Ll.

Down came the rain once more giving us another grey day.

I was a bit more tired today having not gone to sleep until the early hours but once again knowing I'd be losing three hours from my day had me getting straight on with things. 

Today's job was to oil the beech worktop in the utility room. Before class I cleared the worktop, rubbed down any stains and gave it a wipe. When we stopped for our tea break I gave the wood a generous coat of linseed oil and after class I tidied up the rest of the room. The peace lily has joined the trailing geranium cuttings on the windowsill as I felt the porch was going to be too cold and there isn't really room for it in the sitting room. The utility room stays warm as that's where we dry our washing at this damp time of the year. 

In our Welsh class after a few technical issues when my camera kept cutting out we carried on with the short form past tense. Right at the end we worked in pairs taking it in turns to read a pronunciation exercise which contained 35 examples of ll, that phoneme found in Welsh but not in English and apparently in quite a few other languages as well. The best description I found for it is a cross between sh and a cat's hiss. Here is a YouTube video giving a more technical explanation on how to form the sound. Try as we might to avoid words with it in it occurs in many place names and essentials such as -milk (both words), vegetables, book, library, a lot, mess, place, lake, where?, lion, mouse, picture, burn, letter and eye so it is vital that we are able to use it. (Okay, maybe lion and mouse aren't vital in everyday language but you get the idea.) There is one bonus in that ll at the start of a word changes to l (a soft mutation) in a lot of cases depending on the rest of the sentence.

 

No disco aerobics tonight so I should be able to get an early night. (Wow, the rain is hammering down on my study roof right now.)