Librarian, Archivist, & Ornamental Hermit
In 1920 Henry Alexander, writing in Common Faults in Writing English , identified one of those common faults as the use of abbreviations in place of the full word. The examples he gave included “She had not yet recovered from amaze .” and “This is a tiny quote out of a letter from a friend of mine.” People very likely were using abbreviations in place of the full word, but…
It’s time for the yearly list of books I read and, in the process, reflecting on everything that’s happened. It’s a weird thing that when the world is having an awful year I tend to have a good one. I met my partner in 2020, one of the worst years on record, and this year we celebrated our fifth anniversary. I’ve been coming to the end of my MA in Egyptology, though there…
In 1983 the BBC tried to recapture some of the magic that had made I, Claudius such a success in the previous decade. What they came up with was The Cleopatras , a miniseries that follows the last hundred or so years of the Ptolemaic dynasty in Egypt, with a script by Philip Mackie. Mackie’s novelisation is a fairly straightforward translation of the teleplay into a novel. Actually I’d…
Legu ĉi tiun blogaĵon en la angla! Hodiaŭ el la arĥivoj mi elfosas malgrandan rusan/Esperantan kuriozaĵon priskribitan kiel universala alfabeto. Mi ricevis tiun ĉi kiel parton de aro de Esperantaj periodaĵoj kaj arĥivaĵoj, ĉefe apartenintaj al la latva esperantisto kaj komposisto Ints Čače . La arĥivaĵo mem estas trovebla kiel Ints Čače Esperanto fragments and ephemera, 1907-1936 en la…
Read this post in Esperanto! Today from the archives I want to exhume a little Russian/Esperanto curiosity billed as a universal alphabet. I received this as part of a bulk lot consisting of a number of Esperanto periodicals and ephemera, much of which belonged at one stage to Latvian Esperantist and compositor Ints Čače . The collection can be found under Ints Čače Esperanto fragments and…