Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

[Iversen]

Ready for a bit more about Greek? OK, as I wrote above I used one of my Greek dictionaries as goodnight-goodie two nights ago, and I also used it this last evening/night. The dictionary in question is "Vocabulary of Modern Spoken Greek" by Donald Swanson in its second reprint from 1967 (the first edition came in 1959), and the special thing about it is that it has a limited number of words, but more information about each of them. And if you wonder how a dictionary from 1959 still can be relevant? Well, at the time the situation was that Greek had two versions (plus a couple of dialects like Tsakonian and Cypriote Greek): Katharevouse and Dhimotiki, i.e. a conservative variant and another that represented the language actually spoken by ordinary folks. But the preference for Katharevousa of the military junta from 1967 to 1973 made it so unpopular that it became possible after the fall of that junta to switch most publications to Dhimotiki AND to effectuate a spelling reform that kicked out some silent aspirations and cut three accents down to one. Actually one of my favorite dictionaries is a small old German-Greek Langenscheidt that still uses the old signs even though I also own a more modern and bigger Langenscheidt - the reason being that the old one is much more handy and doesn't close again by itself as soon as I leave it alone on a table.

OK, back to Swanson. I saw one of the verbs of the second conjugation (i.e. one that that has the ending ώ (accented omega) in the first person singular present), and then it struck me that I wasn't sure about the endings of its passive dependent past tense endings . In modern Greek verbs basically have a 'present' stem and another stem, which normally is called the aorist stem because it is used to form the aorist, which is kind of a perfective past tense - but the forms that correspond to the present deserve to be called dependent insofar they almost exclusively are used after the particles να (future) and θα (subjunctive (as an alternative to the missing infinitive)) - not to indicate a point in time here and now.

OK, then I arose from my comfy bed and perambulated to my bookshelves, where I found the "Petite grammaire du Grec modern" by M.Triandaphyllidis. But it was more confusing than I had expected, not so much because it was old (first edition from 1975) and didn't specify its position vis-à-vis Katharevousa, but mostly because its layout for the verbs was very different from the one I used for my own green grammar sheets, So now I have put it behind the other books on the shelf so that I don't get tempted to using it again, and instead I fetched the Essential Greek grammar from Routledge (from 2004, reprint 2007), which was so much clearer in its explanations and layout that I may choose to reread all of it just for fun. However there is one quirk: it deliberately tries to avoid using the word "aorist" and speaks instead of 'perfective' forms. Seen from the perspective of Modern Greek this is OK, but it collides with my Bulgarian terminology, where there is the usual perfective forms as in other Slavic languages, but also an "aorist", which typically is used about single events in the past - and I have never really understood where to draw the line between the past tense forms of Slavic perfective verbs and this purely Bulgarian aorist-thing.

Never mind, I have reread the chapters about verbs in Routledge and my own green sheets, and now I feel that I'm on solid ground again in the morphology of Greek verbs - although I still don't remember all the details.

GR: Το σχέδιο παρακάτω απεικονίζει το Εθνικό Αρχαιολογικό Μουσείο στην Αθήνα. Φτιάχτηκε στο σπίτι στην Πρωτοχρονιά γιατί δεν πήγα εκεί πρόσφατα, αλλά είχα πολλές παλιές φωτογραφίες και το διαδίκτυο για να με βοηθήσει. Το αντικείμενο κάτω αριστερά είναι ο πολύ γνωστός υπολογιστής των Αντικυθήρων από ένα αρχαίο ναυάγιο, που εξέπληξε όλους τους μελετητές. Αντιπροσωπεύει περισσότερη πνευματική δύναμη από όλα τα γραπτά του Πλάτωνα μαζί.

F7030a05_ArcheologicalMuseum_Athens.jpg

PS: I have now got an answer from the gathering people. They do intend to make language tables, so now I have to think about how to organize a wee trip to Brno. The venue is not smack in the town center, so part of the task will be to find out what I can expect to have time for during the lunch breaks. I know that the town has several museums (after all I was there as late as 2019), but it's smaller than Praha and I may want also to visit a couple of other places in that end of Czechia. Never mind, the point of the visit will be to use my languages in practice, and that can only be done efficiently at the tables.

[Iversen]

On my goodnight-chair at my bedside I have for the time being a number of used bilingual printouts (most in Czech plus something else), Swanson's Greek dictionary and a small "Baza ĉeĥa konversacio" which I bought in Praha last year. As for my daytime study time it has to a large extent been undermined by other activities. Last Friday I was in the middle of the process of ordering flight tickets to Bologna in Italy for later this month, and then I noticed that my passport was going to expire precisely during the intented stay. Then I had cancel the operation and instead I booked a time early Monday at the local 'Borgerservice' (citizens' servide) to apply for a new passport. But it rained the whole weekend and froze the night before, so I canceled the appointment Monday and got another one for Wednesday. However it rained a bit more Tuesday, so when I tried to leave my home Wednesday I got stuck in the lawn/driveway from my carport to the road and had to get hauled up by the road service. Finally I got a third appointment for today Friday, which I actually succeeded in attending to, and yesterday I got one of my acquaintances to come by with a trailer so that I could buy 400 kg of granite shards which I intend to spread unto said lawn/driveway this weekend to make it more reliable during futures episodes of adverse weather conditions.

Another time consuming activity has been to make even more museum drawings (as if I hadn't enough already!). I basically covered Denmark last year with drawings made in situ, but I made a number of drawing at home based on photos and pictures on the internet. Here in the winter time I have started to do drawings of places I have visited several times so that I have a fair collection of photos, and beside those places they have to have a wellstocked homepage which I can use to fill out the holes - maybe also using 'loose' images from the internet. And of course I use the homepages in the proper languages, but since I mostly focus on the images that really can't count as a serious language studying activity.

Many of the 'big' museums have digitized all or parts of their collections, and ..

FR: .. certains musées sont allés encore plus loin en créant des parcours virtuels de type "Google Earth" à travers leurs salles, de manière que vous puissiez revisiter leur musée depuis chez vous. C'est par example le cas pour l'excellent Musée des Instruments de Musique à Bruxelles - et ma visite virtuelle là a duré au moins aussi longtemps que ma visite physique des lieux en 2015.

F7031a05_Instruments-musicaux-Bruxelles.jpg

SCO: Yestreen ah did twa drawins frae Scotland: ane frae the Scots National Museum of Edinburrae and the ither fra Kelvingrove Museum an Gailerie at Glesgae. Baith are guid auld allroond museums wi a bit o awthing, including lang time dead beasts, but aw some pentings and effects tellin aboot a gey pickle o mair recently dead Scotspersons. And in ma depiction ane Scotsman is walkin his tame Stegosaurus, awhile anither is tellin a greedy Tyrannysaur damned well not tae eat it (anymore than it awready did!) Asides thare's a number o lions strinkled loosely aroond the pictur, juist as there are in the real Scots Museum at Edinburrae. An suirely thare forby aw had tae be a pìobaireachd player aroond somewhaur:

F7031b01_Scots-museum-Edinburrae.jpg

.. an here is the Kelvingrove Museum at Glesgae (wi the auld stanedead crocodyle Steganolepis abuin a blae fish whit still soums aroond somewhaur). Heed forby the lairge kist o whistles tae the richt - free daily concerts at ane o'clock, at three on Sundays:

F7031b02_Glesgae-Kelvingrove.jpg

[Iversen]

Maybe the world's most stubborn reader?

I just stumbled over this old photo from Victoria and Albert museum in London. Apparently could even death not make the famous poetess and (twice) queen Eléanor (or Aliénor) d'Aquitaine stop reading:

Eleanore-d'Aquitaine_never-stopped-reading.jpg

[Iversen]

Since Friday I have made drawings from Exeter, Norwich, York, Cultra (i Northern Ireland) and two from Dublin - and that has of course taken some time. I have also watched videos during the day and studied Czech and Greek during the night, but one thing I had counted on spending time on had to be postponed. Last week I tried to leave my carport twice, and the second time my car got stuck in the mud. Then I got hold of 400 kg granite to make my lawn/driveway more resilient, but the soil has been frozen so that I couldn't get the shards fixed in it. One task for later this week when the temperatures rise ...

Speaking about videos: yesterday I somewhat haphazardly stumpled over a series in Spanish from Paleomania, which deals with paleontology. Well, it can't be a secret anymore that I find that topic fascinating, and when I have finished this rant I'm going to take a closer look at the crocodiles and their fascinating past. Yesterday I watched videos about Macrauchenia (some large extinct herbivores from South America), "Avestruces" (ostriches) and big old dead elephants called Paleoloxodon - which reached 5½ m i shoulder height. And I'm going to see what else Paleomania has to offer. There are similar threads from other suppliers, but most are in English. But then I slipped over the language barrier and watched a video about an 8,7 mio years old ape from Türkiye in English. The funny thing is that our ancestry is supposed to come from Africa (Australopithecines etc.), but 8,7 million years ago there were pre-pre-hominine apes almost everywhere EXCEPT Africa - not least in South East Europe. I'll have to dig deeper into that story.

And from there I was lured into the Ecolinguist universe, where I watched one video where a Romanian, an Italian and a Francophone person tried to decode Romantsch - and they had to battle hard to get anywhere. After that a Quebecquois, an Italian and a Mexican tried to understand Sardinian - same story! I did look at the transcription at the top of the screen, but even without that I think I understood more than the participants.

And finally I watched some videos in German from Umbigrabanti about Medieval German and one about the extinct viking language Norn from the Orkney and Shetland islands - but they were pawned to Scotland as part of a dowry, and they were never bought back to Denmark/Norway. And then their language died. The Faroe islands weren't pawned so they still have their own language.

As for the nightly activities: I have a three-page printout collection with one bilingual page about Praha Zoo plus two morphological pages. However I was not quite satisfied with those grammar pages, so I fetched my own green sheets and then I studied the zoo text acribically using both sets of tables, and I spotted at least one necessary change (which I probably just will think about, not carry out): the forms of the dative and the instrumental have more in common than either has with the locative, so if I ever should happen to discover that I have some time free (hahahahaha) I might spend it on rewriting my green pages to put the cases in the optimal order (=locative last). And then I might write the vocative in grey because it irritates me! It shares most of its forms with the nominative so I can't just put it last. On the other hand the nominative is unquestionably the basic form, so putting the vocative above it also runs against my principles. And it can't be put between the nominative and the accusative because they share their forms in the inanimate masculine and neutrum forms - and of course it would be absolutely idiotic to follow the tradition and push the accusative down to a position after the genitive. And all that for a lousy irritating defective case that hardly ever is used in Wikipedia... OK, maybe I'll do something about it later, but not now. With a bit of luck the Czech might drop it before I find time to revise my green sheets.

I have also read some pages in Swanson's Greek dictionary, but that didn't lead to any untowards ruminations. I just fell asleep.

Macrauchenia (Reddit).jpg

[Iversen]

Last weekend the soil was frozen, but Monday and Tuesday it had thawed, and then I spent some time reinforcing my driveway in and out with 400 kg of granite shards.

Not withstanding the hard work during the day, I have of course continued to read things at bedtime, and I have also watched TV and videos.

SP; He visto, por ejemplo, en TVE dos programas sobre la ingeniería romana. La primera emisión fue sobre las calzadas romanas, que eran necesarias para que los ejércitos romanos pudieran desplazarse y oprimir a otros pueblos, pero también servían a las comunidades locales. Y lo interesante aquí es que los caminos romanos que vemos hoy (en fragmentos) no corresponden al aspecto original: la capa superior ha desaparecido, y luego vemos solo las piedras rotas debajo - y creemos que la conducción romana era muy accidentada. Pero no, los caminos estaban bonitos y lisos. Por ejemplo, se mostró un puente en el que se puede ver que la parte central está un metro más baja que los bordes de la calzada, y esto se debe a 1.500 o 1.600 años de desgaste sin mantenimiento.

La segunda emisión fue sobre las minas, y también se podría escribir un largo discurso sobre eso, pero me abstendré de hacerlo.

EN: As for the Youtube videos - well, lots... Først I watched a Greek video (with subtitles in Catalan) about several kinds of monsters which some claim to have seen in DR Congo. Well, I'm not going there to check... Later I also saw another video in Greek, this time about circus freaks (φρικιά). OK, maybe I ought to be ashamed to watching such things, but both videos had the advantage that I could see what they talked about - albeit the monster images never were really clear. For instance they showed a giant snake seen from the air, but there was nothing on the image which could indicate the real size. In the past there were truly snake monsters like Titanoboa, so the idea was clearly that we should be persuaded to believe that this critter still exists.

Apart from that I watched a series of videos in Spanish about paleontology by Paleomania, including one about half a dozen prehistoric predators from South America, including the 'terror birds' that made up for the scarcity of large mammalian carnivores ... ahem, at least until the landpassage between South and North America was reestablished about 3 mio. years and some of the voracious megafauna from the North hurried down South to munch on the Southamerican fauna. OK, one large terrorbird also ventured to the North, but when humans arrived (at the same time as weather chaos at the latest end of the Ice age) they killed promptly off most of the megafauna. Another video in the series told about the Siberian rhino Elasmotherium, that probably had an enormous horn - but no actual horn has actually survived until now.

RO: Am urmărit și o conversație de aproape o oră despre istoria limbii române. Asta este clar o limbă romanică, dar substratul ei, limba dacilor, nu a fost transmisă – nici măcar o singură inscripție.. S-au trasat unele linii către albaneză (care poate să fie sau nu descendentă din iliriană, care și nu a supraviețuit), dar nimeni nu știe dacă dacul era de fapt înrudit cu ilirianul. Pe de altă parte, știm că româna a absorbit o mulțime de împrumuturi nu doar de la vecini, ci și de la, de exemplu, franceza.

EN: Then I was lured into watching several videos in English, including one that claimed that a picture of a bar by Manet was a complete mystery. For instance a barmaid and her supposed mirror are shown, and the mirror image is shown talking to a man who isn't shown elsewhere in the painting. The simple solution was proposed in the comments, namely that the bar is double, and there are two barmaids and no mirror, QED. I also watched a video about the omnivore Tarrare, who lived in the 18. century and ate everything he could grab, including dead or living animals and garbage. At one point he was hospitalized, and the personnel did some experiments, but they kicked him out when a baby somehow had mysterious ly disappeared from the facility - maybe down into the insatiable stomach of monsieur Tarrare. He died four years later .. of tuberculosis.

One quite interesting find was a video about a dinosaur museum in Kalasin in NE Thailand, uploaded just 3 hours earlier. If (or when) I return to Thailand that might warrant a detour to a little visited corner of the country. I also saw some videos from Natural history museums in the USA: one from the new fossil hall in New York and another - a quite good one - about the Smithsonean museum in Washington. I have visited both, but so long time ago that they have changed their expositions since then. However those videos might nevertheless be useful when I get to do museum drawings of those places. I haven't checked yet whether the museums in question have virtual tours on their own homepages, but I found out that the British museum in London has got such a thing, and it not only helped me when I did my museum drawing thereof, but it also reminded me of my own earlier visits. Actually one consequence of doing those drawings is that I get my travel bug rekindled at a time where I just could have stayed at home, sipping cocoa milk and studying languages.

F7031b06_British-museum.jpg

[Iversen]

When I had written the message above I ate my lunch .... and then I jumped into my car and drove down to Flensburg, the most Northerly town in Germany and quite close to the border. I have been in the area a couple of times with a friend of mine to buy stuff - including funny juices and chocolate and (him, not me) beer. But I hadn't visited the center of the town, and that irritated me. So I took two nights in a centrally placed hotel, and Friday I did my great museum tour. First I walked up to the Museumsberg - named like that for reason! Here there is one building with natural history and cultural history and another with art on three floors (the Gemäldegalerie). After that I went back into the low part of the city and visited the Schifffahrtsmuseum (note the three f's in a row!), which has five floors in the main building including a rhum museum in the basement, two in a building in the back and one floor in a third building. And after that I visited something called the Phänomenta, which basically is a hands on science museum for small children. I made three drawings, and I only spoke High German.

In the evenings I watched Youtube videos with subtitles in a number of languages and no sound, using the app provided by the hotel. It has fewer languages on the list for the autotranslation feature than the version for computers, and I also think it has more commercials, which is extra irritatating because you can't just switch to another task while the evil disturbance goes on - if you leave the app you are out. Well, the thing welcomes you back, and it remembers like an old grumpy elephant what you have watched earlier, but you are not immediately returned to the video you left. Actually I had to leave the app a couple of times because it went into a state similar to the advertisement torture state where you couldn't access the menu with the settings. I got out by switching to Netflix and then right back to Youtube. And by the way, I used speed 1.25 because I find the ordinary speed too slow.

Among the things I watched were two reviews in English of a travesty on the Master of the Rings, called something like rings of shit - at least both videos categorized it as a one billion dollars total failure, and the clips they showed were not only abominable in every respect, but they also went squarely against Tolkiens univers... well, the perpetrators apparently couldn't use words like "hobbit" for copyright reasons, but they had stolen just about everything else from Jackson's Tolkien films and just turned it on the head (like turning Galadriel into a servant of Sauron) and added some irrelevant woke elements. The only positive thing about this abominable junk seems to be that Amazon wasted a billion dollars on the venture, and I hope they won't ever get that billion back!

As for the real mcCoy: I noticed that once you have watched just one video about Tolkien's thing you are bombarded with videos where every puny detail is discussed and analyzed to death. Long ago I have watched the very first Hobbit film (half drawings, half role play) - it was not very good, and apparently everybody has forgotten about it. Then I watched Jackson's trilogi about the Ring, and it was OK - though I would have pressed the 1.25 speed button if I had got one. As fot the trilogy on the Hobbit, I have just seen it in fragments on longhaul flights and I find it slightly weird that one thin book could be inflated to a whole trilogy (the ferocious little elverlady was OK though, even though she isn't mentioned in the book). Besides the trilogy has been too much influenced by computer games for comfort. And if anybody makes a video on the Silmarillon then I'm not going to watch it - too much singing and too much religion (or is it philosophy?). I have read the book, and that's enough.

Y_F7034b07_Schifffahrtsmuseum.jpg

[Iversen]

I have spent a lot of time these last days doing museum drawings, but I have also done some Czech wordlists, and my night reading was also mainly done on old Czech bilingual printouts, supplemented with some pages in Assimil's small Indonesian booklet. I had come to how you pronounce things like 2.14 or 2,14, and no, I didn't find the answer in the booklet. I have checked the internet and found this on Google "The decimal point is generally used in countries such as China, Japan, Malaysia, Singapore, Sri Lanka, The Philippines, etc. Some others use the decimal comma, as is the case in Indonesia and Mongolia". But that still doesn't tell me how to pronounce 2,14. I found a homepage that stated that 37,8 is expressed as "tiga puluh tujuh koma delapan!" - so the comma is simply "koma". But the same page also mentions that some Indonesians use dots, and when it comes to the signs in words over one thousand then both combinations apparently are used. And when I listened to the spoken translation in Google Translate clerly said "titik", i.e. points. So now I have several possibilities, but I don't know which one is used most. And worse, it has occurred to me that I have a series of languages here I actually can't be sure what to use. The problem is that I mostly see the numbers written as numbers (with dots or commas), but I rarely hear them pronounced.

As for the museum drawings I started out doing them in museums where paper and colour pencils or crayons had been proved by the museum (mostly during holidays and/or for the small kids), but then I bought my own coloured ballpoint pens and pencils and the ball started rolling. However I still mostly did the drawings in the museums, which meant that I spent something like three months touring around in Denmark visiting museums last year, so taht I now have more than 300. But then I did a few drawings at home (or coloured the few I had made in black-and-white), and when I decided to make some for zoos I also made them at home. And then it irritated me that I hadn't made drawings earlier, and I made some based on photos from trips post corona, and then... well, now I'm doing them for places visited earlier, PROVIDED that I have a fair amount of photos from earlier visits and that I can supplement those with pictures from the homepages of the museums (or just from the internet). Luckily several museums now had extensive digital material collections, and some even have virtual visits à la Google Earth (for instance the Teatro-Museu Dalì in Figueres). But sooner or later I run out of museums that fulfill those conditions, and then I have to start traveling again.

Here one of my darkest drawings (from the excellent ethnographic Musée Quai Branly near the EIffel Tower in Paris) - and yes: to make it easier to take photos without reflections they have let the audience areas stay almost dark and only put light on the exhibits:

F7035b01_Quai_Branly.jpg

SP: Pero hay lugares que son aún más oscuros y horripilantes, aunque por diferentes razones. Pienso con repugnancia en el asqueroso pozo negro del Prado de Madrid, que en su día fue un excellente museo de Bellas Artes donde tanto los turistas como los madrileños se sentian sinceramente como huespedes apreciados. Pero ya no - finito. ¡Ellos contrataron a un director loco que prohibió la fotografía! Como consecuencia mi dibujo del Prado muestra a un maniaco satanás verde con cuernos en la frente y una cola que salta sobre una pila de cámaras mientras su personal recrea la escena de "Fusilamientos del tres de mayo" de Goya a la izquierda, sólo con visitantes del museo con cámaras como víctimas condemnadas y las fuerzas armadas del director como pelotón de fusilamiento. Vease la versión de Goya abajo:

Goya . fusilamento.jpg

En América del Norte probablemente hay muchos lugares con páginas web ricas en contenido y tengo muchas fotografias tambien yo, pero en Latinamérica generalmente prevalece la misma ideología que en el agujero negro de Madrid: ¡cero fotos!