Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

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Iversen
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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby Iversen » Mon Oct 11, 2021 12:58 am

I think I have mentioned a couple of times that my current studytexts are placed on a notestand besides my comfy chair for easy access. I think I also has mentioned that I have made more printouts in several languages in the false belief that I had run out of texts in those languages - but then I found some unused ones on the notestand. FInally I have mentioned that I make printouts for intensive study as bilingual texts, mostly with the help of Google Translate - even in cases where I might have suvived without them, but old habits have a tendency to linger on, and having the translations is in a way comforting - even if I rarely use them.

So this evening I got the totally idiotic idea to make a list of the current contents of that fabulous notestand, and it follows below. The language abbreviations between parantheses indicate the languages of the translations (though for Romance and Germanic languages I mostly don't use translations). PS: In addition to those mentioned below I have at least one shelf meter of used texts packed away.

Serbian: 3 collections:
no.1 (the newest) with a text in Bosnian about the National museum in Sarajevo (RO) and one about the Etnographic museum in Beograd (GER)
no.2 with historical texts about Serbian kings before the Turks and one specifically about king Radoslav (2xDA)
no.3 with the Wikipedia article about the Bronze age (SW) and one about chess-whizz Capablance (FRIS.)

Ukrainian: one collection .. and I don't even study the language, but it has just turned out to be unexpectedly easy to read:
content: on text about the Burgess shale with its fossils from the Early Cambrian (GER) and one about sponges (which I have studied today) (DU)

Russian: 4 collections:
no.1 about fast animals, including a crayfish (EN) and another about a spider (POR), followed by an article about lateral vision (EN)
no.2 about some wandering entertainer called Skomorokhi (DU), plus something about balalaikas (SPA) and the town Petrozavodsk (DU)
no.3: the extinction after the Triassic (DA), plus something about Placoderms (DA), Labyrinthodonts (DU) and Crurotarsi (SW)
no.4: short articles from Astronet.ru about astronomy, including Pluto's 5. moon, Apollo 17, the Saturn moon DIone etc etc. (all DA)

Polish: 3 collections:
no.1: a text about the town Stargard Szczecinski (DA) and one about the Prisoners' tower there (GER)
no.2: a text about chess-master Nimzowitsch (DA) and one about the opera composer Donizetti (EO)
no.3: texts about food, first on about minced meat (EN, then one about beef steaks and another about the extinct aurochs (2xDA)

Bulgarian: 3 collections:
no.1 with a text about Old Bulgarian aka Old Church Slavonic (I have mentioned that yesterday) (DA) and one about Pannonia (EN)
no.2 mostly with texts about the the Scythians (POR, SPA)
no.3 about butter milk and other dairy products (SW)

Slovak: 1 collection:
content: articles about the town Kosice - first a general one (EN), then a short one about the hotel where I stayed (EN) and one about the Löffler museum (DU), followed by one about the zoo (DA)

F5811b05 - Yoghurts and chocolate in Kosice.jpg

Romanian: 2 collections
no.1 with a long article about pizzas (no translation) and one about cookery in general (DA), and finally an article about Medieval cooking (no trans.)
no.2: ten pages with articles from descopera.ro, like for example one about quantic communication and another about the mortality rates of French Fries eaters (no trans.)

Spanish/Portuguese: 2 mixed collections about 'trunk animals' (Proboscidea), including an article about mammoth hunting in Portuguese and the list of species from the Spanish Wikipedia (no trans.)

Portuguese: 1 'pure' collection with astronomical articles, including one about miniplanet Sedna, another about 'Plutão' and one about 'planet X'

Catalan: 1 collection
content: The archeological museum of Girona, the Aquarium of Barcelona and the cathedral in Barri Gòtic, all from their homepages (no trans)

Latin: 2 collections
no.1 with the myths attached to some of the constellations and some single stars (no trans) - Homer is mentioned in the last article
no.2: mostly about the time after the Romans left Great Britain (St.Gildas, something about Picts and Scots and Saxons (partly humanmade EN)

Greek: only one collection, but it is thick!
content: first something about ivory and mammoths (2xEO), then articles about Phosphines on Venus (which might indicate biological processes) (AF), Poland (EO), Copernikus (IC) and the Mediterranean Ocean (FR)

Albanian: 1 collection
contents: something about the Albanian Wikipedia (which is rather thin) (EN), then something about French communes and about Indonesia (2xFR)

Irish: 1 collection
no 1 about Cu CHUlainn (DA) and the magician Cathbadh (EN), about the Vicipeid itself (DU), the some short biographies: K.M.G.Siegbahn (SW), queen Anne of UK, Georg I and a general article about Britain (3xEN)

Icelandic: 3 collections
no.1 with articles from Lifandi Visindi, including reports about woobly sun behaviour (DA) and crazy teenagers (EN)
no.2 with more from the same source, but this time about astronomy - the history of Venus, red 'plants' on exoplanets (EN) and finally one about blue stars as seen by the Hubble telescope (GER)
no. 3 with articles from WIkipedia about a travelling lady named Guðrið (DA) and the Eirikssaga and Þorfinn Karlsefni

Afrikaans: 2 collections
no.1: the geology of the Karoo groep, something bout fossils, a goodbye from Rosalind F and geological eras (all without trans.), finally a short message about easing of covid restrictions (EN)
no.2: articles from Psigolud about the harm cause by mobile phones, pretending to be Einstein, classical musicians versus jazz musicians and earworms (no trans.)

Dutch: 2 collections
no.1 : nemo-kennislinken articles about Frisian as a help to learn English (doesn't function) and the language learning of babies
no.2: Lystrosaurus, white skin, the first sauropod and seastars with op to 40 arms (no trans.)

Indonesian: 3 collections
no.1: even more about mammoths (!) (FR, RO)
no.2: articles about stars from WIkiwand
no.3: articles avout the Devonian extinction (FR), the Silurian (POR) and the island of Halmahera (EN)

Esperanto: not a printout, but the latest issue of the magazine "Esperanto"

And no, I won't get through all these texts this month - with a bit of luck maybe sometime in November ...

Notestand_2020.jpg

PS: right now the clothespins are placed horizontally - I have revised my study methodologies
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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby Iversen » Mon Oct 11, 2021 9:16 pm

Today was Monday so I went to the Language Café at the library - and saw that nobody had put up the flags and signs that indicate that something special is going on. When I complained to a librarian things were brought into order, but we had a slow start. A young woman approached me and asked whether this was the language café (I was the only one sitting there), but she came to speak Chinese. And already there things could have come to a screeching halt, but I asked her which other languages she knew, and then she mentioned German - playing down her skills, but she turned out to be quite good at it, so we spent around half an hour discussing Chinese grammar (actually I asked questions and she tried to answer them). We had to say no to a lady who wanted to speak French (and another who just was together with her), which is one of the sad consequences of being too few to form subgroups.

A while later another lady came to us, an US American citizen who was doing academic research here, and she could also speak German (plus a bit of French and some Arabic) so we then discussed the phenomenon of German speaking enclaves around the world - in German of course. She had noticed that speakers of "Pennsylvanian Dutch" didn't sound like speakers of Hochdeutsch and asked why. My guess was that they spoke some kind of 'Plautdietsch' (a variant of Low German) like the Mennonites of Paraguay, but when I came home I checked Wikipedia and found out that the Pennsylvanian speech form (also known as "Pennsylvania German, Pennsylvaniadeutsch, Pensilfaanisch, Pennsilfaanisch Deitsch, Pennsilfaani or Pennsilveni-Deitsch") according to the German Wikipedia actually is built on "vorderpfälzisch/kurpfälzischen Dialekten" - so not exactly Standard Low German, but also not Hochdeutsch, rather something in the middle - and definitely not Dutch! In fact there is also a Pennsylvanian lingo based on Hochdeutsch, but it is only spoken by around 5000 persons - against several 100.000s who keep the other language form alive.

GER: Während wir alleine waren, habe ich die First Lady gefragt, wie die Chinesen Tempus ausdrücken, wenn ihre Verben (soweit es tatsächlich Verben sind) nicht flektiert werden können, und es stellte sich unerwartet schwer aus dies zu erklären. Ich fragte zum Beispiel, wie die Chinesen "ich werde bald müde" sagen würden. Sie meinte, daß man entweder "viel "oder"wenig" an "müde" anhängen müßte, damit es funktioniere, und plötzlich tauchte ein Wörtchen "le" auf, welches die Chinesische-studierende offensichtlich lernen müssen, indem sie es in der Anwendung sehen - es zu erklären ist nicht einfach. Und dazu noch eine adverbielle Zeitangabe. Meine engste Referenz ist Indonesisch, wo es auch keinen Tempus bei den Verben gibt, sondern man kann nach Belieben "sudah" hinzufügen ('bereits') um die Vergangenheit anzuzeigen oder "akan" (ungefähr 'tun werden") um in die Zukunft zu schauen. Aber ich habe immer noch nicht gelernt, Chinesisch zu sprechen.

Als die andere Dame ankam, unterhielten wir uns unter anderem darüber, wie man eine Sprache wie Arabisch lernt, wo man in der Regel keine Vokale angibt. Meine Vermutung ist, dass man es durch viel Hören lernen muss, und daher ist es für meinen Lernstil nicht geeignet. Wir haben aber auch über Abwasser und PVC-Kunststoff gesprochen, denn das war ihr Fachgebiet.

Tysk.JPG
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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby Iversen » Sun Oct 17, 2021 11:27 am

It's almost a week since the last update of this thread, but for some of time I was on a family visit, with the ensuing low in my study activity, and after that I was shanghaied by music. Actually I did do something relevant for language learning: I brought along the Kauderwälsch Band 90, Irisch-Gälisch Wort für Wort, and I have used it for goodnight-reading since then. And I have noticed some formulations which I intend to compare to the information in my other sources, including the preparations for my future green sheets. It seems that every time I use another source I find things that suggest a changed setup of those sheets - or even information that contradicts earlier information, maybe because of dialectal differences. My current aim is to find some common ground, but I can't possibly learn all the particularities of each dialect. One good thing about the Kauderwelsch is that it has hyperliteral translations and a reasonably user-friendly way of notating the pronunciation. It seems that there once were tapes or CDs available for the booklet, but I only have the booklet (in an edition from the year 2000). And of course it is in German, but because the nominative and the accusative have merged in moderne Irish the idiotic German way of references the cases by number (and with the Accusative after the Genitive) couldn't be applied, which is comforting for me to know.

I have of course also watched TV, and sometimes even with sound - like in a program about Macchu Picchu in French on History which I watched with my mother (I had to translate certain passages). Or "Linea Verde" in Italian right now. But I have spent most of my time this weekend revising my music collection, which I'm listening through in alphabetical order. And it all started with Giovanni Gabrieli ...

IT: Avevo diviso le sue canzoni e sonate in quattro file di una durata totale di tre ore. E non erano ben suddivisi per anno di rilascio o numero all'interno di ogni rilascio. Ma quando volevo ordinarli, ho scoperto tramite il mio elenco di temi alcuni duplicati inaspettati e quindi anche alcuni elementi mancanti, quindi ho iniziato a indagare sulla questione. Poiché non mi interessano le sue opere vocali, la prima raccolta rilevante è le "Sacrae Symphoniae" del 1597, che ha una dozzina di canzone e sonate mescolate con opere vocali (con nomi, quale alcune delle sonate). Le canzoni di questa raccolta sono indicate dalla chiave di chiesa usata e dal numero di musicisti - per esempio, l'immagine qui sotto è tratta dalla Canzona Quarti Toni a 15 (uno delle opere 'più popolose' - altri hanno soltanto 8 o 10 o 12 musicisti). G.G. era organista a San Marco a Venezia, e divenne famoso per aver disposto gruppi di musicisti intorno alla chiesa per ottenere un effetto stereofonico. C'è solo una sola canzone nel quarto tono, ma mezza dozzina nel dodicesimo tono, la maggior parte con 10 musicisti - e forse c'è a volte un numero di serie corrispondente alle opere strumentali del 1597, ma non sempre (soprattutto non con le registrazioni più vecchie).

Poi venne una pubblicazione nel 1608, "Canzoni per sonare", dove le sue opere furono mescolate con contributi di altri compositori. C'erano sei opere di G.G., numerate 1 a 4 più 27 e 28, e normalmente si ha guardato il "per sonare" quando si tratta di queste opere - ma come si vede, i numeri ricominciano con 1. E finalmente le 16 canzone e 5 sonate delle "Canzoni e Sonate" pubblicate in 1615, dopo la morte del maestro. Queste sono effettivamente numerati (con sonate e canzone mescolate nell'ordine), ma di nuovo numerate dal numero 1. E così si erano insinuati qualche errori, che ho scoperto soltanto perché credevo di aver sentito già qualche tema, ma in una canzone con un altro numero.

E da lì, sono continuato ad altri compositori rinascimentali dove si potrebbe aspettare problemi simili, e ho anche spostato alcune opere più recenti. Quella raccolta musicale infernale è come le sabbie mobili: se ci metti un piede, rimani bloccato! Ma aspetto di pover riprendere presto l'ascolto sistematico, che non mi impedisce di studiare anche le lingue allo stesso tempo.

Gabrieli - canzona quarti toni a 15 (IMSLP).jpg
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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby lichtrausch » Mon Oct 18, 2021 2:06 am

Iversen wrote:GER: Während wir alleine waren, habe ich die First Lady gefragt, wie die Chinesen Tempus ausdrücken, wenn ihre Verben (soweit es tatsächlich Verben sind) nicht flektiert werden können, und es stellte sich unerwartet schwer aus dies zu erklären. Ich fragte zum Beispiel, wie die Chinesen "ich werde bald müde" sagen würden. Sie meinte, daß man entweder "viel "oder"wenig" an "müde" anhängen müßte, damit es funktioniere, und plötzlich tauchte ein Wörtchen "le" auf, welches die Chinesische-studierende offensichtlich lernen müssen, indem sie es in der Anwendung sehen - es zu erklären ist nicht einfach. Und dazu noch eine adverbielle Zeitangabe.

Ich würde den Satz so übersetzen:
我要累了
Wǒ yào lèi le
ich werden müde [Modalpartikel die auf einen Zustandswechsel hinweist]
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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby Iversen » Mon Oct 18, 2021 10:41 am

GER: Danke an Lichtrausch für die Erklärung. Jetzt weiß ich, was "le" bedeutet - grob gesagt, daß es ein Zustandswechsel geschieht (das gleiche als in mehreren europäischen Sprachen durch Aspekt markiert wird). Und wenn diese Veränderung noch nicht stattgefunden hat, wird sie in wohl in der Zukunft passieren – aber im Satz selbst ist nicht klar, ob wir über die Vergangenheit oder über die Zukunft sprechen. Dies muß offensichtlich aus dem Kontext ersichtlich sein.

EN: I have mentioned in another thread that I read fewer books than before my current language craze started back in the noughties. If my libraries had lots of non fiction books in other languages than Danish and English the situation would be different, but it ain't. Instead I read stuff on the internet - rarely full books, but mostly articles or homepages of relevant institutions, and Wikipedia is my preferred source because I can switch between languages. And at the same time I can listen to music.

So to illustrate my aimless wanderings in the digital universe I have noted down what I read about in Wikipedia in an hour or so yesterday evening while listening to music of Torelli and the two Lanzetti's (probably uncle and nephew, both cello players). I know Torelli from far back, but the twain Lanzettis not so well so I looked them up - and the English Wikipedia is more knowledgeable than the Italian one in this case. Actually the same could be said about the pages about Giovanni Gabrieli too, where the English page has a much better worklist than its Italian counterpart. But OK, almost nothing is known about the younger Domenico Lanzetti except the publication years of his works, whereas it is known that his uncle Salvatore Lanzetti was a brillant cello player. However the English Wikipedia article is short and there isn't an Italian one, so I tracked through the site IMSLP (scores) a page at libero.it with some more information - unfortunately in English. And here I read that

It is known that in 1737 he married the sister of the Besozzi brothers (the famous Turin oboists) but that in 1748 she filed for and obtained a divorce on the grounds of torture ("sevizie")

Oh my GOD, as the Americans say - so he may have been a true cello wizard, but probably also a disgusting rascal at the personal level - obtaining a divorce in the 18. century was probably not as easy as it is today. I keep a few of his works in my collection, but they should probably be kept in some kind of digital stench cupboard. However I also listened to some works on Youtube, and here I saw a reference to a certain Fortunato Chelleri. The English Wikipedia article is (almost 'as usual') the longest, but since it turned out that his name came from a German father named "Keller" I also checked the Italian and German articles. And poor Fortunato was not too fortunate after all: he lost his parents early and was reared by an uncle, then had some succes writing operas, but is totally forgotten today - except by nerds like me.

Then I switched to the violin virtuoso Vieuxtemps, and while listening to a couple of his concertos I read the article about him in the French Wikipedia, and when I had finished that I followed a link to his teacher Bériot (famous for writing violin concertos that sound more difficult than they are - I could play them at an earlier stage in my life). OK, Bériot was married to a singer called Malibran ("María-Felicia García, dite la Malibran"). She died as a consequence of a fall from a horse soon after the marriage, but was quite famous in her time - a real diva. But here I noticed that the French Wikipedia didn't have the usual list of languages - and if that disappears then one of the MAIN reasons to use Wikipedia has gone!

Wikipedia without languages.jpg

OK, I tracked my history back to the German article about Vieuxtemps (from where I had skipped to the French version), and it still had the usual language list. I found that the braindead polyglottery hating gang also had removed the language list from the Portuguese version, whereas the Spanish one was still in order - but for how long? If the sick rot of the French and Portuguese Wikipedias is showing a gloomy future for all pages in the family then it will be much harder to move between them - and I can't see any advantages to destroying the multilingual Wikipedia project in this way - except maybe laziness and bottomless stupidity.

After making that sinister discovery I read some pages about Sevilla and its cathedral in Spanish, skipped to the Russian article about Sevilla (where the language list still was intact), then for some reason to articles about Andromeda and Medusa in Russian and Greek and back to Spanish - the kind of skipping around which was my main motivation for using Wikipedia so much. But maybe the cancer will soon spread from the crippled French and Portuguese pages to the rest of the Wikipedias, and then the future looks bleak indeed ...
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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby luke » Mon Oct 18, 2021 11:32 am

Iversen wrote:Then I switched to the violin virtuoso Vieuxtemps, and while listening to a couple of his concertos I read the article about him in the French Wikipedia, and when I had finished that I followed a link to his teacher Bériot (famous for writing violin concertos that sound more difficult than they are - I could play them at an earlier stage in my life). OK, Bériot was married to a singer called Malibran ("María-Felicia García, dite la Malibran"). She died as a consequence of a fall from a horse soon after the marriage, but was quite famous in her time - a real diva. But here I noticed that the French Wikipedia didn't have the usual list of languages - and if that disappears then one of the MAIN reasons to use Wikipedia has gone!

I'm hoping that it's that these 3 French articles about French people just haven't been translated and propagated yet.

But you're more in tuned with these things. Disappearing Wikipedia articles would be quite alarming.
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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby Iversen » Mon Oct 18, 2021 11:48 am

Well, the articles are there, but if I wanted for instance to read about Malibran in Dutch or Swedish or Croatian the French or Portuguese articles wouldn 't give a direct link to the corresponding articles any more. And even worse: if I want to learn the vocabulary for some special topic right now (like balletdancers' shoes or cellos or Italian baroque painting or the Golden Gate bridge) then I find the information in a language I know and skip from there to one I know less well, and with a bit of luck I get a whole article in the second language about the topic - which is better than looking words up one by one in a dictionary. And that has always been the particular force of Wikipedia contrary to other dictionaries so I don't understand why anybody would want to destroy that feature - except laziness and stupidity of course, because somebody has to establish the links to other languages by hand, but it is too important a feature just to be scrapped without even the slightest whimper.

I also miss the counting abilities of Google Search. Now it tells me what it thinks I ought to be interested in, and I couldn't care less...
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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby Iversen » Thu Oct 21, 2021 8:22 am

I'm almost a little bit happy again now. I looked Serabit el Khadim up in the English Wikipedia and just for fun continued to the French version, which I had classified as a blind alley because of the lack of a language list. But then I noticed ...

FR: qu'il y avait un truc nommé "Wikimedia Commons", et là on m'a presenté d'une page pleine de choses irrélévantes, mais aussi (à la gauche) une liste de langues - comme celle que je ne voyait plus dans l'article même. Et par là j'ai appris qu'il y avait un article en Bahasa Indonésia sur les fameuses inscriptions et je viens de le lire.

IND: Nama tersebut mengacu pada beberapa karakter pada pecahan tembikar yang ditemukan selama salah satu ekspedisi Flinders Petrie. Peninggalan zaman Sesostris / Senusret 1 digali dan ditemukan beberapa tulisan yang terlihat hieratik semrawut (meskipun semua menulis hieratik mungkin terlihat semrawut dibandingkan dengan hieroglif yang indah).

EN: The scholars have concluded that this kind of writing was done by Semitic miners who tried to write something, but hadn't quite grasped how to write Ancient Egyptian - so they took the Egyptian hieroglyphs which looked like small pictures and used the initial sound from each sign, not in Egyptian, but in their own early Semitic language - and since they hadn't time to hew pretty glyphs unto stone they scratched something that resembled the hieratic writing which the Egyptians used when they were careless or in a hurry. And thus they almost by accident invented the alphabetic writing systems, albeit probably as an abad - i.e. an alphabet without vowels. One fragment seems to have parallel inscriptions in hieratic and this other kind of writing, but probably with an Egyptian god on the Egyptian side and a Semitic one on the other. Alas, it seems that this item is the only one to have been interpreted today with a reasonably high probability of being correct. My private theory is that the writers didn't succeed in standardizing their writing system since they had to invent everything themselves (in between whacking rocks), and with so little material to study today the chances of ever finding a key to all inscriptions seem to be slim - but these rare fragments nevertheless present a tantalizing early precursor of the true abads that were later invented by the the Phoenicians. It is not totally impossible that the Semitic expats in Egypt brought the idea of writing home to Canaan in a form that was inspired by the gifted, but unschooled Serabit el Khadimians rather than by the hieratic Egyptian writers.

And all that because a Danish TV channel had bought an two-part Anglophone program about the history of writing. The second part told about calligraphy, and it was also quite interesting, but I didn't learn much new stuff. The Serabit el Khadim thing was however new to me.

Seranit-el-Khanim.jpg
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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby lichtrausch » Thu Oct 21, 2021 2:12 pm

Iversen wrote:But here I noticed that the French Wikipedia didn't have the usual list of languages - and if that disappears then one of the MAIN reasons to use Wikipedia has gone!

The list of languages is still there, just in a slightly altered form.

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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby luke » Thu Oct 21, 2021 2:26 pm

lichtrausch wrote:
Iversen wrote:But here I noticed that the French Wikipedia didn't have the usual list of languages - and if that disappears then one of the MAIN reasons to use Wikipedia has gone!

The list of languages is still there, just in a slightly altered form.

It doesn't seem as simple as whether the device uses the .m. (mobile) site. lichtrausch site doesn't show a .m. in the URL.

Did a small experiment with different devices. Perhaps the language list is related to some sort of adaptive user interface that changes depending on how much information the device thinks will be helpful on the screen? Maybe based on screen size or resolution?
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