This is not a good blog with prospects. It’s more a verbose, waffly dumping ground for my conceptual earworms. I don’t stick to topics, I digress, I don’t pay attention to the quality of my writing and there are probably a load of other things I’m supposed to do which I just don’t. To some extent I’m not bothered about this or my readership, which raises the question of why I don’t simply write it all down in a notebook or diary. I do that too. I don’t know why I don’t do it with everything, but what you see here is a small fraction of my writing. I never make more than one draft and I rarely plan. I rarely do research. It’s also influenced by my diary-writing habit of never going back and editing anything, which leads to strange wording on occasion because I won’t do something like change “strange wording on occasion” to “occasional strange wording” or “occasionally strange wording”. I do have rules. I never blog about herbalism, gender identity or education, although I have just now and then stuck something on here which covers both or all three due to not having a single topic. The historical reason for this is that I used to have blogs on these topics, but it helps me to develop thoughts about other subjects which I might otherwise neglect, and I can also escape from “day job”-type matters. Not that I really have a day job, but anyway.
This affords me a certain level of freedom in what I do with it. Nobody reads it, so I can cock up and it doesn’t matter. I can experiment in a way which others can’t without losing readers because I have none. Obviously I don’t literally have zero readers, but there are sufficiently few that I don’t need to worry about people bailing en masse, because there is no «masse» to bail. To quote Samuel Beckett, I’m talking into a vacuum.
So: this is what I’m going to do with this. I’m going to start writing two types of post on the same blog. One will be the kind of thing I’ve been writing up until now. The other will be in Gaidhlig, and incidentally I don’t know how to type a stràc on this computer so I’ll probably use a different device, the aim being to practice writing in that language. I’ve been writing a short passage in Gaidhlig for my weekly class for about a month now, but since term’s come to an end I won’t be doing that for a bit and there are also things I want to write about which aren’t appropriate for that setting. Due to the subject matter of the bits so far, they won’t obey the usual rule of excluding herbalism, education and perhaps gender identity. I’ve already written about herbalism for example, and also seaweed, and I wouldn’t usually stick something like that on here. I mention gender identity because although I won’t be talking about the central issues, it does interest me to attempt to write gender-neutral Gaidhlig, an issue which arose because one of the students is non-binary.
So far I have the following already written:
- Seaweeds
- Herbalism
- My grandfather
The Gaidhlig will be bad. That’s the point. I want help and I want to practice. Although this may not happen, I would greatly appreciate it if people whose grasp of the language is better than mine comment on how I can improve this. After these three, I plan to write about my six plans to move to Scotland and the history of clans McIver and Macintyre.
I’d also like to make a few comments on how I approach language-learning which may not be apparent to people whose first language isn’t the same as the language I’m attempting to acquire. This has a history to it, which also means it never applied to French. I’m fluent in Esperanto and have also been a FORTH enthusiast. FORTH is a programming language I’ve mentioned here before, characterised by the definition of more complex words in terms of simpler words, and Esperanto is largely made up of morphemes which can be chained together to modify the meanings of words. This has led me to take the same approach in languages where my vocabulary is small, so for example I’ve worded “died” as “lost (his) life” in some passages. Such an approach I plan to replace with actual words, and it can run up against idioms, either in English or the other language, but it does hopefully communicate itself well for the time being. I tend to do this on the fly.
I might end up writing things which are seldom or never written about in Gaidhlig, but it’s a living language which needs to be used for whatever purpose needed.
That’s it for now then. Watch this space in Gaidhlig, which I don’t know well enough, but I hope this will change.
A Box Of Chocolates 