Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

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Iversen
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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby Iversen » Fri Sep 24, 2021 5:53 pm

I recently wrote that I had opened an Assimil mini guide to Indonesian (L'Indonesien de Poceh) and saw some fairly elementary which I didn't know - like the word for "neighbour", as far as I remember. But maybe I haven't remember far enough because that word isn't in the small wordlist at the end of the booklet. I have now looked it up in my Tuttle dictionary and found "tetangga", but that word is also absent from the wordlists. Never mind, I have learnt a word more now, and actually a few more the last couple of days. I have just returned from a family visit, and the only thing in a foreign language I had brought along was the Assimil pocketbook. And lo and behold, I did find time to put the first 270 or so words in the book into a wordlist - but it was not a big deal since I aleady knew most of them. So it should probably be seen as a refreshment course and an occasion NOT to read about paleontology.

I doubt that I'll ever do a proper monolingual trip to Indonesia since the locals are more likely to speak either some local language or Bahasa Indonesia with a heavy dose of local words - but less would also be OK. I have only visited the country once, and back then I definitely couldn't speak or read or understand Indonesian - I only used one word, "kecil" (which I had picked up from a guidebook), and I pronounced it wrongly and was corrected. Next time I should be better equipped. However I did see a lot of things, including an example of the gory funeral rites of the Toraja on Sulawesi.

IND: Orang toraja sangat menyayangi kerbau mereka, tetapi salah satu tujuan memelihara kerbau adalah untuk membunuh mereka di upacara pemakaman. Ketika orang (pria atau wanita ) kaya meninggal, mayatnya akan disimpan sampai keluarga mengumpulkan cukup uang untuk menyembelih setidaknya satu kerbau (dan beberapa babi). Dan mungkin mereka sudah lebih bosan dengan turis sejak tahun 2002, tapi rombongan perjalanan kami diundang ke pemakaman dengan tiga penawaran kerbau. Kerbau merah muda sangat berharga. Perhatikan juga gaya bangunan rumah yang khas. Di atap pelana sebuah rumah Anda sering dapat melihat beberapa set tanduk kerbau, dikumpulkan melalui waktu yang lama. Orang-orang ini juga memajang patung-patung leluhur yang sudah meninggal di sisi gunung, tetapi sayangnya pencuri-pencuri jahat telah mencuri sejumlah patung, sehingga kebiasaan ini dapat dihentikan.

F2219a02_Toraja-funeral.jpg
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Iversen
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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby Iversen » Sun Sep 26, 2021 5:30 pm

Yesterday I watched a string of programs on the Italian TV channel RaiUno: 'Passaggio all'Ovest' followed by 'Linea Verde'. Most of the content of that channel is pure junk so you have to be grateful when at last they serve something relevant. By the way: when I wrote "watched" here it should be taken literally - I had subtitles on most of the time (text TV page 777) to avoid the background music, and then I listened to French harpsichord music while I watched those programs. But if I do choose to listen to Italian TV I can understand just about the whole caboodle so I don't fear loosing my listening abilities anytime soon in that language.

The programs told about several places, including some I haven't visited yet - like Papua New Guinea. But I knew some of the places they mentioned, like Genova in Italy and the town Quetzaltenango in Guatemala - and yes, that's a very long name so everybody calls it Xela.

SP: He visitado Guatemala dos veces. La primera vez visité el área de Ciudad de Guatemala a Xela, y la segunda vez visité Ciudad de Guatemala una vez más y tomé desde alla un bus a Tikal (y más adelante a Belice y Cancún). Compré el boleto de avión para Xela sin saber mucho de la ciudad, por lo que me sorprendió que su aeródromo fuera un prado con una choza donde estaba estacionado un solo taxi. Pero la ciudad está muy agradable. Dejé Xela por tierra con un "chicken bus", y recuerdo que la terminal de buses de Xela era en medio del distrito comercial, por lo que los autobuses debían cruzar un mercado al aire libre y después colarse por calles estrechas llenas de comerciantes. Todavía hoy no entiendo cómo se podría ejecutar esto sin atropellar a alguien.

Por cierto: el ave nacional de Guatemala es el quetzal, un ave verde de cola larga.

F1830a04_Aeropuerto-de-Xela.jpg

My goodnight reading the last couple of nights has been the guide to Thessaloniki in Greece which I mentioned recently. It is not thick, but has a fair amount of text on each page and the level is OK. When I wrote about it last time I complained that I only found half the words I tried to look up in my microscopic yellow Langenscheidt from days of yore. The few times I think I need to have a peek in a dictionary while lying down with a book it has to be a small dictionary, but apparently it can also become too small, so now I have switched to a slightly larger Langenscheidt from even further back - from when Greek was written with two aspirations and three accents - but hurray, now I usually find the words I try to look up, and it is still a fairly lightweight thing.

GR: Έχω φτάσει στην ενότητα για τα μουσεία της πόλης, αλλά πιθανότατα θα περάσω από τις προηγούμενες σελίδες για άλλη μια φορά - και αυτή τη φορά με έναν χάρτη, ώστε να δω πού βρίσκονται τα πράγματα που αναφέρονται.

F5527b04_Agios_Paulos_ (at the road up to the zoo of Thessaloniki).jpg

And I am still in the process of making a three-column wordlist based on the words from the Assimil pocket Indonesian (in French). Last time I mentioned that project I complained that the word ("tetangga" for 'neighbour) that caused me to start the whole project wasn't in the wordlists at the end of the book - and it still isn't - but now I have reached the page where I found it. So my memory didn't deceive me. And even though I know most of the words I have seen along the way there are some I didn't recognize - like the days of the week. Since I mostly have read about paleontology in Indonesian those texts were more focused on periods of millions of years than on telling about any odd day in any odd week. Which is one good reason to study a booklet aimed at travelling language learners.
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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby Iversen » Tue Sep 28, 2021 2:31 am

Today I went to the main library around midday, and to my astonishment the language café had been announced again for the first time since December 2020. OK, I went home to eat and returned to the library, where I had slightly more than an hour to spend - so I decided to refresh my skills in a number of languages - just in case somebody might turn up who spoke one of those languages. Since the library doesn't have non-fictional books in most languages I had to contend with peeks into some literary works, but with just 20 or so pages from each book it was bearable to read that stuff. The most interesting item was actually the Postille in Italian by signore Eco, a thin booklet about his work with the medievalesque monster "Il nome della Rosa" which I read in its entirety in the 70s - and later tried to read again forty years later, but I had to drop it because it now felt unbearably somniferous.

And at 4 o'clock PM I was ready for the language café (which in fact isn't a café, but just some tables with chairs and five national flags). Today I only got to speak to one person, but it turned out to be quite interesting - even though she just came to get some training in Danish. She was a Hungarian who had come here to study, and who then remained here. She could easily keep up a conversation, but needed some help with her pronunciation so we did some pronunciation training targeting (among other things) the famous soft d's. She had no problems saying them after most vowels, but after 'i' she consistently replaced them with l's - until I got accidentally got around to write a series of words with the combination 'id', like "at gide", "hvid", "at vide" ("to bother", "white", "to know") and a few more. And then suddenly she could say them perfectly. I still wonder why it was so much easier to pronounce the words when you could see them on paper, and maybe there is a pedagogical bombshell here, but .. well, I'm not a pedagogue. Maybe it's common knowledge among the inhabitants of the ivory tower, or maybe they don't care...

I also got some fun out of the two-hour session. For instanced I mentioned that I had visited an easterly town called "Nyíregyháza" - and then it was suddenly me who needed pronunciation assistance. We also discussed the presence of Celts in Hungary (where I mentioned some of the peculiarities of the Irish language) and the habit of the Hungarians to invert their christian names and surnames. exemplified by Bartók Bela, Liszt Ferenc, Kéler-Béla and herself. And on top of that we discussed the quite interesting Hungarian grammar. I have once read a small Hungarian grammar book and remembered that the form of the verbs depends on the presence of objects or not. So I let her translate "the ship sailed into the harbour" versus "the ship rammed the quay" - and one verb had the ending -ott and the other something else (was it -ren?). This of course also lead to a discussion about the numerous cases in Hungarian - cfr. the difference between "the ship sailed into the harbour" versus "the ship sailed around in the harbour". The Hungarians (like the Finns and the ancient Romans) can express the difference through the use of different cases, and then they don't need a preposition to do the job. Most languages with multiple cases (like Russian and German) use prepositions, but then they goddam still have to use different cases with different prepositions.

Time will tell whether there will be more participants next Monday. The big problem has always been to announce the times properly so we have never been particularly numerous, and that poses problems because the result may be that the only common language is English - but I have luckily had some long discussions in French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, German and shorter forays into a couple of other languages. I hope we'll get back to that situation now that the hysterical covid scare has abated somewhat here in Denmark. 75% of the population has been jabbed so those that get sick from now on are mainly the no-vacc's - and then it's their own fault.

F5407a03_Multilingual-signposting-of-the-Angola-Turako-in-the-Nyiregyhazy-zoo.jpg

CAST: El libro parcialmente en español, "Vislumbres de Bolivia", era en realidad un libro de texto con asignaciones en danés, que contenía algunos textos con temas bolivianos, incluida una entrevista con un guía del Salar de Uyuni. Y ahí radica una afirmación ominosa: el lago salado está lleno de litio (que se usa en baterías recargables y como medicina), y el gobierno está tentado de comenzar la extracción. Pero no puede financiarlo por sí mismo, ¿y quién entonces lo hace? ¿Los chinos? Por cierto, estuve en Bolivia una vez, pero no tuve tiempo de visitar el famoso lago salado.

CAT: També vaig escoltar durant el vespre una conferència en català de senyor Català a Youtube. Ja l’he esmentat anteriorment i la meva intenció era escoltar una mica més de les seves moltes conferències, però això va quedar en segon pla. Ara, però, vaig escoltar una conferència sobre experiments amb la partícula myò 2, que, segons els informes, mostra desviacions inesperades en el seu moment dipolar magnètic, cosa que no es pot explicar immediatament dins de la teoria estàndard actual - molt interesant! Malauradament, la meva connexió a Internet es va aturar a la meitat de la conferència, de manera que hauré de tornar a escoltar-la una vegada més. La conferència es intitula "L'experiment muó g-2 explicat... per a tots els públics". Ahem, això potser és massa optimista....

Books_today_01.jpg

Books_today_02.jpg
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Iversen
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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby Iversen » Thu Sep 30, 2021 7:49 am

Tuesday I spent most of the day refreshing (and updating) my knowledge about the early language history of Europe due to the thread about ProtoIndoeuropean versus PreIndoeuropean (or rather Not-at-all-Indoeuropean) languages, but I spent the evening surfing on the internet. Yesterday I spent the day in town and later on surfing the internet and doing repetitions of Indonesian wordlists, but then I returned to the thread in question - so all in all I have spent nearly a full day reading upp on very old stuff, not on adding to my knowledge and skills in the living languages. But at least I also spent a day on those, i.e. Tuesday evening and most of Wednesday. So the situation isn't totally bleak...

In fact some of my more recent surfing topics were inspired by Lichtrausch's reference to the Spektrum.de site (in German). I read a lot of articles there about psychology, including the psychology of animals.

GER: Zum Beispiel wurde behauptet, daß Hühner eigentlich nicht so dumm sind wie erwartet - und dann wurde vorgeschlagen, sie unter den gegenwärtigen Bedingungen nicht zu züchten, geschweige nachher zu essen. Aber ich habe gestern trotzdem Hühnchen-Pizza gegessen. Ein anderer Artikel erzählte von einem weißen Wal ('Beluga'), der sich damit amüsierte, menschliche Stimmen zu imitieren - ja, mit etwas müssen sie ja ihren Spaß haben, die Tierchen... Einige Artikel hatten in der Tat mit Sprache zu tun. Ich habe bereits einiges über Sprachen bei anderen Hominiden als den Sapiens erwähnt, aber am Dienstag Abend habe ich auch gelesen, daß man Sprachen schlechter lernt, wenn man gleichzeitig Musik hört - in dem Fall habe ich ein Problem. Im Moment höre ich Musik von Aaron Copland, und während des heutigen Tages erwarte ich, stundenlang Corelli zu lauschen. Der Stil von Copland ist abrupt und "hart", also wahrscheinlich (ver)störender als der sanfte Corellischen Barock. Aber dann habe ich zufällig etwas über Klarträume gelesen, nämlich daß man sie im Labor hervorrufen kann, wenn man einige Gehirnteile mit einer Frequenz von genau 40 Hz elektrisch stimuliert. Und von da bin ich zu Anglophone Quellen umdirigert, ...

EN: including to a complete book (which I long ago read on paper): "Exploring the World of Lucid dreaming" - but I didn't read all of it this time. Instead I continued to an article about the complete lack versus overwhelming abundance of visual imagery by Adam Zeman et al., followed by a long article in NY Times about the same subject. To me it is almost incomprehensible how some people can live without a constant barrage of images and sounds in their heads, but to aphantasians this seems to be the harsh reality - and surprisingly this condition seems to be more prevalent among scientists than among other people (not to speak of artists and musicians). We have a few times discussed whether language occurs AS language in our minds which seems to be a related phenomenon, and I have always staunchly maintained that those of my thoughts that ended up as strings of words always were linguistic from the moment they became conscious to me - but this condition seems not be shared by everyone.

GR: Και μετά τελείωσα το βράδυ με μερικά μουσεία στη Θεσσαλονίκη - στα ελληνικά.

Kunst161.JPG

All this happened during Tuesday evening (after I had returned to the present day from the old days), so I'll try to be brief about yesterday. I listened to a couple of my old downloads in Afrikaans in the series "Die Taal wat ons Praat", but apart from that the main staple diet was the quizzes of Euro Linguist Norbert Wierzbicki on Youtube.

AF: Dit is lanklaas dat ek iets in Afrikaans hier op Llorg geskryf het, so ek sal nie onthou nie dat ek byvoorbeeld het geluister na 'n onderhoud om taalonderrig vir mediese personeel, sodat hulle hul Afrikaanssprekende kliënte kon verstaan, en in dieselfde program daar was baie gesê oor die spelling van verkleinwoorde - maar dit was nogal onbegryplik omdat ek selde diminutieve in my Afrikaanse geskrifte gebruik (dit blyk meer relevant te wees vir mense wat self Afrikaans praat).

EN: And then I listened to several of the kind of quizzes where one person asks what words in his/her own language mean - and everybody speak their own native languages. This is quite fun when it works, but first I listed to the beginning of a program where an American man posed questions about Old Norse to a Norwegian dialect speaker, a Danish speaker and a man from Iceland (who of course could understand everything) - but the video was marred by too much speech in English. A video with Norbert W himself speaking Spanish to a Brazilian would have been better with two native speakers, but after that I was more lucky with my choices - including one video with a Gallego speaker challenging two Brazilians and one Portuguese lady. And it can hardly come as a surprise that they could understand each other without problems, but it was surprising that they had so many problems guessing the meaning of the Gallegan test words. After that a video with a Catalan lady pitted against a Mexican and a native speaker of Québecquois and another with a Romanian gentleman pitted against the same Mexican and Canadian - and in this last one the participants were clearly on thin ice.

In other videos in the series the participants speak a number of Slavic languages. The reason that I didn't watch any of them yesterday is that I then would have had to concentrate - hard - and I was busy with other things on my 'puter!

EuroLinguist_xmpibOOz1qA.jpg
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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby luke » Thu Sep 30, 2021 9:02 am

Iversen wrote:EN: And then I listened to several of the kind of quizzes where one person asks what words in his/her own language mean - and everybody speak their own native languages. This is quite fun when it works, but first I listed to the beginning of a program where an American man posed questions about Old Norse to a Norwegian dialect speaker, a Danish speaker and a man from Iceland (who of course could understand everything).

That looks like a very fun show. I was going to ask a question like, "is this sort of like a game show?", but you provided some links. I watched the one with the Catalan hostess. It was better than I anticipated. The capabilities of the contestants, the hostess, mutual intelligibility, language distance, etc, all put to the test. Muchas, gracias seňor.
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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby Iversen » Sat Oct 02, 2021 8:09 am

I woke up this morning from something as unusual as a dream partly in Portuguese (or rather Brazilian). As usual there are some fragments which may or may not have belonged to the same dream, and there were parts that suggested that something had gone before the part I remember. The part I do remember starts with a bus station, and right across it there is a very long queue. A middle aged lady comes along with a big grin, wawing some paper tickets. I ask (in Danish) whether she also bought a ticket for me as we had agreed on (in a forgotten part of the dream), but no - and it is eight o'clock, and the bus is leaving at 8:17. The lady takes her position at the end of the queue, while I rush into the building and is handed a ticket (I don't remember paying for it), and then I get out and enter the first the best bus without queuing up. And from then on the dream somehow slides into Brazilian, probably because I associate the dream bus with the one that brought me from Recife to Natal in Brazil two years ago. So alas, now I have to leave you Anglophones dangling in the air since the rest of the dream was in Portuguese!

POR: OK, subi pelo corredor de ônibus e encontrei um lugar libre - e um momento depois (!) saí numa cidade que certamente não tinha um aspecto dinamarquês. Talvez se podría mencionar que no medio do supracitado percurso no Brasil o autobus demorou algumas horas na beira da estrada porque algum sindicato ou grupo de ativistas havia decidido bloquear a estrada principal um pouco mais ao norte da nossa posição (o motorista se informou disso por telefone celular ) - e então tivemos que esperar até que eles gentilmente levantassem o bloqueio. Felizmente, o viagem de volta para Recife foi tudo tranquilo, então não me lembro muito bem daquele. OK, no sonho saí em uma rua com palmeiras e com placas no português. Percebi que isso devia ser um sonho, então fui a uma loja qualquer e disse "bom dia" para duas mulheres. Descobriu-se que a loja vendia brinquedos, incluindo bichos de pelúcia. Uma das senhoras veio até mim e perguntou se eu queria comprar alguma coisa, e eu respondi que só queria ver se as espécies animais eram da América do Sul - e sim, vi um coati em marrom claro. Não o comprei, mas perguntei se tinham muitos turistas. Não, disse a senhora, todo o mundo é daqui .. e aí infelizmente eu acordei da sonho...

EN: Evidently I spent some time just after I woke up to memorize the dream - otherwise it would have gone irrevocably into oblivion (and I know that I forgot some of it), but then I went to my computer to tell about it here. And then by some weird coincidence (or misfortune) I switched on my TV and saw that there was a program from a French zooparc called La Flèche on TV5. And while I have seen lots of zoo programs in German and English and Danish I think this is the first time that this channel has deigned to show such a program - and since it doesn't provide text TV with subtitles I just had to grab my headphones and listen. So there I may have forgotten even more details from the dream, but you got everything I remember ...

FR: Au fait, je n'ai jamais visité le zoo mentionné, La Flèche, qui apparemment se trouve à la campagne au sud-est du Mans, ni le Parc Aquatique adjacent - il faut probablement un véhicule pour rendre visite à ce lieu.

EN: Apart from that I have not done something special the last couple of days. I have revised some more Indonesian vocabulary from the Assimil language guide, and I have read the section about inflected prepositions-cum-pronouns in the faboulous Nuarleargais (Irish). And of course I have watched TV in several languages - like for instance right now where I'm watching a program from Hawaii and the South Sea islands on the Spanish channel TVE (earlier on we saw a man producing an ukulele, SP: y ahora hacen 'esnorquel' en una laguna en las Islas Cook) - but that's not unusual. A dream in Portuguese is - at least for me.

F5910b06 - pare na beira da estrada de Recife a Natal.jpg
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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby Iversen » Mon Oct 04, 2021 10:19 pm

I finished my Greek guide to Thessaloniki Saturday afternoon (I gave up on finishing it as goodnight reading - I fall asleep too well - and therefore read the last pages at daytime). However I happened to become quite happy about the old Langenscheidt from antediluvian times (with a yellow paper cover instead of the distinctive yellow plastic jacket the company now uses for all its dictionaries) so Sunday I made a wordlist with around 170 words and added at least 80 more today. I once made a wordcount using that dictionary, and my estimate from back then is that it has around 40.000 Greek headwords, and that means that is it brimfull of delicious half-rare vocabulary which I may not need for conversational purposes, but if I know those words in Danish or English or German (as in the dictionary) then it is irritating not to know them in Greek also.

Apart from that, today I went to the second language café this year at the library. Last Monday we were only two persons, a Hungarian lady and me, and her reason to come was that she wanted to train her Danish - but for some of the time we trained it by speaking about the Hungarian language. Today resembled it insofar that we ended up 'training Danish', but it was still a nice way to spend a couple of hours. One of the participants was a Danish lady who had lived several years in France, but now she was learning Spanish - and then we spoke 10-15 minuts in Spanish. However we were then joined by a man from the Philippines, an Italian girl who just had finished her highschool/Gymnasium/liceo and now wanted to study psychology in Denmark, and later on a German lady who had spent the last 10 years in Switzerland - and they would all like to have a slow discussion in Danish - albeit with some detours to English and their native languages. None of us knew Tagalog or the native dialect of the Philippine man, however, but I vaguely remembered that the Philippines have adopted the Spanish numerals and the word for 'table' (mesa), and then we got some fun out of that. And of course we heard about the things they did to get into contact with Danish speakers here and their hobbies in general. I did of course mention this forum when it was my turn. So even though I only got a short time in undiluted Spanish (plus a few scattered sentences in German, Italian, French, Spanish and Portuguese for illustrative purposes) it was a quite enjoyable meeting, and I'm definitely going next Monday too - then time will tell whether I ever will see any of today's participants again. At least we were six people today, which bodes well for the future...

Greek-wordlist.jpg
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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby Iversen » Wed Oct 06, 2021 4:52 pm

Just a short message this time. I have been walking around downtown today, and when I returned I turned on my computer. I did however feel a bit sleepy and decided to take a nap, and I have just woken up from a partly Indonesian dream from the end of that nap. In the relevant part I went into a building where it seems that there was some kind of course going on. However I heard somebody start out "saya, dyo" .. and then stop. And then I tried whether I could do it better, and I could: - "satu, dua, tiga , empat, lima, enam, tujuh, delapan, sembilan, sepuluh" and them breath of relief - and "sepuluh, sebelas, dua belas" (ten eleven twelve), triumph and stop. In the dream I just thought these numbers, or maybe spoke quietly to myself, and without further interaction with the persons in the room I started out checking that I remembered the days of the week, "senin.. " - but then it occurred to me that I could use this stuff in my log, and I woke up and did the right thing: think the dream through before even moving a limb. And that's the only reason I still remember it.

But why Indonesian of all languages? Well, I have told you that I have been making wordlists based on the Assimil "Indonésien de Poche" lately, and after my Greek guidebook came to an end I have been using the tiny Assimil as goodnight reading. At least that's the only remotely logical reason I can give.

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And now I'm ready to continue the task I had started on my computer - nothing to do with language learning: I have mentioned that I have a thematic collection attached to my current music collection, which is organized into files inspired by the audiocassettes that contained my previous music collection. OK, I have reached Demantius 1a and b and DesPrez 1a and b - all in all three hours of music with composer names like Demantius + Senfl and DesPrez + Hofhaimer + Compère, Brumel, A.Kircher - in other words, composers from around 1500-1600 something, mostly from the German speaking part of Europe - and because these three hours are filled up with pieces with an average length of a few minutes the simplest way to make a theme list is simply to start listening and then jot down the themes along the way. With longer works it might be worth consulting the IMSLP site for scores, but not with music from the renaissance. So I started out doing this, but didn't feel 'sharp' enough in my head, and then I luckily decided to take that nap - and got rewarded with a rare dream partially in Indonesian.

I'll restart my language studies when I reach Dittersdorf (from the 18.century) 1a and b - his themes have already been catalogued in the system so I don't need to concentrate...

Demantius.jpg

PS: I mentioned Athanasius Kircher (1602-1680). He was a Jesuite and knew something about just about everything. And he invented a system for churning out music, which is the reason that he pops up in my music collection, but he also knew a lot of languages and other stuff. Unfortunately his reputation has been soiled by the utter sheer nonsense he came up with when he attempted to decrypt the Egyptian hieroglyphs - a feat that only succeeded after the three-lingual Rosetta stone had been unearthed during a Napoleonic campaign down there.

AthanasiusK.jpg
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Iversen
Black Belt - 4th Dan
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Languages: Monolingual travels in Danish, English, German, Dutch, Swedish, French, Portuguese, Spanish, Catalan, Italian, Romanian and (part time) Esperanto
Ahem, not yet: Norwegian, Afrikaans, Platt, Scots, Russian, Serbian, Bulgarian, Albanian, Greek, Latin, Irish, Indonesian and a few more...
Language Log: viewtopic.php?f=15&t=1027
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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby Iversen » Fri Oct 08, 2021 9:30 pm

Since my last message I have spent a lot of time on two non-linguistic things. The first has been to walk around because we have had a couple of days with just the right weather for walking around. The second (mainly in the evenings) has been to make some corrections in a specialized overview for my music collection, in which I had indicated which items I had on my records, in my first and second cassette collections and now in my digital system - and whether the same people played the music from version to version. And I actually still have a limited number of pices which were recorded as far back as the 60s on cheap cassettes or bought on LPs at 5 DM (German mark) apiece. In some cases it's just nostalgia, like some items conducted by one of the first female conductors in Denmark (Grethe Kolbe), in other cases I have simply not been able to locate newer version with less noise - those LPs were all we had when I started to collect music so I was happy about them, but when they have been transferred to cassettes once or twice you can't expect a perfect sound (besides I hate scratches with a vengeance). So earlier this year I made that overview, but forgot to mark clearly whether the digital version was played by the same people as the version in the previous cassette collection - so that's the information I have built into the system now - and that took two full evenings!

OK, back to languages...

I finished the registration task in the late afternoon and then had a look at the notestand where I keep my current projects - including some that were current a couple of months ago. And then I noticed some printouts in Romanian from descopera.ro, and I did what I normally do: copy them by hand while taking notes about new vocabulary and grammatical details. The trouble was - there was no trouble! I knew all the words, and not one single wordform was unexpected. I read one page ahead and found one single word that could justify a peek in a dictionary ("prag" for treshold - I had something about 'dust' on my mind). That was quite unsettling - I didn't expect to be that fluent in Romanian after months of doing absolutely nothing. So I went to the backside of my bookshelves and grabbed a booklet with articles in French and Romanian about Eminescu and Creanga - probably the most famous Romanian authors - and those articles were also surprisingly easy. So I went back to the secret store and found a novel, albeit a short one ("Marea își risipește epavele" by Al-Jabiri), and then at least I felt a bit of resistance - about a dozen words on page 140 which deserved to be looked up. OK, I looked at some other pages also that seemed easier, but nevertheless I'm relieved to know that reading skills in foreign languages just don't enter your brain from above without a little bit of hard work.

RO: Textul pe care l-am copiat din descopere.ro a fost despre o companie care a construit computere cuantice pe bază de probă. Scopul acestor computere este aproximativ că nu sunt binare și, prin urmare, ar trebui, în teorie, să poată face sarcini dificile mult mai repede decât computerele obișnuite. Problema este că este, de asemenea, mult mai greu să introduci date în ele și să obții rezultatele inapoi, iar necesiteau mai mult hardware (și risipesc mai mult CO2 pentru că necesită frig înghețat pentru a atinge supraconductivitate ). Pericolul cu ei este că, în principiu, ar putea fi folosiți pentru a sparge sistemele de codare pe baza numerelor prime utilizate, de exemplu, de site.urile web criptate (cele cu https) - dar poate durează puțin mai mult până că funcționează bine. Între timp, ne putem distra cu sisteme bazate pe inteligență artificială care pot funcționea pe computere obișnuite binare .

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Iversen
Black Belt - 4th Dan
Posts: 4768
Joined: Sun Jul 19, 2015 7:36 pm
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Languages: Monolingual travels in Danish, English, German, Dutch, Swedish, French, Portuguese, Spanish, Catalan, Italian, Romanian and (part time) Esperanto
Ahem, not yet: Norwegian, Afrikaans, Platt, Scots, Russian, Serbian, Bulgarian, Albanian, Greek, Latin, Irish, Indonesian and a few more...
Language Log: viewtopic.php?f=15&t=1027
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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby Iversen » Sun Oct 10, 2021 11:48 am

Yesterday I first printed some new texts in Slavic languages, but then I discovered that I hadn't finished everything in the stack of paper on my notestand - so now I have more than enough to keep me occupied for a couple of weeks. And it isn't a bad thing at all - the Slavic languages have not been at the top of my agenda for some time.

One of my new texts (from WIkipedia) was an article about Old Church Slavonic - or as the article prefers to call it: Old Bulgarian (not to be confounded with Proto-Bulgarian which is the reconstructed step before any written sources). This language is documented from around 50 years after the Bible translation which is ascribed to followers of Cyrillus (827–828) and Methodius (815–820) and is often called "old Slavonic" or some translation thereof. The author (or authors) of the article argue that the Slavonic languages already were so different at the time of the missionary brethren that it would be misleading to suggest that they spoke and wrote a common Slavic language - actually it may just have been a Slavic language spoken by Bulgarian expats in Thessaloniki. And it is also misleading to call it "Old Church Slavonic" since it must have been used for other things - but from today's perspective the name is apt since nobody cares about those other uses. Another factor that complicates the picture is that the language form is claimed to be an early form of Bulgarian, but the writing system was actually commissioned by king Rastislav of Greater Moravia, who asked the Byzantine emperor for a teacher that could teach his subjects to write - and then he got two for the price (in the year 863).

SLK: Na vrchole svojej moci bola "Veľká" Morava kráľovstvom, ktoré sa rozkladalo od Sedmohradska ("[GER]Siebenbürgen" auf Deutsch) cez Uhorsko až po Sasko. Vnútorné problémy a príchod Maďarov pod Árpad po roku 900 vedú k jeho zrúteniu - predtým však kráľ Svatopluk vyhnal učeníkov k týmto dvom misionárom, čo môže vysvetľovať, prečo Bulhari tak veľmi túžia nechať si svoj jazyk pre seba. Na Bratislavskom hrade bola o tomto kráľovstve veľká výstava, keď som ho navštívil v roku 2018, ale inak o tom človek počuje veľmi málo. Prvý kompletný preklad Biblie pravdepodobne napísal knižná škola Preslav v Pliske v Bulharsku a pravdepodobne bol aj tam, kde bolo založené cyrilické písmo.

BU: Между другото, смешно е, че Кирил е дал име на азбука, използвана от много славянски езици- но той не го е измислил сам. Братята са по -скоро привързани към глаголическото писание, което сега е изчезнало. Това обаче не се споменава в споменатата статия.

GR: Παρεμπιπτόντως, ο Μεθόδιος και ο Κύριλλος γεννήθηκαν στη Θεσσαλονίκη (αλλά ίσως σε μια οικογένεια με σλαβικές ρίζες - αυτό δεν είναι γνωστό). Ένα άλλο διάσημο πρόσωπο επίσης γεννήθηκε στην Θεσσαλονίκη: ο Τούρκος αρχηγός κράτους Ατατούρκ - και υπάρχει ακόμη μουσείο για αυτόν στη γενέτειρά του.

F5611a04_the-oldest-Slavic_poem_at_the-Batislava_Hrad (but from when).jpg

EN: When I searched for texts in Serbian I stumbled over the homepage of the National museum in Sarajevo - where the language actually is supposed to be Bosnian, but it resembles Serbian quite a lot. I copied the version in Latinitsa (Latin writing), because I noticed too late that there also was a version in Cyrillic - so these two circumstances will probably mean that I can't use it for my intensive studies - but I have actually visited the museum, so I'm going to keep it. Then I looked for the homepage of its sister museum in Beograd, but ended up at the homepage of the Etnographic Museum instead, which is OK - I have visited both.

And by the way, I have been listening through Dohnayi and Dvorak, so my musical input also stems from the domain of the long-gone Greater Moravian state, but of course I also had my TV running, and..

FR: .. ici je regardé un programme sur ARTE sur les 'blobs'. Si j'avais écouté l'émission, il y aurait probablement eu de l'allemand parlé mis au-dessus des interviews en Anglais, ce qui serait insupportable - mais heureusement, il y a aussi des sous-titres en français sur la page 888 du télétexte. Et qu'est-ce que ce qu'un 'blob' d'ailleurs? Eh bien, les Myxogastria (('slimsvamp' en danois, 'plasmodiale Schleimpilze' en allemand) forment une famille de eucariotes qui peuvent croître à des tailles énormes - une cellule peut atteindre un diamètre d'environ un mètre, c'est qui est le record absolu au monde pour une seule cellule. Et maintenant, certains scientifiques prétendent que ces êtres sont intelligents, même s'ils n'ont ni cerveau, ni estomac, ni membres. Une cellule peut envoyer des pousses de tous les côtés pour trouver de la nourriture, et si celles-ci trouvent quelque chose, la toile se rétrécit au plus économique. Sur les routes non économiques, une trace de mucus est laissée pour que les pousses du 'blob' n'y retournent plus. Et c'est en fait suffisant pour qu'une telle cellule fongique puisse trouver son chemin à travers des labyrinthes. Et s'il n'y a pas de nourriture à proximité, il forme de petits noyaux qui peuvent survivre pendant des années sans manger.

On pourrait penser qu'une créature aussi intelligente pourrait s'emparer de la terre entière, mais c'est probablement le truc avec les traces insurmontables de mucus qui l'a ralenti. En fait, j'ai lu une fois il y a longtemps une histoire de science-fiction sur une matière grise de l'univers qui est accidentellement tombé sur Terre, où elle s'est propagée à l'ensemble du globe à une vitesse fulgurante et l'a couvert d'une souche grise puante. Mais si les Myxogastria avaient voulu conquérir le globe, ils l'auraient pu le faire depuis longtemps, et ils ne le firent pas. Nous avons des préoccupations plus grandes aujourd'hui que les 'blobs'.

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