The There There Letter: Cheese, Chenin Blanc, and CH digraph
Three things from DAH.
DAH is me, David Anthony Hance. I write, organize, plan, produce, manage, direct, act, sing, promote, and make change (not the coin kind).
First up this week, Cheese …
Today we're doing a cheese tasting with friends online, via Zoom. I bought three interesting Northern California cheeses online. We'll cut 2oz samples of each, and deliver them to the doorsteps of ten friends before we meet up online to taste them together. I'd planned to organize a Spring cheese tour, but sheltering in place has scuppered that. But the cheese must go on! There's a really great tool for learning about, touring and tasting California cheese:
The California Cheese Trail
Second up this week, Chenin Blanc …
Chenin Blanc is one of the noble wine grapes. It makes a wide range of wines in France's Loire Valley, and is the most widely planted white variety in South Africa (called Steen there). But it fell out of favor in California in the 1980s and 1990s, when it was often made into a bland semi-sweet wine. Now it's making a comeback with smaller prestige wine producers who've found that Chenin Blanc's sympathetic reflection of terroir and winemaking choices can yield them really interesting and delicious wines. At our virtual cheese tasting today I'll have a Sandlands 2018 Chenin Blanc in my glass.
California Chenin Blanc Comeback
Third up this week, CH digraph …
It's easy to fall down English language rabbit holes. I was thinking about words that begin with CH, and was thinking how differently those letters are pronounced (cheese vs choir vs charade) so I went online and fell down the digraph rabbit hole. In the world of orthography, a digraph is two paired characters written to represent a single phoneme or phoneme sequence different from the normal phonemes made by the individual letters. Here's what I found on Wikipedia about the CH digraph:
"The digraph was first used in Latin since the 2nd century B.C. to transliterate the sound of the Greek letter chi in words borrowed from that language. In classical times, Greeks pronounced this as an aspirated voiceless velar plosive [kʰ]. In post-classical Greek (Koine and Modern) this sound developed into a fricative [x]. Since neither sound was found in native Latin words (with some exceptions like pulcher 'beautiful', where the original sound [k] was influenced by [l] or [r]), in Late Latin the pronunciation [k] occurred.
"In Old French, a language that had no [kʰ] or [x] and represented [k] by c, k, or qu, ch began to be used to represent the voiceless palatal plosive [c], which came from [k] in some positions and later became [tʃ] and then [ʃ]. Now the digraph ch is used for all the aforementioned sounds, as shown below. The Old French usage of ch was also a model of several other digraphs for palatals or postalveolars: lh (digraph), nh (digraph), sh (digraph)."
Oh, boy. How fun to discover worlds of learning about which I know next to nothing. Fortunately, I have some yummy cheese and Chenin Blanc close to hand.
That's all for this week.
From Mary Oliver's poem "Sometimes" …
DAH is me, David Anthony Hance. I write, organize, plan, produce, manage, direct, act, sing, promote, and make change (not the coin kind).
First up this week, Cheese …
Today we're doing a cheese tasting with friends online, via Zoom. I bought three interesting Northern California cheeses online. We'll cut 2oz samples of each, and deliver them to the doorsteps of ten friends before we meet up online to taste them together. I'd planned to organize a Spring cheese tour, but sheltering in place has scuppered that. But the cheese must go on! There's a really great tool for learning about, touring and tasting California cheese:
The California Cheese Trail
Second up this week, Chenin Blanc …
Chenin Blanc is one of the noble wine grapes. It makes a wide range of wines in France's Loire Valley, and is the most widely planted white variety in South Africa (called Steen there). But it fell out of favor in California in the 1980s and 1990s, when it was often made into a bland semi-sweet wine. Now it's making a comeback with smaller prestige wine producers who've found that Chenin Blanc's sympathetic reflection of terroir and winemaking choices can yield them really interesting and delicious wines. At our virtual cheese tasting today I'll have a Sandlands 2018 Chenin Blanc in my glass.
California Chenin Blanc Comeback
Third up this week, CH digraph …
It's easy to fall down English language rabbit holes. I was thinking about words that begin with CH, and was thinking how differently those letters are pronounced (cheese vs choir vs charade) so I went online and fell down the digraph rabbit hole. In the world of orthography, a digraph is two paired characters written to represent a single phoneme or phoneme sequence different from the normal phonemes made by the individual letters. Here's what I found on Wikipedia about the CH digraph:
"The digraph was first used in Latin since the 2nd century B.C. to transliterate the sound of the Greek letter chi in words borrowed from that language. In classical times, Greeks pronounced this as an aspirated voiceless velar plosive [kʰ]. In post-classical Greek (Koine and Modern) this sound developed into a fricative [x]. Since neither sound was found in native Latin words (with some exceptions like pulcher 'beautiful', where the original sound [k] was influenced by [l] or [r]), in Late Latin the pronunciation [k] occurred.
"In Old French, a language that had no [kʰ] or [x] and represented [k] by c, k, or qu, ch began to be used to represent the voiceless palatal plosive [c], which came from [k] in some positions and later became [tʃ] and then [ʃ]. Now the digraph ch is used for all the aforementioned sounds, as shown below. The Old French usage of ch was also a model of several other digraphs for palatals or postalveolars: lh (digraph), nh (digraph), sh (digraph)."
Oh, boy. How fun to discover worlds of learning about which I know next to nothing. Fortunately, I have some yummy cheese and Chenin Blanc close to hand.
That's all for this week.
From Mary Oliver's poem "Sometimes" …
Instructions for living a life:
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.
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