The Garden Reading, 1898Mary Cassatt, 1844-1926
måndag 31 maj 2010
söndag 30 maj 2010
lördag 29 maj 2010
A beautiful evening
The Common Swifts returned earlier this week. So here I am, outside the kitchen (dressed in winter coat, mittens, hat and several blankets) watching them playing tag and screaming. It looks like they're having lots of fun — but I guess their lives are pretty tough.
The sun is about to set now at 22:06, and will rise around 4:00 in the morning. It is hard to go to bed when the nights are so beautiful
torsdag 27 maj 2010
onsdag 26 maj 2010
tisdag 25 maj 2010
måndag 24 maj 2010
söndag 23 maj 2010
lördag 22 maj 2010
fredag 21 maj 2010
torsdag 20 maj 2010
onsdag 19 maj 2010
tisdag 18 maj 2010
måndag 17 maj 2010
söndag 16 maj 2010
Å, Ä and Ö
Å, Ä and Ö are the three last letters in the Swedish alphabet. If you look for Åke Ögren's phone number in the phone book, you have to look at the end of the book. To us they aren't simply an a or o with circles or dots over — they are three separate letters. The Swe-dish word "laga" means mend, but the word "låga" means flame. Väg means way, but våg means wave (in the water or hair) or a balance (to weigh things on). Lök means onion while a lok is an locomotive. So you have to know where to place the circles and dots, or the sentence might mean something you didn't mean!
How do you pronounce these letters is a common question — and a good one.
Like in most other (if not all) languages, the same letter is pronounced differently, depending on the letters which surround it. So these examples won't cover all the possibilities — not to mention dialects.
Å, is pronounced as the a in law.
Ä as the a in fast — the American way of saying fast, that is.
Ö, is similar to u in fur.
I know that English speaking people some-times refer to these letter as umlaut — which I consider wrong even if it has become pretty common. The German word umlaut means "around/changed"+"sound". And is used when a vowel changes like o in mouse becomes i in plural, mice. So English also has umlaut, just as Swedish and many other languages.
How do you pronounce these letters is a common question — and a good one.
Like in most other (if not all) languages, the same letter is pronounced differently, depending on the letters which surround it. So these examples won't cover all the possibilities — not to mention dialects.
Å, is pronounced as the a in law.
Ä as the a in fast — the American way of saying fast, that is.
Ö, is similar to u in fur.
I know that English speaking people some-times refer to these letter as umlaut — which I consider wrong even if it has become pretty common. The German word umlaut means "around/changed"+"sound". And is used when a vowel changes like o in mouse becomes i in plural, mice. So English also has umlaut, just as Swedish and many other languages.
lördag 15 maj 2010
Reading today
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Reading Aloud (Sarah Bernhardt and Christine Nilsson)Julius LeBlanc Stewart, 1855-1919
