children – Dan Q

Dan Q found GCAJJP3 Kohtauspaikat – Virtual Reward 4.0

This checkin to GCAJJP3 Kohtauspaikat - Virtual Reward 4.0 reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

The younger child and I nipped across for a photo while we waited for our tram to come.

Dan Q found GC1JA6P Töölön kirjasto

This checkin to GC1JA6P Töölön kirjasto reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

Very easy find for the kids and I after a delightful visit to the Tram Museum. We went to the coordinates and instantly saw the cache! SL, TFTC, and greetings from Oxfordshire, UK.

Dan Q found GCAC54Z Aquarium

This checkin to GCAC54Z Aquarium reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

QEF for the elder child and I while on holiday. TFTC, and greetings from Oxfordshire, UK!

[13:16 local time]

Distractingly Amazing

Found the younger child not-in-bed but dancing around his room, using his pyjamas as perhaps some kind of streamers or flags.

Me: “Why aren’t you in bed?”
Him: “I’m sorry; I got distracted by how amazing I am.”

Hard to argue with that.

Note #27182

This post is part of 🐶 Bleptember, a month-long celebration of our dog's inability to keep her tongue inside her mouth.

It’s the Third of Bleptember, and this routine-loving pupper is still confused by the fact that the elder child doesn’t come on the school-run morning walk any more, instead leaving early to catch the bus to her new school. Look at those big anxious eyes, poor thing!

Note #27169

This post is part of 🐶 Bleptember, a month-long celebration of our dog's inability to keep her tongue inside her mouth.

The Second of Bleptember brought back the morning school run into this doggo’s routine. And while she was glad of the extra walk, she also seemed glad of the opportunity to lie down in a quiet, child-free hallway upon our return home.

Rabbithole

The dog came out for a walk with the eldest kid and I, but we couldn’t stop her sticking her head down rabbitholes!

(Oh, and the dog kept doing it, too.)

Note #27145

Looking forward to the school run starting again next week… so I get a bonus excuses for walks around our beautiful village!

Heterophonic Homonyms

The elder of our two cars is starting to exhibit a few minor, but annoying, technical faults. Like: sometimes the Bluetooth connection to your phone will break and instead of music, you just get a non-stop high-pitched screaming sound which you can suppress by turning off the entertainment system… but can’t fix without completely rebooting the entire car.

A car dashboard with five amber and one red warning lights lit. — There’ve been other “this car is getting a bit older” technical faults too. One of his tyre pressure sensors broke the other month and caused a cascade of unrelated errors that disabled the traction control, ABS, auto-handbrake, parking sensors, and reversing camera… but replacing the pressure sensor fixed everything. Cars are weird, and that’s coming from somebody working in an industry that fully embraces knock-on regression bugs as a fact of life.

The “wouldn’t you rather listen to screaming” problem occurred this morning. At the time, I was driving the kids to an activity camp, and because they’d been quite enjoying singing along to a bangin’ playlist I’d set up, they pivoted into their next-most-favourite car journey activity of trying to snipe at one another¹. So I needed a distraction. I asked:

We’ve talked about homonyms and homophones before, haven’t we? I wonder: can anybody think of a pair of words that are homonyms that are not homophones? So: two words that are spelled the same, but mean different things and sound different when you say them?

This was sufficiently distracting that it not only kept the kids from fighting for the entire remainder of the journey, but it also distracted me enough that I missed the penultimate turning of our journey and had to double-back²

…in English

With a little prompting and hints, each of the kids came up with one pair each, both of which exploit the pronunciation ambiguity of English’s “ea” phoneme:

Lead, as in:
- /lɛd/ The pipes are made of lead.
- /liːd/ Take the dog by her lead.
Read, as in:
- /ɹɛd/ I read a great book last month.
- /ɹiːd/ I will read it after you finish.

These are heterophonic homonyms: words that sound different and mean different things, but are spelled the same way. The kids and I only came up with the two on our car journey, but I found many more later in the day. Especially, as you might see from the phonetic patterns in this list, once I started thinking about which other sounds are ambiguous when written:

Tear (/tɛr/ | /tɪr/): she tears off some paper to wipe her tears away.
Wind (/waɪnd/ | /wɪnd/): don’t forget to wind your watch before you wind your horn.
Live (/laɪv/ | /lɪv/): I’d like to see that band live if only I could live near where they play.
Bass (/beɪs/ | /bæs/): I play my bass for the bass in the lake.
Bow (/baʊ/ | /boʊ/): take a bow before you notch an arrow into your bow.
Sow (/saʊ/ | /soʊ/): the pig and sow ate the seeds as fast as I could sow them.
Does (/dʌz/ | /doʊz/): does she know about the bucks and does in the forest?

(If you’ve got more of these, I’d love to ~~hear~~ read them!)

…in other Languages?

I’m interested in whether heterophonic homonyms are common in any other languages than English? English has a profound advantage for this kind of wordplay³, because it has weakly phonetics (its orthography is irregular: things aren’t often spelled like they’re said) and because it has diverse linguistic roots (bits of Latin, bits of Greek, some Romance languages, some Germanic languages, and a smattering of Celtic and Nordic languages).

With a little exploration I was able to find only two examples in other languages, but I’d love to find more if you know of any. Here are the two I know of already:

In French I found couvent, which works only thanks to a very old-fashioned word:
- /ku.vɑ̃/ means convent, as in – where you keep your nuns, and
- /ku.və/ means sit on, but specifically in the manner that a bird does on its egg, although apparently this usage is considered archaic and the word couver is now preferred.
In Portugese I cound pelo, which works only because modern dialects of Portugese have simplified or removed the diacritics that used to differentiate the spellings of some words:
- /ˈpe.lu/ means hair, like that which grows on your head, and
- /ˈpɛ.lu/ means to peel, as you would with an orange.

If you speak more or different languages than me and can find others for me to add to my collection of words that are spelled the same but that are pronounced differently, I’d love to hear them.

Special Bonus Internet Points for anybody who can find such a word that can reasonably be translated into another language as a word which also exhibits the same phenomenon. A pun that can only be fully understood and enjoyed by bilingual speakers would be an especially exciting thing to behold!

Footnotes

¹ I guess close siblings are just gonna go through phases where they fight a lot, right? But if you’d like to reassure me that for most it’s just a phase and it’ll pass, that’d be nice.

² In my defence, I was navigating from memory because my satnav was on my phone and it was still trying to talk over Bluetooth to the car… which was turning all of its directions into a high-pitched scream.

³ If by “advantage” you mean “is incredibly difficult for non-native speakers to ever learn fluently”.

The Local Historian

Back in 2021, as part of a course I was doing at work, I made a video talking about The Devil’s Quoits, a henge and stone circle near where I live.

Video screengrab of Dan standing in front of some standing stones. — It started with a fascination after discovering a little-known stone circle near my new house. It grew into an obsession with the history of the place.

Two years later, our eldest was at school and her class was studying the stone age. Each of three groups were tasked with researching a particular neolithic monument, and our eldest was surprised when she heard my voice coming from a laptop elsewhere in the class. One of her classmates had, in their research into the Quoits, come across my video.

And so when their teacher arranged for a school trip to the Devil’s Quoits, she asked if I could go along as a “local expert”. And so I did.

On a sunny day, Dan sits with his back to a stone, more of the circle visible in the background. — It turns out “local expert” just means “I read the only book ever written about the archaeology of the stones, and a handful of ancillary things.”

And so this year, when another class – this time featuring our youngest – went on a similar school trip, the school asked me to go along again.

I’d tweaked my intro a bit – to pivot from talking about the archaeology to talking about the human stories in the history of the place – and it went down well: the children raised excellent observations and intelligent questions¹, and clearly took a lot away from their visit. As a bonus, our visit falling shortly after the summer solstice meant that local neopagans had left a variety of curious offerings – mostly pebbles painted with runes – that the kids enjoyed finding (though of course I asked them to put each back where they were found afterwards).

But the most heartwarming moment came when I later received an amazing handmade card, to which several members of the class had contributed:

A hand-coloured card, saying 'Thank you so much', with a child's drawing of somebody talking about Bell Beaker people and a photo of Dan showing pictures of pots to a class of schoolchildren. — I particularly enjoy the pencil drawing of me talking about the breadth of Bell Beaker culture, with a child interrupting to say “cool!”.

I don’t know if I’ll be free to help out again in another two years, if they do it again²: perhaps I should record a longer video, with a classroom focus, that shares everything I know about The Devil’s Quoits.

But I’ll certainly keep a fond memory of this (and the previous) time I got to go on such a fun school trip, and to be an (alleged) expert about a place whose history I find so interesting!

Footnotes

¹ Not every question the children asked was the smartest, but every one was gold. One asked “is it possible aliens did it?” Another asked, “how old are you?”, which I can only assume was an effort to check if I remembered when this 5,000-year-old hengiform monument was being constructed…

² By lucky coincidence, this year’s trip fell during a period that I was between jobs, and so I was very available, but that might not be the case in future!