Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

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Iversen
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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby Iversen » Thu Feb 23, 2023 8:18 pm

Today I have spent some time reorganising the mess at the back of my carport and the adjacent shed with the endgoal of getting rid of some of the stuff. After that I jotted down the themes from some of my music files, and then I was already close to five o'clock before I got time to study. My first item on the agenda was the second half of the Ukranian article about the brain, but ...

UK: продовження було більш технічним, ніж початок статті. Було багато латинських слів, але оскільки я не нейрохірург, я недостатньо розумів пояснення — і навіть Помічник перекладача французької мови був незрозумілим. Тож я кинув це й почав вивчати статтю про Велике вимирання в Ордовик-Силурій 400 мільйонів років тому. Це було набагато легше. Але я віддаю перевагу писати про інше.

EN: And if you choose to use Goggle Translate from now on (or one of the alternatives) then the rest of this rant may become slightly more comprehensible. :P

LA: Heri hic in foro bis nuntios scripsi folias meas virides grammaticae exponendas, at quamobrem tempus non habebat etiam explicare quid antes (die marti) feci. Et quia nova vetua nunc sunt mihi primo parebat rationale descriptiones omnes in lingua latina scribere - sed Google Transvertere -clam dictu - non satis bene sermonem latinam vertet, et ergo omnia in lingviis textorum fieret.

EN: And just a few words in English to introduce the project: madam Rowling wrote seven (not eight) books in the original series about Harry Potter, and I have translations of five of them (not the Caldron and not the Hallows). Two will therefore be absent from the rant below: no. 1 (the philosophal stone) in Ancient greek which I don't study and no. 3 (o prisioneiro de Azkaban) in Portuguese which is too easy. I studied short excerpts of the rest (a couple of pages) in the following fashion: I have two notestands. I placed a translation on the nearest one and tied the open book with pegs so that it wouldn't close magically, and the original would then be placed on the more distant one, open at the same passage in the plot and also clogged down with clothes pegs. That way I can magically avoid to buy new ink for my printer. And now you get a wee snippet about each of the four books (very short in the case of Irish, which I still have serious problems with):.

IR: Sa chéad leabhar, mharaigh Voldemort é féin trí thimpiste nuair a thug sé ionradh ar theaghlach Potter. Agus anois tá ulchabháin ag eitilt thart ag cur eagla ar an uasal Dursley. Mharaigh Voldemort athair agus máthair Potter freisin, ach is ar éigean a tháinig Harry slán (cosúil le horcrux, ach níl a fhios ag éinne go fóill). Agus anois caithfidh na draoi áit a fháil chun an leanbh a stóráil.

LA: Heu, non dixi quod omnia in lingviis textorum fieret?? Sic est, librum secundum de Harrio et amiciis suis de camera secretorum sermone latine tractat, et ego non ad initio incidui studium, sed apud vibramen et litturas caput quartum, ubi Harrius cum familia Visliorum ad mensam culinae ientat. Et hic indicem librorum studiendos apud scholam Hogvartiensis a Bubonem Scandiacem Heduig accipit - octo libros, exinde septem de Gilderoy Lockharti. Quia familia Vislius etiam Ronaldo libros emere debet (sicut per bubonem semianimum affertum), istud calamitas vera familiae est. Postea per pulvis tubalis emptum eunt, sed Harrius - qui nihil de rogo magico sciat - in taberna falsa advenit (apud dominum Borgin), ubi Malfoni pater filiusque vidit. Et tunc ego narrationem relinqui ut alia librum consultare. Lingua latina mihi multe facilior est quam hibernica.

POR: Comprei o terceiro livro da série (O Prisioneiro de Sirius) em Lisboa e li no avião a caminho de casa. Não seria um desperdício estudar algumas páginas individuais minuciosamente, mas também estou lendo sobre a história de Portugal no mesmo idioma, então pulei este volume. E o livro seguinte (sobre o pote mágico com um nome a mais) só tenho em inglês.

POL: Piąta książka mnie zaskoczyła. Było na niej napisane „Zakon z Feniksa” i myślałam, że jest po chorwacku (albo po serbsku, ale napisane złymi literami) – ale kiedy otworzyłam książkę na przypadkowej stronie, odkryłam, że jest po polsku. Ale nieważne, staram się też uczyć polskiego. To obłędnie długa książka - 949 stron, i prawdopodobnie czytałem ją raz, dawno temu, kiedy była nowa, ale dla celów naukowych to przynajmniej o 900 stron za dużo. Wylądowałem w rozdziale Luna Lovegood i to w tej książce zły nauczyciel sabotuje zajęcia na temat przerażających stworzeń, więc Harry zaczyna udzielać lekcji, jak z nimi walczyć. I o tym jest kolejne 800 stron.

RU: И тут я добрался до русского перевода шестого тома "Гарри Поттер и Принц-полукровка". Злой Волан-де-Морт теперь возрожден (и четко выглядит он как человек, чье имя категорически нельзя упоминать!), а позже в книге профессор Снейп убивает Дамблдора, потому что Драко Молфой не осмеливается. И здесь меня удивляет, что Снейп пишется Снегг, поэтому в моем текстовом экземпляре я пишу Снейп! Ничего особенного в изученном мною текстовом отрывке не происходит — Дамблдор тоже слышал о хоркруксах (и обжег одну рукy), но найти их сложно. И это удается только в последней книге, которой у меня нет на других языках, кроме английского.

GER: Im letzten Monat wurden übrigens alle sieben acht Filme auf einem deutschen Fernsehsender gezeigt (Sat1 ? - oder vielleicht Prosieben?), aber ich habe nur ein paar kurze Ausschnitte geschaut - und ohne Ton (sie hätten so wie so Deutsch gesprochen). Die visuellen Effekte sind unterhaltsam, aber auf die Handlung verzichte ich lieber, und ich habe nicht Geduld um auf die Effekte zu warte. Entbehren sollst du, sollst entbehren! wie irgendwelche philosoph einst schrieb...

Western Jutish: å nu tøws a te at a hår skrewen og studeert nok for idaw, så nu får I ett' mer for den femogtyw-øre.
EN: (human-made translation: and now I think I have written and studied enough for today so now you won't get more for that twentyfive-øre (a small copper-coin that was abolished many years ago - but the expression has survived)

My apologies to those who have fallen asleep...

Garri Potter VI.jpg
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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby Le Baron » Fri Feb 24, 2023 12:35 am

Wow, that was a linguistic tour-de-force, and I don't even think about Harry Potter (or Гарри Поттер - I'll start calling him 'Gary' from now on :lol: ) most of the time in any of the comparatively piddling number of languages I know.
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Iversen
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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby Iversen » Fri Feb 24, 2023 9:31 pm

Well, I may have got around a few languages yesterday, but I always fear that people look at those multilingual rants and give up reading them because they don't know all the languages. What's worse: I intend to write one more interminably long and multilingual rant today. The reason is that I have spent most of the day listening to Youtube videos from Ecolinguist's channel. He has some mostly in English, and this also pertains to his live shows (I listened to one about the Germanic language family today) - and that's not really what I want. OK, I learnt that there may be something like 28 fluent speakers of North Frisian left in the world and maybe 400 with passive skills (numbers quoted from memory), but I find it more interesting to hear about languages IN those languages.

Below I'll run through today's 'quiz' type videos where 2-3 persons try to guess what the heck the first one is speaking about - and in the best ones everyone speaks his/her own language, and there will be running transcriptions somewhere in the screen. If only the test words or one short quote is in the tested language and the rest is in English then it's not fun at all.

Informationen.JPG

Actually the first one I watched was of this type, but at least with long quotes which were left on the screen long enough for me to read them. The test language was 'Englisc', which is an attempt to guess how English would have sounded if Guillaume le Bâtard (William the Bastard) had lost the battle at Hastings - there is also a Wikipedia in this language. I didn't understand much of what sir Eadwin said, but when he read each sample aloud while it was on the screen my comprehension suddenly became much better - and actually I do think that I understood as much as the three modern Anglophones did (not as much as might have been expected). But it surprised me that "bleah" means 'red' and not blue.

IC: Í næsta myndbandi setti norðmaður frá Austur-Noregi ('Østfold') verkefni fyrir Svía, Dani og Íslending - og gekk það reyndar frekar sársaukalaust. Íslenska konan talaði mjög skýrt og skýrt svo ég átti ekki í neinum vandræðum, og hinir Skandinavar skildu hana betur en búist var við (en ég bjóst ekki við kraftaverkum). Lítið var rætt um hið þögla 'h' í dönsku og norsku "hval" sem á íslensku er borið fram sem 'k', en skrifað "hvalur". Reyndar er 'k' meðal annars í spurnarfornafnunum (eins og "kvifor") á nýnorsku, og ákveðnar norður-jótlenskar mállýskur bera það líka fram, þo sem h. Hið mállausa 'h' er eitthvað sem þeir fundu upp fyrir austan...

BU: В следващото видео задачите бяха на български (и се решаваха от руснак и самия Норберт 'Ecolinguist', който е поляк). Те бяха на български и в последното видео, където трябваше да отговарят поляк и чех. Всъщност се опитах да направя 'славянски кръг', защото съм слушал твърде малко тази езикова група. Като цяло мина сравнително добре, но само когато виждах транскрипции на казаното (явно има опция и за английски субтитри, но не я използвах). Като цяло смятам, че най-ефективният начин за мен да се науча да разбирам нови говорими езици е да слушам, докато чета пълна транскрипция. И тъй като съм учил езиците, които слушах, не беше въпрос на речник - въпреки че естествено знам по-малко славянски думи от участниците. Единственият език, който дори и с транскрипция не разбирах беше чешкият, защото никога не съм го учил. Между другото, забелязах, че българското 'ъ' звучи почти като а (а не като румънски 'ă')- трябва да науча вътрешния си глас на това!

AF: Daarna het ek weer 'n paar Germanis video's gekyk. In die eerste moes 'n Nederlander en 'n Vlaming Hoogduits probeer te verstaan, en dit behoort relatief maklik te wees. In die volgende een moes ’n Duitserin en ’n Sweed Afrikaans probeer te verstaan, en dit het nie heeltemal probleemvry verloop nie. Hulle het byvoorbeeld geraai dat 'n woord 'n soort rekenaarspeler ('gamer') het beteken, maar dit het waarskynlik net 'n nuweling moes beteken.

RO: Au urmat apoi două videoclipuri cu româncă Gia împotriva trei neolatiniști. În primul prima le-au pus sarcini a ei, iar în a doua Gia le-a pus sarcini neolatinistilor. După cum era de așteptat, au existat unele probleme, dar nu de netrecut. Una dintre întrebările din prima se referea la reptile, iar cuvântul "squamata" (solzi) era o problemă mai mare decât se aștepta. Dar când s-a discutat despre mărime, unul dintre latiniști a menționat că șopârlele din trecut erau enorm de mari. Probabil că ele se gândea la dinozauri, dar acestea nu erau tocmai șopârle.

CAT: Després un vídeo on un mexicà i un quebequois havien d'endevinar paraules catalanes, i varen sortir força bé.

UK: Потім відео, де українка мала вгадувати польські слова, а потім відео, де словак, росіянин і поляк мали вгадувати українські слова. Я дізнався, що "будь ласка" по-українськи означає "please", і що українське 'и' насправді звучить як румунське ' ă '.

IT: Dopo la cena (pizza funghi fatta da me in casa) ho guardato una serie di film in cui si dovevano indovinare compiti nei dialetti italiani: toscano, napoletano, siciliano - ed era stato abbastanza facile con le trascrizioni sullo schermo. Ci saranno tuttavia sempre parole sorprendenti nei dialetti - ad esempio, era impossibile per me sapere a mano che "putia" in siciliano significhi "macelleria" - ma il torinese ha detto "prezzomolo", ed ora sto tutto confuso. Per me questo sarebbe piuttosto una osteria o taverna. Nel video napoletano rispondevano un francese, un catalano e un uomo veneto (credo di non aver mai sentito il vero veneto!), e in quello siciliano ci erano un italiano di Torino, una signora spagnola e un portoghese da indovinare. E questa serie si è conclusa con un video in cui a stabilire i compiti è stato un uomo da Svizzera che parlava surselva (uno dei dialetti che costituiscono la cosidetta lingua 'romancio') - e non ho capito molto, ma ho notato che la parola per il violino era simile al tedesco "Geige", e che una pietra surselva si chiama "crap".

Kunst035.JPG
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Iversen
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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby Iversen » Mon Feb 27, 2023 9:20 pm

I would have posted something here several times, but every time I happened to be caught up in some other thing - like the heated debate about Esperanto today. By the way: speaking about Esperanto (and other conlangs): I found a book in Esperanto called "Historio de la universala lingvo Volapuko", and since it only contains 29 ordinary pages (plus wordlist with 21 pages) it is a clear candidate for my goodnight reading.

I have paused the history of Portugal because we now are past the most interesting period (the one with the farflung voyages of discovery) so it's a good place to do something else - soon Felipe II of Spain will gobble up the whole country, but luckily the Braganças will rescue it, thus saving it from the fate of Galicia (which became adjoined to the 'kingdom of Asturias', later part of Spain). While writing these lines the question occurred to me: how come that Galicia and Portugal ended up in separate kingdoms? It's a fairly complicated story, but I found a reasonably clear explanation in the Portuguese Wikipedia in the article about the socalled Reino da Galiza - and it seems to be a matter of dynastic trouble that didn't take linguistical barriers into account. I won't go into all the details here, but

POR: Para simplificar, comecemos com a afirmação que Dom Afonso VI outorga o governo das terras galegas desde o cabo Ortegal até Coimbra como condado a tanto Raimundo de Borgonha como a sua esposa Urraca (filha do rei Afonso VI). Mas os novos duques decepcionam ao rei na guerra contra os almorávidas (muçulmanos), e portanto no ano 1096 "Afonso VI partilha o território em dois condados, um correspondente às atuais terras galegas e o outro às portuguesas, que dá a Henrique de Borgonha, pai do primeiro rei de Portugal Afonso Henriques e casado a Teresa (outra filha do rei Afonso). Quando o duque Henrique morre, sua viúva Teresa continua a governar ambos condados, mas os seus exércitos sofre em 1128 uma derrota total a São Mamede contra seu filho. "A morte de D. Teresa (1130) e a batalha de Ourique (1139) consolidam enfim o poder de Afonso Henriques e a independência efectiva do reino de Portugal.", diz a Wikipedia. Mas então algo se acontece no norte:"em 1111 a nobreza galega (...) coroa em Santiago de Compostela o filho de Urraca e Raimundo, Afonso Raimúndez, como rei "- e então as rodas da história rolaram.

Dona Teresa de Leão.jpg

EN: OK, back to yesterday. Here I started a wordlist with all the words from the last couple of Ukrainian texts, and I also did one with Greek words. And then I plucked a random book from my shelves, namely the Teach yourself Samoan, 3.edition from 1973. And no no NO - I'm not going to study Samoan. I don't have time, I don't have any particular reason to do so ... and apart from that, with the possible exception of a few things published immediately before the TY was written there was one and only one book in the language, namely the Bible (published by some missionaries who had to devise a writings system for the purpose -but their language is lauded by the TY auhtor) - and I have already read that book (in Danish and partly in other languages). But even without any obvious utility it may still be interesting to see how such a language is constructed.

Apart from that I have collected several books to choose from for my upcoming reading session. On my goodnight-chair I still have got the book with Romanians on their first trip abroad and the Portuguese history book, and now soon also the book about Volapük and "40 Leçons pour découvrir le grec ancien" and " ΡΟΔΟΣ - το νησί του Ήλιου" (Rhodos - the island of Helios), both of which I mentioned in another thread today. Right now I'm mostly minded for the Greek guidebook because reading a whole book in Greek without a dictionary will be an excellent test of my current level in the language ... or methinks a failure, but I DO believe I have made enough progress since I translated it into Danish as one of the first things I did to learn Greek - it was hard work, but became easier as I gnawed my way through the pages. Time to test the outcome ..

Rodos - to nisi tou iliou.jpg
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Iversen
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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby Iversen » Tue Feb 28, 2023 12:44 pm

Reading the guide to Rhodos actually went as well as could possibly be hoped for - I could understand it almost completely, and there would have been little point in using a dictionary except to clarify a few words per page. It would wihtout any doubt be harder to read a novel about the daily life of somebody (with lots of smalltalk), but I haven't got such a book - my translation of Potter alpha is in Ancient Greek. Just after midnight I read the first 12 pages and then I fell asleep (ZZZZZZ....). Around 4 o'clock I woke up and read 12 pages more, but then I got the idea of noting down the exact words I might have looked up if I had brought along a dictionary, and the complete list follows below - now with translations added:

p.12: κτηνοτροφικό (farmstock)
p.12: προϊον (product) - seen before so not really unknown
p.13: ξίφος (sword - and not sickle, even though that's what Kronos normally is said to have used to castrate his father Uranus (!))
p.13: μοχθροί (evil, spiteful - plural form)
p.13: μαγγανεία (witchcraft)
p.13: θυγατέρα (daughter)
p.14: παράλειψη (omission)
p.14: χατήρι (not in my dictionaries - probably a misspelling for χατίρι (service))
p.14: τρικυμία (storm - means something like triple waves)
p.14: γλιτώσει (from γλιτώνω, rescue, save)
p.14: στεριά (mainland)
p.18: αναθύμα (not in my dictionaries, but αναθύμηση (memorial, monument) is there)
p.18: πορεία (walk, path, direction)
p.18: γραφικότητα (picturesqueness)

Besides I jotted the word "ενυδρείο" (fishtank, aquarium) down from a townplan at page 16 at the exact location where I knew the aquarium should be - so I didn't need to look that one up. "Aquarium" is obviously a Latin word so the Greeks would not even contemplate using it, and then it doesn't matter what the rest of the world does.

And at that point (page 18) I decided that I would stop writing words down - it hampered my extensive bulldozer training too much, but I did however commit the following nominal clause to paper because I think its very heavy adjectival part (plus a possessive pronoun added after the substantive) is quite characteristic for Greek. it reminds me of the utterly Greek construction "το δικό μου ενυδρείο" (the 'that-one' my fishtank). Its nearest parallel would probably be found in German:

p.18: με τη μοναδική στον κόσμο γραφικότητα της
with the unique in-the world picturesqueness its

GR: Η Ρόδος είναι επίσης γνωστή σε όλο τον κόσμο για τον κολοσσό της, ένα άγαλμα που σε όλες τις εικόνες στέκεται πάνω από την είσοδο του λιμανιού στην πόλη της Ρόδου με ένα πόδι σε κάθε πλευρά. Είναι αρκετά απίθανο και δεν αναφέρεται ως τέτοιο σε καμία πηγή, επομένως πιθανώς ήταν η ιδιοτροπία ενός μεσαιωνικού ζωγράφου ή χαράκτη. Χρειάστηκαν 12 χρόνια για να χτιστεί το άγαλμα, αλλά έπεσε κατά τη διάρκεια ενός σεισμού μόλις 54 χρόνια αργότερα - και στη συνέχεια τα απορρίμματα παρέμειναν στο έδαφος για 800 χρόνια χωρίς κανείς να σκεφτεί να γράψει ακριβώς πού βρισκόταν το άγαλμα - οπότε στην πραγματικότητα δεν το γνωρίζουμε σήμερα.

Absolutely not the colossus of Rhodes.jpg
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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby Iversen » Thu Mar 02, 2023 9:44 pm

I have several times mentioned the problems I have had with my old computer: at first it would suddenly show a black screen, then return with the message "restituted the screen driver", later on it would simply freeze. Still later it got very sensitive to screen updates - with Youtube being a key sinner, and within the last couple of weeks it had developed the habit of restarting in the middle of a startup. I expected the poor thing to die, and today it apparently said goodbye: I started it up, but the screen remained black. Bah...I could tap in the keyboard code, then close alt F4, and it shut down as planned, but with the same black screen during the whole operation. And I tried to attach a screen from another company - but no, still just that black screen. OK, then it had to be the graphics card - the question is whether you still can buy one. So I opened the cover for the first time in its life to have a look (it seems I got it in Januar 2012) and plucked out the graphics card, and lo and behold, it was so full of dust that you hardly could see the surface. Well, I then cleaned it up with a brush and now the computer seems to work again. :) :D :lol: I can't be sure that it won't freeze or restart again, but just removing the dust definitely had an effect. And that was just in time since I had several things to do that I so far only can do on the old lady.

Kunst016.JPG

IT: Ad esempio, due giorni fa stavo ascoltando i miei file di musica del compositore rinascimentale italiano Dario Castello e sono rimasto perplesso dai nomi confusi e da alcuni temi ripetuti. Sul vecchio PC non posso più accedere alla raccolta di temi IMSLP, ma posso farlo su quello nuovo, a il quale tuttavia non ho collegato una stampante. OK, ho scoperto che Dario C scrisse due raccolte di sonate, una nel 1612 e una nel 1629, e l'ultima è stata ristampata nel 1644, con un'ulteriore ristampa nel 1658. E avevo fatto un vero casino quando ho composti i file. Ci sono volute parecchie ore per identificare i pezzi e dargli gli anni e i numeri corretti, metterli in ordine logico e aggiornare la mia collezione tematica. E le ultimi due operazioni devo eseguire rispettivamente in Audacity e Photohouse, che ambedue ho installati soltanto sul vecchio PC.

DK: Herudover besøgte jeg en dyrehave med min søster i dag og tog adskillige fotografier - og alt der hører til at løse den opgave ligger på den gamle computer.

EN: So when it simply refused to communicate with the screen at my return to home it was a shock. But maybe it was just a case of dirt - accumulated through the last 11 years because the thought simply didn't occur to me that computers also can choke in layers of dust (if they live long enough).

FR: Hier j'ai d'abord regardé la télé française. Le premier programme était un quiz, mais numéro deux était un programme sur les grottes et leurs utilisateurs troglodytes, et c'était tellement intéressant que je l'ai écouté (les deux chaînes françaises TF2 et TV5 n'ont pas de sous-titres - du moins pas quand le signal a atteint mon appareil), ce qui n'est définitivement pas normal dans mon univers. Par example on a discuté le fait qu'il y a un nombre limité de signes autour les oeuvres d'art rupestre, et ce sont les mêmes dans les grottes où on les voient. Et des signes standardisés - on dirait une sorte d'écriture prématurée?? À 30.000 ans avant notre ère??

EN
: Later on I watched two Brits travelling around in Italy. They visited some interesting places (like Amalfi and Paestum), and one of them in fact succeeded in communicating in Italian with a Napoletano - but not for long, then they returned to talking English as usual. Such programmes I normally watch with subtitles and sound turned down so that I can listen to music by for instance il signore Castello!

And after that I solved a quadruple sudoku and a couple of ordinary ones, listened to even more videos from Ecolinguist's channel on Youtube - and from there happened to end up watching a video about the earliest history of the earth, which gave me an idea: I made a bilingual text collection about that topic, and therefore I finished the day yesterday doing two things in Greek: first I studied a text about the first period in the history of the Earth, called Hadean after the Greek world of the underworld, and then I read some more in my guide til Rhodes, but soon fell asleep.

GR: Και όταν η Γη ήταν καινούργια, ήταν πολύ ζεστή - η επιφάνεια ήταν λιωμένος βράχος για εκατομμύρια χρόνια, και κάποια στιγμή οι μετεωρίτες κατέρρευσαν. Χρειάστηκε πολύς χρόνος μέχρι να βρεθούν κομμάτια βράχου από αυτό το μακρινό και μάλλον εχθρικό παρελθόν - και στην πραγματικότητα δεν το βρήκαν: βρήκαν μικρά σωματίδια ζιρκονίου σε νεότερους βράχους και μέσω μετρήσεων ραδιενεργών αποβλήτων σε αυτές τις μικρές σταγόνες ζιρκονίου, ήταν δυνατό να αποδειχθεί, ότι ήταν άνω των 4 δισεκατομμύρια ετών - και όλοι ήταν πολύ χαρούμενοι.

Kunst019.JPG
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Iversen
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Language Log: viewtopic.php?f=15&t=1027
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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby Iversen » Sun Mar 05, 2023 9:50 pm

This thread was last updated Thursday the 2/3, and even though I chose to visit three zoos today and didn't study aught, I have done a number of things since Thursday.

I'll be brief about my text studies: I have studied three texts from Wikipedia. The first in Russian was a rather short one about the Korsakov syndrome, which generally is caused by excessive drinking, but may also have contributing causes like lack of vitamin B1 and general senile degeneration - but drinking seems to be the main cause. And it makes the brain swell, causing memory loss and other nasty things- and unfortunately it seems to be uncurable and irreversible. For some reason I have chosen to add a translation from Russian into Frisian, which isn't even a language on my study list. It's something I sometimes do for fun, but in those cases where the language actually is one my agenda then I guess that just watching the translation counts as an extensive sub-activity within the general intensive framework.

The Ukrainian text told about the end of the Ordovician, where the temperature went down in a series of glaciations, and the result was of course a loss of biodiversity (which by the way has become my favority euphemism for weeds in the garden). It has been suggested that this was caused by one single gamma ray burst, but if there really was a whole series of distinct catastrophic events then that doesn't seem realistic. The author(s) of the article doubt that gamma ray bursts even exist, but that doubt is probably not warranted. Anything that dangerous is likely to exist.

The last of the three texts was in Bulgarian and told about the English jurist, writer, philosopher and astronomer Francis Bacon (with an Icelandic translation - again just for fun) . He actually became a baron and viscount and god knows what, 'keeper of the Press' (censor?) and even lord-chancellor - but alas, he was then sentenced for corruption and thus got far more time to be philosopher and scientist for the rest of his life, which is the reason that he is remembered today. BUT...

INDO: Francis Bacon bukanlah Bacon Inggris pertama. Pendahulunya adalah Roger Bacon yang brilian, yang merupakan cikal bakal pemikiran ilmiah. Tetapi dia juga seorang biarawan Fransiskan, dan atasannya Bonaventura yang tumpul dan jahat tidak menginginkan pemikir independen dalam ordonya, jadi ketika Bacon pulang dari Paris dan mulai mengajar, MALAventura yang jahat mengirimnya Roger kembali ke Paris selama 10 tahun kurungan. Paus Clemens mengeluarkannya, tetapi ketika paus meninggal, Roger dikurung lagi, sekarang selama 14 tahun.

RogerBacon(Wik).jpg

I have also watched more Youtube videos than I normally do (at the expense of my A to Z music listening). The first ones were in English - like one about 'the boring billion' , i.e. the first 'billion' (=1.000.000.000) years after the absolutely most deadly extinction in the history of the Earth - even worse than the one after the Permian, though less clearly documented. It all happened because some ingenuous cyanobacteria found out how to produce oxygen through photosynthesis, and that poisonous gas killed almost all other kinds of life (though some aneorobic bacteria still exist today in inhospitable locations). Then all free iron on the planet rusted (giving red rocks), but when all accessible iron had been used up the seas basically became a black stinking sludge for the next 'billion' years. After that I watched a video about strange matter, which is a state of matter which is so compressed that the quarks start moving freely around - and then weird things happen.

But after that I felt I should do something non-English, and I found a series of popular science in Portuguese (or rather Brazilian) from an account named Terra000 and watched a couple of them. But then I wanted to find something similar in Catalan, and it turned out to be slightly more complicated (mostly because Youtube doesn't have a language criterion). I first searched again for "ciència Català" and again found the series by the man named Català, who got the splendid idea to do a series of lectures on Youtube while he was confined anyway to his home due to corona restrictions. My main grievance with this series is the mediocre sound quality, so I continued to search.

I found several accounts with short videos of 1-3 minutes, which isn't really satisfying. However the more you find the more the algorithm seems to grudgingly accept your particular interests, so the darned th´g£inb#g still proposes snooker videos galore, but now interspersed with items in Catalan - and even though not all of this was popular science I did find some that both were clearly spoken and not just morsels of a few minutes' duration. For instance I watched a video lasting almost 53 minutes about the Paseig de Gràcia in Barcelona, which turned out to be delivered by the TV station TV3 - and then ...

CAT: d'alguna manera em vaig assabentar que aquesta cadena de televisió té tot un compte de Youtube atípicament referenciat com youtube.com\@TV3 alguna cosa, i allà es pot trobar molts videos en català, encara que la majoria de les coses no em van gaire temptar. Però almenys he rebut ara la confirmació que encara puc entendre l'idioma sense problemes malgrat molts anys sense visitar Catalunya.

Passeig de Gràcia.jpg
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Iversen
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Language Log: viewtopic.php?f=15&t=1027
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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby Iversen » Tue Mar 07, 2023 11:56 pm

Just a short notice this time: Yesterday I finished a Russian article about mammoths and after that I started a Slovak wordlist with around 100 words. Today I added a 100 more to it, but then I came to think about the effect of not only wordlists, but working to increase my vocabulary by any methods iimaginable - and there is one way to test that: wordcounts. I did one in 2022 for Ukranian because it was a late addition, but apart from that the last major campaign happened in 2021. I wrote a few things about the topic back then, but there is also a short description in my "Guide to Learning Languages", 3.edition from 2016. So today I went through the Slavic languages (and only those) using the same methods as last time.

The results are definitely not scientific: I copy all words from so many equidistant pages that they can fill one folded A4 sheet, and I colorcode the words as known, something in the middle and unknown. The first problem is of course that I take the words from a dictionary where I can see the explanations, and on top of that it's me and myself who classifies them in the three categories I mentioned. The next problem is that the size of the dictionary dictates the absolute numbers I arrive at, but there is a solution: focus on the percentages. If I (quite subjectively) feel that I know half the words in a big dictionary in one language and half the words in another smaller one in another language, then I can still say that my vocabulary probably is at the same level in those two languages, in spite of the numbers. My experiments have shown that the percentages are reasonably stable - although the percentages do tend to fall when using extremely big dictionaries (like my Bratli Spanish-Danish one with at least 200.000 headwords).

The results generally hovered around 50% percent known words across the bulk of the Slavic languages, and that surprised me somewhat. I have studied Russian on and off for more than a decade and only got 47% known words, which is exactly the same as in Serbian, Polish and Slovak and only marginally higher than my score for Ukrainian, which I only have studied since last year. How can that be? Well, I did an experiment i 2014 where I so to say ate my way through a Serbian dictionary with wordlists, and then I did wordcounts for pages both before they had been used for wordlists and after, and the result was interesting. I had almost no experience with the language before (and only knew some rock-bottom Russian), but nevertheless I understood roughly a third of the headwords before I had done wordlists, but after that I reached two thirds known.

Inspired by this result I did one more wordcount today, namely one for Czech which I haven't studied (apart from the few words I included in my 30 -language mini-wordlist campaigns), and lo and behold, again my level was around a third known words (34%, cfr the table below). That includes loanwords from Western languages, but also a lot of Slavic words. Since I'm testing passive vocabulary I accept minor differences in spelling, but basically the words that are called "known" should be immediately comprehensible in the form they have in the dictionary. So you can probably subtract some 30% from all the results that hover around 50% - it's only the last 20% that really are new additions. And that's not enough!

There is another relevant point to notice in the Serbian table below: my results with the Сазвежћа dictionary stayed at their high level even in 2018 (after 4 years), but the results with other dictionaries are lower. Why? Well, I did my grand wordlist study on that dictionary, and the others have partly other words, partly other explanations. But against expectation it doesn't seem that my results with Latinitsa dictionaries are lower than those in Cyrillic, even though I mainly use Cyrillic study texts when I work on Serbian. And in the results from today I noticed one last thing, namely that I knew a higher proportion of nouns and adjectives than I do of the verbs, and that means that I ran into lots of unknown words each time I accidentally landed on a page with the typical prefixes for verbs. So from now on I'll have to focus on learning verbs in my Slavic languages...

Serbian wordcounts.jpg

Czech wordcount.jpg

("kendt"= known, "ukendt"= not known]

Ahem - did I promise a SHORT notice this time?? promises, promises ...:oops:
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Iversen
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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby Iversen » Wed Mar 08, 2023 12:24 pm

Yesterday I mentioned that I had done wordcounts for seven Slavic languages - including Czech which I don't study (yet), but I assumed that counting known words there would indicate how many words I get 'for free' in those languages. And it turned out to be roughly a third of the headwords in a midsize dictionary, which corresponds with the level I had in Serbian before I started doing wordlists.

This morning I thought it might be fun to do my very first wordcount in Albanian too, a language which I have worked on at a very low level (not yet here in 2023), but don't exactly know well. I just did two columns with 61 words, but it turned out that I could recognize 19 (31%), and then there where 11 where I had some suspicions (the 'la-la' categori in the tables above). And loanwords made up the bulk of both those categories.

OK, if Albanian isn't distant enough - what then? Then I looked at my shelves and found a Latvian-German dictionary from Hempel, and I checked page 294. The first thing I noticed is that derivation within families seems to be well organized in this Baltic language (which I haven't studied at any level), but if I don't know the root then the whole family goes into the bin named 'unknown'. But on page 294 I noticed "plūkt" for plucking fruit (pflücken in German), and there were loads of other loanwords: "plus", "pluss" (the sign, but also 'advantage'), pneimatisks, poēma, pokals, pokers and polaritate, just to mention a few. OK, maybe page 294 is atypical so le't try another, for instance page 144 - but there you find the word "nakts" for night and a whole busload of derivatives thereof, like "naktsmiers" ("Nachtruhe") and "naktsseanss" ("Nachtvorstellung", nightly show - with or without ghosts). I haven't done enough counting to see where this ends, but even Latvian isn't exotic enough.

So what about something in Asian, but it has to have a comprehensible writing system and that eliminates most of the candidates for which I have bought small souvenir dictionaries. Indonesian is out because I have studied it , but my minuscule Pocket Vietnamese dictionary from Tuttle might do. And finally it seems that the free lunch has ended. I can see lots of compounds (and an array of accents and/or diacritics that even beats Czech), but practically nothing I can understand. I have visited Vietnam once, and it was during the Chinese new year so I learnt to say 'happy new year" (CHÚC MỪNG NĂM MỚI) with all the appropriate tones (at least that's what the polite Vietnamese guides told me), but that's probably the nearest I get to learning that language.

F1416b04_street in Hanoi.jpg
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Iversen
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Language Log: viewtopic.php?f=15&t=1027
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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby Iversen » Fri Mar 10, 2023 10:04 am

Iversen wrote:And (...) I noticed one last thing, namely that I knew a higher proportion of nouns and adjectives than I do of the verbs, and that means that I ran into lots of unknown words each time I accidentally landed on a page with the typical prefixes for verbs. So from now on I'll have to focus on learning verbs in my Slavic languages...

... and I spent several hours yesterday trying to do exactly that.

OK, to do something eficient concerning the Slavic verbs I would have to use a dictionary that provided clear information about the imperfective/perfect pairs, and none of the dictionaries that were compiled for the benefit of Slavic users can live up to that. And very small dictionaries also skip this kind of information. Which effectively left me with the choice between Polish and Russian. And since I for the time being freely can visit Poland, but not Russia I chose Polish. The dictionary I used was the big fat green German-Polish compact Pons - which on the other hand is so informative that you may drown in examples and constructions and words for totally unimportant things, so I also kept my somewhat smaller French-Polish Oxford within reach. In spite of the name of the editing house this one is written for Poles wanting to learn French, and sometimes the explanations there are more to the point than those in the big and very meticulous Pons.

I did something 200 words organized in pairs, and with a few exceptions the only other words allowed were things like verbal substantives based on the same roots as the verbs.

PO: A wieczorem pouczyłbym się czegoś innego, ale potem dałem się wciągnąć w szybko rozwijające się wątki o esperanto, i wtedy ten wieczór był zmarnowany...

Kunst172.JPG

PS: Nie piję kawy .. ale może być Broomhilda i jej przyjaciele robili to kiedy a malowałem obraz
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