so I used pillows for support. But I was in a big tour group of other disabled people so we had to wait for all of them and all the rest of the passengers, and again in reverse at the other end in Tenerife, which was a four-hour flight from Gatwick. At the end I was in such pain that I just thought "never, ever again" and I have never flown since. Come on airlines! It's 2014 - can't you come up with something better for severely disabled people like me? I guess it would not be profitable, right? Anyway, I wasn't going to Poland by train either, because I had a hoist and commode chair and besides, I needed a wheelchair adapted van when I got to Poland. So we rented one from the UK and drove the 1000 miles (1600km) to Kraków!  I decided that, since I had only one driver (a friend of one of my carers), I needed to stop for two nights on the way and two on the way back. That was the crazy part - six days of travelling for a five-night stay in Kraków. I couldn't really make the whole trip much longer either. Fortunately I have a good friend in western Germany and another good friend in Dresden in the east, so I arranged to meet up with them on the way there and the way back. I actually stayed two nights in Dresden on the way, so I had a chance to walk through part of the Old Town and along the river Elbe with my friend. I had been there before in 2006 and they have done a really good job of restoring the many of the old bits that the Allies destroyed on those tragic nights in 1945. It's a surprisingly nice place, except that sandstone is not an ideal building material - it erodes and turns black really fast. On to Poland...

In 2006 I briefly went across the border into Poland at Görlitz/Zgorzelec and it was so run-down and the customs officials at the border (they are gone now because of free movement in the EU) looked almost Soviet - As far as I was concerned, I might as well have been in the middle of Russia! However this time we went across the border on the motorway (Autobahn/autostrada) and everything was modern and smooth and disappointingly normal and boring until Kraków. After having some fun listening to the GPS navigation lady trying to pronounce Polish street names, we got to the Ibis hotel, which was quite central, by the Vistula (Wisła) river and near Wawel Castle.

Day One - Kraków Old Town and Kazimierz

I was dropped at the Main Market Square (Rynek Główny) and was struck not only by the grandeur and beauty but by the smoothness of the paving - it was smoother for my chair than any other old town I've been to, anywhere. I was in heaven, apart from the fact I was in a province of International Tourist Land with all the living statues and souvenir stalls and crap like that. But apart from that it was very nice. I went inside St. Mary's Basilica (Kościół Mariacki) and then on through the small square (Mały Rynek) to Planty - a green, leafy walk round the edge of the Old Town, where the town walls once stood. Later we went to Kazimierz, the old Jewish part of town named after King Casimir (Kazimierz) III. It was a bit more bumpy and less attractive, but I had a brief look in the old cemetery and then we made good use of my portable-ish metal ramps to get into an Israeli restaurant for a meal. There aren't many Jews living there now, but these days it's quite a thriving tourist area with many Jewish restaurants. The film Schindler's List was partly filmed there.

Cloth hall (Sukiennice)	St Mary's Basilica (Kościół Mariacki)

Day Two - Wawel and Kościuszko's Mound

After one of my carers had left for Zakopane to get the permit for the next day's trip to the mountains, which had failed to arrive on time by post, I went along the riverbank to Wawel Castle. We spent some time finding the way to get in, which turned out to be by car, but inside the walls I found it very smooth and nicely restored. Unfortunately, none of the castle's interior was wheelchair-accessible, nor was the cathedral, but I had a good look around the beautiful renaissance courtyard and the outside of the buildings, which were in various architectural styles. I accidentally posed for a photo next to Pope John Paul II's statue, which irritated me slightly, but what can you do? It's Poland.  Later we drove to Kościuszko's Mound (Kopiec Kościuszki) and had a go at climbing the spiral path to the top, but it was steep and bumpy and too scary to go up more than halfway. It's funny because the buildings around the mound look fortified and quite old, but there are antennae and dishes on top, because RFM radio station broadcasts from there.

Me in distance going to Wawel Hill

Day Three - High Tatra Mountains and Zakopane

We drove off at 6.30 am and headed south. We had to get to the Tatra National Park no later than 9 because any private cars with a permit have to arrive before that time. From the car park there was a two-hour trek up the road to the lake, Morskie Oko, so obviously I needed to take the van up there. Unfortunately we had picked the wrong day (a public holiday), so the road was already super-busy, but despite the crowds the lake and mountains were stunning and the weather was beautiful and warm for 1300 metres (4500 ft) above sea-level. We all sat by the tourist chalet in the sunshine, looking at the lake and mountains, which rise about 1000 metres above the lake. We had a strange brunch there of oscypek smoked cheese, sour cabbage, potatoes and szarlotka - an apple cake, which is served a lot in the Polish Tatras. I went down the road for a while and breathed the mountain air before we drove down to a town called Zakopane, which is used as a base for skiers and hikers. The buildings, even the new ones, are all in this wooden Tatra mountain-chalet-style, but to be honest it's really just a dump, full of shops and eating places and tourist crap like traditionally-dressed idiots walking around for artificial historical effect. This pretty disgusting oscypek cheese that looks like a fat penis was being sold almost every ten metres and I was happy to get back to Krakow's Old Town, have a meal (in a Georgian restaurant as it happened) and see Kraków by night. Wow, Kraków was even more magical at night, with lamps lighting up the gothic, baroque and renaissance structures. Wonderful place.

Morskie Oko	Fat penises for sale!

Day Four - Bar Mleczny and Wieliczka Salt Mine

First we went for a walk somewhere between the hotel and Wawel, but sort of failed and ended up going up a main road really far before having a chance to cross in my chair. We had some very cheap lunch at a 'bar mleczny' (literally 'milk bar'), which is a really cheap kind of café that has provided meals for workers and the poor from the early 20th century until today - it was pretty much the only place in Communist times.  The atmosphere is more like a public toilet than a café and they often don't have everything (like... tea in my case. What kind of place runs out of tea?!), but the food is traditional Polish like bigos, barszcz, pierogi, kasza and pork schnitzel and it's super-cheap, like 5 zlotys (around £1) per meal. Then we headed for Wieliczka, which is almost a suburb of Kraków, and famous for its huge, centuries-old salt mine.  We took a massive wrong turn and nearly missed the last tour of the day, and then to our horror discovered that the lift down to the mine was slightly too small for my chair. However, we'd come so far and we were so determined to get down there that we actually removed my tray and an armrest or two from the chair and yanked me into that damn lift. Well, it was literally awesome down there - we went along tunnels and into big chambers and past a big pool of saltwater and even into a real, functioning cathedral where almost everything was carved out of the rock salt, even the chandeliers. We were taken into a huge dining room, which is used for functions and guests of the hotel they have down there!  It was rather like the villain's underground lair in a Bond movie. The air in the mine was cold and dry and, although I loved that place, I was quite relieved to get back to the surface, put my chair back together and feel comfortable again before our long journey back to England.

Rock-salt statues carved by miners

Smuggling ourselves into Germany... and a very odd restaurant

We set off early, which was useful because the Polish autostrada sucks like in France, where you have to join a traffic jam in order to pay at the toll gates. At the German border a police van overtook us and went in front of us. A message in its rear window flashed up saying "Willkommen in Deutschland!" - such friendly Germans! No, it actually said "Folge mir" ("Follow me"), so we followed them to a place off the road and they asked us questions like "Do you smoke?". They looked at our passports and had a look in the van and, instead of a van-load of cigarettes and drugs, they found three Poles, me and a load of equipment and luggage - they let us go almost immediately... and they never found the heroin I had stuffed under my chair. No, there was no heroin really. We still arrived in Dresden sooner than expected, despite all this, and we met up with my friend and her boyfriend. He suggested a restaurant near the station called Schwerelos (Effortless). Wow, what a funny place! The food was good, but nothing really exotic. What was exotic, however, was that you ordered with one of four tablet computers that were connected to your table, and the food came on rails, rather like a rollercoaster. It was effortless more for the staff than the diners, though, because they just sent the plates and pots of food by rollercoaster, for you to serve.
The next day we drove to Aachen near Belgium and had a meal with my other German friend and his parents. The day after that, after getting lost in Aachen's streets and parking next to a church instead of the Cathedral, which we were looking for, we headed for the Eurotunnel in Calais and arrived home that evening.

So, thanks to the airlines and the general complications associated with being severely disabled, I had just spent eleven days going to Poland for five nights, and taken three people with me, which was not cheap even staying at "budget" Ibis hotels. However, I reasoned that instead of staying at home, I had been there, travelled by road so had seen more stuff on the way, met up with friends and probably had the best trip of my life so far.

My thoughts on learning languages

In this, my second post on this blog, I thought I would write some of my thoughts about one of my favourite pastimes; learning languages.

My experience of languages so far

Well, I live in England so it's no real surprise that I, like most English kids, didn't start learning a foreign language until the age of eleven. And in those days the choice was pretty much... French. Theoretically another option was German, but who wanted to learn a harsh, guttural language that makes you sound like a Nazi? Plus the school had trouble finding any decent German teachers, if any at all. I started learning both, got out of German after two years, and did French for five years until GCSEs... I can't speak French.  It was only in my first year at university, as one of my optional modules, that I started learning German again. I got quite far with German and I even tried one year of Modern Greek (subsidised by the Greek government... I wonder now if that was very wise on their part).  German is said to be quite a difficult language... it's not - not when you consider that I'm now having a go at Polish and a bit of Russian!

What is it about languages that I enjoy?

I'm a show-off... well that's part of it - I like impressing Germans with my ability to remember useless words like Säugetier (mammal)... and Poles by possibly being the only English person who can pronounce Polish properly  But seriously, as I learned more I realised that there are lots of good and interesting things one can discover when learning a foreign language - not only the ability to communicate.  Here are some things I have discovered in my language adventures:

An appreciation of the relationship between languages

As I started learning German I noticed the similarities between it and English. Here are some German examples: Mutter = mother, Tochter = daughter, zehn = ten, zwölf = twelve, Pfeffer = pepper.  As I knew someone who was German but knew Dutch, I had a go at learning some simple Dutch - now here are those same words in Dutch: moeder, dochter, tien, twaalf, peper.  Wow, this was amazing!  I had not only shown myself that these three West Germanic languages were closely related, but my tendency to spot patterns had shown me the High German Consonant Shift (basically in German you get z or ss instead of t, pf or ff instead of p, etc.).  I love this sort of thing.  I even noticed some less obvious examples like how German Tier (animal) is cognate with English deer, which once meant animal but eventually acquired its current meaning (as in these creatures below).  In German these are actually Rentiere.

The relationship between Germanic languages is not much of a surprise, but as I started looking up some Polish words, I noticed that Polish also has some relationship with Germanic, but this is far less obvious because it is a Slavic language.  Just a couple of examples: matka = mother, noc = night, stać = to stand.  I won't go into more detail, but the Slavic, Germanic, nearly all European and some Asian languages (like Sanskrit) are all in a big family called Indo-European (a notable non-member of this family is Hungarian, which looks like it was imported into Europe by aliens).  Basically, this stuff fascinates me.

The chance to use other writing systems

I started teaching myself Russian a couple of months ago, but I actually learnt the Russian alphabet in no time, over a decade ago. Same with Greek, which has so many similarities to Cyrillic/Russian. It's wonderful when you see a sequence of strange letters like ГЕОГРАФИЯ and you decode each letter and get G E O G R... oh, Geography.  However Cyrillic and Greek are relatively boring alphabets and work the same way as the Latin one, with consonants, vowels, capitals and lower-case letters.  A more interesting script I can read (though not understand the language) is the Korean one - Hangul.  Hangul looks scary at first and comes in blocks, each representing a syllable, but unlike Chinese or the 3 Japanese scripts, each block is made up of actual vowels and consonants so each syllable can be read phonetically. The picture below shows roughly how it works.  The text in the picture says H a n - g eu l (Hangul).

I learnt new sounds, concepts and stuff my language doesn't have

I guess the first concept we English speakers find strange in foreign languages is gender - why is a table male? Then there are grammatical cases. Although, say, English and French actually kind of have cases, you don't really have to think about them.  In German you do, which is eye-opening to an English speaker, but if you really want to get into cases and complicated grammar - but not learn Latin or Ancient Greek - then something Slavic like Polish or Russian is very interesting... and very difficult.  Another eye-opening thing in Slavic languages (especially Czech, for instance) is the seemingly ridiculous clusters of consonants you get.  If you show most English speakers the Polish word wszczniesz (you will initiate) or Czech čtvrtek (Thursday), something like the following message will probably pop up in their head...

Then they'll say "What?  But you can't say that".  But of course you can say it.  First of all, sz, cz and rz are single sounds in Polish, so it can look worse than it is, then in čtvrtek the r kind of acts like a vowel, giving the word two syllables. And you can actually make a lot more sounds and sequences of sounds than you think, but first you have to open your mind a bit and not think so Englishly, or whatever language you speak. Once you're used to it čtvrtek is not so hard to say.

Maybe more respect for other cultures

When I was starting my Modern Greek course I was thinking "What am I doing here?". I felt I didn't belong there because I had no connection to or knowledge of Greece or its culture, but as the course progressed and we learned a bit about Greece along the way, I felt more relaxed and comfortable and I think a bit more respectful and interested in Greek stuff. I don't think doing grammar exercises from a book is necessarily going to have this effect, but usually a language course you attend will cover a bit of culture, like religious festivals or buying food. I don't know if it works the same for everyone, but I think getting into foreign languages, food or anything is a good start in trying to build bridges between cultures and peoples. And on this note I'll end this very long blog post. Auf Wiedersehen.

7 things I LOVE about Russia

We've heard a lot of bad stuff about Russia in the news recently, but it doesn't really matter to me what the Russian government may or may not be doing. There are just certain things about Russia that I really like, and here are seven of them:

1) The Cyrillic alphabet

I love the Cyrillic alphabet, used in Russia and other countries, because it's different enough from the Latin alphabet to be cool, but it's similar enough to have the same styles and fonts applied to it as the Latin and Greek alphabets. Many of the letters are similar to Greek ones, because it is related to the Greek alphabet, the connection being the Orthodox Church - it's complicated but it is named after St Cyril, a 10th-Century Greek missionary.

2) St Basil's Cathedral

It's almost ridiculous, but so colourful and magical - it looks like if you licked it it would taste sweet like pryaniki (gingerbread), except the green bits, which would obviously taste like, well... basil I guess ;o) But seriously, Red Square wouldn't be the same without St Basil's, just as Russia wouldn't be the same without all its other wonderful churches. By the way, St Basil's no longer functions as a church but houses a museum.

3) Russian winter hats (ushanki)

These hats must be essential for surviving the Russian winter. Why do I love them? I suppose it brings to mind big, tough Russia that can take a proper, harsh winter, unlike England, which almost shuts down after a few snowflakes have settled. I think they also look nice, especially with the earflaps flapped up inside, as in the picture below on the right.

4) Soviet-era architecture

I don't mean the rows of identical concrete tower blocks that we tend to associate with Communism - I mean the earlier, good stuff like the soaring Socialist-Realist skyscrapers and the Moscow Metro.` I'm no fan of Stalin (after all, for a while he was playing with the idea of demolishing St Basil's!), but the architecture under his rule was quite monumental and impressive, in my opinion.

Moscow State University, main building	Red Army Theatre, Moscow
Kiyovskaya station, Moscow Metro	Elektrozavodskaya station, Moscow Metro

5) Matryoshka dolls

Also known as Russian dolls, they are a late 19th-century adaptation of Chinese boxes, fitting one inside another inside another, and so on... I wish this went on forever, but realistically it has to stop or they'd be microscopic! There are other versions too, like Russian and Soviet leaders, which became popular in the late 1980's as a kind of joke.

The original set of dolls by Zvyozdochkin and Malyutin, 1892	Putin, Yeltsin, Gorbachev, Brezhnev, Khrushchev, Stalin, Lenin, and some tiny Tsars

6) Russian cars

I know the reputation of Russian cars is not exactly up there with Ferrari or even Volkswagen, and I know some Russian cars are not so Russian after all, like the VAZ (Lada) 2101/FIAT 124, but for some reason I love old Russian cars - they were relatively unknown in the West (except Ladas, which were very popular in the UK and I remember them), they were simple and rugged and were mostly not at all posh (I don't really like posh things). Actually, I'm not an expert on Russian cars - I just like them, so here are some pictures.

Vladimir Putin looking at his 1972 Zaporozhets (Ukrainian actually)	Lada Niva/VAZ-2121
GAZ Volga 31029 looks like a cross between an 80's Mercedes S-Class and a Morris Marina!	Much nicer looks - a much earlier GAZ Volga 21

7) Russian (and Soviet) aircraft

Well, I like aircraft from all over the world; British, American, French, Japanese, German, as well as Russian. As one of the two superpowers, the USSR made some awesome and wonderful contributions to aviation. I don't want to get into the history or politics of the Cold War or weapons, but you've got to admit, planes like the MiG-29, Tupolev Tu-144 and Antonov An-225 Mriya (well, strictly that's Ukrainian) were and still are pretty impressive.

It's Concorde, right? Wrong. Tupolev Tu-144.	Antonov An-225 'Mriya' ('Dream') carrying Buran, the Soviet space shuttle that flew only once in 1986.

...and below, we have a video of the Russian-made Mil Mi-26, the biggest helicopter in the world, lifting up a CHINOOK like it were a toy helicopter - and amazingly it has ONE - giant - rotor!