This postA day goes by without blogging and I feel like the world has come to a halt. Methinks I need to unplug from cyberspace a bit. (And while I don’t really need to say this, the Middle English nerd / English Language major in me wants to point out that I’m using “methinks” to mean “it seems to me,” not “I think.” For what it’s worth, once upon a time in Old English there were two words who looked very much alike, Þyncan and Þencan. Þyncan meant “to seem,” whereas Þencan meant “to think.” Eventually they converged into a single word (like reverse Siamese twin surgery). In doing so, the expression “me Þincð” — which used Þyncan, not Þencan — became “methinks.” And people thought it meant “I think.” They lived happily ever after. The end.)
As part of researching this parenthetical note which has completely taken over this blog post, I ran across two rather cool things. The first is that the OED now has an RSS feed for the Word of the Day. Today’s word, for example, is manurance.
The second is an online version of Bosworth and Toller’s Anglo-Saxon Dictionary. ~drool~ There are some large gaps in it, but it’s still not too bad. Especially considering the cheapest I can find the book itself online is $150, with the next cheapest being $322 or so all the way up to over $600. Just a wee bit out of my budget, I’m afraid.
Speaking of languages, a couple of weeks ago Rikker pointed me to a site that has several FSI language courses available, including both the audios (in MP3) and the workbooks. These are from the Foreign Service Institute, which means they’re solid. (The government’s been using them to teach languages for a while now.) Right now they have Arabic, Cantonese, Chinese (Mandarin, I suppose), French, German, Greek, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, and Vietnamese. For example, the Spanish programmatic course has a student text (in PDF), an instructor’s manual (in PDF), and over 45 MP3s of audio to go with it. And it’s all free! (Legally, I hasten to add. :)) Almost too good to be true.
