Learn the nuances of English with The English Nut. He teaches and entertains you! Discover the A-Z of adjectives which include the sense of 'very' in this video.
In this and other videos, The English Nut explores fascinating facts about English, including the origin of English words in India and elsewhere, provides useful tips on English usage and, in a lighthearted manner, corrects typical Indian English mistakes. Watch the videos for entertainment--and you might just learn a thing or two as well. :)
As The English Nut, one of my goals is to interview Dr Shashi Tharoor about the English language.
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Video #38 TRANSCRIPT
Episode Title: Names that became words: Braille
Can you read with your hands? Sounds impossible? Well, that is how blind people read. A feat that is possible because of an accident a three-year-old child had while playing in France, two centuries ago.
Super: Louis Braille (1809 - 1852)
The child was Louis Braille. His father was a leather artisan. One day, Louis was playing in his father’s workshop with an awl, a small pointed tool used for punching holes in leather. He accidentally jabbed himself in the eye with it. First the one eye and then the other got infected, and little Louis became totally blind. Not understanding what had happened to him, he would keep asking why it was so dark all the time.
Luckily for Louis, his parents sent him to one of the world’s first schools for the blind, the Royal Institute for Blind Youth in Paris. Its founder had devised a system of raised letters using the normal English alphabet-which the children could trace with their fingers and that is how Louis first learned to read. But the books were difficult to make, costly, cumbersome and fragile. So much so, that initially there were only three such books in the school.
Super: night writing ~ braille
One day Louis Braille learned of a system called night writing. It was devised by Captain Charles Barbier of Napoleon Bonaparte’s French army. Soldiers used lamps to read combat messages after dark, which made them easy targets for the enemy. Night writing, which could be read by the touch of your fingers, solved this problem. Over time, Braille refined night writing to create what we know today as braille.
When he was only 15, Louis had already created a working model of braille-a system that used six raised dots in different patterns to recreate the alphabet. Ironically, Louis used the awl, the same instrument that blinded him, to develop his raised-dot communication system.
Louis Braille stayed on at the institute where he studied for most of his life, becoming a professor of history and mathematics there. But braille was not adopted at the very place he taught until two years after his death. In fact, the school authorities actively opposed it. After Louis passed away, the students pressurised the school into implementing the far superior braille system.
Super: French surname Braille ~ English word braille
Over the next few decades, braille spread throughout the world as the standard system of writing and reading for the blind, not just in French, but in English and other languages too. By the mid nineteenth century, the French surname Braille had become the English word braille, used to denote the system that Louis invented while still a mere schoolboy.
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Негізгі бет 'Very' is a very lazy word. Replace it!
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