Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

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chove
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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby chove » Wed Feb 17, 2021 2:16 pm

Is there any sort of standardised spelling you use for Scots, by the way? I've been told "just write it like you'd say it" but that leads to arguments online, like when someone told me not to use "fir" because they used "fur" (for). It's hard to work against being brought up with the idea that it's "just English spelled badly."
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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby Iversen » Wed Feb 17, 2021 4:12 pm

Actually I try to make my Laalands Scots as little English as possible!

My main guide is the excellent https://www.scots-online.org/dictionary/english_scots.php, but I don't check everything I write against the internet guru so there may be deviations. And sometimes I also deliberately spell things differently from what I see in the dictionary because its proposals look too close to Standard English.

The main problem with Scots is of course that it is so difficult to find long texts that also are interesting. I use Wikipedia a lot, but the Scots Wikipedia isn't particularly rich in content - and I have no way of checking which dialect I'm seeing. The result may be far from anything native Scots would produce, but then its their fault that they haven't written enough. There are almost nothing in Scots in the Scottish bookstores - only the same boring stuff in Sassenach which you would find in Portsmouth.

By the way, I have the same problem with Low German (Platt), where I try to use the spelling of Sass wherever possible. But I only have a small dictionary, and to boot it often comes up with more than one possible spelling, and then I have to choose 'by ear'. I also own a larger Low German dictionary, which I bought in Berlin, but it uses a different spelling system (maybe representing a dialect from Mecklenburg-Vorpommern rather than the one from Schleswig-Holstein which I heard in my youth). The result is that I sometimes have to look for words in the Berliner book, but then rewrite them as I think the Sass would have written them. The Low German Wikipedia allegedly follows the Sass orthography.

And finally there is the problem with Nynorsk (New Norwegian), which is one of two allowed spelling systems in Norway. The problem is that I don't like the bokmål spelling, which is used by some 80-90% of the population (too close to Danish), but I haven't found a good something-to-Nynorsk dictionary yet. And the problem is magnified by the plethora of dialects used in Norwegian media, which makes it difficult to choose one's own way of speaking the language - and those two things in combination are responsible for the sad fact that I haven't felt on sure enough ground in a language which I can understand without any problems to do a monolingual trip, and therefore it is not included among the languages I claim to speak.

As for Scots I have had one and only one conversation purely in the Scots leid (ahem, some kind of Scots), and that came about when I ran into a couple of Scotspersons at the polyglot gathering in Bratislava in 2018. At least that single experience proved that I can speak fluently in something resembling Scots if I get the chance. And right now I'm terribly annoyed that I didn't also write this answer in Scots, but the idea came to me too late...

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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby Iversen » Wed Feb 17, 2021 5:14 pm

SCOTS: Ah coudnae resist the tempteetion tae rewrite the message abuin in Scots nou that ah micht have at least ane reader. So here gaes:

Ah try as best ah can tae make ma Scots as little Ingles as possible. Ma main guide is the braw dictioneerie frae Scots-online, but I cannae check awthing ah write against the internet guru so thare micht be some wee devieetions*. Bytimes ah aw deleeberately spell things as unalike frae whit ah see in the dictioneery acause its proposals look owerly close tae Standard Ingles.

* this is ane ensaumple! the wird 'deviation' isnae in the dictioneery, and it woud haed been spelt differently if it had been thare!


The main problem wi Scots is shuirly thats t'is so damned neef tae find lang texts whit aw are interestin (espeicially if ya daena fancy literature). Ah use Wikipedia a lot, but the Scots Wikipedia isnae parteecular fousame in content - and ah hanae ony way of kennin whit deealect ah'm seein. The result micht tharefore coud be verra faur frae whitsomiver ony native Scots body micht come up wi. There is haurly onything in Scots in the Scots buikshops - anely the same dreich stuff that ya woud find in Portsmooth.

Ah've had anely one converseetion purely in the Scots leid (ahem, some sort o Scots), and that came aboot when ah came ower a couple o Scotspersons at the Polyglot Gatherin at Bratislava in 2018. Housomiver that single experience proved that ah can gab fluently in something akin tae Scots if ah git the chance. And richt nou ah'm well blythe wi me sel fair havin written an answer tae Chove in the ane and anely confeerin tongue.

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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby chove » Wed Feb 17, 2021 5:31 pm

Ah'm feart tae try typin in Scots in case ah get it wrang!
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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby Iversen » Wed Feb 17, 2021 5:37 pm

Yours chances o gettin it richt are better than mines acause you live thare! :D
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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby rdearman » Wed Feb 17, 2021 5:40 pm

Doesn't matter, apparently you can just make it up. :D

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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby Iversen » Fri Feb 19, 2021 12:48 am

At least I didn't write the other half of the Scots Wikipedia! In fact I have read the discussion about AmaryllisGardener and his project already back in 2020, and as far as I can see he is still in charge of the Scots version - but I have checked the history of a couple of articles and didn't find anything more recent than 2020. Well, maybe the turmoil has taught him something ...

Apart from that, when I did my wordlist thing I sensed that my Irish had become not only rusty, but almost crumbled down to point zero. So I decided to do something about it. First I tried to find my green sheets, but unsuccesfully - and it has occurred to me that I may not even have transferred my notes to green paper, and white paper has tendency to disappear down my oversized paperbin without leaving any alarm signals - that's why things that are meant to last have to be written on green paper!

Well, instead of searching in vain I grabbed Harry Potter 1 in Irish and Englishfor the second time and started from the very beginning again again, caibidil 1 line 1. To re-internalize the sentence patterns in it again I copy not only the Irish text and write new words in the right margin as I'm wont, but I also write a hyperliteral translation betwen the lines to make sure that I don't skip anything. It's harder than it sounds because the Irish way of pattern-thinking is so different from any other language I have ever worked on, but I don't think I need to dig through more than maybe one chapter to be back to the level where I can write simple things in the language again.

And this evening I launched an attempt to construct some new green sheets, based on the online Gramadach na Gailge with reference to my paper guides. Or in other words: I copy some passages from the Gramadach and reformulate others in a spreadsheet, and the idea is then that I'll try to compact it once I have collected the bare essentials and thought about the best way to present them. The Gramadach is of course already close to what I would have wanted on paper if I didn't have this madman urge to make whole grammars fit on a couple of A4 sheets, but I have also copied some parts og the Gramadach's German version to a Wordfile for later reference if the original should become inacccessible. So far I have covered the mutations and articles/nouns, and I am probably around halfway through this worksheet-based intermediary stadium.

I do own a paper grammar by N.Mac Congáll, and it is actually not bad, except for a couple of irritating quirks: 1) it doesn't translate its examples, 2) it repeats itself by taking for instance all prepositions and repeating the same statements unchanged - instead of dividing them into a few main categories (leniting and eclipsing prepositions) and then adding footnotes where something is special for just one of them, My TY grammar is half full of exercises which I couldn't see myself doing when I am searching for information, whereas my old TY textbook with the light blue cover isn't bad for a textbook. Unfortunately it teaches the conservative Munster dialect, contrary to all my other learning tools.

Irish-grammar_18feb21.jpg

And one final thing: our museums and libraries and shops and eateries are still closed (not to speak about travel locations), and I fear that our paranoid government will limit its expected opening to letting school children above fourth class get back to school - provided that the pupils will accept to be covid tested twice a week (which will cost a fortune). The irony is that the population already has done its share - if you look at the table below we lie at 71 newly infected per 100.000 per 17/2 2021, against 1184 in the Czech Republic (poor Czechs!), and if people don't see any improvements soon they may stop caring about the social distancing and hygiene measures that brought the infection numbers down - and then we are really in trouble! Actually letting school kids attend school again is one of the more risky possibilities, but apparently the youngsters are getting desperate and depressed. And I am losing the last shred of my confidence in governments and administrative bodies.

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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby Iversen » Sat Feb 20, 2021 6:56 pm

Yesterday I spent a lot of time on piecing materials about Irish grammar together in the spreadsheet I mentioned a couple of days ago. At the time I thought I was halfway through, but of course I wasn't, and now I am at a loss to see how all the information I have collected can be squeezed down to a couple of pages, which is my normal goal. But at least I have my spreadsheet now for further study, and it has been a good repetition course to gather all that information. In addition I did work my way through a few more lines in Harry Potter, but not as much as expected - instead I spent several hours fixing/replacing broken zippers in my preferred winter coat and my best fleece sweater, and after that I patched up some pillows. That took several hours.

One of the most conspicuous features of Irish (and other Celtic languages) is that they inflect words at both ends. If you take for instance Latin or Modern Greek the adjectives have grosso modo the same endings so here the logical layout for a green sheet is to put the table of adjective below the corresponding table for the substantives, and then you can place the articles and other paraphernalia at the level of the substantives. Not so in the Germanic and Slavic languages: here the adjectives have different endings from the substantives, and in the Germanic languages these endings even depend on whether you have a definite article, an indefinite article (or none) or certain other elements at the start of the substantive clause, so here logic tells you to put everything, i.e. articles, the different set of adjective endings and the substantive endings, on the same line. And then we have the Irish system... gosh.

I'm still thinking of ways to deal with that monster, but it seems that the most economical way to describe the initial mutations of for instance substantives would be as effects of something in front of them - or in other words, describe the substantival and adjectival endings (or palatizations/depalatizations) without even mentioning what happens at the beginning of the words, and then describe the mutations as effects of preceding articles (or prepositions and articles) - if there are such articles. The grammars are all curiously secretive about the situation where there isn't any article - so does a 'naked' feminine substantive in the nominative/accusative have lenition or not? Maybe the answer can be gleaned by looking at the names of female characters in Harry Potter... time will tell.

Today I have watched several hours of German TV from Arte - there were three excellent nature documentaries there in a row (from Königsee, the Bodensee area and the hot Kaiserstuhl). After that I first studied the final part of the passage about the Devonian (the section about plants - 'tanaman') from my dubious Earth history in Indonesian, and after that comes the Permian - so where is Carbon? I don't remember anymore where I got the text from (somewhere on Facebook, I think) and I don't remember whether I skipped every other period or the author/translator did.

And after that I finished my article about the labyintodonts in Russian and followed it up with an article about the famous Ichthyostega (still in Russian), which was found on Greenland in 1931 by Eigil Nielsen, a member of the Danish Lauge Koch expedition. A much beloved Danish cartoonist and humorist named Storm P(etersen) even made drawings based on the first informal reconstructions, but then our local authorities made the fatal error of leaving the task of describing it scientifically to Swedish scientists ..

SW: Och hva hände då? INGENTING ALLS !! Den första som fick fossilet het Gunnar Säve-Söderbergh, men han ble allvarleg sjuk og skrev förståeligt nog ingenting medan han låg och kämpade med döden - vilket varade förvånande länge. Etter kriget dog han, ock fossilet kom då til en man kallat Erik Jarvik, och fortfarande hände inget INGET ALLS. Jarvik var enligt uppgift en lärd man, men inte precis en prydnad för forskarstanden med hänsyn till tempo. År 1955 utfärdade han dock en skiss, men den liknade Storm Ps teckningar i förvånande grad, så kanske han hade glömt var han lade originalresterna och ville bara inte erkänna det. Eller kanske ville han båra inte svara på frågor. När tröga Jarvik äntligen dog i 1998 kom fossilerna till Cambridge i England, men HURRA HURRA, nu har de äntligen kommit hem till Danmark, där vi lika gärna kunde ha behållit dem från början. Historien berättas i "Videnskabens Verden", men jag känner den också från en utställning på Zoological Museum i Köpenhamn, och der fanns en annan ritning som faktiskt var bättre än den nedan - men jag har inte kunnat hitta den, och museerna är för närvarande stängda så jag kan inte kunnat fråga varken där eller på Storm P-museet.

Ichtyostega (Wikipedia).jpg

StormPdk-fisk.jpg


EDIT: (DK) Og så fandt jeg sørme alligevel den tegning som jeg ledte efter - blandt mine egne fotografier fra den omtalte udstilling:

F5921b12_Ichtyostega.jpg
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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby Iversen » Sun Feb 21, 2021 11:27 pm

Today I have spent several hours reading articles in English and Danish about prehistoric humans. It all started when I wanted to check today's covid statistics - our government has just allowed children up to 4. class to attend school, but then infection numbers exploded in frist one town, and now seemingly also in at least one other. I then checked the risk assessments made by a team of experts and lo and behold, they had estimated the risk from this particular move to be absolutely minimal - and now the learned ones dicuss whether it can be blamed on the English variant alone, the alternative being that they bungled up the discussion because children don't seem to be as seriously affected as elderly people. And then they totally forgot that children have an uncontrollable tendency to touch each other, and that they can carry the virus around just as easily as adults can.

However between all the covid babble I suddenly noticed a link to a newspaper article about mysterious genes in African populations, and from there through a few steps to the original (and rather technical) article by Arun Durvasula, Sriram Sankararaman in Science Advances 12 Feb 2020. The message is basically that there is a component in the genes of especially West African peoples that doesn't come from Homo sapiens (just as Europeans and Asians have traces of Neanderthal and Denisovan genes) - and nobody has found out yet precisely which kind of extinct human that could be.

And from there I continued into some articles about Neanderthals that suggested that they left abstract art on cave walls 68.000 years ago - long before the Cromagnon came to Europe and started to paint mammoths and aurochs and whatever else they had running around in their backyard at the time. The Neanderthals also supported invalidated family members, one article stated, but that's actually not a new observation - the very first Neanderthal found was drawn by an archeologist as a primitive hairy ogre with a club. But newer research has shown that the socalled 'holotype' just was an old man of maybe fifty years or so, with arthritis and severe health problems, so if he survived that long his family group must have supported him - which gives a rather more positive impression of their living style and intelligence level.

Misrepresented_Neanderthal_man.jpg

Newer conception of an elderly Neanderrman from the museum in Neanderthal.jpg

OK, nuff about dead people. I have spent fair amount of time this evening doing wordlists in Albanian with words from the culinary anthology I have mentioned earlier, and now I have put those texts to rest on a pile of used paper and instead printed a new text set about corona - partly from Macedonia, partly from Albania. And these texts are actually easier to read than those about pizzas which you may remember from recent comments in this thread. Take for instance this passage from portalb.mk:

"Në qendrat Kovid në Shkup janë hospitualizar 18 paciente gjatë 24 orëve të fundit"

"Shkup" is of course Skoplje, and "të fundit" means 'past' (the past 24 hours) - "përfundoj" means "I end" something (there is no infinitive in Albanian so you use the 1.p.sing. as in Modern Greek or Bulgarian). With this in mind it shouldn't be a big problem for ye distinguished readers of this wee log to gather that "in the Covid center in Skoplje has been hospitalized 18 patients during the past 24 hours". The rest of the text and its sequels may not be that easy, but at least I don't have to look long lists of vegetables and condiments up.
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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby Iversen » Thu Feb 25, 2021 7:30 pm

Monday I spent time on Irish (Potter) and Albanian (Corona), but I also followed a lead to the Wikipedia article in Bahasa Indonesia about the ..

INDO: .. kepunahan besar antara zaman Devon dan Zaman Batubara (Karbon) - salah satu dari lima kepunahan besar, tetapi jarang disebutkan dalam literatur. Sebenarnya ada dua peristiwa bencana yang bisa berjarak beberapa juta tahun, masing-masing dinamai menurut nama Kellwasser dan Hangenberg. Ini membuatnya sedikit lebih rumit untuk menjelaskan apa yang sebenarnya terjadi, tetapi salah satu elemen dari bencana tersebut adalah kandungan oksigen di atmosfer turun - tetapi para ilmuwan sedang mendiskusikan mengapa. Ada juga zaman es dan perubahan permukaan laut serta beberapa aktivitas gunung berapi. Peristiwa terpenting selama periode ini adalah benua Laurasia dan Gondwana hingga benua super besar Pangea, yang menampung sebagian besar daratan bumi hingga era Trias.

EN: Tuesday I went on a nice leisurely family visit once again - even though I should know that my study activity tends to diminish under such circumstances. The weather was excellent for hacking away at an old carport floor buried below 5-20 cm deep down in a corner of my mother's garden, but I only managed to work one afternoon (Wednesday) - the following morning (today Thursday) my visit was cut short by an importune kidney stone that sent me directly to the local hospital. So not only did I have to postpone the removal of several square meters of cement lying on a floor of broken brick below a layer of soil mixed with tree roots with a diameter of up to 15 cm, but I also had to limit my goodnight reading to the chapter about substantival morphology in a "polish grammar in a nutshell", which I once found on the internet.

POL: Niestety nie wykorzystałem przerw w szpitalu na studiowanie innych aspektów polskiej gramatyki.

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