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Language & Literature

Calling All (Reluctant) Bookworms

Em is a reader. A bookworm. She always has been, and always will be. Some people love to read, but some people don’t. Which are you? Maybe you are nagged by your parents and teachers for not reading enough. Perhaps reading is a chore, part of your homework assignment that you rush through, without enjoying because it has to be done. Would you like to learn to love reading? Em has some tips for you.

I really love reading. I mean, I really love reading. I learned to read when I was 4 years old, and I’ve never really stopped since. I used to amaze adults with my reading – I read classic Greek literature (translated, obviously) when I was 9 years old.

Art & History, Popular

Early English Writing – Runes and the Futhorc

Did you know that English hasn’t always been written using the alphabet that we know today? There have been several changes in the way we write over the centuries. We shall start by looking at the runic script. You may already have heard of runes, and perhaps you know that the term refers to some form of writing. We’ll look at runes and the early English alphabet called Futhorc.

Runic Script

First of all, what are runes? Contrary to what legend and hazy modern stories may tell us, runes are not magical, and they are not an exclusive part of an ancient Celtic religion or only associated with druids. Neither are they symbols of the mysterious or spiritual. It is very simple. Runes are letters.

Runic script is a system of writing that is surprisingly close to what we use today in its concept: runes are the letters in a set of alphabets (sometimes called ‘runic alphabets’). These alphabets were used to write Germanic languages. Not simply German as we know it today, but other languages in the same family. This means that it includes English. In fact, the earliest form of writing for English was runic.

The very early form of English that evolved from a language we call Proto-Germanic, which we believe gave rise to many other languages such as German, Dutch, Swedish and others, is known by the term Old English and sometimes also Anglo-Saxon. The second term reflects the names of the Germanic tribes which are believed to have formed the main group of speakers that arrived on the British Isles to displace Celtic languages. It is this early form of English, Old English, which was written in runes.

The Futhorc or Fuþorc

The version of runes used to write Old English is known as the Futhorc. It was developed from the older system of runes used to write other, earlier West Germanic languages, known as the Futhark (fuþark). This Futhark consisted of 24 runes, and the early English speakers found it necessary to expand that and add extra runes to reflect the changes in pronunciation, or the sounds that gradually became part of the language.

They started by adding two extra runes, and this gradually increased until the Futhorc consisted of as many as 33 runes, or letters. You may be thinking that this is rather a lot – but then consider that our modern alphabet uses combinations of more than one letter in order to represent one sound, such as ‘th’ or ‘sh’ and so on. The Futhorc has a separate letter, the thorn þ, to represent ‘th’.

Now, in modern English, we use the Latin alphabet with a few modifications to write our language. The Latin alphabet was first adapted from the Etruscan alphabet, which was in turn derived from the Greek alphabet, and this is where we get its name from.

We call it ‘alphabet’ from the first two letters, A and B, which in Greek are alpha and beta: alphabet. So what about this ancient runic system? Where does the name ‘futhorc’ come from?

There is nothing mysterious about it. It is not an arcane word with some sort of symbolic meaning requiring years of study to understand. When we break it down, it is the same idea as the alphabet. The name ‘futhorc’ derives, or comes from, the first six letters of the runic alphabet. These are feoh (F), ur (U), thorn (TH), os (O), rad (R) and cen (C); FUTHORC, as you can see.

It is essentially the same concept as the alphabet that we use today: each rune, or letter, was used to represent a phoneme, or sound, the basic building blocks of our words.

The Futhorc was used for several centuries to write down English, and for a while when the Latin alphabet was first used for English, the two were both in use at the same time. You can even see some early monuments which have both systems of writing side by side!

Runes were used from around the fifth century to the ninth or tenth centuries in English, although the Germanic Futhark is much older than that.

In our next post, we’ll take a look at the Latin Alphabet, and tell you where you can go to take a look at RL examples of the Futhorc and the Latin Alphabet.

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Food and Recipes, Toys and Games

Offline Minecraft Activities

What to do When Your Parent Says ‘No More Minecraft Today!’

You could wail, ‘That is UNFAIR! You are horrible to me, you are so MEAN!’… or you could talk to them about WHY they are banning Minecraft for the day. Is it perhaps because you’ve been playing for hours and hours, and they think that you should get off the computer/iPod/Playstation?

We are willing to bet that is the reason, not because they want to annoy you. We parents worry that you are online too much, that you are ruining your eyes, that you are going to turn into a big square person who looks just like Steve!

So instead of complaining, how about you and your parents have a look at these fab OFFLINE Minecraft activities that are all to do with Minecraft, so that both you and your parents are happy? (Remember our article about negotiation? That is what this is!)

Food and Recipes, Home, Health & Style, Written By You

Being a Teenage Vegetarian

What do you do when you want to become a vegetarian but your parents aren’t too keen? Tabitha explains how her family reacted to her decision, how they have adapted to having a teenage vegetarian in the family and how she eats healthily without meat.

Like a lot of teenagers, I decided to become a vegetarian. Some do so because they want to rebel, some people think it will be healthier, or just don’t like meat that much. I was convinced to go veggie when I was 13 after a biology dissection. It was only a rat, but it made me realise that I didn’t want to be eating animals as I have a pet rabbit and it was just too close to home for me. Also, a Jamie Oliver programme I accidentally watched featuring the making of sausages put me right off… But mainly for me, it was the animals.

Science, Nature and Tech

A Kid-Friendly Explanation of The Big Bang & An Amazing New Discovery by Scientists

Most scientists believe that the Universe began in a Big Bang around 14 billion years ago. The entire Universe was inside a bubble thousands of times smaller than a pinhead, and was hotter and denser than anything we can imagine.

When the explosion called the Big Bang happened, the Universe as we know it was born. In a fraction of a second, the Universe grew from smaller than a single atom to larger than a galaxy. It kept on growing, and is still expanding today.

Now researchers in America think they have found traces left in the sky that prove this that the Big Bang did really happen. It takes the form of a distinctive twist in the oldest light detectable with telescopes. These twists of light are called ‘gravitational waves’ – the effect is a little bit like how waves form on the surface when you drop a big stone in a pond. However, you also have to imagine that the Big Bang formed the pond itself.

The team leading the project, known as BICEP2, has been using a telescope at the South Pole to make detailed observations of a small patch of sky. The aim was to find evidence of ‘inflation’ – the idea that the cosmos grew rapidly in its first trillionth, or trillionth of a trillionth of a second – growing from something unimaginably small to something about the size of a marble.

The leader of the team, Prof John Kovac of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics said:

“This is opening a window on what we believe to be a new regime of physics – the physics of what happened in the first unbelievably tiny fraction of a second in the Universe.”

Over the coming years, scientists will work hard to investigate every aspect of this discovery. Other experiments will be carried out to see if they can replicate the findings of the American team. If this research is confirmed, it will be one of the greatest scientific discoveries of our time.

EDIT

Dr Sarah Bearchell drew our attention to this video, which explains the concept of gravity and gravitational waves with the help of a towel, an apple and a ping pong ball. Check it out