The Lake of Innisfree - revisited

In September 2010, I wrote an entry reflecting my perspective on the poem "the Lake of Innisfree" by the famous writer William Butler Yeats. In the entry, I basically agreed that going to some places we long to go could be a possible way to feel free and be happy and satisfied with our lives. However, today, reflecting back on what I wrote based on the experiences throughout the whole year 2010, I now realise that happiness is really a state of mind regardless of where we are. One could be happy just at home spending time with the beloved ones. Some are happy spending their time alone reading their books on the porches. Some might enjoy their life to the fullest but are swollen inside.

Why do English and French belong to different branches?

Let's start 5,500 years ago, a group of speakers that lived in Europe (exact location a debated topic, let's say it was the south of Russia, to follow the most mainstream opinion), they are called the Indo-Europeans.

People migrated / moved around / split up....

Current classifications divide the languages of the split by the word they used to describe "one hundred", the centum and satem languages. The satem languages were the ones to the East, that developed into the modern languages such as Polish / Latvian / Urdu / Punjabi / Kurdish / Bosnian, there were many branches of this side of the Indo-European language family. You can see an exact language family tree for the Satem languages here.

The other side of the split were the centum (pronounced 'kentum') languages, which consisted of some further groups of people that again migrated and their language evolved further into more subfamilies such as the Hellenic branch (which is the ancestor of Modern Greek), the Celtic branch, (which is the ancestor of Welsh/Scottish/Irish), the Anatolian / Toccharian branches...

... and finally the ones we are interested in, the Italic branch and the Germanic branch.

So somewhere between 1,000BC and 500BC, there were two groups of speakers, one Italic and one Germanic. The story of Germanic is that people migrated west and one group stayed behind, this is called the East Germanic branch and developed into Gothic (which is now extinct). Now what happened is some speakers went north and we had the North Germanic branch (also called 'Scandinavian', which developed into Old Norse, which then further split into East/West, and modern Norwegian/Faroese and Icelandic belong to West Norse while Swedish and Danish belong to East Norse.

So while all this is going on our speakers didn't stay still... no no they kept moving West into (I'm sure you can guess it !!) the West Germanic branch, which then further split into the German dialects, Dutch, Frisian, Saxon, and (the ancestor of) English.

So the speakers of these languages were all happy playing along around the borders of Germany/Denmark and they hear about the Romans leaving England, so they invade afterwards and bring the language which is to become English, to England (obviously it wasn't called England before they arrived.

So then the language further develops, well the dialects of the Angles, Saxons and the Jutes all spread around, resulting in today a huge massive collection of various dialects united by a standardised common language. This is where England's rich set of accents / dialects is from, these closely related (but not 100% linguistically united) peoples.

So you can see why English is a Germanic language, becomes earlier it was the same language spoken by the same ancestors of the current speakers of Dutch/Frisian/German etc, whose earlier ancestors were the same as the speakers of all Scandinavian languages and even earlier the ancestors of the Gothic people, all the same group of people, just constant evolution / mutation of the language to lead to this way I am typing to you now.

Right, where are we now? Okay, so Italic establishes itself and has a few related dialects with Latin being one of them (the only other major branch I can remember is Umbrian at the moment) but Latin established itself about the same time the Germanic speakers were all one united group.

The story then is complicated, but I'm trying to give the basic story with a lot of generalised details, but what happens is the Latin of the people (Vulgar Latin) develops, and the Romans spread all over Europe, setting up base in Portugal / Spain / Franch / Italy (where they already were), Africa, you name it, the Romans had people there, all speaking this "Latin of the people", which by this time is usually referred to as "Proto-Romance, and it is just the daughters of Latin.

Latin spread across Europe, and just like what happened with the Germanic languages, closed contact especially after the fall of the Roman Empire in about 500AD meant the language of these people can slowly start evolving / developing into further dialects.

And what do you know, these descendants of the Romans start talking differently and before you know it, you have Portuguese, French, Italian, Spanish, Romanian.... the developments of the once united language spoken in Rome (Latin) which was a development out of the Italic branch, which at one time was the same language that the ancestors of Germanic spoke.

So that's why French belongs to the Romance (Italic) language family, and English belongs to the Germanic language family. Just like I posted before here is a link to the family tree for the centum languages.

I found some pictures on a Wikipedia site that might prove more illustrative, as I said before around 1,000BC the picture looked like:

It doesn't state it there but the purple is Germanic, as you see two separate branches / separations of a once-earlier united language.

Then the following picture represents the period immediately after the fall of the Roman Empire (note that the purple Germanics have just landed in the UK).

And that, with the pictures I hope clears up my (quite rushed/low quality) explanation of the origins of both languages.

Now after all this happened, after 1066 the French speaking Normans invaded and English borrowed a lot of words from French, and while Latin was still used as a lingua-franca around Europe all the new terminology (for example, scientific discoveries etc) was taken from Latin.

This is why English is full of cognates with French/Latin, but these are only vocabulary changes, the core grammar, the history, the syntax, it's all (as John said earlier) very closely related to the other Germanic languages.

To someone who looks at pages and pages of the language, the only thing they see are the words, which might lead them to think of a relation, but linguists can see beyond the words, they can see the ordering, they can see the syntax, then see the grammatical functions and only once you view languages in a way that isn't only at the words that are in the lexicon, can you then see how there is nothing really "Romance" about English.

Reference: lingforum

Also please refer to Language map

The Private Life of Pippa Lee

The Private Lives of Pippa Lee by Rebecca Miller




The Private Lives of Pippa Lee reveals the buried dark desire of every woman. Some might control it well, some might be taken away by it. Reminds me of Michael Jackson song , "Dangerous".



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The Last Song book review

The Last Song by Nicholas Sparks




A very touching story that reveals the beauty and strong relationship between father and child. Totally a beautiful craftmanship. Worth reading, touchy, another classic work of Nicholas Sparks!



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My Chirstmas Gift

Christmas Gift Toy & MySpace Layouts at pYzam.com

Why Chillie are hot

I,  quoted in an article by an Australian writer.

 

To read log on here

Behind the Car Crash

It hasnt even been a month since I purchased my new car (It's a KIA Forte/ Cerato 1.6 SX ) and somebody has already kissed its ass. The feeling was definitely undescribable, somewhere in between anger and frustration. My friends thought it was so irrelevant of me to not to charge the person who hit me from the back. However for me, I did not have the feeling to charge him since he was too old and so does his car which came with no insurance. I think it wasn't fair to just charge him and letting go of the guy who stopped his car suddenly  to take a turn without no prior sign at all (and not to mention he just left the scene!) Despite this scene, what I want to share in this blog is my feeling. Despite anger and frustration I am proud of myself because I was able to forgive the old man out of humanity. It is true when people say.."humanity is the essence of human being", it is indeed in the heart of every person in the whole world regardless of who we are. Peace!

Untitled, just some monologue

It is true when some people say we never really realise how much we love our beloved ones and how much they matter to us until the moments when we realise we might lose them. On the last night Jeremy was with me at my parents, he expressed his thoughts to me that he didnt think I love him enough. Just when he finished uttering that, I could feel my heart torn into pieces like there was a spear that just went through it. I was so scared.No, I was terrified! My body stopped functioning for that mere second and I could think of nothing other than what would my life be without him in it anymore.I tried hard not to cry. All the moments that we had spent together all this time came flashing back and it kills me to realise that if I ever lose him, Im not only going to lose my boyfriend, but worst of all my best friend. I never have really shared as much as I do with him with anybody else. I never feel this free to fully express myself without feeling stupid and scared of being judged. I am me as long as I am with him and I hope he will be himself as long as he is with me.

Discovering Indonesia- Part 1 jakarta

Indonesia is a country riches with many exotic places which  can easily make your  vacation an unforgettable and meaningful one. A trip to Indonesia would not be complete without a visit to its capital city, Jakarta which is the largest city in the country. With its population of 8, 490 000, Jakarta is indeed a very busy and crowded city. I had had the opportunity to visit Jakarta in June 2010 with my boyfriend, Jeremy. We arrived at Soekarno Hatta International Airport, Jakarta at about 5.30pm and got passed the immigration an hour later. It was not difficult to find a cab service from the airport to get to the intended destination. However, taking bus is not a practical option since it is too crowded and takes too long to reach its destination. For the whole time while we were in Jakarta, we stayed at Jeremy's cousin's house. It was in a suburban area called Cilandak which was about half an hour from the city during the time when there is not much traffic. A very beautiful house with a swimming pool which was rented at about 400usd per month. Traffics in Jakarta are congested most of the time and makes it difficult to drive. Salute to all drivers in Jakarta, they must be really skillful to be able to drive in such a busy and congested traffic! With so many motorbikes on the road, it is impossible to visit places in the city by walking. Thus, most of the time during our visit, we decided to take a cab to travel to places. We spent 3 days 2 nights in Jakarta and visited nothing much besides malls. Not to mention that there are quite a number of big sized malls in the city. The ones that we visited were Cilandak Town Square Mall which was only 10mins walk from Jeremy's cousin house and the Grand Indonesia mall. On the last day of our trip, we left Jakarta for Bali.

This is specially for my boyfriend. I am sorry that you all have to read this. But if he reads this, I just want him to know that I love him very much and that he has been a great boy friend and best friend to me all along. I dated some guys before I met him, but with him I could tell that he is a real man, not a boy like most of the ones i used to date. He cares for me and I want to do my best to do the same for him. I just can't imagine life without him. Je'taime mon singe.

The Spices of Life

The world is round, so does our journey. we always find ourselves coming back to the same spot where we started it.

Some people are just too busy looking for the meaning of life yet forget to live it.

Most of us are liars. We all lie to ourselves. We often believe and admit the truth to ourselves. In reality, we often just selectively believe what we WANT to believe instead of what we SHOULD believe. For example, how many of us would honestly admit that we are doing our jobs because we really love it and not because we are forced to do so just to earn some money out of it? How many of us really date our partner because we love him or her and not because we are just too scared to be alone?

Just some thoughts for the day, enjoy them!

The irony of life

Life is never static. Everything about life changes in every second with our without our realisation or will. People change. Best friends drifted apart. Enemies become friends. Life is such an irony. But the greatest gift in life is the moment you met a special someone who ready to share his or her life with you.

Adaption in life

Life is all about adapting ourselves to suit our environment. Whether we believe it or not, we always adapt ourselves in order to maintain our survival within a society or an environment. Sometimes adaptation can be a very reflexive process whereby we do not even realise that we are going through the process at all. Sometimes it could also be painful. Like adapting ourselves to live a society that uphold values that contradict with the ones in our own society. But I think, the most important thing everyone needs to do is to compromise and try to respect the cultures of the society that they are living in. Its rather be safe than sorry.

Fat, Can You Fight It?

My sister just screamed at me because I called her fat and refused to eat the lunch that I bought her today. I just didnt see why she was so angry because she IS fat, at least for someone her height. But anyway, is it really important if u are skinny or fat? It doesnt make you less human, does it? Well, my boyfriend is a gym freak, I wonder if he is gonna walk out on me one day if I suddenly become fat (not that I want to be fat). lol. Well he may be, cos most of the world population do not want to have a fat partner. But how can we define fat? Does fat means obese? Or does fatness has a scale, that may goes from skinny-to chubby/plum-to fat-to obese?

I did some readings on the subject and I found out that fat is directly controlled by a hormone called Ghrelin that relates to hunger perception. The amount of Ghrelin hormone in a person body relates to the person feeling of hunger. The more Ghrelin present, the hungrier one feels. It also partially decreases the utilization of existing fatty tissue. Thus, in order to lose weight, ones has to control the release of Ghrelin hormone in their body to the minimum to avoid frequent hunger and to increase the use of existing fat tissue in their bodies . However, is it possible for a person to do so? The answer is YES.

Its true that the amount of hormone present in a person body is hereditical which means one person can have bigger amount of the hormone in his or her body compared to somebody else.Even though obesity is hereditary, it is not inevitable that one person with more obese genes will become obese. There are chances for the person to have an ideal body weight provided that she or he follows a strict healty lifestyle which includes taking healthy and well-balanced diet and exercising regularly. Human body needs a certain amount of energy which is termed as calories each day. Excess energy is stored as fat. Exercise functions to remove the excessive fat in one's body and contributes to weight loss. The more active you are, the more calories your body needs.By eating less than your body needs and exercising more, you force your body to use its existing fat stores for energy. So, if you are fat, its not the end of the world till you start a strict work-out plan and living on healthy diet.

                        

Lois

C'est Lois. Elle est mignonne et intelligente. =) She looks good in the dress Jammy and I picked up for her christmas gift.

My first french lesson - Pronom (pronoun)

Pronom (Pronoun)  

i= je

he/she = il/ elle

you=il

we=nous

they=ils/elles

you=vous (plural)

A sentence = pronom + verb + complement/adjectif

Vebre etre (Verb to be)

present tense

je suis= i am

tu es= you are (one person)

il/ elle est= he is/ she is

nous sommes= we are

vous etes=you all are (plural, more than 1 person)

ils/ elles sont= they are (male)/ they are (female)

Examples :-

i) beau/belle (good looking/beautiful/pretty)

je suis belle (i am good looking (for female))/ je suis beau (i am good looking (for male))

tu es belle (you are good looking (for female))/ tu es beau (you are good looking (for male))

 il est beau (he is good looking)

elle est belle (she is good looking)

nous sommes beaux (have to add -x to indicate plurality for words ending in -au) (We are good looking (for male)).

nous sommes belles (have to add -s to indicate plurality) (we are good looking (for female)).

Vous etes beaux  (You all are good looking (for male))

Vous etes belles ( You all are good looking (for female)) 
 
Elle sont belles ( they are good looking (for female))

Ils sont beaux (they are good looking (for male))

Journey

A journey is always a brilliant teacher. It is the best way we can learn about new things and take on a new perspective on life and ourselves. It lets us feel the tangible experiences and encounter the intangible ones in a meaningful way. It reminds us about the value of living. It makes us see things that are essences to our survival, like the values that we normally take for granted. It brings us close to nature and humanity, makes us discover ourselves and what we mean to the world. It makes us strong and not to give up in life.

merci l'amour

Thank you
for coming into my life
for healing my soul
for making me see a new perspective on life
giving me a new purpose of living

Thoughts on Love

They do not love that do not show their love.

The course of true love never did run smooth.
Love is a familiar. Love is a devil. There is no evil angel but Love.

-- William Shakespeare

God of The Small Things

This is one of my all time favourite. It explores many issues at the same time, exposing the wonder of how small things in someone's life can add up and affect the person life badly and in an unexpected way. One of the main issues that become the back bone of the story is discrimination based on social class or hierachy. It narrates how dreadful and painful life is for a person who is born in the low social class or caste. The story is set to be in Ayemenem, Kerala India. It is mainly being organised around many events that occur in a two-egg twins, Esthappen and Rahel's life and in the life of  people who are closely related to them like their family and friends. Some misfortunes which are related to death, love  not returned and love between caste have been exquisitely explored in an amusing and tragic ways to add spices and give life to the story. Enough said, the story is worth reading!!

I want to escape
To retreat into a new dimension
I want to run
and fly
And enter the world
beyond imagination
beyond thought

The world 
Full of spirit
Full of force
To reach the unthinkable
To experience the impossibles
To fathom the future
Where there is no chagrin
Where the future is much more discernible
As clear as water

l'amour

My boyfriend suggested that I write about love. But I think he forgot to tell me in what genre he think i should write about it. So I figured the genre out myself. Well, I was thinking of fiction because I assumed it was lighter, required less thinking than writing an expository. However, it was not slightly true at all. Fiction could be as complex as expository when the writer is unclear about the real or main message that meant to be conveyed to the readers, the message that will become the backbone of the story and put the live into it. Thus, in order to determine that real or main message,the writer needs to possess full and deep comprehension of the subject/ concept. So, in my case, if I were to write a fiction about love, I will have to grasp a good comprehension of what love is, which is quite a challenging task as I honestly think the process of discovering love requires more time than most people think.

Love is really difficult to understand. Sometimes I wonder if I ever really understand what love is. But to claim that I never understand it at all would do myself no justice since I had experienced it at some points in my life. Sometimes I think of love as a spiritual thing. Something pure.Something impulsive. Where the only agent that can react to it is heart (human and animal's heart). Sometimes I think of love as one of the reasons why human race was gifted with the innate ability to communicate with  each other. Love is when human clings to each other to form a perfect harmony with the nature. Like a child clings to its mother until it is old enough to survive, and the mother clings to the child until she is positive that the child is capable to look after itself. Thinking of all these, one thing that I come to learn and conclude is that no matter how different our perception of love is, it always makes us feel good and appreciated, maybe a little bit worried sometimes for we afraid it might slip away at some point in our live. But with love, we come to appreciate live more and to live in harmony with our beloved and our souls. It gives a meaningful purpose for living. Love is a perennial beauty that lives within every soul. It is a gift from god to all kinds.