Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

[Iversen]

EN: Friday I first listened to Kevin Fei Sun's speech, which was intitulated "Indo-Aryan for Slavic speakers". Well, I don't claim to be among them, but the talk was in English, and it supported one of my chunches, namely that the Baltoslavic languages may have stromnger ties with the Indoarian languages than with the Germanic and ItaloCeltic ones - for instance they are Satem languages, as opposed to the Western European languages plus Tocharian which are Centum languages. But there are also isoglosses that couple the Slavic languages with for instance the celtic ones - like the idea that you don't HAVE (or own) things - they have just chosen to be at your place.

Room 2 would host RDearman' talk in French about demoralisation and loss of motivation, so to stay happy and motivated I went to room 1 instead to hear about the miserable and troubled learning career of M.Spantidi - in English. But she had good news: if you really have made a fool of yourself then you will definitely remember the word that caused it. And afterwards I stayed in the same room to hear professor Keeley explain why you can't measure polyglots on the number of languages they claim to speak - one reason being that a more varied stock of languages opens up for more extensive shortcuts to related languages. And he should know - his name tag was one of the most richly decorated with colorful flags, most of which presented exotic languages from somewhere in Asia. Right now he is battling with the writing system of Tibetan.

After lunch there was a hiatus of two hours in room two, the one reserved for non-English lectures, I asked how this could have happened and was told that there had been som late cancellations, but I wonder whether it wouldn't have been possible for other participiants to fill out the holes. Many of us have some topics which it is hard to keep us from talking about - with or without slides. Instead I first listened to something about the resusscitation of Manx and then to something about the project Wikitongues, which purports to get documentation of some of the languages that are in danger of disappearing soon. Actually you need more than a few videos to document a language to the extent that it can be reconstructed - a few YouTube videos with a duration of 3-7 minutes each don't cut the mark ... but anyway, it is a beginning, and these people at least do their share of some valuable conservation work.

At this point I would like to break the chronology to mention David Prine's hilarious talk about the sadly dead language Tunica from Saturday (btw David is one more of us LLORGians). Tuncia is (or was) a North American native language that died with a man named Sesostrie Youchigant 60 years ago, but luckily he had first spent a lot of time telling the lingvist Mary Haas about the language, and now it is been revived by members of the tribe aided by staff from the Tulane university (plus Dave P). But nobody expects the result to be an exact copy of the language that died, and that's the right attitude to have. I also find it completely idiotic when obdurate traditionalists try to prevent creative Neolatinists from introducing new words for electronics and rockets and nuclear physics and silly sitcoms on TV and things like that, which we sorely need to keep the language alive and kicking.

OK, back to Friday and the last speech of the day:

FR: Dans le dernier discours de la journée, Mireille Grosjean a parlé d'un projet de standardisation qui vise à aider à sauver le Romantsch malade du sud-est de la Suisse. Comme elle disait, ce pays a trois et demi langues officielles, puisque tous les lois devraient en principe apparaitre dans toutes les langues officielles, mais dans le monde réel ça ne se passe pas. Puisque le Grischun a du moins six dialectes, chacun de sa propre vallée, on a pensé qu'il faudrait créer une orthographe commune. Et on a réussi a ce faire, mais personne ne parle cette invention purement écrite. Bon ben, les Norvegiens ont aussi deux formes purement écrites de leur langue, et les 'allemands' helvétiens utilise le norme écrite de l'Allemagne tandis qu'il parlent leur dialectes régionaux ... mais la différence c'est que ces communautées linguistiques ne ne sont pas en train de mourir.

[Iversen]

The tour de Gathering had now reached penultimam Saturday stage, and...

POR: .... claro que eu escolhi escuchar a palestra de P.Nogeira sobre a pronúncia brasileira do português - e eu gostei a palestra embora fosse em inglês . Basicamente os brasileiros pronunciam todos os 'e' não tensos no final de uma sílaba como /i/ (ou em alguns casos /ji/), incluindo as sílabas no meio de uma palavra. E porque eles odeiam grupos de consoantes eles também inserem i-sons sempre que vêem a necessidade: "o Mackidonnals". Além disso têm uma forte tendência a pronunciar as iniciais r como um gutural /h/ ("a rua" se torna em /a HHHHHHHHUUUUa/). Todas estas as coisas distinguem claramente a sua variante da lingua da variante portuguesa, com a qual eu sou mais familiarizado. O estranho é que todos os países lusófonos em 2009 concordar-se-am em lutar por uma ortografia comum para todos, mas esta ortografia definitivamente não cobrirá a mesma pronúncia em todas as regiões do mundo.

EN: From there I went to a quiz in English, Esperanto and Russian (though for some reason English was dropped, so..). No, let's skip that item. I walked out when the quizmaster refused to repeat one of his impossibly long and convoluted questions. And then I was caught up in a discussion that lasted until well ínto the next round of lectures.

We were photographed during the lunch break, and some of us LLorgians even managed to congregate to have a separate photo taken of just us ... but alas, some were not there, and even though it should be possible to photoshop them into the picture later - although this presupposes that we have a photo of them, preferably taken on the same stair under the same blue sky, so it is likely not to happen.

After midday I listened to Dave Prine's talk about the ressurrection of Tunica, which I also have mentioned earlier, and after that ...

IT: .... S.Artinian degli Stai Uniti tenne una conferenza sulla plasticità del cervello, la quale che è molto più grande di quanto presunta prima - il che chiaramente è rassicurante per noi semi-anziani che ancora voglamo imparare quelche lingue nuove. Io avevo aspettavo più informazioni hardcore sulla fisiologia del cervello, ma la lezione è andata bene tal quale. E poi seguirono i discorsi lampi, prima parte, con cinque minuti max a ciascuno. Ripeterò solamente a questo tema che al fine ci era rimasto tanto tempo (perché uno degli oratori non era arrivato). che se mi ha dato la possibilità di improvvisare la tirata nell'italiano alla quale ho referito sopra.

EN: The day ended with one more round of lightning talks. And for me the most notable event here was (as mentioned earlier) that there was some time left over, and when the volunteer in chargé of the talks offered a free change to speak to any member of the audience I was the one who grabbed the opportunity.

[Iversen]

The last day Sunday I first listened to T.Q. Hung talk about ways to improve your listening succes, but his three step model didn't really address the central problem for weak listeners, namely that you can't both try to get all the words AND think about the meaning of some of the words along the way. If you try then you will lose the next five or ten words, maybe more.

After this room 2 would host a talk in French about holocaust and other sad things, so to stay happy I once again skipped a non-English talk and chose one in English. It could have been Jane F telling us that we shouldn't be scared of Asian languages, but I ended up listening to Gareth Popkins telling us about the notion of talent. He is a very entertaining lecturer, but of cause he can't make us all more talented in just čť minutes. At least he managed to get the message through that talent isn't just one single thing - it is a conglomerate of different skills, some of which are more culturally based than others.

And at this point I sneaked out of the gathering bubble and went into town, where I visited the local watch museum and the Narodny Gallery and ate some ice cream and walked around in Stare Mesto until around 14:30. But being a generally quite the obedient event participant, I was back in service at 15 o'clock for B.L.S. Hua's quite interesting talk about the Austronesian languages, which once covered an immense area from a number of islands in Thailand over the bustling millions of Indonesia to the Easter Island... plus Madagascar. Thanks to my attempts to learn a bit of Bahasa Indonesia I do know something about some of the characteristics of these languages, including their reliance on affixes and their relaxed attitude to precise indications of number and time , and I have also studied verb formation in Tagalog and a few other things. I even knew that the group arose in some communities on Taiwan, and funnily enough I remeber that I once saw a sign post in Chinese, English and one of these local languages on the Eastern coast of Taiwan). But I was surprised to see how different the words in the dozen or so old Taiwanese languages were from the words in their presumed offspring. The linguists who have hammered that out in soundshifts must have been really clever!

EN: The day continued with one more round of lightning talks. Several of these were quite good, but I would like in particular to mention a speech describing the writing system of Akkad in 5 minutes. And of cause it can't be done - far too complicated - but it was a brave attempt. The point is that the Sumerians invented the cuneiforme writing system, and when they were conquered by the Akkadians these adapted the Sumerian writing system even though it didn't suit their own language (Sumerian is consideret a linguistic isolate, while Akkadian was an early Semitic language). The result became a situation where one cuneiforme sign could be used both as an ideograph, but also as a phonetic indication or a typological marker of sorts. We got an example where the six or so meanings of one sign were pinned out. The speech ended with the commented elucidation of a short passage which referred to the Great king Sargon I ... and I'm glad that I don't have to refer to the Danish queen in the same complicated way.

After that the series of talks was over, and it was time for the final ceremony ... but I have already commented on that several days ago, so here I'll end my review of the event.

[tarvos]

As I mentioned above the first day started early at 9:00, and the first speaker was Judith Meyer, who started the whole gathering thing, but also is known for her ability to learn languages fast - and that was exactly what she spoke above. Not really anything new, but a good and solid talk with wise councils to likeminded learners. Then I could have learnt about Warlpiri (the favorite language of the late Kenneth Hale or being told that speaking from day one really is a good idea, but I went to room 2 to hear M.Długosz' talk (in German) about the German Schlesian dialect (it seems there also is a Polish Schlesian dialect), mostly from the sociological side. And then me....

FR:: Eh bien, je pense que j'ai réussi à dire ce que je voulais sans commettre trop de gaffes. Au début j'avait un problème avec l'ordree de mes images. Je les amène toujours sur une clé USB et ils ont toujours des noms qui commencent par un numéro. Mais ici, il semble que ils ont été montrés dans l'ordre chronologique, ce qui était un peu inquiétant pour moi. Le problème a été resolu, et depuis lors tout est allé selon le plan. Vous connaissez dejà le contenu, donc je ne vais pas le répéter ici.

RU: Затем Р. Кокорин рассказал, как полиглоты учают языков. Он говорил по-русски, а поэтому я понял только половину. Я не слушал достаточно, и это ошибка, которую действительно хорошие полиглоты не совершают,

EN: After lunch I could have stayed in room two, but my oral Polish is way below A1, and I could have watched David James and Lydia Machova demonstrated the goldlist method - but as you may be aware I have my own wordlist method, so I listened to a lecture about the Bengali language instead, and then I went back to room two to hear something about extensive reading, which seems to be reading where you deliberately avoid loooking words up.

SP: Para estar cómodo para usted, este método siguiendo a Joanna van S no debería usarse con un idioma situado al livel en menos de un buen B2 o C1 o C2, pero yo supongo esto solo se aplica si realmente quieres entender todo el texto. He yá mencionado que estoy leyendo un libro checo en el cual conozco al máximo la mitad de las palabras, y puedo adivinar quizá la mitad del resto. Tengo evidenemente que repasar el libro de vuelta a casa, pero la primera lectura no es una pérdida de tiempo. Este ejercicio fortalece mi capacidad para sobrevivir en una cámara de tortura checa.

EN: And finally the secret missions of RDearman and his audience. The idea is that you have to do something extra to find conversation partners in a strange and maybe not too friendly world. One person in the auditorium proposed that you could walk into a porn shop pretending to be a person suffering from the fortunately quite rare giraffe fetichism, another to avoid paying your bus tickets to get some nice and long talks with the controllers ... however I have been riding Slovakian city busses for a week now without seeing any of those control guys so the method may not be that efficient. The general problem with most of the methods that were proposed was that you would end up paying for things you might not need, and that is contrary to my principles. The same obviously apply to incommodating poor innocent giraffes.

Joanna van S, the delinquent Dutch polyglot. XD

(Btw that extensive reading talk was mine, for the people who don't know my real name).

[Iversen]

I have now included the full referentials of Tarvos.

Btw. those who have been following my comments while they were written may have noticed that I have moved some comments around between the days. Well, the reason is simply that I got confused and messed things up... There may be more things that ought to be corrected, and that will happen next time I check in.

EDIT 11/6: ... like the spelling error in "commnets"

[Iversen]

I came to Bratislava through Hamburg and Vienna and returned home through the same two cities. But even though I now have been to Slovakia three times within the last three years or so I still haven't seen everything, so after Bratislava I went to Košice and stayed three nights there, followed by three nights in Žilina. By a rare coincidence my hotel in Košice had a free computer for guests who don't carry their own gadgets around - this is becoming rare as most now offer free wifi instead. But my luggage is limited to handluggage, and I have not yet bought one of those notebooks or whatever they are called. So if there hadn't been that computer in the hotel I would probably not have commented on the gathering since it would all have been old news by now.

Since I returned late Thursday I have been busy organizing my photos from the tour - and even though I didn't do much tourism during the gathering I still had taken more than 600 photos (plus those I deleted right after I had taken them - at least 100 more). This has now been cut mercilessly down to 225, and I have done the usual editing - like making slanted lines vertical or horizontal, removing redshifts and unwanted items from indoors photos etc. etc., and I still haven't had time to write my travelogue. So... no study activities the last couple of days and maybe one more day spent on travel related things before I can resume my studies at the usual level.

EO: Dum mia vizito al Vieno, mi fakte vizitis la Esperantan Muzeon - sed ĝi estas tre malgranda! La Globomuzeo en la sama konstruaĵo estas iom pli granda, kaj kun la sama bileto vi povas ankaŭ viziti la papyromuzeon en Neues Hofburg. Krome, mi vizitis plurajn aliajn muzeojn (la Muzeon de Natura Historio kaj la Arta Historiomuzeion kaj la Teknikan Muzeon. Evidente mi ankaŭ vizitis la bestoĝardeno ĉe Schönbrunn kaj la kastelon mem, sed pro mi estas ĝenega ke vi ne devas foti tie, kaj principe mi ne ŝatas subteni instituciojn kun tia kondamninda nefidinda sinteno al siaj klientoj..

GE: In Hamburg besuchte ich die sehr berühmte Mini-Eisenbahnwelt, aber die zwei größten Überraschungen waren das riesige Meeresmuseum und das Gewächshaus im dem alten botanischen Garten, die ich beide zum ersten Mal sah.

SLK: A Slovensko? Táto krajina má aj dobré pamiatky, a sam chcel by zdôrazniť Slovenskú Dedinu v Martine (v Žiline). Ale teraz som unavén v mojej hlavy - preto už nie ďalšíe slovenské.

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[Iversen]

... and here I am sitting, and I have not yet written the travelogue text, not done any serious studying. The problem is that I have already uploaded all my old musical compositions (revised or unchanged) to the IMSLP site with one exception, a concerto for viola and orchestra. So Saturday I took a peek into the lamentable old sheets and decided that it was beyond rescue apart from a few themes - but then the catastrophe happened: I got an idea for getting something out of the dastard misery and began sketching. The concert will not be for viola and a full orchestra (much to the relief of the purely theorical soloist - the tone of violas isn't all that powerful), but for viola plus a chamber orchestra consisting of a flute, clarinet, a trumpet, a tuba and the usual assortment of strings. And the only reason that I have stopped composing now is that my stock of blank notesheets is dwindling and I have reached a useful place to take a pause. So now I'm going to write the travelogue while I still remember what I did while still 'out there', and then time will tell whether there will time for study after that - I'm not very optimistic about that, but I'll try my best. Else I'll be back tomorrow.

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[Iversen]

And here I sit again, but this time my ears don't glow in the dark of pure embarassment.

I have written my travelogue (at least the one that is divided into daily tidbits).... but I still haven't made the maps. I have not included comments to the gathering - it will be enough to include a link to the relevant part of this log.

I have sketched at least least one movement of the viola concerto. And "sketched" means that I have made a score with lines for all instruments from the first to the last measure, but being a sketch I have NOT yet filled out all the secondary voices in the score - that can wait. And I have only written one movement with a duration of around 7-8 minutes, and I have so far no idea about what to do about the other movements. Maybe there won't be any, and then the thing will be downgraded to a "concert piece" (R.Schumann wrote a "Konzertstück" for four French horns and an orchestra, so I would be in good company ... except that he ended up in a mental institution).

And lo and behold, I have read a few thing in other languages since yesterday. I read some more articles in the Portuguese sci magazine "Super Interessante" which I have mentioned earlier (and which contrary to expectation, giving the title, actually IS very interesting) - but since I have written about it already I'll focus on another line of investigation, ahem extensive reading. This morning I read in my daily newspaper (Jyllandsposten) that the definition of the term "dinosaur" has changed during the history. OK, they still write the newspaper in Danish, but this topic interests me so I read the whole article.

The term "Dinosaur" was coined by mr. Owen, who wasn't a fan of Darwinian evolution, but knew something about bones. He saw some fossils of an Iguanodon, a Megalosaurus and a Hylaeosaurus (maybe he even named these critters, ah dunno), and then he noticed that their pelvis didn't resemble that of contemporary critters - except maybe birds, but the size of the bones didn't match that of your standard lunchtime chicken. The newspaper wasn't quite precise, by I suppose the point is that the old critters AND burds have an extension of the sacrum, which has fused with the nether part of the spine. And he thought the old bones looked terrible, so he named them collectively "dinosaurs" (deinos = fear, terror, scare in Old Greek).

Then in 1882 a mr. Seeley noticed that the most prominent bone (the pubis) in the pelvis of critters named as dinosaurs could turn either forward or backwards - and nothing proved that the two groups were close relatives. So according to him the word "dinosaurs" didn't really cover a unitary group of animals and we should stop using it. The animals with a forward pubis bone were called "ornithischians" (ie. birdlike hipsters) and those with a backwords were called sauriscidae (reptilelike hipsters) - and the irony is of course that we now know that the birds not only descend from, but belong to the sauriscidae, but it is too late to change the names now. We now generally recognize that there should be something behind the name dinosaurs (otherwise all kids will start wailing - like when they downgraded Pluto), and the current definition according to Wikipedia therefore now goes as follows: "Dinosauria itself [has been] redefined as the last common ancestor of Triceratops horridus, Passer domesticus, Diplodocus carnegii, and all of its descendants, to ensure that sauropods and kin remain included as dinosaurs" ("Passer domesticus" is of course the common house sparrow, Diplodocus is the long thing that fills up the main part of the largest hall in the Carnegie museum at Pittsburg and Triceratopus is the three-horned horror that always fights against T Rex in the old films).

It took some time (and some gentle convincing) to get most paleontologists to include birds into the dinosaur clade, but apart from that the main bone of contention seems to be what to be what to do with the Sauropodomorphs - or in more comprensible lingo: the ENOOOOOOOORmous Animals with a long tail and and a very long neck (and not very much brain) - Diplodocus is a wellknown member of this group. They have for some time been seen as belonging to the same group as Triceratopus (the Ornitischians), then in spring 2017 somebody (mr Barrow and his cohorts) for some reason kicked them right out of the Dino world, but the idea didn't catch on to remove such an iconic animal from the group, and then the definition was adjusted so they became true respectable dinos again. So stop crying, kids ....

DA: Jeg malede faktisk en Sauropodomorph dyppet i vand til op over mavesækken en gang i halvfjerdsene. VI er alle blevet klogere siden - disse dyr levede formentlig på land. Der levede dinoer i søer og floder, herunder den kolo-enorme Spinosaurus, men nej - ikke Brachiosaurus eller hvad dyret på maleriet nu skulle forestille at være. Ikke desto mindre: her er den rædsomme anakronisme:

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And this lead me to reread a collection of Catalan articles on paleontology from a number of specialized homepages.

CA: S'ha dividit tradicionalment els rèptils pel nombre de forats al cap darrer l'ull: els anàpsids amb zero forats (tortugues), els sinàpsids amb un forat (rèptils mamiferoides del Permià, i per tal, dels mamífers actuals), Euryapsid amb un forat a la part superior del crani (alguns rèptils marins aquatics extingits) i els diàpsids amb dos forats, i aquest grup doncs inclou tot des de la tuàtara a través els a serps i els cocodrils fins als llangardaixos ... una col·lecció una miqueta heterogèna si he de dir la meva opinió honesta (però no era jo qui va començar comptant trauques en cranis de animals morts). Acaba amb tots els anomenats rèptils estant diàpsids, excepte els nostres avantpassats rèptils mamiferoides) els quals només tenien un forat. La propera vegada que jo mengi un pollastre rostit complet, he de recordar comptar el nombre dels forats als costats del seu crani. Hi hauria d'haver dos forats.

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[Iversen]

I have been an internet-less family visit the last couple of days, but I did do one study relevant thing: Russian wordlists. That's not a new thing, but for once I used a Danish -> Russian dictionary, not the other way round. The reason I normally use dictionaries in the other direction is that it feels more like sweeping an area with target language words, where using a dictionary from a base language into the supposed target language more is like filling out holes and nudging with different translation possibilities in the target language. On top of that the alphabetical order can serve as a memory hook if you use a Target->base language dictionary, where a dictionary in the opposite direction is more likely to give results that scatter in all possible directions even with related base language words. In this respect the resulting wordlist resembles one made from a text, where the new words also are picked from all over the alphabet - but with the caveat that you don't have the text to make a group out of the words.

Ultimately it was the handy size of the book that make me choose to carry it along.

At the end of the day it actually didn't matter too much, because I ended up spending more time doing gardening than language studies.

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And sorry, no more forum writing here today - it's time to study.

[Iversen]

I have spent several days finishing the viola concertino which I mentiond a few message ago, and now it has been uploaded - parts and all. And that filled out the last hole in my row of opus numbers at IMSLP. All my old works have now been uploaded 'as is' revised or replaced with something of the same kind.

I celebrated this with a bit of grammar studies, ha ha.

During the Bratislava event I spoke to an Irish participant and after the conversation I checked the Assimil 'shop', where I found the Assimil mini guide to Irish. I already read some parts of it in Bratislava and even sketched the morphology of the nouns based on the information in the booklet. But then I did tourism for a week, and ordered photos and travelogues and visited my family etc etc, so my celtic studies didn't continue ... until today. At this point it should be said that I already studied the Irish language around 2012, where I visited Galway to participate in an Esperanto congress, but then put it on the shelf in favor of the Slavic languages. However I bought some book about (and in) Irish before and during that event, and today I did the comparative grammar study that ultimately should lead to a stack of homemade green grammar sheets.

I'm not really going to do a course in Irish, but my studies can illustrate a topic with a somewhat broader prespective, namely active grammar studies.

Let me first say that the Assimil has a neat grammar section with tables, and in this it mentions four cases: nominative, accusative, dative and genetive. And I really dig this order because the genitive does have some quirks of its own. You may remember my warnings against the usual German-inspired order of the cases in the Slavic languages. The accusative there takes its forms in the masculine from the nominative and the genitive, so the logical order is nominative, accusative, genitive ... and the rest afterwards. This is the ONLY logical order, but very few Slavic grammars use it because the tradition dictates a different order (which I won't even quote here). In Irish the genitive must be the last one because it haves differently from the other cases. For instance the article in the genitive singular of feminine nouns is the same as in the plural, and 'strong' nouns have the same form in all cases in the plural EXCEPT the genitive.

One thing in Assimil should serve as a warning sign: the nominative forms are always the same as in the accusative. When you look in other grammars they are sometimes combined into a common Nominative-Accusative, at least at the morphological level (they have of course different syntactical roles), and this is the logical thing to do. On the other hand a peek in these other grammars show a case that Assimil doesn't mention, namely the vocative. Luckily this case is fairly simple since it always has a particle "a" in front of a proper name or common substantive, and this last word always undergoes the mutation called lenition or (in my old Teach Yourself from 1961, reprinted 1980) 'aspiration'. In the writing you see a 'h' after an initial consonant.

The old TY will in some respects differ from my other sources (including the TY grammar of Ó Dónaill), ostensibly because it is because the fairly conservative Munster dialect, and the forms it proposes in the dative plural were quite surprising. For instance "an bád" (the boat, masculine) becomes "na bádaibh" ('for' the boats, p.36 ) , and "an chloch" (the stone, feminine) becomes "na chlocaibh" - which conflicts with the rule i quoted earlier, namely that the forms of the nominative/accusative and the dative are the same in the plural. The reason could be that the dialect on which the old TY is based has preserved some forms which other dialects (including the constructed 'compromise dialect' used for pedagogical purposes) have dropped, but in that case I would prefer to learn the simpler new system.

The old TY is a text book so you can't blame it for mixing informations and exercises. I do however blame the so called "Irish grammar" from the same company for being an odd (and unsatisfactory) mixture between a real grammar and a textbook - if I use a grammar I expect it to give me information and not to subject me to a third degree interrogation. But luckily I found a real grammar (by Mac Congáil) in Ennis in 2012 - and even in two versions, one in English and one in Irish, called respectively "Irish grammar book" and "Leabhar Gramadaí Gaeilge". It's main drawback is that not all example words and phrases are translated.

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