I’ve started yet another new blog, this one for Rudder and me to document our move and our life abroad. It will  be the one we tell all of our friends and family, so may be a bit sanitized. (Not that this one is particularly salacious!) It could be difficult thinking of things to write both here and there, but I will be keeping this one as my main place for writing. Especially right now while the move is the biggest thing on my mind, I may end up duplicating some of the entries from here that deal with that topic specifically. I don’t expect to update there as frequently.
Oh, and the new place is here. I expect the formatting to be changing a good bit in the near future as it shakes out.
We decided to call the new site Avontuur, which is Dutch for adventure. I’m expecting to enjoy learning Dutch. It reminds me of nothing so much as Poul Anderson’s essay, “Uncleftish Beholdings”. There are some later cognates with English, of course, where both languages adopted words from a similar source in Latin or elsewhere, but the greater number of cognates are to words that have been in the English language since Anglo-Saxon times. For that reason, they’re not necessarily cognate to the direct English translation. For example, “carpet” is “vloerbedekking” – which at least to me comes out as floor-bedecking. “Wasapparatuur” – wash apparatus, and there’s an example of a cognate with a Latinate root – is either “washing machine” or “washer and dryer”. If the latter, that’s a useful single word we don’t have in English. And “bedroom” is “slaapkamer”, or sleep chamber. That one’s a little confusing actually, because “bathroom” is “badkamer” so I keep confusing the two.
See how much fun this is??
 (You can tell my new vocabulary is coming from looking at apartment ads.) I can’t actually say most of this out loud yet; I haven’t figured out what vowel sounds go to what symbols. I don’t know how regular they are, either, or if they’re like English and just have to be memorized. The hardest sound, though, is the ‘g’, which sounds like a softer ‘ch’ as in l’chaim. I can do the hard ch fine; Rudder, who hasn’t had six years of Hebrew school or grown up around people who speak Yiddish, will have trouble with that one. When I can say “vliegtag” (airplane), I’ll start to feel I’ve got the phonemes learned.
I’ve always wanted to learn Dutch, because it seemed to be *between* English and German. That softer gutteral is what my first German teacher taught us to use — sort of like whistling in your throat.