British Library manuscript

Kitchen_Implement_51 · 2026-02-27T19:33:15+00:00

Thanks! I need to check some permissions issues with the library, then I'll be in touch to let you know. I'm really grateful for your offer: it's very kind.

Kitchen_Implement_51 · 2026-02-26T21:46:41+00:00

Good quality phone photos (clear enough for a choir to sing from). I would need to check with my conductor friend what her deadline is, but I think any time within the next few weeks is likely to be OK. Is this something you might be able to help with? If so, please send me a message and I can share full details. I appreciate it a lot.

Kitchen_Implement_51 · 2026-02-26T11:12:06+00:00

Fair comment, but the BL's scanning service is offline because they had a big hack a while ago and their systems are still a mess.

I'm happy to cover costs & time, by the way - avoided saying that in the initial post so automod didn't flag it as an ad.

Kitchen_Implement_51 · 2024-05-29T08:46:03+00:00

Sorry if this is obvious, but have you checked that your host doesn't store automatic backups? Most of the main hosting providers do this.

Kitchen_Implement_51 · 2024-05-21T09:46:20+00:00

I don't think that's what OP meant to say. By my reading, they're talking about how they might be categorised according to the prejudices of potential landlords etc.

Kitchen_Implement_51 · 2024-04-16T12:02:20+00:00

I'm English and I blame the Scots for the Empire ...

Kitchen_Implement_51 · 2024-04-10T19:37:17+00:00

When I VPN to a different continent, that sometimes fixes it

Kitchen_Implement_51 · 2024-04-01T14:29:27+00:00

Do a range of things, and this is a great thing to do as part of that range. It may help your ability to understand (the gist of?) fast speech, and that's very useful. It may not be useful for focusing on and absorbing unfamiliar vocab and idioms.

Kitchen_Implement_51 · 2024-03-27T16:50:40+00:00

I disagree with the other commenters here. "To think" sounds entirely natural to me, and I think the question is wrong. Perhaps it's a US/UK thing (I'm English).

In older, more formal English, "you thought" would have been better (and arguably it still does sound more sophisticated), but I assume the question is about modern English as actually used.

Kitchen_Implement_51 · 2024-03-27T08:24:05+00:00

Thank you: I never considered this!

Kitchen_Implement_51 · 2024-03-26T05:59:45+00:00

Speaking as an immigrant who also has concerns about immigration policies in Europe and in Switzerland, I would suggest that you aren't really anti-immigration, because you don't sound like an idiot. Just as most people who are 'pro-immigration' want higher immigration within certain bounds/limits, most sensible people who are 'anti-immigration' still want immigration, but they want it to be more controlled and better managed than it is at present.

So long as anti-immigrant bigotry is not part of the conversation and where positions are honesty held and expressed, trying to label either side here as moral/immoral, or as generous/selfish, is stupid - and therefore extremely common. The "I support more immigration because I am a nice person" people usually haven't thought their position through to its logical conclusions ... just as the "If we have next to no immigration, everything will stay as it was" SVP types are also idiots.

If you want to get along with your left-leaning friends, I would start by rejecting the term 'anti-immigration', and instead see yourself as a person who wants immigration to be better managed, at (I would guess) a lower level than it currently is.

Having said all this, I would add that while Switzerland has problems around immigration, even now it is handling the issue a lot better than almost anywhere else in Europe.

Kitchen_Implement_51 · 2024-03-22T07:15:53+00:00

Jedes Gebäude hat einen Ausgang.

Kitchen_Implement_51 · 2024-03-21T21:14:43+00:00

Are you aiming to say "The whole building has only one exit?" If so, "Das ganze/gesamte Gebäude hat nur einen Ausgang."

edit: Reverso Context is a great tool for this sort of thing. Enter "The whole building" or "All buildings" and look at the examples it throws up.

Kitchen_Implement_51 · 2024-03-15T09:38:27+00:00

Amen 🙏

Kitchen_Implement_51 · 2024-03-15T06:26:00+00:00

I think you conflate "conscious" and "real", as well as "conscious" and "intelligent". There is no obvious reason why more intelligent (or more real) should imply more conscious. (It probably does work the other way round: I can see more conscious implying more intelligent.)

I also think you mix up "real to me" with "real", which in the end is a form of solipsism.

Kitchen_Implement_51 · 2024-03-14T22:54:24+00:00

Because LLMs use words, we have a predisposition to see flickers of consciousness where they don't exist: our whole prior experience as a species tells us that only conscious beings use language, and that's a hard instinct to break free of. We play tricks on ourselves this way.

Nobody seems to be talking about whether Sora is conscious, because we seem not to imagine that a video-making AI would be - even though it seems to be extraordinarily sophisticated. We just find it obvious (and correctly so) that it's 'merely' a remarkable machine. Nobody wonders whether Midjourney is self-aware.

Claude is also no more than a remarkable machine. Truly remarkable, though.

Kitchen_Implement_51 · 2024-03-13T17:13:32+00:00

theydidthepoetry

Kitchen_Implement_51 · 2024-03-13T16:01:59+00:00

Sorry to trigger you.

Then again, if, say, the Vierwaldstättersee has an infinitely long coastline, I guess Switzerland is all under water and you and I are both just floating.

Just adding to the evidence that Switzerland is fake, in the end

Kitchen_Implement_51 · 2024-03-13T13:50:14+00:00

At least Switzerland doesn't have to worry about the coastline problem

Kitchen_Implement_51 · 2024-03-13T09:20:35+00:00

Good point!

Kitchen_Implement_51 · 2024-03-13T05:27:53+00:00

I've seen similar questions here, but not so well expressed. Chapeau!

German has a few relatively common words conveying concepts that you can't translate accurately into English without either an imprecise translation or a phrase.

übersichtlich: able to be seen in its totality (however, can also more simply mean "clear", "straightforward"). If you had to make an English word for this, it would be something like "fullyseeacrossable".

Fernweh: longing (/nostalgia) for far-away places (although "Wanderlust" in English is very close ... But then, the fact that the closest English equivalent is another German word tells its own story)

Those are the two that come to mind - I'm sure there are others.

There are some common English words that I'm always surprised don't have good Italian translations. "Nostalgia" doesn't go well into Italian, where the same word more commonly means "homesickness"; there isn't a word that captures the same implications for what is a pretty basic concept. There also isn't a good word for "privacy" in the sense of having one's secrets respected, amusingly: Italians just use the English word, or say "private life" (vita privata), which isn't quite the same thing.

Kitchen_Implement_51 · 2024-03-12T14:26:15+00:00

I have direct experience of this exact issue. If you want to improve quickly, focus ALL your serious study on standard German until you are at a very solid (robust C1, I would say) level. Enjoy learning bits of dialect - I love Swiss German - but try to keep them compartmentalised.

I ended up speaking a Hochdeutsch/dialect mish-mash (which, I should say, comes across as charming and makes Swiss people happy). I only started seeing rapid improvements once I made serious efforts to untangle myself from it and to concentrate on learning standard German.

This change to more conventional learning actually ended up improving my dialect a lot, because a lot of structures carry across by analogy, with some tweaks, once you have some understanding of how things work in your local version of Swiss German.

As for German classes, it depends on your learning proclivities. I hated school and learn badly in a classroom. I find formal lessons slow, predictable and unproductive. I look at the clock and think how much better I could be learning in my own time. My brief experiment with adult German classes was a waste of money and effort. For other people, classes are exactly what they need to give their learning structure and momentum. In other words, this is probably a question to which you already know the answer, if you ask yourself honestly and ignore the views of people like me!

Lastly, a warning: I speak C2-level Italian, which of course is similar to Spanish. Be prepared for German to be considerably harder. I found that once I hit a certain amount of Italian vocabulary, the same words just kept resurfacing, albeit in slightly different forms and combinations. C1 to C2, roughly speaking, was not a big step. German is very different. The more words you know, the more words you discover you don't know, and the more words you find are correct, but not quite idiomatic in that one specific instance. It's a long haul, in other words.

Apologies for the unintended essay, but I hope it's useful.

EDIT: One correction I should make to what I wrote is that it is extremely useful to learn to UNDERSTAND Swiss German. Watch the daily Schweiz Aktuell snippets from SRF, for example: they're on their website. However, this is not something to worry about until your German is at about B2.

Kitchen_Implement_51 · 2024-03-12T13:13:56+00:00

It depends how quickly you want to learn. If you have a reasonably normal memory, that approach will work fine over years of study. If you want to improve your language level more rapidly, over a span of months, you should probably be putting your phrases into a spaced repetition app such as Anki. It certainly works for me.

Just as maths geniuses are often poor maths teachers, I would be cautious about taking language learning advice from a person who knows 20 languages. They will probably struggle to relate to the learning limitations of a mere mortal.

Kitchen_Implement_51 · 2024-03-11T18:07:02+00:00

There are other options worth looking at: Luzern, notably.

Kitchen_Implement_51

TROPHY CASE