Mork the Fiddle's 2019 Log

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DaveAgain
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Re: Mork the Fiddle's 2019 Log

Postby DaveAgain » Thu Dec 02, 2021 3:19 pm

MorkTheFiddle wrote:French
Promise at Dawn, via Hoopla. Dir Eric Barbier. With Charlotte Gainsbourg and Pierre Niney. French with English subs, which I used. Bio of Romain Gary (1914-1980), French writer, combat pilot and diplomat. Some think Gainsborough overdid it as Gary’s domineering mother, but I thought she caught the woman’s character well. Solid performances by all, clearly told story. Gary was a prolific and highly-decorated writer whom I know only by reputation. I gave the movie 10/10.
I read the book version of that, I liked it so I'm glad to hear there's a good film adaptation too. :-)
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MorkTheFiddle
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Re: Mork the Fiddle's 2019 Log

Postby MorkTheFiddle » Thu Dec 02, 2021 5:29 pm

DaveAgain wrote:I read the book version of that, I liked it so I'm glad to hear there's a good film adaptation too. :-)

Have you read anything else by him? Before I watched the movie, all I was familiar with was Les racines du ciel.
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MorkTheFiddle
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Re: Mork the Fiddle's 2019 Log

Postby MorkTheFiddle » Thu Dec 02, 2021 5:33 pm

rdearman wrote:
MorkTheFiddle wrote: The commentary of C. E. Graves and the translation by Rex Warner help a lot.

This book came up yesterday when I was searching for books on strategic warfare. I downloaded the English translation. :)

Did you get Warner's translation? There are two or three good ones in English, and a couple in French.
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DaveAgain
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Re: Mork the Fiddle's 2019 Log

Postby DaveAgain » Thu Dec 02, 2021 5:47 pm

MorkTheFiddle wrote:
DaveAgain wrote:I read the book version of that, I liked it so I'm glad to hear there's a good film adaptation too. :-)

Have you read anything else by him? Before I watched the movie, all I was familiar with was Les racines du ciel.
No, that's the only one.

I bookmarked la vie devant soi which was him writing fiction that sounds similar to his autobiog (also a film), and Gros Câlin .

Dominique Bona has written a biography too, and I want to read one of her books at some point.
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Carmody
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Re: Mork the Fiddle's 2019 Log

Postby Carmody » Thu Dec 02, 2021 6:13 pm

Well I read La promesse de l'aube de Romain Gary and came away with the sense that he was so driven by his mother that he really had no sense of his own identity apart from pleasing his mother. His portrayal of himself in the book I found rather sad-a real puppet on a string.
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MorkTheFiddle
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Re: Mork the Fiddle's 2019 Log

Postby MorkTheFiddle » Fri Dec 03, 2021 5:47 pm

Carmody wrote:Well I read La promesse de l'aube de Romain Gary and came away with the sense that he was so driven by his mother that he really had no sense of his own identity apart from pleasing his mother. His portrayal of himself in the book I found rather sad-a real puppet on a string.

The movie gives the very same impression. It was faithful to the book, I guess. He was pathetic, in a way, but on the other hand accomplished a LOT. :)
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Re: Mork the Fiddle's 2019 Log

Postby Carmody » Fri Dec 03, 2021 8:17 pm

Am I the only one that thinks that most of the big accomplishments in the world are by people who have "a LOT" wrong with them.
:?
um........
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MorkTheFiddle
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Re: Mork the Fiddle's 2019 Log

Postby MorkTheFiddle » Sat Jan 29, 2022 7:33 pm

Since the last post, I've been reading Spanish, French and Ancient Greek, as usual.
In Spanish, continuing La novel de Genji, by Murasaki Shikibu. Now 88% through it.
Also, Los pazos de Ulloa, by Emilia Pardo Bazán. Reminding me a bit of La sombra del viento, by Carlos Ruiz Zafón, a kind of Gothic novel in which some buildings and places are characters, and there is an intricate mesh of incidents. A rich treasure trove of new vocabulary for me, so far some 382 new words and expressions and I'm only on location 1642 out of 4701. Luckily for my purposes, archive.org has a dead-tree version, last due date Mar 07, 1983, which shows me I'm on page 195, though actually only the 102 page of the book. Which makes 382/102 = about 3 and 3/4 new words per page. Enough, for sure, but fun learning that a 'jaco' is a 'nag' or that 'eras' are 'threshing floors' (a 'pazo' is a country estate, busy with, among other things, farming).

In French I continue rather leisurely through the third volume of Jules Michelet's Histoire de France. Now in the Crusades, and in the midst of the Fourth, which ended up not capturing Jerusalem from Arabs but instead plundering Christian Constantinople.
La Seconde Guerre mondiale, 1939-1945, by Jean Quellian, was on my list for awhile. Except for excepts from books and journals of participants--a journalist from the New York Herald Tribune, a snippet from the memoires of Mannerheim, and so on--nothing much new here. I stopped reading just before he goes into the Soviet invasion of Finland. I can't give this much more than a 5/10.
366 jours pour mieux vous exprimer en français, by Christelle Molon, which I promised to review a year or so ago after last year ended, but I won't. I stopped 11 mars. There are entries about the difference between 'ont' and 'on' (10 mars), or verb agreement (7-9 mars), the use of the period (22 fev). Important stuff, but worth a brand new book? Anyway, that's what it is. Give it 2/10, because it is not entirely worthless.

In Ancient Greek I'm reading and reading about Thucycides. There is more to tell about that, but I need a couple days to gather my thoughts. :)
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Many things which are false are transmitted from book to book, and gain credit in the world. -- attributed to Samuel Johnson

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MorkTheFiddle
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Re: Mork the Fiddle's 2019 Log

Postby MorkTheFiddle » Tue Feb 08, 2022 5:35 pm

Ancient Greek
Over the past few weeks I've been reading and studying Thucydides' History. Thucycides is challenging and rewarding at the same time, and he is teaching me to be a better reader of Ancient Greek. At the same time, I took a bit of a pause to catch up on seemingly little things that have been slowing down my reading and understanding. One such involves compounds of the two very frequently occurring and lookalike words in Ancient Greek, εἰμί and εἶμι. Both words have compounds, and because the accents and breathings disappear in compounds, the result are words that in some forms look alike. Four such words are σύνειμι, ἄπειμι, πάρειμι, and πρόειμι. Various forms of these words often throw me while reading, and I wanted my head to get familiar with them and to be able to distinguish them quickly and easily. So my decision was to look at as many of the different forms of the words as I could stomach.

To locate them in the texts, I used some tools of the Perseus web site. First, I look up the lemma in Perseus:
In the address bar of my browser I type "Greek πάρειμι" (w/o the quotes of course and πάρειμι in Greek letters). This little command brings up πάρειμι and its definition in the Perseus dictionary. Image
The image show up rather small here, but the screen shows the grammatical parts of the verb, and below that, the words "Word frequency statistics"

Clicking on that brings up the next screen: Image. This shows, among other things, a list of authors (on the right) whose works contain a form, any form, of the lemma of interest.

For this search, I'm interested only in Herodotus, not Thucydides (cause I'm taking a bit of a break from Thucydides), and the screen says 332 instances of the lemma show up in his works. So next I click on that number, 332, and get the next screen:
Image This gives one instance only from Herodotus, but I'm interested in all of them, so I click over to the right on More and get yet another screen. However, the next screen has rather a large amount of data, so for now I'll be content with what this screen gives me, which in its basics, is:
book 1, chapter 9: ... κοιμώμεθα ὄπισθε τῆς ἀνοιγομένης θύρης στήσω. μετὰ δ᾽ ἐμὲ ἐσελθόντα παρέσται καὶ ἡ γυνὴ ἡ ἐμὴ ἐς κοῖτον. κεῖται δὲ
, which is just what the quotation is and that it comes from Book1, chapter 9, of Herodotus' Histories. If I am not sure of what all that means, I can go to the SCAIFE Viewer, or I can search for the quote in a bilingual version. For my purposes, the most convenient and useful (for my purposes) bilingual version is a French-Greek translation by P. H. Larcher. I have the Greek and the translation side-by-side in a Word document that I can search. Unfortunately, as in this case, there is a bug or any rate a glitch in Word. Sometimes it finds the Greek I am looking for, and sometimes not. In this case, alas, not. So I have to look by hand. In spite of Word, I find it and see part of the corresponding French translation. In this case, the translation is not exact nor word for word, but I can confirm that here the word παρέσται is future tense and means simply 'will be.'
Mission accomplished: the word and a sample if I need one. Now just another 165 sentences to go. :)
No, really, I'll go on to other forms of the words, and maybe not even all of them. I just want the word to stick in my head and recognize it the next time I see it.

There is more to say about reading Thucydides, but I'll save it for another day.
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Many things which are false are transmitted from book to book, and gain credit in the world. -- attributed to Samuel Johnson

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MorkTheFiddle
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Re: Mork the Fiddle's 2019 Log

Postby MorkTheFiddle » Sun Feb 20, 2022 10:03 pm

Spanish: nothing new to add this time.
French: Two books added to the active reading list, with a shout-out to Carmody.

Memoires d'hadrien
The Random House Book of Twentieth Century French Poetry, a solid and hefty collection gathered by the American novelist Paul Auster.

Ancient Greek

Thanks to (1) the explanation about nGrams and their use in language learning by Spanish Input, among other places, (2) probably by a post by Sprachprofi, which I may have read a few years ago and forgot about, and (3) by Building Your New Testament Greek Vocabulary, 3rd edition, by Robert E. Van Voorst., I have created some examples of important vocabulary, mostly associated with Thucycides, with the help of perseus and the SCAIFE Viewer and a bilingual copy created in Microsoft Word of Thucydides +
and a list of word and translation in order by appearance in Thucydides with the help of Word, Excel, notepad++ and Microsoft Access.
Here is a list of words I did look-ups on:
    αἱρέω 154*181
    τηρέω 1053*18
    ξυμβαίνω 158*141
    δέχομαι 393*173
    ὁρμάω 479*263
    παραινέω 1187*56
    παρίημι 1218*56
    κωλύμη ?*11
    παρῆν (πάρειμι) 139*11
    χράω, to fall upon, attack, assail
    χράω2, χράω 1164*183 (of a god) proclaim an oracle; (mid.) (of a person) consult an oracle
    ἵημι
    σφάζω
    ἄπιος
    αἴρω
    πάσσω
    πάρειμι sum139* ibo 1669*
    ἀσάω 0*
    ἀνίημι Note ambiguity with impf 1s and 3p ἀναμένω
    ἔπειμι ibo. ἔπ-ειμι (2) (εἶμι), ἔπεισι, part. ἐπιών, ipf. ἐπήιε, ἐπήισαν, ἐπῇσαν, mid. fut. ἐπιείσομαι, aor. part. ἐπιεισαμένη: go or come upon or at; abs., or w. acc. of place or person, ἀγρόν, Od. 23.359; met., πρίν μιν καὶ γῆρας ἔπεισιν, ‘shall come upon’ her, Il. 1.29; also w. dat., τοῖς ὀρυμαγδὸς ἐπήιεν, ‘came to their ears,’ Il. 17.741; esp. in hostile sense, attack, w. acc. or dat., Il. 11.367, Il. 13.482
    sum. (Autenreith) ἔπ-ειμι (1) (εἰμί), opt. ἐπείη, ipf. 3 sing. ἐπέην and ἐπῆεν, 3 pl. ἔπεσαν, fut. ἐπέσσεται: be upon, be remaining, Il. 2.259, Od. 2.344, Od. 4.756. See ἔπι, under ἐπί.
    εἴκων pres part εἴκω to be like, seem likely
    pres part εἴκω2 give way, retire
    fut part εἰκάζω represent by an image
    likeness, image. fem nom sg.
    πείρω <50* pierce vs πειράω 324* attempt, endeavour, try; make trial of
    ἔξεστι 436*
    κενόω 5113* beware of ἐκείνων etc.
    χόω 3993*
    νόμος 91* (note the accent) usage, custom, etc.
    νομὸς 3370* place of pasturage: no instances in Thuc.
    ὁράω 65* (note especially conjugation)
    ἄγνυμι 3730*
    λαμβάνω 68*
    ἀφίστημι 405*. Does NOT occur in DCC list of 500. ἀφίστημι, ἀφίστημι, ἀποστήσω, ἀπέστησα (trnas.) or ἀπέστην (intrans.), ἀφέστηκα (intrans.), ἀφέσταμαι, ἀπεστάθην, (trans.) cause to revolt; (mid. or intrans.) revolt
    κοινόω 364*/ Very few forms in use.
    θέσθαι aor mp inf τίθημι 141*40
    καιρός 211*/57
    μέλλω 142* augm. 7- 11.41 ||| + dyn. inf. 51.33 | + fut. inf. 51.33 | ἔμελλον in counterfactual constructions 34.17, 49.11 | ἔμελλον + fut. inf. representing fut. ind. in indirect statement (with verbs of perception,etc.)
    41.15
    51.33 μέλλω be about/going/likely to, plan to, wait to, delay may be construed with:
    a future infinitive (very regularly):
    ὁρμέω 910*19
    ἐφίημι 1109*14
    δεινός
    πράσσω 95*191
    φθείρω 1240*40 Note διαφθείρω
    ληίζομαι 4092*6 note ληιστήρ, ὁ, pirate
    ἀναιρέω 267*
    τίθημι 141*40
    λέγω 16*7
    χωράζω <50*73? But compare χωρέω
    ἀναχωρέω 776*
    ἐφέζομαι sit upon <50*
    Note ἔπεισεν is aor 3s of ἐφέζομαι, ἐφίζω and πείθω all three.
    ἰδιάζω to be alone <50*
    καταλλάσσω <50*3
    ὑπακοή 1112*19
    παραγίνομαι 366*/12
    ἀνταποδίδωμι <50*/2
    ἐπιδίδωμι 1709*/1
    μεταδίδωμι 1827*/
    ἄπειμι be away, be distant, be absent. 1493*/
    ἄπειμι2, ἄπειμι, go away 577*/
    ἐξουσία 752*/
    τηρέω 1053*/17
    παρατηρέω <50*/0
    ἀναφέρω 1235*/5
    ἀποφέρω 1730*/7
    συμφέρω 336*/39
The number following the word and preceeding the asterisk is the number of times the lemma occurs in the body of Greek lit housed by Perseus; the number following the asterisk is the number of times the lemma occurs in Thucydides. These numbers come in the first instance from Logeion and in the second from Perseus. And <50 means the word occurs fewer than 50 times in Perseus's corpus.

Here is a listing plus partial translation from one of the shorter results, with some light editing. The numbers at the end of the lines after the appearance of Thucydides indicates the Book the quote is from.
παραδίδωμι 298

1 [4] Κολοφωνίοις δὲ Νότιον παραδίδωσι πλὴν τῶν μηδισάντων. καὶ ὕστερον Ἀθηναῖ Thucydides 3
Paches then gave up Notium to the Colophonians not of the Median party;
2 τοῦτο ξυμβαίνειν καὶ ὅστις ἐλάχιστα τύχῃ αὑτὸν παραδίδωσι, Thucydides 5
commit himself as little as possible to fortune
3 διαφύγοι, ὑπὸ τῶν ἱππέων, Νικίας Γυλίππῳ ἑαυτὸν παραδίδωσι Thucydides 7
Nicias surrendered himself to Gylippus,


By the way, Building Your New Testament Greek Vocabulary was used because it is there and because AFAIK something for classical Greek is not there. :( Anyway, words in frequent use in the NT probably match those in frequent use in other subsets of Greek, and few in any of the words listed above are special to Thucydides.

The database of words and translations from Thucydides looks something like this. I mock this up cause pictures of the database are a tad difficult to see.

Word Translation Sentence Status
ἐς into, to; to, up to, until; for (a year, e.g.); as far or as much as; in regard to; inμετὰ δὲ σφίσι τῶν ἱρῶν μεγάλων γιγνομένων {ἐς} τόδε ἡ ἐπωνυμίη ἀπίκετο.099
δὲ1. but. 2. indecl particle giving emphasis NULL 099
τὰς the. fem acc pl, fem gen sg ὁ{τὰς} μὲν ἐκείνου τύχας ταῖς Θεμιστοκλέους εἰκάσας,5
Ἀθήνας * NULL 98

The "Word" comes from the text itself. The other data is from LWT. Translation is obvious, Sentence gives part of the context of the word, and Status shows how well I know the word. Take the status with a grain of salt, because I don't always use Status for what it is designed for. 99 means 'well known,' 98 means 'Ignored,' and 5 means 'Known.' An asterisk standing on its own as well as NULL mean there is no information there.
The database represents the entirety of a Book and gives the words in the order they appear in the narrative.
The value of this is that I can read the account without the distractions of the app or the colors or formatting used by LWT and can see the definitions if I need them. The downside of course is that if I have not yet looked up the meaning of an unknown word, it isn't there. But the query in the database can be run later un with updated data if required.
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Many things which are false are transmitted from book to book, and gain credit in the world. -- attributed to Samuel Johnson


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