[Editor's Note: Thank you for sending feedback to previous posts. Your comments are being forwarded to Liz and are always very appreciated by the librarian.]
From Liz....
Great sailing today aboard the TSES – the students are
continuing to explore their new surroundings and get into a routine with
classes, drills, etc. The food is GREAT,
especially the desserts, which do wonders to keep everyone happy, including
yours truly. :) The library was VERY
busy tonight, with cadets/crew doing research, studying, using the computers,
watching the movie, and generally just "seeing what the library's
about."
Although many cadets continue to take a moment or two
daily to explore a new area of the ship with which they were not previously
acquainted (including the library!), most are already acclimating to their
work/watch/study schedules. Engineer
students are diligently studying for round two of seminar, and deck students
are working on their celestial navigation work as well. There are only a few kinks left in the email
system to work out, but students who visit the library to use the computers are
most frequently adding the salutation “Dear Mom and Dad…” to their notes
This time for nostalgia is short-lived, as we were
briskly called on deck for our first round of safety drills, this time for
fire. Being the first of such drills
(the others being man overboard, abandon ship, and security) to ensure the
preparedness of the ship’s crew in case of emergency, cadets and crew mustered
at their assigned stations for roll call.
Cadets were then inspected to make sure they were properly equipped for
such an emergency. Long sleeves?
Check. Ball cap? Check. Knife, flashlight, and life jacket? Check, check, check! We were lucky today that the weather was
favorable to our outdoor drills – a few clouds dotted a bright blue sky as the
ship rolled gently along across the Atlantic.
As for the library, I have been getting news (including sport scores) from my shore colleagues and these are being VERY well received! Lots of Yankees versus Mets rivalries are breaking out in the library in a friendly sort of way, of course. Some professors (especially those from Texas Maritime) are still working out lesson plans and come down to the library for ancillary materials; others have been perusing the DVD collection. I’m surprised by the number of students who are diligently studying – focused for HOURS – on their homework or studying for seminar tomorrow. I would have thought they’d do that a little later in the cruise, but they are finding the materials they need for the most part here which is reassuring!
And one of my first reference questions came up... this one was what the name of the “made up” language is, we think by a German linguist, which combined elements of many languages to make one “universal” language. I've tried looking through our guides to English language, but nothing seems to ring a bell. [Editor's Note: I believe this was Esperanto. Luckily for us we have a copy of the Encyclopedia Britannica aboard for these types of obscrue reference questions!]
1 comment:
From Wikipedia:
August Schleicher (19 February 1821 – 6 December 1868) was a German linguist. His great work was A Compendium of the Comparative Grammar of the Indo-European Languages, in which he attempted to reconstruct the Proto-Indo-European language. To show how Indo-European might have looked he created a short tale, Schleicher's fable, to exemplify the reconstructed vocabulary and aspects of Indo-European society inferred from it.
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