Somewhat Silent

At the moment I’m in Gothenburg (Göteborg) in Sweden for a conference (an international one, so the language of the conference is English). But I needed to escape the vast numbers of people after the opening event tonight and found a quiet Italian restaurant near the hotel. Most of the people there, sitting outside on the terrace where I was too, as it’s a beautiful evening, were Swedish. I should emphasise that this is a language of which I know not one word (correction, I do now know one word - “Tak” which means “Thank you”, I think

Anyhow, I was sitting surrounded by these Swedish people and the sorts of sounds their conversation was making were exactly like the way I (sort of) hear English. The way intonation rises and falls in sentences - that sort of thing - seems very similar to English, except that when I tried to lipread them nothing made any sense at all apart from some slightly confusing words which might have actually been English since everyone seems to speak it more or less perfectly here.

So, all this Swedish-sounding-like-it-might-be-English has got me wondering whether other Scandanavian languages sound (and even look on lips) quite similar to English. I have no idea, but this evening’s experience was kinda interesting. It could so nearly have been English until I tried to work out whether it meant anything.

Not a very profound observation, but it’s kinda cool to be posting from a hotel in Sweden

I told myself I’d never do it, but here I am on a quiet Sunday and the result is that I’ve made myself a myspace.com profile. Now I feel as if I can stalk myself

Anyone else on there from somewhatsilent? If so, I’m at http://www.myspace.com/makropulos

Nigel

Yesterday I was in a meeting from 10 a.m. until 5.15 p.m. with all my faculty colleagues in the music department (that’s about 15 people in all). Fortunately we were sitting around a big table so at least I could see everyone, but since only about 30 minutes of the meeting was really important, I got irritated at the amount of effort it takes to try and work out what they were saying. So much of it could have been done by exchanging emails…gah. Anyhow, as the day wore on, I was getting worse at concentrating (this will be a familiar feeling to everyone here). The amount of effort it takes is way too exhausting unless there’s some point to it. I mean, how often do I go to bed at 10 p.m.?

Fortunately I didn’t have to say anything specific except for a bit
of pre-planned support for something one of my friends was proposing, so I lurked for most of the time (and it was a squarish table around which we were sat, so at least I could see who was talking) and threw in the occasional semi-witty comment (which is my way at meetings). In one case I made a suggestion based on what I thought I’d heard and the looks of complete confusion around the room suggested I’d not quite got it right. We were talking about the new building at the time…so when I *thought* someone said something about having “a nice cafeteria”, I said “so
long as the ground floor doesn’t end up looking like Starbucks?” Why, oh why did I not just shut up?…I was surprised to be met by looks of total confusion. One of my nicer colleagues passed me a little note: “She was talking about ‘admissions criteria’ What did you think she’d said?” So at least there was something to laugh about afterwards.

I’ve just been on national radio in the UK. And I’ve just been listening to the broadcast through my super-shiny (and super-loud) headphones, so I could sort of hear myself, my co-author and the interviewer. I missed the nice bit at the end where the interviewer signed off by saying something very complimentary (and very quotable) about our new book, but my partner told me about it and made me feel very bouncy. So - it was cool, it was a lot of fun to do (radio studios are brilliant places to hear because they have no background noise and very clear acoustics, and you look straight at the mouth of the person interviewing you), but I couldn’t help seeing the ever-so slight irony of a deafie being on the radio

I dislike fireworks for two main reasons. Ths first is that they terrify my dog, who has been a gibbering wreck all evening (November 5th is Guy Fawkes Night in England). The second is that they terrify me. I have no high frequency hearing, but I do have some low frequencies, so the deep bomb-like bangs come through only too clearly. That’s a weird sensation when you’re not used to hearing stuff – suddenly to have scary explosions going off in my head. I would just have taken my hearing aids off, but had friends round for dinner, so that wasn’t an option. One of these friends has virtually no low frequency hearing but has some good high frequencies, and she was hearing fireworks a totally different way. Apparently there are fizzy sparkly sounds that are just as disconcerting as the low booming ones. And almost every fire/burglar/car alarm in the district seemed to be set off by them this evening as well.

It’s disconcerting, as a deaf person, to have such a loud evening…!