w. 35

Friday, 2 September

ENGLISH

Ordinals

The numbers used to order or rank things are called ordinals. In English, we use -st, -nd, -rd, and -th behind the numbers to mark them as ordinals.

1^st – first

2^nd – second

3^rd – thirth

4^th–20^th  - fourth through twentieth

21^st – twenty-first

etc.

CURRENT EVENT

We discussed THE WALL! that Donald Trump reiterated last Wednesday in his immigration speech in Arizona that he would build. I connected this topic with the general topic of migration. As we noted on Monday, humans have been migrating for millions of years. We have not yet discussed the reasons for which humans migrate—only that they always have, and that history provides no model for suggesting that man-made barriers are successful for limiting the need, desire, or means for migrating. There are some models for totalitarian states limiting certain types of migration of their own people, but these have proved to be very detrimental to the states they sought to protect (think Soviet Union/Eastern Europe during the Cold War).

EARLY CIVILIZATIONS (Chapters 1 & 2 in your book)

Continuing with the look at the development of humans, we discussed the issue of “culture” (see p. 6). There are so many different norms that we have created throughout the millennia of human development. These are categorized in the graph on p. 6. And as I stressed in class, these things—how we dress, rituals we partake in, religious beliefs, roles we assign people, etc.—have all changed over time, and are today different according to where you are. I used the term social construct to refer to these elements of life, because they are things we as people create—constructs—and they agreed on in groups in society—social.

All of these social constructs are different from natural phenomena (such as gravity, thunder, lightning, the movement of the planets . . . ), which are not the result of decisions people make in groups. But many of our social constructs can be understood to be connected to natural phenomena (worship of nature gods, myths for explaining thunder and lightning, naming constellations of stars, etc.)

We also considered the role of domesticating plants and animals as a part of creating more complex societies and what can eventually be called civilizations.

(On the note of thunder, I’ll note that I’m not an expert in Nordic/Norse mythology, but I find this thunder thing rather confusing. It seems clear that lighting is created by Thor’s hammer, Mjölnir, but thunder is something most sources seem to gloss over without properly explaining. So perhaps it is always Thor’s chariot, pulled by Tooth-cracker and Tooth-gnasher (English translations I found and find quite delightful) creating the sounds of thunder, but that’s not clear to me. For I’m not certain if it’s meant for Thor to always “be on the move,” so to speak, when he’s wielding his hammer and causing the lightning.)

Monday, August 29

CENTURIES

Here's a little heads-up for one thing we'll be doing week 35: centuries!!!

In English we use centuries more often than we use hundreds. This is confusing for Swedes, because in Swedish only hundreds are used (e.g., 1900-talet). However, I still think most of you are familiar with hearing that we are currently living in the 21st century -- but 2016 does not start with 21, so you should have a clue that the centuries and the year do not completely jibe.

Here's a nice visual I found online that I will be using in class.

ENGLISH

All countries are capitalized all the time. So not south africa, but South Africa. (I confess that I treated Africa as a country when speaking with Ek2, and I started to do same with Sa2. This is, unfortunately, a boo-boo that I and other Westerners make fairly often.)

Also, all adjectives made from countries are capitalized. So:

South Africa à South African

Sweden à Swede (and Swedish)

As I noted, in English there are often differences between the capitalized and lower-case version of a word. So Swede and swede do not have the same meaning. Thus, I feel like such a Swede and I feel like such a swede could communicate very different things and conjure up very different pictures(!).

CURRENT EVENT

We noted the recent suicide bombing in Yemen. I provided my little “trick” of YO for remembering which country south of Saudi Arabia is Yemen and which is Oman.

BIG-PICTURE HISTORY

We looked at timelines of the development of Earth and the development of humans. I have provided these slides from Monday on Vklass.