Posts
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FOSDEM 2007
read moreThe nice people at FOSDEM recorded their main talks and put them online, sadly without giving a playlist, so you have to click each link each time you want to play something.
So here you are, a playlist for your comfort.
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Ehrensenf & RSS
read moreVery few of you might have noticed that Ehrensenf I mentioned yesterday doesn’t offer a RSS feed with enclosures, so you can’t add it to your favorite podcatcher (go Democracy!!!) for automatic downloading of new episodes.
Well, I sat down for half an hour, pulled some PHP and DOM XML magic out of the hat and voila; a feed with enclosures! (psst, don’t tell them, they lack the feed for a reason, namely advertisements).
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Ehrensenf
read moreAs a regular Rocketboom viewer, I was introduced in December to the german show Ehrensenf (ES) (anagram of Fernsehen, or television), which I since then catch daily, too.
ES reached 300 episodes today! Congratulations!
While it seems to be a copy of Rocketboom at first sight, be it in German, the show turns out to be quite fun to watch and to be different.
Both shows are produced and scripted, but most hosts of ES (they have “backups” so to say in case Katrin is on the road for 3sat or otherwise busy for the radio or her studies in technical journalism) are in my opinion better than Joanne from Rocketboom. It just looks a bit more spontaneous, less rehearsed.
ES is funny, despite the Germans are thought of to have no humour at all (which is true in many cases, especially TV shows) and even though the ES team is from Cologne (and thus not from Düsseldorf).
That being said, I think the Netherlands lack a good light news internet-tv show, but somehow I just can’t imagine it happening here. The only site I would expect to come out with such a thing would be Geenstijl… Yay, what fun would that be… (pause) NOT!
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Icelandic euros?
read moreAn article titled Icelandic euros sold on eBay in Morgunblaðið caught my attention today.
The eBay auctionnair ede2016 claims they are proof coins. The MBL article however mentions that they are coined in 2004 by a Swiss company, which also created and sold Swiss, Greenlandic and Faroese euros.
The coins don’t have any money value, and probably not even collector’s value. Iceland is neither a member of the EU nor of the EMU(European Monetary Union), but they signed a number of EU treaties such as Schengen (Because of this treaty, it is possible for a EU citizen to stay in Iceland for as long as six months without residence permit, as opposed to 3 months for non-EU citizens).
The Icelandic krónur is completely independent from any other currency (which is the reason why it fluctuates so heavily, usually between 75 and 100 eurocents within one year) and it is unlikely that they will take up the euro soon or will even tie their currency to the European common coin. However there are some voices to do the latter.
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The genitive is in grave danger
read moreIndo-European languages all had this beautiful case system with at least four base cases, nomenative, accusative, dative and genitive (which is the Icelandic order) and usually a few more.
In many languages however, including Dutch, those cases have almost completely disappeared. We have remnants of cases in our personal pronouns (ik (nom.), mij (acc.), mijn (dat./gen.)), put ’s’ behind words to indicate ownership (i.e. a simple genitivus form) and do weird things (they’re in fact inflections) with adjectives (“sometimes” add ‘e’ suffix), but otherwise they’re completely gone.
In some languages which still have cases, such as German and Icelandic, the genitivus tends to disappear slowly in favor of a construction using the dativus.
Der Dativ ist dem Genitiv sein Tod is an example of a sentence which doesn’t use the genitive but the dative instead, and becoming more and more common in spoken language. It is already pretty common to use this construction in Dutch (“De dativus is de genitivus zijn dood”) and now look what this language has become! The sentences “Der Dativ ist der Tod des Genitivs” or even “Der Dativ ist des Genitivs Tod” say exactly the same and are more aestetically pleasing.
In Icelandic the genitive is used extensively for creating adjectives out of nouns: “Ráðhúsið Reykjavíkur” (City Hall of Reykjavik), “Flugstöð Leifs Eiríkssonar” (Leifur Eiriksson Airterminal). However, here also the genitive is threatened by the dative in the sense that they will probably merge somewhere in the next 200 years.
As a citizen of a case-deprived country I would like to say to those lucky enough to still have them: Save and protect them!
And to those living in case-deprived countries having to learn a highly inflectional language: There will be a day when the penny drops and all of a sudden it just comes naturally, believe me.