JonM

There is several orders of magnitude difference in terms of what was preserved though. The various reconstructed versions of Cornish are mutually intelligible without any difficulty and would've been so to the last speakers of it. The differences are mostly in spelling, as there was never a standard orthography for the language. The last native speakers were in the 1890s and linguists at the time spent a lot of time quizzing them and writing things down. It's absolutely not recreated from fragments. That's a world apart from the Tasmanian languages, where there are some lists of words - and no way to even tell if all the words in some of the lists even belong to the same language as other words in the same list. It's like attempting to recreate 'west european' if all we had was a few dozen words that the Romans had half-heartedly noted down of the various celtic, basque, germanic, etruscan and greek languages they encountered before killing all of the speakers. As copa said, it's an attempt by indigeneous people to salvage something from the ashes, which I applaud, but it is essentially an invented language. Of course, Hebrew is an interesting parallel here - the only example of a dead language being revived as a spoken language (after ~2000 years). It would be a rather different language today if it had been revived by North African Arabic speaking Jews, rather than European Yiddish speaking Jews.

Except Cornish had hundreds of years of written documents, 19th century linguists who'd got lots of grammar and vocabulary from the remaining native speakers, plus two closely related living languages to compare with. Whereas palawa kani is pretty much made up from a few lists of words, with no grammar at all. It isn't even possible to be sure how many different languages there were.

I'm at the game in York, glad I brought a deckchair. The ground is rammed. Pretty enjoyable so far, particularly as a Lancashire supporter, although the Yorkshire #9, #10 and #11 batsmen did a great job of recovery. Given the size of the outfield, it seems like 100+ short of a competitive total though, so Yorkshire will need to take some wickets.

Southend United have a new sponsor for their West Stand, a local estate agency called Gilbert & Rose. Not sure that the Gilbert & Rose West Stand is quite the image they intended though.

Athletics Weekly has a picture of Keely Hodgkinson (world 800m silver medallist) and Ella Toone, on the track at Leigh Sports Village, as kids having taken part in a school sports day there. Shows what a difference having facilities like LSV can make.

Disappeared quite a few years ago, after winning Elite 2 in the 1990s and doing well in Elite 1 for a while.

You're right obviously, but I suppose Keighley may be able to access additional funding and/or do further work in later years once the thing is built. For comparison, relatively nearby, Accrington's Eric Whalley stand cost £1.3 million for 1200 seats in 2018. Took less than 8 months to build. It has toilets, concourse refreshments, disabled bays etc. but not the other stuff mentioned. It's one of those off the shelf module type designs. Obviously steel prices are quite a big factor.

I don't think the RFL can be blamed for not taking the women's euro final into account. There are very few free weekends in the sporting calendar and I would not prioritise the bash to go into one of them over other RL events. You're basically getting the away support of six championship clubs plus a few neutral people. If that added up to 4k on Sunday, I'm impressed. Couple of thousand from Widnes, couple of hundred from Barrow & Whitehaven, bit more than that from York, bit less than that from Workington, less again from Newcastle would've been my guess.

It was. Barrow well on top in the second half and deserved winners. Some really skilful bits of play for their tries too.

Widnes look pretty disorganised without any half backs on the pitch.

Barrow 12 Widnes 16 HT. Two really good tries from kicks for Barrow. Slightly strange atmosphere, like a Widnes away game, without the home team's fans.

Very much agree with what wrote in both your comments, but I think your earlier point is one where RL really is different from other entertainment products. A large proportion of the people who buy our 'product' do so either because one or the other of their parents did, or because they played RL as a child. It tends to be rooted in family and/or where you grew up. People are generally much more mobile than they were, and specifically pretty much half of the 18 year olds in the country leave wherever they grew up, go to university, and mostly don't come back. Places like St. Helens or Castleford are in this cycle where people come from there; they don't move there from elsewhere very much.

Presumably their coaches were told to park in one place, and everyone knew where to meet at the end, and they were told something different part way through the game.

That's a bit harsh on other Northern cities IMO. Liverpool, Manchester & Newcastle, for example, are all big tourist destinations with lots to do. York has millions of visitors per year. Leeds is probably the least interesting big city in Britain.

Yes, funny to read an interview with Olly Ashall-Bott in La Depeche mentioning that he and Georgia Stanway live together in Widnes and they expect readers in Toulouse to know who she is.

Can you pay on the day? I can't get the ticketing website to let me buy anything.

Canterbury & Hardgear are donating kit for the Ukrainian team taking part in the European under-19s in September. Canterbury will be supplying the tournament referees kit, which is made from "post-consumer" recycled polyester. https://europeanrugbyleague.com/articles/2166/canterbury-and-hardgear-to-donate-ukrain

I guess Fji played Ireland at Rochdale in 2013 - it was a sellout IIRC. They also had a warmup against Hornets I think. The civic reception and the Fijian players singing hymns got quite a lot of publicity at the time.

My wife has occasionally come to RL fixtures with me over the past 25 years or so, although I'm not sure she entirely gets the rules, even now. As we drove home on Sunday, she observed that it seems like there's a reasonably sized minority of people there who just want to shout abuse at someone in authority, and who like to go home feeling angry about something.

I wonder whether that's why Mr. Moore has been dropped too? I can imagine a conversation along the lines of "James, you were probably the only person in the ground who thought it was OK to score a try by diving through the legs of the man playing the ball, why didn't you disallow it?" "Well, I could see it wasn't a try, but Liam only asked me to check the grounding, so there was nothing I could do."

Hmm. Who knew that the name of the former England and Essex Cricket captain would fall foul of the swear filter

Loads of good stuff today 1956 England cricket spin bowler Jim Laker takes 9-37 in Australia's 1st innings in 4th Test at Manchester; best return ever in Test cricket; bettered in 2nd innings 10-53. 1990 Graham ###### scores 333 v India at Lord's. 2012 The opening ceremony of the Olympic Games in London. 1214 The Battle of Bouvines - once called the most important battle in English history that no-one has ever heard of 1377 First example of quarantine in Dubroknik, the city council passes law saying newcomers from plague areas must isolate for 30 days. 1586 Sir Walter Raleigh brought the first tobacco to England, from Virginia.

And of course, the amount of money needed to make it worthwhile is correspondingly less. A one-off England v Tonga game could generate a few hundred thousand in profit. Not worth it for the ARL, but a significant sum for RL in Tonga.

I think they still only have 4 days between the games - 1st, 5th and 9th for the England/ PNG/ Canada/ Brazil games and 2nd, 6th and 10th for the Australia/ NZ/ Cook Islands/ France group, followed by the semi-finals on the 14th and final on the 19th. Presumably keeps hotel costs down and minimises the amount of time amateur players have to take off work.

And I think the original intention was to tie that specific game into school dates too, but things got moved about with the delay. I suppose if the idea is to promote this specific fixture to children, and it needed to be a double header because PNG v Canada is going to be a tough sell, then you can't start too late in the evening. (Incidentally, I understand the actual sales for the Headingley match were 5000 odd at the start of the month, so the talk of beating 15 000 is still somewhat aspirational...)