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Greetings of the season.
For one reason or another people seem to be a bit nicer this time of year.
As in years past, I offer for your view a set of Christmas cards
saved by my grandmother from around 100 years ago:
http://www.usgennet.org/usa/ga/state1/cards/chrstmas.htm
We're off to show our daughter real snow, on this her first
Christmas. Temperatures in MN are a lot colder than here. We should
be there by Sunday where the high is forecast to be 1 with a low of
-16 (16 degrees below zero)! Christmas Eve - high -> 5, low -> -15
warming up on Christmas day to 17.
Stay warm!
May you and yours have a wonderful holiday season.
Tim Stowell
An update on how my family tree is budding:
https://www.mccallie.org/ftpimages/309/download/download_group11565_id370...
then turn to page 16......
or a shorter version if the first URL wraps around on you:
http://tinyurl.com/6cq9k6
By the time 2nd grade ended here, two months after our return, our
daughter was chattering along in English and Spanish.
For me Chinese was somewhat like learning Greek, although I found Greek harder.
One has to learn the symbols, the Pinyin which is a phonetic spelling
of what the symbol is pronounced as, and the dreaded tones.
Context is everything. One word spelled the same in Pinyin with the
same tone can have 40 different meanings depending on its use.
Our daughter was having trouble telling the difference between he and
she because in Chinese they are spelled and pronounced exactly the
same, while the character is slightly different.
Being in my 50s and having had a burst ear drum in the last few
years, I was not as able as my 7th grader counterparts in hearing the
fine difference between the tones.
There are first, second, third, fourth tones, a neutral tone and the
one the boys coined - the stupid tone!
The word - ba - depending on tone can mean - eight, to pull out, target, dad.
Their sentence structure is different than ours so one feels like one
is speaking in broken English. They do not use verb tenses as we
do. A character can be translated as a phrase or it may take more
than one character to create a word.
From a genealogy standpoint it gets quite interesting as well:
We would have grandparents, uncles, aunts, cousins, nephews and
nieces and we might say which side of the family they come from.
There are Chinese words for these individuals -
grandfather, grandmother, father's elder brother, father's younger
brother, wife of father's elder brother, wife of father's younger
brother, father's sister, husband of father's sister, brother's son,
brother's daughter, sister-in-law, and about 8 words for cousins.
This cover's just the father's side, for there are an equal number,
but different words for relatives on the mother's side.
Tim Stowell
The UNEXPECTED always happens.