Caution: This post is very long! It runs to 45 pages on the Web.

We did a post on this earlier, but it looks like we only scratched the surface. There are tons of webpages on this topic, and I suppose one could read away on the subject for some time, but after a while, things start getting repetitive. This post is very good. They did a survey, and this is what they came up with. This post is also very good. There are more in various places on the Web.

The nine hardest languages to learn overall were:

Mandarin, Hungarian, Finnish, Polish, Arabic, Hindi, Icelandic, German and Swedish. I would just leave Swedish off the list altogether, as it’s actually a pretty easy language to learn.

The eight hardest languages to speak (or to pronounce correctly, specifically) were French, Mandarin, Polish, Korean, Hungarian, Arabic, Basque and Hindi.

The hardest languages to write were Arabic, Mandarin, Polish, French, Serbo-Croatian, Japanese, Russian, Basque and English.

Mandarin, Arabic, Japanese and Russian of course use different alphabets.

Ratings: Languages are rated 1-5, easiest to hardest. 1 = easiest, 2 = moderately easy, 3 = moderately difficult, 4 = very to extremely difficult, 5 = most difficult of all.

Time needed: Time needed to learn the language “reasonably well”: Level 1 languages = 3 months to 1 year. Level 2 languages = 6 months to 1 year. Level 3 languages = 1 to 2 years. Level 4 languages = 2 years. Level 5 languages = 3-4 years of study, but some may take longer.

Indo-European

Indo-Aryan

Indian languages like Kashmiri, Hindi and especially Sanskrit are also quite hard, and Sanskrit is legendary in its extreme complexity. Sanskrit grammar is very complicated. There are 8 cases. However, Sanskrit has one of the most regular grammars on Earth. Sinhala is also difficult.

The Hindi script is quite opaque to Westerners, some of whom say that Chinese script is easier. You speak one way if you are talking to a man or a woman, and you also need to take into account whether you as speaker are male or female. In addition, Hindi has many long words.

Hindi is rated 3, moderately difficult.

Kashmiri, Sinhala and Sanskrit are rated 4, extremely difficult.

Iranian

Persian is also said to be a hard language to learn, but I am not sure why. On the plus side, Persian has a very simple grammar.

Nonetheless, Persian only gets a 3 rating as moderately difficult.

Romance

French is pretty easy to learn at a simple level, but it’s not that easy to get really good at it. For instance, there are idioms everywhere, and it’s often hard to figure them out. There are many genders, but they are not much used anymore. French has a grammar that is neither simple nor difficult, that combined with a syntax is pretty straightforward and a Latin alphabet make it pretty easy to learn for most Westerners. One problem is pronunciation. There are many nasal vowels, similar to Portuguese. The orthography is also difficult, since there are many sounds that are written but no longer pronounced, as in English.

The English language, having no Language Committee, at least has an excuse for stupidity. The French have no excuse, since they have a committee that is set up in part to keep the language as stupid as possible. One of their passions is refusing to change the spelling of words even as pronunciation changes, which is the opposite of what occurs in any sane spelling reform. So French is, like English, frozen in time. Furthermore, to make matters worse, the French are almost as prickly about writing properly as they are about speaking properly, and you know how they are about foreigners mangling their language.

A good case can be made, though, that French is harder to learn than English. Verbs change much more, and it has grammatical gender.

French is one of the toughest languages to learn in the Romance family, and it gets a 3 rating for moderately difficult.

Italian is said to be easy to learn, especially if you speak a Romance language or English, but learning to order a pizza and really mastering it are two different things. For instance, Italian has 8 indicative tenses, 4 subjunctive tenses, 2 conditional tenses and 1 imperative tense, and these are used regularly. Foreigners usually do not learn Italian at anywhere near a native level.

Italian has many irregular verbs. There are seemingly hundreds of combinations just to make articles and prepositions and thousands of irregular verbs with all sorts of different irregularities.

Ridiculously, some Italian words are masculine in the singular and feminine in the plural or vice versa. There are many different ways to say the – il, i, lo, gli , l’ (masculine); la, le, l’ (feminine). Some say that Italian grammar is among the most complex on Earth. Few Italians even write Italian 100% correctly. A problem with Italian is that meaning is inferred via intonation. If you mess up the intonation of your utterance, you’re screwed and will not be understood.

Italian is still probably easier to learn than French and it gets a 2 rating, moderately easy.

Surprisingly enough, Romanian is said to be one of the harder Romance languages to speak or write properly. Even Romanians often get it wrong. One strange thing about Romanian is that the articles are attached to the noun as suffixes. In all the rest of Romance, article are free words that precede the noun. English: telephone and the telephone; Romanian: telefon and telefonul. Romanian is harder to learn than Spanish or Italian, and possibly harder than French. It has considerable Slavic influence.

Romanian gets a 3 rating as moderately hard to learn.

Spanish is often said to be one of the easiest languages to learn, though this is somewhat controversial. Personally, I’ve been learning it off and on since age 6 and I still have problems, though Spanish speakers say my Spanish is good, but Hispanophones, unlike the French, are generous about these things.

It’s quite logical, though the verbs do decline a lot with tense and number, and there are many irregular verbs, similar to French. It has the good grace to lack case though, spelling is a piece of cake, and words are spoken just as they are written. Nevertheless, Hispanophones say that few foreigners end up speaking like natives.

Rated 1 as easiest of all.

Portuguese, like Spanish, is also very easy to learn, though Portuguese pronunciation is harder due to the odd vowels such as nasal diphthongs and the strange l . Writing it is a bit harder, since there are consonants that are written but not spoken.

Portuguese gets a 1 rating, easiest of all.

Hellenic

Greek is said to be a pretty difficult language to learn and oddly enough, it’s rated the second hardest language to learn by language professors. It’s easy to learn to speak simply, but it’s quite hard to get it down like a native. It’s the rare second language learner who attains native competence. Greek grammar is so simple it’s ridiculous, but there are problems with writing Greek. Like English, the spelling doesn’t seem to make sense, and you have to memorize many words. Further, there is the weird alphabet.

Greek gets a 4 rating, extremely difficult to learn.

Classic Greek is worse, with a distinction between aspirated and unaspirated consonants, a pitch accent system and a truly convoluted system of noun and verb inflection.

Classic Greek gets a 5 rating, hardest of all.

Germanic

People often say that English is easy to learn, but that is deceptive. For one thing, English has anywhere from 500,000-1 million words (said to be twice as much as any other language – but there are claims that Dutch and Arabic each have 4 million words) and the number increases by the day, furthermore, most people don’t understand more than 50,000. Yet they only use 5,000 at most.

Actually, it is said that the average American or Brit uses a mere 2,500 words. As we might expect, our cultivated Continentals in Europe, such as Spaniards and French, probably have twice the regular vocabulary of English speakers and far more colloquial expressions.

In addition, verbal phrases are a nightmare. The spelling is insane and hardly follows any rules at all. There are figures of speech everywhere and it seems impossible to learn them all. In fact, few second language learners seem to get all the idioms down pat.

The rules governing the use of the indefinite, definite and zero article are opaque and possibly don’t even exist. There are synonyms for almost every word in a sentence and the various shades of meaning can be difficult to discern. In addition, many words have many different meanings. There are strange situations like read and read, which are pronounced differently and mean two different things.

There are various different levels of the infinitive, though they are not used that much – to take, to be taking, to be taken, to have taken, to have been taken. There are actually 12 different verb tenses in English, and foreigners often have problems with them. There are over 200 irregular verbs.

There are quite a few dialects – over 100 have been recorded in London alone. Letters can make many different sounds (a consequence of the insane spelling system) – one vowel can be pronounced 26 different ways. English prepositions are notoriously hard, and it’s said that few second language learners really get them down right. This is probably because it often seems that many English prepositions obey no discernible rules.

While English seems simple at first – past tense is easy, little or no case, no grammatical gender, little mood, etc. – that can be quite deceptive. In European countries like Croatia, it’s hard to find a person who speaks English with native speaker competence.

The problem with English is that it’s a mess! There are languages with very easy grammatical rules like Japanese, and languages with very hard grammatical rules like Arabic. English is one of those languages that is a total mess. There are rules, but there are exceptions everywhere and exceptions to the exceptions. Grammatically, it’s a clusterfuck. It’s hard to know where to start.

Nevertheless, for a variety of reasons, English only gets a 2 rating as moderately easy to learn, in part because it is fairly easy to speak it well enough as to be more or less understandable much of the time.

German’s status is controversial. It’s long been considered hard to learn, but many say that they did not have much problem learning it. However, let’s not underestimate German. There are 6 different forms of the depending on the noun case – der , die, das, den , dem and des – but 16 different slots to put the 6 forms in (see comments for more), and the gender system is irrational. In a more basic sense and similar to Danish, there are 3 basic forms of the: der, die and das. Each one goes with a particular noun, and it’s not very clear what the rules are.

Pronunciation is straightforward, but there are some problems with the müde, the Ach, and the two ch sounds in Geschichte. One problem with German syntax is that the verb, verbs or parts of verbs don’t occur until the end of the sentence. German also has Schachtelsätzen, box clauses, which are sort of like clauses piled into other clauses. The syntax is very rigid but at least very regular. In addition, subclauses use SOV word order. German case is also quite regular. The case exceptions can be almost counted on 1 hand.

An example of German case (and case in general) is here: The leader of the group gives the boy a dog. In German, the sentence is case marked with the 4 different German cases: Der Führer (nominative) der Gruppe (genitive) gibt dem knabe (dative) einen Hund (accusative).

There are three genders, masculine, feminine and neutral. Yet maiden is neutral and petticoat is masculine! The r in German is quite strange, and of common languages, only French has a similar r . Any given noun inflects into 4 cases and the 3 genders.

One problem with German is that you need a big vocabulary to even engage in small talk. This is a real disadvantage. German also has a vast vocabulary, said to be the 4th largest in the world.

On the plus side, word formation is pretty regular. Pollution is Umweltverschmutzung. It consists, logically, of two words, Umwelt and Verschmutzung , which mean environment and dirtying. In English, you have three words, environment, dirtying and pollution, the combination which has no relation to its semantic roots. Nevertheless, this has its problems, since it’s not so simple to figure out how the words are stuck together into bigger words, and meanings of morphemes can take years to figure out.

Also, German is not very inflected, and the inflection that it does take is quite regular.

German gets a 3 rating, moderately difficult.

Icelandic is said to be very hard to learn, much harder than Norwegian, German or Swedish. Part of the problem is pronunciation. The grammar is harder than German grammar, and there are almost no Latin-based words in it. The vocabulary is quite archaic. Like German, Icelandic has preserved a lot more of the original IE grammar than English has.

There are four cases – nominative, accusative, genitive, and dative – as in German, and there are many exceptions to the case rules, or “quirky case,” as it is called. Verbs are modified for tense, person and number, as in many other IE languages (this is almost gone from English). Icelandic also modifies verbs for mood – active, passive and medial. Furthermore, there seems to be a lack of rules for the declensions and many just have to be memorized. The numeral system is completely convoluted and crazy, but Icelandic speakers take pride in it.

Icelandic gets a 4 rating, hardest of all to learn.

Faroese is said to be even harder to learn than Icelandic, with some very strange vowels not found in other North Germanic languages.

Norwegian and Swedish are both easy to learn, and Norwegian is sometimes touted as the easiest language on Earth to learn. Nevertheless, dialects can be a problem. Swedish does have the disadvantage of having hundreds of irregular verbs. There is also the problematic en and et alternation, as discussed with Danish. Swedish also has some difficult phonemes, especially vowels, since Swedish has 9 vowels, not including diphthongs.

Swedish and Norwegian get a 1 rating, very easy to learn.

Danish is actually a pretty tough language to learn! It’s not that hard to read or even write, but it’s quite hard to speak. For one, there are a huge number of dialects. Denmark is just a bunch of really cold islands, with a freezing cold ocean in between them.

People generally stayed on their islands and didn’t move around much. Each little island has its own dialect, and the dialects can be quite baffling for second language learners. There are eight major dialects, and countless minor ones subsumed under them.

Written Danish is very hard to master. For instance, instead of the, there is den and det , and instead of a and an, which are regular in English, there is en and et. Whichever form goes in front of a noun depends on the noun and seems quite arbitrary. There is en hund -a dog and yet et kæledyr – a pet. In addition, nouns take different endings depending on which form of the article they take. A horse – en hest, but the horse – den hesten.

In addition, there d words where the d is silent and other d words where it is pronounced and it’s hard to figure out a rule system for it all. The d in hund is silent, for instance.

There are three strange vowels, æ, ø and å, and only Danish has the å .

One advantage of all of the Scandinavian languages, though, is that their vocabulary is fairly limited.

As with Maltese and Gaelic, there is little correlation between how a word is written and how it is pronounced. Pronunciation of Danish is difficult. Speech is very fast and comes out in a continuous stream that elides entire words. Vowels in the middle and at the end of words are seldom expressed. There are 9 vowels, and each one can be pronounced in 5-6 different ways. There is also a strange phonetic element called a stød, which is a very short pause slightly before the vowel(s) in a word. This element is very hard for foreigners to get right. Just about any word has at least four meanings, and can serve as noun, verb, adjective or adverb. It’s been said that Danish children speak later than other Scandinavian children.

Danish gets a 3 rating, moderately hard to learn.

Dutch is said to be harder to learn than English, due to the large number of rules used in both speaking and writing. Dutch people say that few foreigners learn to speak Dutch well. Part of the problem is that some words have no meaning at all if it is isolation (meaning is only derived via a phrase or sentence). Word order is somewhat difficult, as foreigners often seem to get the relatively lax Dutch rules about word order wrong in long sentences.

Dutch gets a 3 rating, moderately hard to learn.

Goidelic

Any Gaelic language is tough. Irish students take Irish for 13 years and some take French for five years. These students typically know French better than Irish. There are inflections for the inflections of the inflections, a convoluted aspiration system, and no words for yes or no. The system of initial consonant mutation is quite baffling. One problem with Irish is that the way a word looks often does not much to do with the way it is pronounced.

Welsh and Scottish Gaelic are also said to be very hard to learn, some say harder than Irish, although Welsh has no case compared to Irish’s two cases. There is a close orthography-pronunciation match. And the Welsh verb system is very regular – Welsh has a mere five irregular verbs. Gaelic languages are harder to learn than German or Russian.

Scottish Gaelic, Welsh and Irish get 5 ratings, hardest of all.

Armenian

Two obscure branches of Indo-European, Armenian and Albanian, are said to be very hard to learn.

Rated 5, hardest of all.

Albanian

Similarly to Gaelic, Armenian and Albanian are harder to learn than either German or Russian. Albanian may be even harder to learn than Polish.

Rated 5, hardest of all.

Slavic

Czech and Slovak are notorious; in fact, all Slavic languages are. Language professors rate the Slavic languages the third hardest to learn on Earth. Czech is in the Guinness Book of World Records as the hardest language to learn. There are seven singular cases, seven plural cases and forty different “modes” for words. Yet it’s full of exceptions and exceptions to the exceptions.

Czech has 7 cases in singular and 7 more cases in plural for nouns for a total of about 40 different “modes” of declension. There are also words that swing back and forth between “modes.” Adjectives and pronouns also have 7 cases in the singular and plural. There are lots of exceptions, too. Verbs also decline. There are 6 genders, 3 in the singular and 3 in the plural.

Truth is that almost every word in the language is subject to declension.

One of the problems with Czech is that not only nouns but also verbs take gender. As with other Slavic languages like Russian, it has the added problem of fairly loose word order. In addition, there are significant differences between casual and formal speech.

Slovak is said to be even harder than Czech, but that’s a tough call. These two languages are the only ones with 7 cases (nominative, accusative, genitive, locative, dative, instrumental and vocative). There is also a hard and soft i which is hard to figure out.

The suffixes on nouns and verbs change all the time in strange ways. It’s sometimes said that even Czechs never learn to speak their language correctly, but that is probably an exaggeration. It’s also full of words that don’t seem to have vowels. Some say that Slovak is even harder than Polish, but, it’s probably a toss-up between Czech/Slovak and Polish.

Czech and Slovak both get 5 ratings, hardest of all.

Polish is similar, but in Polish at least there are invisible vowels in Polish. That’s not so obviously the case with Czech. Try these sentences: Strč prst skrz krk or Mlž pln skvrn zlvh. Or these: Szczebrzeszynie chrząszcz brzmi w trzcinie i Szczebrzeszyn z tego słynie. Wyindywidualizowaliśmy się z rozentuzjazmowanego tłumu.

I and Y, S and Z, JE and Ě alternate at the ends of some words, but the rules governing when do this, if they exist, don’t seem sensible. The letters Ř and Ť are very hard to pronounce, and the Ř exists in no other language. Polish written to spoken pronunciation makes little sense, as in English – h and ch are one sound, and Ó, u and ł are one sound. There are nasal vowels as in Portuguese.

Polish is full of words that don’t seem to have any vowels in them. Further, native speakers speak so fast, it’s quite hard for non-natives to understand them. Due to the consonant-ridden nature of Polish, it is harder to pronounce than most Asian languages. Furthermore, since few foreigners learn Polish, Poles are not used to hearing their language mangled by second-language learners. Therefore, foreigners’ Polish will seldom be understood.

Polish grammar is much more difficult than Russian grammar.

Polish has seven cases, and there are no particular rules about the cases, unlike German. It also has 7 genders, 5 in singular and 2 in plural. The genders of nouns effects causes the adjectives modifying them to inflect differently.

Nouns
matka - mother (female gender)
ojciec  - father (male gender)
dziecko - child (neuter gender)

Modifyng adjective
brzydki - ugly

Singular
brzydka matka - ugly mother
brzydki ojciec - ugly father
brzydkie dziecko - ugly child

Plural
brzydkie matki - ugly mothers
brzydcy ojcowie - ugly fathers
brzydkie dzieci - ugly children

In addition, there is an animate-inanimate distinction in gender. Look at some words: hat – kapelusz, computer – komputer , dog – pies and student – uczen. All are masculine gender, but computer and hat are inanimate and student and dog are animate, so they inflect differently. I see a new hat – Widze nowy kapelusz , but I see a new student – Widze nowego ucznia . Notice how the now- form changed.

For instance, English have one word for the genitive case of the 1st person singular – my. In Polish, depending on the context, you can have the following forms: mój, moje, moja, moją, mojego, mojemu , mojej, moim, moi , moich, moimi, etc.

English has one word for the number 2 – two. Polish has 20 words for two: dwie, dwoje, dwóch (or dwu ), dwaj, dwiema, dwom (or dwóm), dwoma, dwojga, dwojgu, dwojgiem, dwójka, dwójkach, dwójkami, dwójki, dwójke, dwójek , dwójce, dwójko and dwójkom.

Polish has perfective and imperfective verbs, but that is the least of the problem. The problem is that each verb is in effect a separate verb altogether, instead of just being conjugated differently. The verb to see has two completely different verbs in Polish: widziec and zobaczyc . Widziałem – I saw (repeatedly in the past, like I saw the sun come up every morning). Zobaczyłem – I saw (only once; I saw the sun come up yesterday).

This is not a tense difference – the very verbs themselves are different! So for every verb in the language, you effectively have to learn two different verbs.

In addition, the future perfect and future imperfect often conjugate completely differently, though the past forms usually conjugate in the same way – note the -em endings above. There is no present perfect as in English, since in Polish the action must be completed, and you can’t be doing something at this precise moment and at the same time have just finished doing it. 95% of verbs have these crazy dual forms, but for 5% of verbs that lack a perfective version, you only have one form.

Plurals change based on number. In English, the plural of telephone is telephones , whether you have 2 or 1000 of them. In Polish, you use different words depending on how many phones you have: 2, 3 or 4 telefony, but 5 telefonów. Sometimes, this radically changes the word, as in hands: 4 ręce, but 5 rąk.

It’s often said that one of the advantages of Polish is that there are only three tenses, but this is not really case, as there are at least 10 tenses:

I play. grac – to play.
Present – gram – I play.
Past – gralem – I played.
Conditional – Gralbym. – I would play.
Future – Bede grac. – I will play.
Continuous future – Bede gral. – I will be playing.
Perfective future – Pogram. – Implies you will finish the action – I will have played.
Perfective conditional – Pogralbym.
Pluperfect – Doesn’t work in the 1 singular form but does in the 2nd singular, 3rd singular and 2nd plural forms – Tys gral. – You had played.
Pluperfect conditional – Bylbym gral. – I would have played.

In addition, like Serbo-Croatian, Polish can use multiple negation in a sentence. You can use up to 5 negatives in a perfectly grammatical sentence: Nikt nikomu nigdy nic nie powiedzia – Nobody ever said anything to anyone.

Like Russian, there are multiple different ways to say the same thing in Polish. In English, you can say Ann has a cat and you can’t mix the words up and mean the same thing. In Polish you can say Ann has a cat 5 different ways: Ania ma kota, Kota ma Ania, Ma Ania kota, Kota Ania ma , Ma kota Ania. The first one is the most common, but the other 4 can certainly be used.

It is said English-speaking children reach full adult competency in the language (reading, writing, speaking, spelling) at age 12. Polish children do not reach this milestone until age 16. However, most Poles are quite proud of their difficult language (though a few hate it), and even take pride in its difficult nature.

Polish gets a 5 rating, hardest of all.

Bulgarian is said to be easy, but it’s often hard. Though it is close to Russian, there are Russians who have been living there for 20 years and still can’t understand it well. It has only three cases, but all Western Slavic languages are pretty tough.

Mood is very complicated. There are different ways to say the same idea depending on how you know of the event. If you know about it historically, you mark the sentence with a particular mood. If you doubt the event, you mark with another mood.

If you know it historically but doubt it, yet another mood. And there are more than that. These forms are rather rare in world languages. The only one I can think of offhand is Yamana, a Patagonian language that has only one speaker left. Bulgarian is probably the easiest Slavic language to learn.

Bulgarian gets a 3 rating, moderately hard to learn.

Slovenian is also a very hard language to learn, probably on a par with Serbo-Croatian. It has 3 number distinctions, singular, dual and plural. It’s the only European language that has retained the dual. In addition, there are 6 cases. There are 18 different declensions of the word son, but 5 of them are identical, so there are really only 13 different forms.

   Singular Dual       Plural 

1. Sin      Sina       Sini
2. Sina     Sinov      Sinov
3. Sinu     Sinovoma   Sinovom
4. Sina     Sinova     Sinove
5. O sinu   O sinovoma O sinovih
6. S sinom  Z sinovoma Z sini

There are 7 different ways that nouns decline depending on gender, but there are exceptions to all of the gender rules.

Slovenian gets a 5 rating, hardest of all to learn.

Serbo-Croatian, similar to Czech, has seven cases in the singular and seven in the plural, plus there are several different declensions. In addition, there are three “genres” and 15 or more tenses. Whereas English has one word for the number 2 – two, Serbo-Croatian has 7 words: dva, dvije, dviju, dvoje, dvojica, dvojice, dvojici , dvojicu and dvojicom. The grammar is incredibly complex. There are imprefective and perfective verbs, but when you try to figure out how to build one from the other, it’s all irregular.

As in English, there are many different ways to say the same thing. There are several verb conjugations and no pronouns, since pronimalization is marked on the verb as person and number. Word order is almost free or at least seems arbitrary, similar to Russian.

Serbo-Croatian, like Lithuanian, has pitch accent – low-rising, low-falling, short-rising and short-falling. It’s not the same as tone but it’s similar. In addition to the pitch accent differentiating words, you also have an accented syllable somewhere in the word, which as in English, is unmarked. And when the word conjugates or declines, the pitch accent jumps around in the word to another syllable and even changes its type in pretty unpredictable ways. It’s almost impossible for foreigners to get this pitch-accent right.

Serbo-Croatian is surely as hard to learn as Polish and possibly even harder (though this is controversial, and it’s probably a toss-up which one is harder), and it’s harder to learn than Russian.

Serbo-Croatian gets a 5 rating, hardest of all.

People are divided on the difficulty of Russian , but language teachers say it’s one of the hardest to learn. It has seven cases, but the grammar is fairly easy for a Slavic language. The problem comes with the variability in pronunciation. The adjectives and endings can be difficult. In addition, Russian has gender and lots of declinations. The adjectives change form if the nouns they describe have different endings. Adjectives also take case somehow. Verbs have different forms depending on the pronouns that precede them.

Word order is pretty free. For instance, you can say I love you by saying I love you, You love I, Love you I, I you love , Love I you and You I love. Some say that even after a couple of years of study, it’s hard to speak even a simple sentence correctly.

Pronunciation is a bit strange, with one vowel that is between an ü and i. Many consonants are quite strange, and every consonant has a palatalized counterpart, which will seem strange to speakers whose languages lack phonemic palatalized consonants.

Like German, Russian builds morphemes into larger words. Again like German, this is worse than it sounds since the rules are not so obvious. One problem is that accent, generally not written out, changes the way the vowel is pronounced. In addition, there is the strange Cyrillic alphabet, which is nevertheless easier than Arabic or Chinese.

Like Sanskrit, Russian is also famous for being extremely regular.

Russian gets a 4 rating, very hard to learn.

Baltic

Lithuanian, an archaic Indo-European Baltic tongue, is said to be extremely difficult to learn. There are many dialects, which is interesting for such a small country, and the grammar is extremely difficult, with many rules. There is grammatical gender for nouns, and in addition, even numerals have gender in all cases. The language is heavily inflectional such that you can almost speak without using prepositions.

A single verb has 13 participial forms, and that is just using masculine gender for the participles. You can also add feminine forms to that verb. Furthermore, while it does not have lexical tone per se, it does have pitch accent (I am not sure what the difference is!). It’s almost impossible for foreigners to get the accent right, and the accents tend to move around a lot across words such that the rules are opaque if they exist at all. Often you need a dictionary to figure out where the accent should be on a word. Lithuanian pronunciation is also difficult.

Try these words and phrases: šalna, šąla šiandien, ačiū už skanią vakarienę, pasikiškiakopūsteliaudamasis , ūkis, malūnas, čežėti šiauduose.

Or this paragraph: Labas, kaip šiandien sekasi? Aš esu iš Lietuvos, kur gyvenu visą savo gyvenimą. Lietuvių kalba yra sunkiausia iš visų pasaulyje. Ačiū už dėmesį .

Lithuanian is an archaic IE language that has preserved a lot of forms that the others have lost.

Lithuanian gets a 5 rating, hardest of all.

Latvian is another Baltic language that is somewhat similar to Lithuanian. It’s also said to be hard to learn. Try this: Sveiki, esmu no Latvijas, un mūsu valoda ir skanīga, skaista un ar ļoti sarežģītu gramatisko sistēmu. Latvian and Lithuanian are definitely harder to learn than Russian. They both have aspects like in Russian, but also have more cases than Russian, plus a lot more irregular verbs.

Some say that the Baltic languages are even harder to learn than the hardest Slavic languages like Polish, Czech and Serbo-Croatian.

Latvian gets a 5 rating, hardest of all.

We had a short drive to the beach resort of Jurmala and when we arrived we had another tour reorganisation discussion that convinced me to finally dispose of my useless personal itinerary.  This was really beginning to irritate people so I was pleased when it was all sorted out to everyone’s satisfaction and we were allowed to get off the coach and head for the beach. 

 This was a real surprise for this was a very high quality beach with miles of scrupulously clean sand and a clear Baltic Sea stretching out towards Sweden over the horizon.  I had expected the sea to be grey and forbidding like the North Sea of my childhood holidays but instead it was a serene denim blue with a fringe of seal grey sand and it looked genuinely inviting.  Under the Communist regime up until 1991 this was a popular destination for high-level Communist Party officials and it was a favourite destination of Russian Presidents Brezhnev and Khrushchev. 

There were a few holidaymakers on the beach but not many in the sea because I suspect that looks were deceptive and that the Baltic remains fairly inhospitable for most of the year.  I wasn’t prepared to take the testicle shrinking test to find out.

We came dangerously close to another incident when we found a beach bar to stop for a drink and Alona helpfully gave menu interpretation assistance.  I didn’t have the heart to tell her that I am reasonably proficient in ordering a lager from a menu in almost any language in the World and there really wasn’t any difficulty at all here in translating from the Latvian ‘beer’ to English ‘beer’.  Kim however interpreted the offer of help as down right interference and I think Alona came within a whisker of finding the menu deposited somewhere that the sun doesn’t shine! 

After the beach we separated and half the party returned to Riga and the others went to a Spa resort at a hotel and enjoyed the saunas and steam rooms, the swimming pools and Jacuzzis.  I choose the Spa resort and enjoyed a session in each of the attractions including an especially memorable fifteen minutes in the sauna with  Alona and another fifteen minutes in the Jacuzzi with  May while the others went off to enjoy a massage.

Tonight we had agreed to eat at the Maritim and when we arrived the others were waiting for us in the lobby of the hotel.  At the bar there were some misbehaving Brit-louts who had been drinking heavily and were rearranging the furniture in the bar so we declined to join them in there and had a drink in the lobby instead.  Eventually Nick joined us, looking pretty rough it has to be said, he clearly hadn’t recovered completely and he rejected the offer of a beer.  I have no idea exactly how much he had had to drink the night before but it certainly resulted in the loss of a whole day of his holiday so it must have been a considerable amount. 

The restaurant was on the top floor but it was quite a challenge to get there using a lift that absolutely refused to cooperate with our instructions; we pushed the buttons but found ourselves going up and down like an out of control yo-yo with frequent stops at floors we hadn’t requested and a couple of return visits to the lobby.  We laughed ourselves silly and were about to give in when it stopped one floor below the restaurant and we decided that this was probably the best we could hope for and so took the stairs for the final part of the way.

The restaurant was nice but it was posh and I wasn’t really in the mood for posh.  Or the posh prices either I have to confess!  By Riga standards this was very pricey indeed so when Kim, after heavy prompting from me, decided that she didn’t fancy it either and left I let my mean streak take over completely and was quick to follow her example.  We took a taxi into the old town and went instead to our favourite from our previous visit, the Lido pub where we had beer and wine and copious amounts of food at the sort of prices that we prefer.

We finished the evening in the top floor bar at the Albert, which on account of it being Friday was busier tonight.  There were two burly bouncers at the door whose main task seemed to be to supervise the activities of the prostitutes.  There were a lot of dubious looking women about looking for customers and there was a continual flow of what we took to be hookers going up and down in the lifts to the bedrooms below. 

There was a lot of ‘fucky fucky’ at the Hotel Albert tonight that was for sure!

The next morning we were delighted to be woken early by shafts of razor sharp sunlight piercing the paper-thin bedroom curtains and blazing radiantly into the room.  I really don’t object to being woken like this.

We had another full day planned but for some the pace was beginning to tell.  Mark had decided in advance to skip the morning session to recover from his late night out and May choose to stay in the city for some solo retail therapy.  This was absence through choice; Nick on the other hand had planned to be there but he had rejected my sensible advice and had given himself a monster hangover and was quite unable to leave his hotel room because of his ferocious headache and constant vomiting. 

With depleted numbers our first destination was Ethografiskais Brivdabas Muzejs, the Latvian Ethnic Open Air Museum located in a forest next to Lake Jugla just to the east of the city.  We arrived and were introduced to our guide who was an elderly lady dressed in traditional costume who accompanied us into the museum and provided us with a continuous and informative narrative. We strolled leisurely in the sunshine amongst the trees where there are about one hundred and twenty wooden buildings that have been dismantled and then rebuilt here as examples of the heritage of Latvia. 

There are five regions to Latvia (Latgale, Zemgale, Kurzeme, the Liv land and Selija) and each had its own traditions and buildings styles, examples of which are all represented here. There were houses, farm buildings, windmills, barns, and churches and over the last fifty years or so genuine structures have been discovered all across Latvia and removed to Brivdabas for display.  Some of these buildings are as much as two hundred years old and were still in use until about fifty years ago before being taken apart and moved to this Museum.  We liked the guide’s story about the wedding tradition of the bride knitting a pair of highly coloured gloves as a gift for all the guests and in case we didn’t believe her she opened a chest full of them to show us just to prove it.  If I had to knit a chest full of gloves that would certainly keep the guest list numbers down.

At the end of the tour we looked for somewhere to eat and found a likely looking place amongst the pine trees with a delicious aroma of cooking food.  We went in to order but were told that this was being prepared for tomorrow, that didn’t seem to make a lot of sense and I wondered why, if that was the case, they hadn’t prepared some yesterday for today but concluded that it wasn’t worth asking the question; they had some drinks but seemed equally reluctant to sell those as well so we wandered back to the entrance and found an alternative little restaurant serving a limited choice of traditional Latvian food.  Mickey and David had black peas and bacon; there were an awful lot of black peas and not a lot of bacon and they both confessed later that it was not terribly appetising.

Now everyone should have known what to do next because we all had our personal itineraries but sadly they didn’t seem to help a great deal when we arrived back in Riga at the appointed pick-up point.  We quickly found Mark who boarded the bus but we failed to locate May and the driver was anxious about being parked illegally.  I don’t know what the penalty was but he was very nervous about it.   May appeared but disappeared into McDonalds so Alona went in after her and May came out of a different door.  Between us we managed to turn this into a key-stone cops routine as I went to McDonalds to find Alona and she came out of the other door and vanished down the street, as I couldn’t find her I went back to the bus to be told she was heading away from us which required a hundred metre sprint to advise her that we had finally assembled everyone and to bring her back.  There was still no sign of Nick and he wasn’t answering his mobile phone so we assumed that he was still recovering and we left without him. 

Don’t miss the Martin Parr exhibitions at the Baltic Gateshead – on until Jan 17th 2010

source – artnews

I have visited the Martin Parr exhibitions at the Baltic, Gateshead twice – and am still trying to work out what the feeling is that his work gives me.

The new exhibition is called Luxury – and includes the above shot and a whole range of others of the rich indulging in different parts of the world.  Could he (should he) also re-present the noveau-poor and make it as hard-hitting as Bill Brandt’s views of the upper and lower classes?  Or is his gently-satirical and affectionate voice too accepting of the foibles of all classes?

The Parrworld exhibition is just plain interesting – on many counts.  His collections enrich the way we receive his work – we get  better idea about the mind that selects this shot, and that and that.

The collection of his photo-books (on which he is an expert and has published) is a fine display.  The one that got me most was the beautiful inscription from Cartier-Bresson.  It was also great to see prints from world masters and from fine North-East photographers.

But I don’t think you can really get into the man, or let him into your sensibility without including his films Martin Parr’s Moving Pictures especially Part One: Modern Times – Think of England.  Modern Times – think of England shows his sympathy and a kind, gentle inquiry voice as the camera records the food,and holidays, and recreation of (mainly) the English.  It’s not a pretty picture – it is not pastoral or elegiac, or sanitized. The racism is there along with the disgusting food.  But above all there is bemusement and acceptance – and not, as with Louis Theroux, with a sense of superiority.  I don’t suppose for one moment that Parr shares the values embedded in most of what he photographs or films but Parr is accepting of the diversity of people – and he enables us to look without our habitual judgementalism – or at least provides a space in which to look before we make judgement.  The photographs are a re-arrangement of elements that hold back judgment.

Perhaps Parr’s work is primarily for the English/British – the pictures and films are certainly not flattering.  Like the weather that keeps imposing itself a certain cussedness and a tinge of stupidity are in the mix.  I can’t believe that the work on file is a first choice for the UK Tourist Boards.  An interesting comparison is to be made to compare the images and film put out by the Tourist Boards and the work of Parr – or of Calum Colvin.

I am starting to focus the feeling – and some of its main elements are;

A satire that is more kind than vicious – though it is unflinching about the mores of his subjects.

For me – a fellow-Englander and a fellow Brit seeking unblinkingly the Englishness of the English (and the Britishness of the British?  Perhaps he or someone else should pay comparable attention to the other parts of the UK.  See for example the work of Calum Colvin, starting with the ‘Ossian’.)

A document-provider and celebrator of ‘low’ culture.

A celebrator of foibles – gentle and satirical.

Photographs that seem like snap-shots writ large.

Photographs that make us look and see – before we judge and ‘en-box’.

His work is historical, but largely nostalgia-free.

Martin Parr holds up a pretty straight mirror – and he frames in a largely kind and accepting way.

Yesterday, we played host to a new local/national initiative to foster debate within the art world. The debate was titled Steady State and was hosted by MMM, which stands for Missions, Models, Money and Era21

Attendees included the heads of Arts Council North East, Baltic, Centre for Life, Live Theatre, NFM, GNAF – and arts and policy chiefs from Government Office North East and Newcastle City Council.

Speakers were:

The debate ranged widely over arts policy in the challenging economic climate, the power of art to engage with the excluded and the conundrum that amateur participation doesn’t necessarily lead to greater audience uptake.

Really great to see that the established institutions can springboard off the debates to see the organic nature of what we’re creating at Hoults, which is equally valid and challengingly freef0rm for today’s market. With 400+ people working out of the yard in 50+ creative media firms, we’re reinterpreting the old model of monolithic dinosaurs and turning our cohort into a very active collaborative community.

NFM kindly agreed to host the meeting – not quite sure who paid for the cakes but they were scrummy.

- As a result of receiving a mallard and a treatise on species variation from his friend Alfred Russell Wallace, Mr Charles Darwin formulated the argument that became his Magnus Opus, The Origin of Species.

- In response to the spectacles available to see at their home town zoo, the Providence RI band The Low Anthem found the inspiration for the joyously celebratory and naively awestruck title of their newest album, Oh My God, Charlie Darwin.

- In recognition of the 150 years that have passed since Darwin’s achievement, and with something of the eulogistic acclaim that marks the Low Anthem’s album’s nomenclature, an exhibition entitled A Duck for Mr Darwin now graces the University of Warwick’s Mead Gallery after its inception at Gateshead’s Baltic earlier this year.

-And in response to the happy coincidence of returning home to see my parents in Coventry where this exhibition was showing (YES, Warwick University is in Coventry shocker), and finding the Low Anthem’s album for just £5 at the University record shop, I am writing this now, in order to wax lyrical about both, as well as their forefather of influence.

(I have thus further attempted to understand what I previously distinguished as a local art history as the result of happy coincidence, of life marching on: spiralling through and beside cultural stimuli which throws itself at you/me/all of us, and which might and can and should become internalised, putting oneself at the centre… a blog would then become the most appropriate home for such a self-involved/self-involving/self-EVolving rambling as this… and I am able to almost see in this sea of self-centred stories something actually tremendously down at heel. Art history takes on the mundanity of the everyday, the product of evolution and of living, experience as base in the most transcendental way possible, and to be celebrated on terms equal to breathing…[stop the manifesto] ).

Charlie Brown and Snoopy as doctored by me

 

In Dorothy Cross’ video work Stage from the exhibition, the artist speaks to the actress Fiona Shaw (the fearfully flirty headteacher of a matriarchal all-girls school in the joyous Three Men and a Little Lady, to my mind) about life on the Galapagos where they visited on a Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation and Galapagos Conservation Trust residency, extolling the infinite possibilities and potential of life; successes contained within the word if,

          IF stops you being trapped where you actually are… you can dream from IF.

The same work opens with footage of a tortoise’s throat bellowing with every breath, like a leather bouncy castle wall announcing a child’s ricocheting from it in slow motion. Here, the tortoise still possesses all the majesty which Mr Darwin found in it, and the enduring potential of evolution.

Marcus Coates, meanwhile, finds something equally enthralling about the tortoise, as a video work entitled Intelligent Design shows an adult male tortoise failing repeatedly in his endeavour to mate with a female. The work says everything it needs to about such a ridiculous challenge to Darwinian common-sense.

Marcus Coates-Intelligent Design

 

Coates’ video work Human Report, also the result of a Galapagos residency, further exposes something of the fall-out of Darwinian theory, and the lessons unlearnt; impactful human interjections in nature’s beautiful narratives, and our inability to adapt appropriately or with any respect to out surroundings, as told by the Galapagos’ lauded friend, the Blue Footed Booby, reported on Ecuadorian television.

Elsewhere, anthropology-cum-ecology prevails in pieces by Ben Jeans Houghton, Mark Dion and Andrew Dodds, all of whom play upon the idea of the most artistically resonant if somewhat staid patterns of humanity; collecting, researching, compiling, repeating, (reviewing even)… a social commentary of sorts.

For me, Jeans Houghton’s work is particularly successful, displaying a conceptual playground in a shed. That is, his life’s collection of things, assorted into colour ranges and displayed, yes, in a shed. Reminiscent of

a)Darwin’s shed (at it’s most obvious), and

b) the leisure time of the jobbing enthusiast, this piece is like an ode to the hobby, the collector, the anal amongst us. It is an ode to what my mother calls the autistic spectrum of man. What’s more, it provides an opportunity for us to consider things as things, where “commodities” become different to the minutiae of pointless collections. In Darwinian terms, this is the celebration of those animals no-one gave a shit about till Attenborough exposed them as godly (see previous blog entry on the Vogelkop Bowerbird!!!)

The Low Anthem’s work might unintentionally be classified similarly: a stunning appreciation of that least noticed in society till we are drawn to us it once. Just as Fleet Foxes returned harmonies to the mainstream with last years eponymous debut album, and Bob Dylan reminds us of America’s grand musical heritage on his theme time radio hour (his comprehensive knowledge of 50 years of American musically sits just beyond my brother’s inane knowledge of 90s pop trivia on the aforementioned spectrum), so do The Low Anthem recall a bygone era, and an attestation of the remarkable tranquillity to be found in simplicity. Pioneer trails, bar-room balladry and the wind-scorched, buffalo-filled acres of a pre-industrial hinterland infuse songs such as the near-perfect To Ohio.

Throughout the exhibition and the album, my thoughts were directed toward a picture of evolution concerned primarily with ancestral descent, and what lay before us. Charles Avery’s work, alternatively, is characterised by his forward/sidewards glance at an imaginary island to which he is an intruder, a collector, an outsider and an explorer. He presents for us an ever-growing narrative exposing life on the Island, one both eccentric and adept as it trundles along by way of an irony-laden and tongue-in-cheek appreciation of post-colonial theory, identity formulation, postmodernity and victorian anthropology. It offers hope in a crazy world where the One-Armed Snake is both a threat and a gambling den. The metaphors are full and complex, yet as fun as fun can be.

Charles Avery

 

Returning to Dorothy Cross’ acclamation of the wonder inherent in if, my resounding response to both this exhibition and this album continues to be what if? What if we really did live in a world where Darwin’s theories truly had the impact on they deserved, and juvenile sniggering at a tortoise attempting to make love to another under the banner of intelligent design? was, rather, hearty laughter at a bygone time when people actually believed in creationism? What if the rampant commercialisation of everything made way for a more simple, local appreciation of the things closest at hand? What if the lessons of our ancestors were actually learnt?

Mark Fairnington’s beautifully painted series of animal eyes affected me most noticeably, as I stared into the glassy irises and found only the reflection of museum rooms. Fairnington painted these works not from life, but from stuffed models in the Natural History Museum, where these once-noble now stuffed and stuffy beasts stood motionless. As wonderful as the works are, it made me want to go out a look at real animals.

GO ON, GO AND LOOK AT A COW!

Mark Fairnington - Bison

Since the Ottoman royal harems were filled with women from both the Mediterranean and the Baltic – Italian families even casting their daughters on the Adriatic to be picked up by the sultan’s sailors — my Turkish husband jokes he finally brought me back to Istanbul where I belong.

I don’t know, in the span of history and forgotten connections of family, anything’s possible. My Lithuanian family name, echoing a town and river on today’s Belarus border, also sounds a lot like the imperial Turkish bloodline of Osman.

family name derived from this town

As a fourth generation immigrant, I’m so far removed from who and where I come from I’m visited by ghost urges from genes and culture long ago severed. Today I post at expat+HAREM, the global niche about how the mysteries of our extended lineage often crop up as synchronicity, wanderlust, and quirks of taste.

For instance, why does this Northern California girl raised on turkey burgers crave the beet soup borscht? When I feel kinship with my Ukrainian, Estonian, Jewish, Italian and Greek friends, what do their wide brows or brown eyes, their stoicism or talkative personality, remind me of? Do they mirror the mix that is me?

What ethnic or regional mystery reverberates in you?

Tonight the legend of Santa began.  Though I couldn’t see Miss Q’s eyes, I could tell from her body language she was soaking it in; the floats, dancers, singers, bands.  She didn’t particularly like the truck horns, and her mum was blinded by their LED seizure inducing lights, but the horses were a hit as were the gymnasts.

We had one rocky moment, when a bone-head operating a remote-controlled mini-float (picture a rectangular box with a head sticking out of it) drove straight at Miss Q.  She is skittery around remote-controlled cars on a good day, but to have one, with just a head sticking out, come straight at her, wasn’t good.  Fortunately the bagpipes were a good distraction.

Last year, when Miss Q was one, she vibrated on my shoulders, pointing out animals and bubbles as the parade went by, but this year she was older, wiser.

This year, she was waiting for Santa.

Almost three is a magic number.  It’s the age when you’re just figuring out who Santa is and what he can do for you.  He’s not a complete stranger, but then again, he’s not quite the jolly elf dropping down your chimney with gifts.

“I want Santa to bring me a reindeer baby for my reindeer friend,” Miss Q told me when I asked.  She was playing with her stuffed reindeer, Baltic, and Baltic’s girlfriend, her sister’s stuffed reindeer, Baltic, at the time.

It felt very, very, very wrong to push; to declare, Surly you must want something else; or pull out the Toys ‘R Us catalogue.  If she wanted a reindeer baby, she wanted a reindeer baby.  She would find the catalogues in good time.

This is why two-and-three-quarters is a magic number.  Miss Q is still pure.  She believes Santa lives in the North Pole with penguins, because they’re with Frosty in her book.  She doesn’t have an alphabetized wish list.

After Santa cruised past in his reindeer driven sleigh, Miss Q looked happy, but she wasn’t overjoyed.  In fact, she wanted to go into Seeing Is Believing.  Great, I thought.  Here it comes. But she just wanted to look.

When we got home, she walked me to the cupboard.  “I need to write Santa a note,” she said.

To the adult eye, her note was red lines and squiggles, but to Miss Q and Santa, it was pictures of him with his reindeer.

The setting was superb. Nothing would spoil the wedding breakfast.

One of the rules of NaNo is that one writes and DOES NOT EDIT until the required minimum wordcount of 50,000 words (or end of novel, if that adds up to more) is reached. But for your sake, dear Reader, I have edited a little. Corrected spelling and typos. Otherwise it is open to revision and redoing in December

This, therefore, for good or for ill, is an excerpt from my work-in-progress: or NaNo WIP.
I hope you enjoy. It’s a miracle to witness the continuing flow, I can tell you.

All had been made ready for the guests. The bride waited at the head of the stairs

Horses and carriages stood at the gates, a long line of opulence and conspicuous wealth, each waiting its turn to process down the shady lime avenue which heralded the last mile of approach to the house.

Not a family in Aberdeenshire had been ignored. Invitations sent in January by messenger, hand delivered to Clubs and castles throughout the shire ensured that the assembled gathering would be the greatest affair in the social calendar for a generation. John Ramsay Irvine was going to make sure his daughter’s marriage was witnessed by them all. Grooms and stablehands were lined up at the curved façade to help ladies down awkward steps as consorts and cousins and brothers assisted with the finery, petticoats and layers of taffeta and veils billowing in the slight breeze.

The day was glorious: mid June brilliance with a scent of abundance in the air.

A phalanx of footmen ushered ladies into the house to powder noses, while gentlemen were escorted to the gigantic marquée set on the lawn, hands charged with a glass of champagne immediately they stepped under the awning. Butlers and footmen manfully shouldered silver trays groaning under the weight of crystal brimming with bubbles. Chatter was loud but festive. The ladies would join them in a moment. For now the tent was dominated by menfolk catching up with colleagues, discussing the week’s affairs, arrangements for the shooting season in late summer, and whose house-party already had its quota of family and summertime guests.

When the first of the ladies emerged from downstairs boudoirs and stepped into the light of the terrace, a hush descended on the crowd. Every one of them, matron, maid, young miss was adorned in finery, as if they individually were to be the bride: tiaras appeared glinting in the sun: getting a summer airing from safes and velvet boxes they’d nestled in since Christmas or for parties at Hogmanay. Pearls and rubies shone and sapphire necklaces extracted from bank vaults for this special occasion reflected blue light from the lake.

Brother Hugh stood alone, apart from the jostling crowd, waiting for a signal from his mother’s window that Catherine would soon be ready to take his arm; for him to proceed with her to the little chapel across the lawn to the glade of trees down by the lake. But carriages were still appearing, stopping at the great entrance to unload more adorned maidens with doting brothers or fiancés, and trundling slowly off to the Home Farm where grooms and drivers would wait to be summoned again after it was all over. A long procession still stretched down the lime avenue as far as Hugh could see. There was no rush yet to summon Catherine and her maids.

In the upstairs chamber with its four-poster usually reserved for her mother, Catherine stood radiant. She was to wear Great-grandfather’s South Seas pearls and the ruby necklace brought with him from Russia when he was a successful merchant plying Baltic waters to Danzig. It was now family tradition that these, the first glittering evidence of John Ramsay’s fortune, should be worn by every bride since 1758, the year that the adventurer purchased the Straloch estate from the famous cartographer, Robert Gordon of Straloch. It had been Ramsay’s fortune which built the grand mansion in its grounds.

Today Catherine felt like a swan gazing in her mother’s long dress-mirror at the sparkling jewels round her white neck. There was something about these new continental gowns, the low ‘empire’ line made fashionable by the ladies of Napoleon’s court . The British may have defeated the dictator, but his ladies’ fashion sense lingered on. The high bosom and low neckline made her feel dizzy in the shafts of sunlight glancing through the gauze curtains. It danced and shifted, casting a pool of light at her feet. She allowed herself to peer over her sudden perky breasts at the pompom slippers of maroon silk which peeped out below the vanilla silk hem of her gown. Mother was right. This new line may be a little too daring for such a backwater as Aberdeenshire, but it was just the most beautiful creation she had ever seen and she was standing in it, allowing its long pointed sleeves to hug her delicate wrists, the tight waistband to nip her small frame even more closely than she ever would have dared at a normal party.

‘Everything is allowed for a wedding, my dear. Even daring narrow waists and low necklines.’ If her mother’s voice had a hint of disapproval, it was covered by laughter. Tones tinkled in pride at the sight of her daughter’s surprise.

“We may be of merchant stock, but Grandfather knew a jewel or two. And I must say they do add a je ne sais quoi to your already fabulous beauty.’ Her mother laughed again. ‘I may not be the one to say, but it does run in the family.’

She reached out her own silk-gloved hand to caress the folds at the rear of her daughter’s gown, smoothing an imaginary crease.

Bridesmaids in the ante room behind the pillar giggled and, seeing Catherine’s mother smile and beckon, fell into the room in a huddle of lace and satin and pink pumps.

‘Careful, girls. We don’t want any accidents.’

All four glanced at each other and then at their hostess and giggled again.

‘I wish it were all over. No, of course I don’t but Hugh said he’d start the procession at least by two. It must be close to three.’ Catherine’s small face crinkled in a fleeting frown, scanning her mother’s profile. One of the house maids popped her head round the door.

‘Carriages still coming, m’lady,’ she said, bobbing a hasty curtsey. ‘Master Hugh says another glass of champagne should settle the gentlemen. He wants to know if you would like some up here.’

‘Most certainly not. Thank you, Rose. Tell the Master we shall wait for his signal.’ The maid’s head disappeared again.

‘I can see the end of the carriages.’ A tiny gloved hand holding its regulation posy of roses dropped the long curtain at the window and one of the Burnett girls burst into a fit of giggles. Another grabbed the curtain and then she too dropped it with a guilty look. She turned to the other bridesmaids and whispered
‘It’ll be the bridegroom in the very last carriage.’

‘I heard that.’

Catherine was nervous as a kitten. The last thing she wanted to know was news that that her darling, handsome husband-to-be was the last to arrive. She swept the thought aside. Henry was like her brother Hugh: so strong and brave. Such a pity Father was no longer well enough to sit up, far less be wheeled to the ceremony. But until she became Henry’s, Hugh would be her rock. He would more than make up for her father’s infirmity.

Hugh had turned out like his grandfather: he’d continued the work begun by Great-grandfather in the 244 acre estate after he built the palladian mansion, just as father and grandfather had done. Nowadays there was talk in Society of how rash a move it had been, in the time of King George III, to pull down a 13th century building and put up a Georgian palace. But Great-grandfather was an innovator. He knew all the tricks and turns used by wealthy European royalty in his day and his palace was built to the scale and proportions of the great Italian architect, Palladio, whose style thereafter became the fashion.

Straloch had been revolutionary for its time. Now in the early 19th century, It was considered ‘all the rage.’ For a wedding ceremony and breakfast attended by all the County’s best families, its size and style were totally inkeeping. It had precisely the required number of public rooms, a grand ballroom, drawing room, morning room and a dining salon that none could rival. It had outlived its ‘foreignness’ and become a style which other families copied. Burnetts and Forbeses and Irvines all had since pulled down ancient towers and put up a palladian edifice in its place: at Colpy and Keig and Pittodrie, palaces were erected where cramped medieval towers had been. The Ramsay fashion had become the norm. And in Aberdeenshire, a county renowned for its conservatism, that was saying something.

Hugh was more like father in the way he cared for and tended the trees of the avenue, the stately park specimens getting most of his love and attention. And he had recently started a programme of planting the new fashion in trees: beech.

If you listened to Hugh on the endless variety of beeches one could plant… he could bore anyone to tears. It was enough to make her yawn just to think of it. Some day, of course all this would be Hugh’s. Catherine was just fortunate to be able to have such a beautiful backdrop for her Big Day. And as for father’s being an invalid and not really able to know what was going on, was something one just had to be philosophical about. He seemed more himself when she’d spoken to him this morning, wanting to share with him the excitement to come, the huge numbers who would attend. He looked at her through watery eyes, propped himself up on one elbow from the cushions on his daybed and whispered:

‘Be still in the candlelight, Darling.’

She had not the faintest idea what he meant, but she nodded her head and kissed him on the forehead.

Suddenly Annie Farquharson jumped up and down at the window, her pink slippers doing ballet turns.

‘It’s Hugh. He’s signalling to be ready. He’s pulling out his fob watch and pointing. I think he means it’s time.’

‘All right, all right, girls. No need to lose our heads. Now, we all remember the order. When Hugh comes to the door, you four go first. Ahead of him. Follow Catherine’s cousin Jamie to the head of the stairs and wait. Do you hear me? Wait until I get there.’

There came a chorus of ‘yes’.

‘He’s coming. He’s coming,’ Annie bobbed up and down more frantic than ever.

‘All right, Annie. Now into your special order, please girls. We do this as we practiced it. All right?’

Catherine felt remarkably calm. If Hugh was ready, it meant her dear beautiful wonderful sweet loving kind fiancé Henry was already down in the woodland glade by the lake; at this very moment entering the little chapel and waiting for her. The thought made her faint with pleasure. Annie’s sister June had the presence-of-mind to prop her up. She tut-tutted her support.

There was a knock at the door and Hugh was ushered in by a dressing maid. He whispered something in Mother’s ear and looked over at his sister:

‘Ready my sweet princess? I’ve never seen you more glorious than today. Really. And I’m not being brotherly. I really mean it. You could not look more perfect. I think you are right about these new styles. It’s going to be the wedding of the century.

That’s pretty bold, she thought. This is only 1822. Surely newer fashions will one day make all this seem out of date and from a different world. Again, she brushed the unruly thought aside like a wisp of stray hair in her eye, took a step towards him and grasped his outstretched hand.

‘Thank you my darling Hugh. I would not be able to do this without you.’
He smiled and led her to the door.

Each waited her turn to descend the Great Staircase

On cue, the piper at the front door thrummed up his bagpipes and began a low drone. Catherine could see outside sunlit faces turn from the awning towards the front door.

It was beginning.

She held Hugh’s arm in a tight grasp.

‘You’ll be wonderful,’ he whispered.

She smiled up at him, wishing she could say something in return, but her eyes filled with tears and she swallowed instead.

Six pages rushed past carrying golden candelabra from the drawing room to stand in two rows down the great staircase. As one of them came abreast of her and Hugh, he tripped and looked at her wildly as if to apologize for his clumsy nervousness. His companion bent over to help him fix one of the candles which was beginning to work itself loose from its holder, its flame still alight, but shaking. As one page righted himself, the other’s grasp on his own candlestick slipped.

Catherine and Hugh could only stand and watch. In slow motion, the triple glow of golden light wrapped in cherubs and foiled bacchanalian wreaths, began a downward curve towards the staircase. Hugh grabbed his sister tightly, starting to swing her torso out of the way of the falling light. For a moment all Catherine saw was light: a small flame, so tiny it could do no harm, its glow wanting so much to add to the perfection of her day. Its fall was broken by the solid mahogany ball-and-claw knob of the bannister at the head of the stairs. Instead of cascading flame-first down the stairwell into the abyss below stairs, the dislodged candle bounced back and – oh so excruciatingly slowly – turned its menacing beam on Catherine.

Bridesmaids leapt to left and right, each trying to avoid what must happen: the staircase was in disarray. Other candles started to shake and falter.

‘Hold your lights, there’. It was Hugh’s voice, so close to her ear, but it sounded a million miles away.

Her eyes were glued to the falling candle. Why was it taking so long? It should have landed by now. By now she should be able to jump sideways and out of harm’s way. But Hugh’s arm held her tight. She was immobilized. All she could do was watch, frozen in time as the dislodged candle made a soft thump – such a simple sound – and hit the top of the staircase. Candle wax spilled in all directions, some of it sparking with a flame. One tiny spark of wax fell on the hem of her gown and she stared – her eyes wide now, her mouth open in a silent scream of terror – as flames engulfed her vanilla silk underskirts.

One of the butlers held a tray. He stood crouching back by the open door of the room they had left a moment ago. Hugh let go her arm, made a couple of strides across the landing and grabbed two champagne glasses, throwing the contents at her. He missed and the liquid splashed her arm.

‘Bring me a carafe,’ he ordered, his voice sounding more like a general in Napoleon’s army than her own gentle brother.

He grabbed another two glasses and threw. This time they hit their mark, but in the few seconds’ delay, the fire had caught hold. It was burning her silk stockings. She felt heat sear her legs. It seemed to penetrate right through to the bone. Her tears couldn’t help her. Her brother’s champagne rescue was doing a little but not enough. The candle, so small and innocent a flame, was doing its worst.

Fire raged up the front of her skirt, smoke engulfing her face, her neck, the pearl and ruby necklace. A page stumbled towards Hugh carrying a bedroom ewer, its enormous weight of water slowing him down. Hugh grabbed the jug and poured its contents down her uncomplaining front. His left hand held her steady, in case she fell from the sudden mass of water. Nobody spoke. The other pages stood motionless, still in position lining the staircase. Of four bridesmaids, two were crying and two were holding gloved hands in anguish over their open mouths. Mother had stopped rigid in her tracks halfway down the staircase. She and the pages created a flimsy barrier between Catherine and the jostling crowd of onlookers beginning to push into the main entrance hall.

All could see now: she was the centre of attention: this tragic apparition, her faultless coiffure still crowning a face ravaged by tears, sleeves and gloved hands soaking wet but intact.

Rubies glittered as if they knew red was not only a colour but a flame.

And below the waist – nothing – it was all gone. She was naked except for two charred shivering legs, a vestige of maroon slippers looking like something from the Black Death. She collapsed to the floor just as Annie rushed to cover her nakedness with her vanilla stole. The last thing she heard was her mother’s voice:

‘Give her some air. Let her breathe.’

But it was father’s words which she heard in her mind:

‘Be still in the candlelight, Darling. Be still.’

Two new exhibitions installed at Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art this October are Damien Hirst’s Pharmacy (in conjunction with Tate Connects) and the only UK showing of Parrworld by photographer Martin Parr, an exhibition of photographs, photographic books and a range of objects from Parr’s personal collection.
It was fun looking at and documenting the work, and meeting Martin himself..

It is maybe the abstraction of the contributions in Russian science that turns them so loose. The paraphernalia of objects existent today do derive frm the most conspicuous of the German culture and the privacy needed to obtain severe pretensions to the American be-bop creative beginning of the 20’s does do justice to the Japanese concentration on the individual.

But it is the breakthrough not acknowledged in the population’s well being that interprets concepts as actions – notice the news, for instance.

The perseverance of Russian scientists in the MIR or the absence of discussion in Mathmatical theorems, the investigation on head communication, the existence of advances beyond those that would be expected in areas such as medicine in Cuba or strategic weaponry deployment, so important to modern logistic organisation, spread open the rift between what was in history oblived and the preference for a future that became spy rid, spy fulfilled and now information free.

It is a small price to pay and Russian hackers agree. The step by step evolution also dictated the Russian bitterness – Medvedev is again betting on an open society, Sarkozy stepped the play up and now the G20 brought back the spectrum of unacknowledged contribution upon mediated science, mid-level, nice and easy theoretical frameworks ready made for consumption without borders.

But one is less again prone to straps and handles: science in the Japanese laboratories is paid for, the EU seems not to cope with productivity.

Yet the EU is not building upon the potential of new players – the breakthrough of the G20 in bringing new scientific challenges in areas so interesting as renewables, the play of the logistic network associated with TENE, potential agreements between external countries and actual contenders of the EU’s transportation, production, extraction sectors, all of these might contribute to the development of new industries.

The EU does not lack opportunity but the integration of cross-border projects – the Baltic is a good starting step.

Period: from 2007 untill present day
Client: Mosterfarm AS
Type of work: steel construction
From 2007, Navikon is a permanent subcontractor for Norwegian Mosterfarms AS (former Bomlo Construction AS) in scope of fish farm production. Steel sections of fish farm
as a half-products are produced at Navikon’s facilities in Świnoujscie and shipped to Mosterfarm production site, where qualified Navikon’s staff assists Mosterfarm in finally mounting of fish farms. Our total production from 2007 was over 1600 tons.

I am profoundly pessimistic about the US recovery and here’s why.  At this late date, and looking at all those who surround Obama; the very same people who surrounded Bush and Clinton btw, we are being sucked dry by a massive parasite.

Not only does this parasite deprive the host, us, from nourishment, but in order to survive the parasite takes over the host’s brain, ours, to make the host think the parasite is important to the host’s, our, survival. Even to the detriment of the host itself, us.

I know, sounds like something out of Star Trek or Red Dwarf, I know

In order to get rid of the parasite we will have to undergo a painful procedure, the hard work of organizing and stocking the operating room. The only tools that will work to rid us of this parasite are our feet, a pitch forks, some rope and constant vigilance. However, there is only a small window of opportunity and it’s closing fast.

Sure, we can keep this parasite under control for a little while with a short term relief made of some fancy words, but keep in mind that this possible cure is also being distributed by the parasite. Maybe the cure has good intentions, but maybe it has been convinced like the host.

Regardless,  if we wait much longer the parasite will destroy the host, us, and from the looks of these big wide, open and empty streets it might be time to get used to the charms of the local peasantry and put on your feudalism.

This is what the banks are trying to do in the US

Feudalism

more info
Why Iceland and Latvia Won’t (and Can’t) Pay the EU for the Kleptocrats’ Ripoffs
By Prof. Michael Hudson – Krugmen pails in comparison to this man

2008 interview THEFT!

Parr World, Baltic Museum © Pierfrancesco Celada

Conversation between:

P: me, Pierfrancesco

M: Martin Parr

MARTIN PARR
16 October – 17 January 2010
PARRWORLD

BALTIC Museum, Gateshead

SERIPOP
31 July – 2 August 2009
A weekend of design, print, illustrations and live music curated by Sophie Brown.
Rosella Studios documented the three day event for Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art.

Once again there were plenty of ships in the Kiel Canal including these two heading towards the Baltic Sea.

By breakfast time on September 8th our holiday was almost over. It was our 36th Wedding Anniversary and as a detailed description of the celebrations, and of the final stages of our travels, appears on Granny-Anne’s blog I will try to avoid too much repetition here. Ahead of us lay two days of cruising, first, through the Kiel Canal to the North Sea. then our course would take us south to the English Channel and along the south coast and up the Solent to Southampton. The next 36 hours passed very quickly, in retrospect, until later on the Wednesday evening I noticed with some surprise that we were just about within sight of “The White Cliffs of Dover”. I had never seen them from sea level before and we were a long way off in poor light, Even so, I had to try, at least, to take a few photos, one of which is shown here.

Part of our distant view of the White Cliffs of Dover in the poor light of late evening.

One good night’s sleep later and I awoke early to find that we were in the Solent already – another place that I had never been before. I was amused that at such an early hour of the day, one of the first vessels I saw was this ferry (?) seemingly sponsored (or perhaps owned) by IKEA – suppliers of nearly all our bookshelves and other storage units of which a few can be seen here.

This was a tremendous holiday from Page and Moy. It had been a complete change from our normal routine and we had been totally pampered by all the wonderful people who looked after us aboard Ocean Majesty. Though we had done little exploring in some of the ports, we were very happy with the whole experience and would return to any of them for a much longer holiday.
And finally, to my frequent visitor Shoreacres, I haven’t taken many photos of the sea but here are three, just for you!

Checkpoint Charlie, in a brief moment when the lone U.S, soldier was not surrounded by tourists wanting to be photographed with him.

The structure of the Berlin Wall was far less formidable than I had always imagined and I took this photo of the end of a surviving section to illustrate the point. It didn't need to be any larger as there had been several thousand East German guards watching every inch of the other side of it.

The concert hall at The Gendarmenmarkt, where I was out of sight of our tour group by the time I had wandered off far enough to get it all in the picture.

The German Cathedral, also at The Gendarmenmarkt.

The Brandenburg Gate

On September 7th we arrived at Warnemunde and, after an early breakfast,  set off for a coach tour of the Berlin Highlights. The journey to Berlin took approximately three hours. A fine restaurant lunch was provided for us but the day’s schedule was delayed in the afternoon by heavy traffic.

As everywhere else where conducted tours were taken, I am sure that the selection of the route by the guides, inevitably, will have cast a somewhat rose-tinted light on the city as a whole and Berlin was no exception. It was elegant and impressive. We saw wide streets with many palaces and fine churches and other majestic buildings of an historic nature, many of them restored or rebuilt since World War Two.

We saw parts of the former Berlin Wall (1961-89) and also the amazing amount of reconstruction that has occurred since 1989. There were also many examples of modern architecture in glass etc. which I found impressive – and, coming from me, that is a compliment indeed.

It had been a long day by the time we returned to our ship, Ocean Majestry, for a late dinner.  Berlin was one of the few European capitals that Granny-Anne particularly wanted to see and although there are better ways to get there from the UK, our Baltic cruise had presented the opportunity so we took it.

And finally, some of the many very relaxed-looking cyclists and other pedal-powered transport that I saw in Berlin.