Happy Anniversary to Sandra and Garret!
Community and Popularity
There’s an interesting discussion thread over at blivet. (Yes, I know it’s really called “compatibility and popularity”, but there are interesting thoughts about our weblog community, too.)
Hal says:
“I read your and others weblogs because I feel a connection, a kindred spark if you will. I think its the difference between moving into a neighborhood or small town as a committed resident and settling in for the long haul and moving into a dormitory for a semester. […] I feel the same way about the friends I’ve made through blivet. I’ll follow through hosting changes and search engines if necessary to keep a bit of a connection to people. I didn’t get that two way connection from the web in the first seven years I had web pages. This is really the first time I’ve felt like someone might read what I’ve put up…”
Speaking of Harry Potter…
… there’s a whole weblog dedicated to him. via BookNotes.
David Singer says he enjoyed reading the fourth book of the Harry Potter series. Check out his comments on his weblog!
Wireless
It seems Brent‘s new iBook and Airport station have strange effects on some people…
John: “Too busy today to post much. I’m hiding in the bushes outside Brent’s place with a sniffer monitoring his wireless websurfing activity.”
Brent: “I caught John VanDyk, dressed as a huge squirrel, trying to hide under the ivy out front. For John things have gone horribly wrong — I’ve got him locked up in a closet, I’m trying to make him talk. All he’ll give me is his name, rank, and Frontier serial number. So far.”
John: “Aargh, maybe if I make him think I’m nuts he’ll let me go. Get it? Squirrel? Nuts? Either that or I’ll gnaw on his iBook…”
Harry Potter
Diese Woche sind gleich zwei Artikel zum neu erschienen vierten Band von Harry Potter zu lesen:
- Zum Beispiel Harry Potter – Ein Erfolg wider den Zeitgeist Von Susanne Gaschke (auf Seite 1!)
- Schluss mit lustig: Der vierte Harry-Potter-Band ist da Von Susanne Mayer
Und die deutsche Ausgabe erscheint erst Mitte Oktober…
I enjoyed the book immensely. See my contribution to the hype. (Also the previous few days’ worth of my blog, for that matter.)
— David Singer
David,
thanks for pointing me to your website. I love to read comments from people who love books I like.
So far, I’ve only read the first and second books, but I enjoyed them a lot. I read them in one afternoon each, without a break! But I don’t know if that will be possible with parts three and four, which I hope I’ll be able to read soon. I heard the fourth book has over 700 pages…
Cheers,
Andrea
The fourth book has 734 pages in the US edition (the UK edition is a bit shorter, but may not have any fewer words). And it’s worth it. But I suspect it’ll take more than an afternoon unless you read a lot faster than I do (or have a much longer afternoon) — I probably devoted at least 12 hours to reading the book. And now I want to go back and re-read all four in close succession.
Do you read the books in English or in German? It looks like you said that the book would be available in German in mid-October, but my German is nowhere nearly good enough to be sure that that’s what you wrote.
Phew, 734 pages is more than I could read in one afternoon! I consider myself a fairly fast reader, but not that fast.
I read the books in English, the US version, in fact. And I’m going to stick with that edition for the following books, too. I always try to get the original version of a book, if I can read it – and that means an English edition for many books. (Besides German and English, I speak only very little French; barely enough to read books in French. And there are no books in Latin that I’m interested in.
) I suppose the UK version of Harry Potter probably is even “more original”, but André bought me the books on his last trips to the USA.
The advantage of reading books in the original English (UK/US version) is that most books are available much earlier than the German translation. It has happened many times that books appeared on German bestseller lists that I had already read several months earlier.
And your German is well enough to understand what I write here – the German edition will be available on October 14. I don’t know how good the translation is, but the pictures on the covers sure are not as good as those on the US edition. Another reason for reading the US version!
Andrea
Actually, this is the first of the Harry Potter books I’ve read in the US edition (it’s almost accurate to call it a translation!); I picked up the others on trips to England and am sorely tempted to order the UK edition of this one, too (rather than wait until my next trip and have to haul it home personally — and I’ll be going from England to Germany (Stuttgart) before coming home, so that’s another reason not to load my luggage with the book). The UK editions have been far less illustrated than the US editions.
My rabbi’s 12-year-old son got the book last Saturday morning and finished it Sunday morning. I didn’t have a chance to ask him if he slept any on Saturday night, or if he read it straight through!
I can read two languages fluently: English and American. I can puzzle out some German, French, or Spanish, but only if I have a lot of context to help (so knowing that you were talking about Harry Potter helped enormously) — but I certainly couldn’t read anything written in one of those languages for pleasure.
Actually, this is the first of the Harry Potter books I’ve read in the US edition (it’s almost accurate to call it a translation!)
Is it so very different? I mean, I’ve never really noticed any difference between English and American books, except that some words are written differently (like labor, humor instead of labour, humour etc.), but maybe that’s because neither is my first language. I’m not even certain whether my English is more British or American. At school, we learned British English, but I had an American teacher for the last three years (after having been taught by a British teacher for two years and German teachers for four years), and I mostly read American English now and see American films. Also, all my practice comes from trips to the USA, rather than the UK.
I picked up the others on trips to England and am sorely tempted to order the UK edition of this one, too (rather than wait until my next trip and have to haul it home personally […]). The UK editions have been far less illustrated than the US editions.
Illustrated? My books only have little drawings at the beginning of each chapter.
So do you think I should switch to the British edition? I could order that at our local bookstore, I think, or maybe they even have them on stock. (While Bonn used to be the capital of Germany, there were lots of foreigners here, so our bookstore has a fairly large section of English books, which is nice.)
I can read two languages fluently: English and American.
How about Australian/New Zealand English? Is that another language, or do you count that as British English? I always wonder whether they write their words like the British or the American version, but haven’t been able to find out. Do you know?
Andrea
The two editions aren’t that different other than in choice of words — but the first book has a different title on the two sides of the Atlantic: Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone in the UK versus Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone in the US. It’d be interesting to do a detailed comparision of the two books. The UK editions that I have have almost no interior illustrations, while the US edition has a drawing at the top of every chapter.
I believe it was Winston Churchill who said that “England and America are two nations divided by a common language.” It’s not quite that bad, but there are some interesting cases — for example, “pavement”. In the US, that’s the surface of the road on which one drives; in the UK, it’s the surface adjacent to the road on which one walks (the sidewalk, in US terms).
Australian/New Zealand English tends to use British spellings (as does Canadian English), but the vocabulary is different from either American or British English. (Canadian English vocabulary is very heavily influenced by American English.)
The two editions aren’t that different other than in choice of words — but the first book has a different title on the two sides of the Atlantic: Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone in the UK versus Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone in the US.
By the way, I just saw that Amazon.de already takes orders for the fourth and fifth (!) part, although neither has been published in German yet. All five Harry Potter books rank within the top ten selling books of Amazon.de. Wow.
Australian/New Zealand English tends to use British spellings (as does Canadian English), but the vocabulary is different from either American or British English. (Canadian English vocabulary is very heavily influenced by American English.)
Oops, I thought Canadian English was more or less the same as US English and used the same spelling, too. Since “your” English is referred to as “American English” mostly, I thought that “American” included the US and Canada.
Oops, I thought Canadian English was more or less the same as US English and used the same spelling, too. Since “your” English is referred to as “American English” mostly, I thought that “American” included the US and Canada.
Some Canadians are unhappy when they’re confused with Americans (in fact, Molson Beer has a very popular commercial in Canada called “The Rant” on that very theme — see http://www.iam.ca for the Web site that grew out of that commercial). But that aside, yes, Canadian English is probably closer to US English in vocabulary than it is to British English (the flood of US media into Canada is a large part of the reason), but they kept British spelling. And there are, of course, a few words which are peculiarly Canadian (example: “washroom” for what would be a bathroom or restroom in the US and a WC or loo in the UK).
I guess most of my answer to that is here.
I can tell pretty well who is from the US and who from Great Britain, but it’s difficult for me to distinguish between dialects within either country.
When André and I were in the US last year, I tried to hear what part of the US people came from by the way they talked. Many Americans commented on the different dialects, but I couldn’t really make them out. I tried and was able to hear some differences, but I don’t know which dialects belonged where.
Before we met Craig a while ago, he told us he does not talk with a Texan accent, so now I know what Texans don’t sound like.
Sigh. I’m working on it…
I was referring to the difference between Canadian and US English, which is usually pretty apparent to me — but I do get a lot more exposure to the difference than you probably do. Similarly, I can tell many US accents apart fairly well, but I can’t identify very many UK accents, and I’d be completely lost in telling apart the kinds of German you mentioned.
It’s like the claim that Eskimos have many different words for “snow”, while English has only the one word because the differences are more important to someone who lives in a snow-rich environment. Of course, English has many phrases to describe snow — even a Californian can tell the difference between wet snow and dry snow!
Canadian and US English – I think I’ve never talked to a Canadian, so I really don’t know how it sounds or what words they use. I wonder why we only learn about British and US English in school, but not about Canadian or Australian English.
Different kinds of German – it should be easy for foreigners who speak German to distiguish between Northern Germans and Germans from somewhere else, including Austria and Switzerland. People from Northern Germany will be the only ones they can understand properly since the others speak with a strong accent!
By the way, the “normal” German that is spoken in the northern part of Germany and is taught at school and as a foreign language is an artificial and also a very young language. It was created because people wanted a single written language for all the different German dialects that were spoken. Then it became popular to pronounce words the way they were written instead of using the dialect. The dialect(s) in northern German had more sounds in common with the written German; that’s why they speak German “better” than other Germans.
BTW, I recently heard the claim that Eskimos have dozens of names for snow is an urban legend. They don’t have more words than English or German has.
Canadians say ‘oot’ and ‘aboot’ when they mean ‘out’ and ‘about’. The newscaster Jonathan Mann on CNN International used to have a very noticable Canadian accent, but now he’s been in Atlanta a long time, and it’s not noticable at all.