Letters from Chopin

2 April 2011 - Six letters written by Frederic Chopin, thought to be lost in 1939, have been found and donated to a Warsaw museum dedicated to the Polish composer. The letters, written by Chopin to his parents and sisters between 1845 and 1848, were believed lost after the outbreak of World War II. After it emerged in 2003 that they still existed in a private collection, moves were made to secure them. Chopin was born in Poland in 1810 but spent half of his life in France. According to museum curator Alicja Knast, the letters were last displayed in public in Poland in 1932 and were still confirmed as being in Warsaw in 1939. It is thought the letters went missing, like many other cultural artefacts, after the Nazis invaded Poland. The museum was assisted in their recovery by Marek Keller, a Polish art dealer now based in Mexico. He acquired them directly from their owners, who Knast said wished to remain anonymous. In the letters, written in Polish, Chopin describes daily life and his cello sonata in G minor, one of his few non-piano works.

Aggltinative Language

1 April 2011 - The Mongolian language  is tthe best-known member of the Mongolic language family. It sounds a bit weird, but really beautiful and musical. It may have about 5.2 million speakers, including the vast majority of the residents of Mongolia and many of the Mongolian residents of the Inner Mongolia autonomous region of China. In Mongolia, the Khalka dialect of Mongolian, written in Cyrillic, is predominant. Mongolian has vowel-hermony and a complex syllabic structure for a Mongolic language that allows up to three syllable-final consonants. It is a typical agglutinative language that relies on suffix chains in the verbal and nominal domains. While the basic word order is subject-object-predicate, the noun phrase order is relatively free, so functional roles are indicated by a system of about eight grammatical cases. There are five voices. Verbs are marked for voice, aspect, tense and epistemic modality. In sentence linking, a special role is played by converbs. It almost like science.

100 Words

31 March 2011 - England's Italian football manager Fabio Capello claims he can manage his players with just 100 words. So how far could you get with a vocabulary of that size? Despite his sometimes colourful language, communicating with Wayne Rooney does not require a Shakespearean command of English. That's just as well, as the England manager has admitted he's having problems learning some of the basics. "If I need to speak about the economy or other things, I can't speak," he told reporters. "But when you speak about tactics, you don't use a lot of words. I don't have to speak about a lot of different things. Maximum 100 words." In Capello's defence, his vocabulary appears to be far wider than 100 words. But how far would such a limited knowledge take you? For Peter Howarth, deputy director of Leeds University's language centre, Capello's defence of his language skills looks shaky. "It's a ridiculously small number, you could learn 100 words in a couple of days, particularly when you're in the country surrounded by the language," he says. "People do say that from a learners point of view, English is relatively easy to use without too much grammar ... but Fabio Capello needs a range, presumably, and to communicate emotions and a bit of nuance."

UB Fashion

30 March 2011 - Now here is something you did not know about Mongolia: there are a number of fashion shows that take place in Ulaanbaatar throughout the year. The biggest and most well know is Goyol which takes place in December over a whole weekend at the Cultural Palace. It showcases the best of Mongolian and international designers and models and normally sets the trend for the coming year’s look. Tickets for each day cost around Tg6000 but it’s well worth it for the show. Unfortunately one can’t take photographs without a photopass but a few shots from the aisles shouldn’t be a problem. Moda takes place in the State Drama Theatre and costs around Tg4000. It concentrates a little more on traditional wear than the latest cutting edge fashion but is still worth a look – especially as the show is not your standard runway fair but incorporates scene from famous Mongolian plays and also opera signing.

Cable Bill

29 March 2011 - You may have heard the story about the man living in a 14x60 trailer who got a $12,864 electric bill, or the Corpus Christie man who was billed $7.7 million by his water company, or the Canadian whose cell phone provider hit him up for $85,000--the list truly goes on and on and on. Now the outrageous bill receivers club has a new member. Yes, based on the cable bill that an American man received this week, he's either the king of pay-per-view, or the victim of one of the most extreme computerized billing glitches in the history of computerized billing glitches. Fortunately for him, it looks like it's the latter. When the Ohio man's attempt to make a payment on his cable bill to Time Warner was rejected, he learned that the company had calculated his past-due amount at more than $16 million. "All I want to do is watch March Madness," Mr DeVirgillio said. A local newspaper reported that DeVirgilio did the math and concluded that he'd have to order 1.6 million on-demand movies or a pay-per-view fight 400,000 times to accumulate $16.4 million in charges.

Genghis Tomb

28 March 2011 - For Mongolians the remains and burial place of the great leader Genghis Khan are sacred. From the period of reconstruction the desire to remember the heritage of Mongolia has resulted in an increased feeling of pride over their great Khan. The Mongolians and Japanese jointly held a prospecting expedition which made a search for the burial place of Genghis from 1990 to 1993. The expedition did not produce any results. People’s thoughts were divided on the subject and some Mongolians were angry about the expedition so the searching work was stopped. Since 1993 the Academy of Sciences has not given a grant to make a new search. In fact the expedition did not fully search territory of Khentii aimag which is thought to be his final resting place. There is a legend that if one touches upon Genghis remains, much trouble and hardship will follow.

Mongolian Customs

27 March 2011 - Mongolians traditionally were afraid of misfortunes and believe in a variety of good and bad omens. Misfortune might be attracted by talking about negative things, or by persons that are often talked about. They might also be sent by some malicious shaman or enraged by breaking some taboo, like stepping on a yurt's threshold, desecrating waters or mountains, etc.The most endangered family members were children, and that's why they would sometimes be given non-names like Nergui (Mongolian for: without name) or Enebish (Mongolian for:: not this one), or boys would be dressed up as girls.Before going out at night, young children's foreheads are sometimes painted with charcoal or soot in order to deceive evil spirits that this is not a child but a rabbit with black hair on the forehead.