Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

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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 Jul 18, 2021 6:06 pm

I have studied a couple of texts since the last post, and I may write more about them later, but today I'll focus on Esperanto. In the thread "Why learn Esperanto?" I mentioned Amri Wandel, who seems to be the driving force by most of the scientific activities in that language, and when I had written the text it occurred to me that I hadn't listened to anything in Esperanto for a fairly long time - actually I haven't listened much to anything much since May except the few languages which my Cable TV still offers due to travels and family visits (read: gardening) so I have a long list of languages that need a wee bit of repolishing. So I switched to Youtube and listened to three long lectures in Esperanto with sinjoro Wandel, and hurray, I can still understand just about anything the man says (in spite of the clattering doors of the first lecture). Whether I still can speak it remains to be seen (or rather heard).

Not too many years ago I had great problems speaking Esperanto each time I arrived at a conference or gathering, and it took either one or two days OR one single extended conversation to revive it, but I have just done a small test: I read the text above and tried to translate it on the fly into Esperanto, and it went fairly well. If you can do that in a languages then you can also speak it. But maybe the fact that I had been listening to the language for more than an hour helped..

EO: La unua prelego temis pri Esperanto kaj scienco ĝenerale, sed ĝi estis la kutima rakonto pri diskriminacio kontraŭ sciencistoj kiuj ne havas la anglan kiel gepatran lingvon - ili ne nur devas verki siajn librojn kaj artikolojn en fremda lingvo, kiun ili devas unue lernu kaj eble neniam lernas perfekte, sed tiam ili estas juĝataj laŭ la kvalito de sia lingvo. Sur pure teoria nivelo, eble estus pli bone uzi lingvon kun malpli rava freneza literumo kaj malpli da neregulaj verboj (ĉu iu ajn menciis Esperanton?), Sed tio ne okazos en la reala mondo.

Bedaŭrinde, ĉi tiu prelego okazis en ĉambro kun sennombraj klakaj pordoj kaj pordegoj, kaj oni povas aŭdi tusantajn virojn kaj eĉ malgrandajn bebojn en trafiko. Poste mi aŭskultis du prelegojn pri astronomio (n-ro 1 kaj n-ro 4 en serio), kaj ĉi tie aŭdiĝis nur la voĉo de s-ro Wandel, sen klakaj pordoj aŭ alia ĝena bruo. Mi ne povas diri, ke mi lernis multe da novaj (krom ke Oriono eble etimologie devenas de malnovgreka vorto por urino - 10 minutojn post la komenco de la prelego n-ro 1). Sed ĝi estis nobla kaj bonorda kaj informa, kaj tia materialo alimaniere mankas.

EN: I forgot to test the trick mentioned by Luke, but I'll do it soon. The reason might be that I always have avoided the "remember me" buttons, but maybe the button of good ol' Llorg won't send my password to anyone, and maybe it will forget me after I have checked out - I'm not comfortable with storing my passwords anywhere on my PC.

Astronomi.jpg

GR: Και τώρα το Youtube πήγε αυτόματα από τον Βαντελ στο Εσπεράντο σε μια διάλεξη στα ελληνικά για το παράδοξο του Φέρμι. Συνήθως απενεργοποιώ αυτή την συνάρτηση, αλλά αυτή τη φορά χτύπησε το σωστό στόχο !!

Ferrmi's Paradox.jpg
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Iversen
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Languages: Monolingual travels in Danish, English, German, Dutch, Swedish, French, Portuguese, Spanish, Catalan, Italian, Romanian and (part time) Esperanto
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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 » Mon Jul 19, 2021 10:06 pm

... and speaking about Greek: this evening I have made a wordlist with about 280 Greek words and intend to extend it further before going to bed, but earlier in the day I started in good faith watching more astronomy with the Greek guy Astronio - and then there was a link to the right on the Youtube page which led me into temptation: an Anglophone video named "Electrons do NOT spin" by a certain "PBS Space Time" - and of course I had to watch the video to see why they don't spin when all other particles spin. One of the comments to that video goes as follows "I perfectly understood everything until the first sentence", another states that "The more he talked the less I understood EVERYTHING he was saying!" - which is a quite interesting and unusual use of the word "everything". But apart from that its was interesting, and when it was mentioned that spinors that describe the spin of electrons reverse after 360° and have to go through 360° more to get back to their senses I simply had to read some more about spinors - and then I forgot all about language learning and watched a few more videos in English.

PS: electrons DO have spin at value ½, whereas bosons like the protron have whole-number spin. The Higgs particle is assumed to have spin 0. But spin just isn't what you might have expected - it is not like the rotation of a particle, but an internal number which somehows define a particle angular momentum. Luckily I don't have to understand the details in this...
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luke
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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby luke » Wed Jul 21, 2021 4:35 pm

Thank you for the tips on language islands in the other thread:
https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... 21b7d0c5eb

BTW, it would nice to find a link to your guide to learning languages on the first page of this thread, since you have some other important links there.

BTW, your art is magnificent. Very, very interesting. For those who don't know, there's a link to Iversen's YouTube channel there, and I'm not reading from a teleprompter. :)

Your guide is not that hard to find, but I was told to have courage, so I'm bringing my question straight to the master.

Thinking about stockpiling versus learning specific items. You seem to enjoy stockpiling, which is admirable. The Boy Scouts used to say, "be prepared". But with specific vocabulary, do you gather and write down words you want to remember for your three column lists?

I'm not clear on if you use three column lists for both or if you use multiple approaches. The title of your language log thread seems to indicate that you are quite flexible, which is why I ask.
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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 Jul 23, 2021 6:27 pm

In the first post of this log thread I have collected links to my language learning guide, to my thread about Google Translate (the afterglow after a lecture which I never got the chance to give in New York), to the place at IMSLP where all my musical compositions are stored, to my modest corner of the homepage of my travel club and to my account on Youtube, which Luke apparently has found. I don't like my videos so I don't update it and almost never visit it so it is astounding that there still are people who subscribe to it, maybe in the hope that I might return to doing videos - but it won't happen. I have even stopped doing lectures since the gathering guys blocked me from speaking about the use of translations in language learning.

But I have not stopped answering questions here, and Luke asks me how I choose specific vocabulary, and whether I always do three columns in my wordlist.

Let's take the last question first, and the answer is that I always first use the original wordlist layout with three columns. I chose a setup with columns containing foreign - native - foreign words in groups of 5-7 words or so because this setup forces me to force my brain to memorize the words in both directions, but with the foreign words as the most important ingredient. And I learn words with their translation in groups because that approach forces me to stop repeating each word in my head - I have to think about other words and then return to the culprit. In this way I train my ability to recall newly memorized words after thinking about something else.

And then there is a repetition, typically one day later, but this is not a stonehard law. Here I typically do two columns only: I copy the translations from my list (and thereby get the opportunity to 'accidentally' see the original words again, which isn't cheating, but smart learning), cover them and then aim to reconstruct the corresponding first or third column with the foreign words. This is at least what I do when I have based my wordlist on a dictionary, but when the words come from a study text I may do the repetitions simply by rereading the text slowly, taking care to spot the words from my wordlist and hopefully remember what each of them means. And then there are no columns in the repetition.

Which leads directly into the question about specific vocabulary (I assume that this means thematic vocabulary), and here I must say that I don't really like readymade thematic wordlists - although a travel guide with thematic sections may lure me into incorporating a list or two into a wordlist (I'm not a fanatic). I get my general vocabulary by studying different kinds of texts AND doing wordlists, and then I get my specialized vocabulary by studying specialized texts and including the new words in them in a wordlist. In other words MOST of my vocabulary in foreign languages has been through a wordlist at some point. And the exceptions have at least come from written sources, not from speech. I don't remember any words just because I have heard them once.

GER: Ich war übrigens auf einem Familienbesuch dieser Woche, und da habe ich ja nicht meine Büchersammlung auf der Hand. Was tun? Tatsächlich brauchen auch meine alten Sprachen manchmal ein Bissel Aufmerksamkeit, und diesmal geschah es, indem ich eine deutsche Wortliste mit ungefähr 160 Wörtern erstellte. Und selbstverständlich gibt es ganz viele unbekannte Wörter auch in so etwas wie Deutsch, wie z.B. "Gelichter", "gelieren", "gelinde" (im Sinne von "mild"), "Gelispel", "Geleucht", "Gelin"k (als "Scharnier"), "Geleier "Gelbling" oder "Gelse" (=Moskito). Wie habe ich doch Ferien in Deutschland überlebt ohne alle diese Wörter zu kennen?

Bei meine Mutter gibts auch Deutsche Fernsehkanäle. Sie hatte einst Dutzende Kanäle vom Astra Satelliten-Komplex, aber aus unbekannte Gründe wurde es weniger und weniger, and letzt endlich funktionierte das System gar nicht mehr. Aber Sie hat immer noch ARD, ZDF, NDR -plus Sweden 1 und Norwege 1 und BBC 'Brit'.

EN: .. and luckily also a host of Anglophone documentary channels (plus all the Anglophone programs on supposedly Danish channels). Today I watched a couple of programs on History from Spain and Italy, and hurray, they let some of the experts speak their own language and didn't even add a translation on top of them (as for instance the Germans do). I simply hate the situation where I can hear both the original voice and a dubbing - then better just the subtitles.

SP: Hoy vi al principio un programa sobre tesoros en el Palacio Real de Madrid, que por supuesto he visitado. Pero fue hace mucho tiempo y fue un placer para mi recordar esta visita. Lo más memorable del programa fue un pasaje sobre un relojero suizo que llegó a la corte de Felipe IV con un reloj extremadamente intrincado que no solo podía mostrar el reloj sino también tocar melodías en la flauta. La amada esposa del rey acababa de morir, pero esta obra mecánica maestral logró animarlo.

P2814b02 - PalacioReal-SalonDeGasparini.jpg

IT: E poi una trasmissione sugli Uffizi di Firenze, che ovviamente similarmente ho visitato durante parecchie viaggi - ma l'ultima volta ho rinunciato a entrarci perché la fila per la vendita dei biglietti era lunga diverse centinaia di metri. Forse sarebbe stato possibile oggi se fosse laggiù (perché la corona tiene a distanza le orde di turisti) - ma sto a casa in Danimarca e deve accontentarmi di guardare film di laggiù.

EN: One thing more: I have plucked berries galore at my Mother's place - several kilos of blackcurrants and redcurrants, but also something that apparently is called Jostaberries. And there is a linguistic angle to this. According to Wikipedia it's a complicated German crossbreed involving three original species from the genus Ribes: the blackcurrant R. nigrum, the North American coastal black gooseberry R. divaricatum, and the European gooseberry R. uva-crispa. And the English name apparently comes from the German names for blackcurrant and gooseberry, namely Johannisbeere and Stachelbeere. Well well, and the Danish Wikipedia claims that this name also is used in Denmark. But I have never seen or heard that name here, and in our family we call it "solstik" (literally 'sunstroke'), because it is a cross between solbær and stikkelsbær.

Solstik.jpg
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Iversen
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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 Jul 25, 2021 9:42 pm

First I would like to thank Luke for the tip about the "remember me" button. I have now used it for some time, and it does actually prevent the site from kicking me out all the time. I had imagined that it functioned like one of the "remember my password" buttons, which stores your password somewhere so that you don't have to tip it in yourself (with the result that you can't remember it if it somehow is deleted). But you have to login with the usual riddle and all that, so this button apparently only lasts for one session. Today I had a session running in the background from early afternoon till late in the evening - definitely an improvement from a couple of minuts.

Today I have studied texts in Indonesian and Serbian, and I have done the repetitions for a Greek wordlist with around 200 words which I made during a week ago. The Indonesian text was a section from the sejarah bumi (Earth's history) which I have mentioned several times, whereas the Serbian text collection was new - albeit about old things.

SE: Имао сам збирку текстова о пчеларству и другим темама које сам овде већ поменуо. Његов наследник је одломак (са преводом) из дугог текста на српској Википедији о стварању Краљевине Србије. Тада је на Балкану постојало неколико малих словенских краљевстава и морали су да се крећу између утицаја из Грчке, амбициозног бугарског царства, Млечана и чак римокатоличког папе, коме је очигледно приписано право да поставља краљеве. А понекад се владар повукао (добровољно или по љубазној препоруци), а затим је био затворен у манастиру. Све је то врло компликовано, а копирао сам само део чланка, па ми недостаје контекст. Али онда је уследила битка на Косову Пољу, а после ње турска окупација. После тога је све изгледало другачије.

SP: Además, por supuesto he visto televisión sin sonido, incluida una transmisión en TVE sobre la ciudad de Cádiz y la zona montañosa que hay detrás. Da la casualidad este es un área que nunca he visitado, pero parecía que hubiera suficientes lugares interesantes para pasar una intera semana de vacacion allí. Peró, sin embargo también me falta extraño el norte de España entre A Coruña y San Sebastián y tambien el espacio entre Toledo y Murcia, así que la pregunta es qué región sará el primero.

DA: Jeg overvejer i øvrigt at bruge mit genoplivede malersæt til at producere et eller flere malerier med geografiske temaer - det sker for tit at jeg ikke har et maleri klar til at illustrere en meddelelse om for eksempel Østeuropa. [GR] σ'αυτό το πολυσυγκεχυμένο ημερολογίο - από την άλλη πλευρά, έχω τουλάχιστον δύο πίνακες με ελληνικά θέματα.

IT: E a proposito, ho ascoltato almeno quattro ore di musica barocca italiana, compresa l'intera opus 9 di Albinoni.

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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 Jul 27, 2021 9:47 pm

Today I first worked briefly on a Greek text about the find of phosphines in the atmosphere of Venus. The thing that troubles the scientists is that it mostly is produced by anaerobic bacteria here on Terra, and nobody knows what it is doing on Venus which is assumed to be utterly sterile. Actually we can be be quite sure that nothing lives on its surface which is hot enough to melt lead, so anything living would have to eke out a precarious living high up in the atmosphere - but then nobody can explain how it appeared there. Actually I have printed this article long ago and now vaguely remember having read it through back then, but I had forgotten about it.

After that I read and partly copied a chapter about the reforms of zar Peter the Great in a book I bought way back in the eighties, but didn't use until I started learning Russian during the past decade. The special thing about this book is that it is printed with accent signs, and since I very seldom hear Russian the position of the stress is a sore point in my pronunciation - although as anybody who knows Russian can tell, its position is of extreme importance for the sounds. So just reading silently through a text with accents must be beneficial for my pronunciation, which for the moment only is tested in my mind - I haven't said anything aloud in Russian for at least three years, and then was only a few sentences during a gathering.

RU: Ближе к концу учебы французского в университете я решил, что должен начать изучать русский и греческий языки. Когда я сдавал экзамен, я обнаружил, что на академическом уровне не было работы, а купленные мной книги по греческому и русскому языкам никогда не использовались. Но примерно через 30 лет я начал изучать оба языка, а потом они снова появились. Славянские книги (также относящиеся к другим славянским языкам) покупались в отделе Академического книжного магазина, который занимался только славянскими книгами, которые стоили очень дешево. Но, к сожалению, магазин пришлось закрыть.

Я не пользовался "Странитсы Истрории" несколько лет, но когда я вернулся к ней, я почувствовал большую разницу - теперь я могу читать ее почти, не ища слов в словаре. Конечно, это не такой же уровень сложности, как классический роман, но мой пассивный русский язык, должно быть, добился прогресса, несмотря на долгие паузы бездействия. Но когда я никогда не говорю и почти не слышу этого, это плохо для активных навыков. И сегодня славянские факультеты университетов борются за выживание - все думают, что английского бы достаточно.

Stranitsy istorii.jpg

FR: Et pendant que je travaillais, j'écoutais de la musique. Certains oeuvres manquaient de thèmes dans mon catalogue, ainsi ai-je dû passer du précieux temps à écouter les thèmes pour les noter dans mon système. Et c'est pourquoi aujourd'hui j'ai écouté pendant une heure et demie la musique de clavecin d'Henri d'Anglebert, y comprit l'émouvant Tombeau pour son professeur manifestement bien-aimé, M. de Chambonnières. Ma mère aime la plupart des genres de musique classique, mais pas la musique de clavecin - elle appelle cet instrument "piano à clous" ('sømklaver' en danois). Mais moi, je suis assez coriace pour écouter ce genre de choses.

SW:SW: Jag har reviderat och kompletterat på min musiksamling genom flera år, och jag har nu börjat genomlyssna samlingen i alfabetisk ordning, och av en slump betydde det en betydande svensk ekskurs med kompositörer som Hugo Alfvén och Elfrida Andrée. Och nu kan vissa fråga vem den senare var (den första skrev Midsommarvaka och ryckte den danska målaren Krøyers fru - vilket är tillräckligt för att bli känd!). Elfrida Andrée levde från 1841 till 1929. Hon var, så vitt är känt, Sveriges första kvinnliga telegrafist och första kvinnliga organist, och det skola inte förvåna mig om hon också var den första framgångsrika kvinnliga svenska kompositören. Lyckligtvis fick hon några få värda efterträdare - jag kommer snart till Valborg Aulin och om några månader till H. Munktell. Numera är det såvist inte någon sällsynthet at se unga kvinnliga kompositörer, men det har kostat många ansträngningar att hitta några få kvinnor bland tidigare tidors kompositörer till min samling.

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Iversen
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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 Aug 01, 2021 8:57 am

I have now spent a couple of nights more in the hotel with the many 'funny' TV channels - so for instance I have listened to a program in Romanian about the Pharaos, and I have watched "Do you want to become a millionaire" in Portuguese - and I have listened to a lot of news about corona in a number of languages until it got too boring. I don't know which resource they use, but it is definitely not a Danish cable provider - it must be something on the internet. I remember I once had a link to a portal where I could listen to radio from all over the world - it must be something like that they have found. But then I stopped listening to radio.

Anyway, the principle was that I listened to 'national' television in the local languages, but later in the evening and into the night I watched foreign programming with subtitles in the local languages instead. And I found out that it was relatively easy for me to read Greek subtitles, but not nearly as easy to understand Greek speech. I'm at the level where I can listen to the voices and parse the whole caboodle into words and phrases, but then I loose the semantics because there still are too many words I don't know - or at least have to ponder about in my mind. In Romanian and Portuguese and Dutch I don't have that problem - there I may hear words I don't know, but I am fast enough not to let that block my internal linguistic decoder. And I certainly don't have the problem in good old acquaintances like German and French and Spanish and English, which I also have on my TV at home. Or Norwegian for that matter: I watched a couple of programs of the "20 questions to the professor" type, where you definitely have to be able to decode several variants of Norwegian at full speed, and where your vocabulary is thoroughly tested. And After that I could hear my inner homunculus speak with a Norwegian voice - but haha, the guy hasn't studied Norwegian so I can't trust that the things I hear inside my head are correct in any variant of the language.

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Iversen
Black Belt - 4th Dan
Posts: 4768
Joined: Sun Jul 19, 2015 7:36 pm
Location: Denmark
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 Aug 08, 2021 9:13 am

Since foreign travel has been a no-go for much of this year and beset by administrative complications when it at last became possible, I have travelled extensively in my own country. Since the museums reopened in May I have travelled roughly 1½ month (including short excursions), and I have spent something like three weeks on familie visits (one reason being the berry season in my mother's garden). If you take into account that it takes me roughly one day after each week of travelling to put my travelogue system into order, I have actually been at home for less than a third of the time since the beginning of May - and of course that has limited my study time. But now I intend to stay at home for at least a month or two, so it's time to recuperate some of the lost ground.

My strong languages have not been affected much (I think, but with no actual proof), whereas I have spent too little time on the weaklings so they need some repolishing. So yesterday (Saturday) I worked my way through a number of bilingual texts in a series of those languages that aren't either Romance or Germanic. I'll mention some of them over the next couple of days, but one language that deserves a special mention is Ukrainian. It is not a language I ever have studied (apart from including it into my mega-wordlist project, where I made wordlists in thirty or so languages), but it resembles a cross between Polish and Russian, just with some spelling quirks.

My first Ukrainian text was the Wikipedia article about the Burgess shield (spelled " Берджес-Шейл", or - more congenially - translated into "берджеські сланці" - note the plural) in Canada, where a lot of funny animals from the Cambrian has been found in 1909 by mr. Charles Doolittle Wolcott (spelled "Чарльз Дулітл Уолкотт") in a location that deservedly bears the proud name of Fossil Ridge (translated into "Хребет копалин"). However it has only recently (since new excavations by Alberto Simonetta in 1962) dawned on the world how weird this old fauna really was, and I'm actually thinking about including it into a painting (now that my almost equally old oil paint gear has been dusted off and I have some spare time at home).

I could now write at length about these critters, but since I can't do it in Ukrainian yet it would be pointless. However there are some features of the language itself which might be relevant. Point one: it is not nearly as cryptic as I had expected. In general a popular science article is a good place to start with a new language, but the fact is that I could recognize and understand many of the words even without peeking into the translation (in German just for fun) - mostly from Russian, but the reason could be that my Russian is better than my Polish. Anyway, the trickiest feature is that there are two i's, which both are used in the name of the capital "Київ" (with the trema on the "i" only there because of the proximity of the "и") - one of the two places I have visited there, the other being "Львів". Between those "і" seems to be the more closed vowel, while "и" seems to be a slightly more open one placed further back in the mouth, reminiscent of Russian "ы" or Romanian "â". So as you see knowing some fragments of Russian may actually lead you astray when it comes to the pronunciation of Ukrainian, but so far I stick to the texts, and I'll teach my inner voice to pronounce the words correctly later.

By the way: the language I had worked on just before my Ukrainian experiment was Serbian, so each time I saw a "ь" after an л or н I tended to write it as a Serbian ligature (љ, њ) - but at least I couldn't do that with the common sequences "cь"and "ць", which I don't remember from any other Slavic language.

I don't have an Ukrainian grammar, but during my visit to L(j)viv in 2019 I managed to buy a "Словнік украïнський-англійський англо-икраïнський" with allegedly 120.000 "слів". The only snag is that it is written for Ukrainians who wish to learn English, so the English-Ukrainian section section is thicker than the Ukrainian-English one - and the English grammar in the middle isn't of much use for a "чужоземнець" like me. But I'm happy that I found and bought it.

F5929a01_Nymph_behind_the_opera_in_Lviv.jpg
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Iversen
Black Belt - 4th Dan
Posts: 4768
Joined: Sun Jul 19, 2015 7:36 pm
Location: Denmark
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 Aug 08, 2021 6:37 pm

I have had once more attacked a new Slavic language, but this time it was purely by accident. I have for several months had some old papers on the notestand where I keep my current study texts, and when I dug down the pile I discovered some papers that must have been taken either from the background storage where I keep used study texts or maybe from my international travel bag, which hasn't been used since before corona. I simply don't remember. One indicator for the advanced age of these papers is that the ink almost had run out to the extent that several lines weren't complete, and that hasn't happened for me in a very long time. So they must be several years old.

OK,I came from studying the Ukrainian text I mentioned above, and then I happened to grab a nondescript collection of texts from a Slavic source written in Latin letters. I had expected it to be in Slovak, but as I remember the Slovak orthograhy it is bristling with diacritics and accent signs, and it uses the letter ' (!) profusely. Not so with this text. I checked the source - something with "sk", which I assumed would be Slovak (it ain't - Slovak is "sl" ). I started copying and looking up unknown words - surprisingly few, actually, but as a rule they weren't found in my tiny, but excellent micro Langenscheidt for Slovak. Like "kot", which I knew I had seen somewhere - and I also knew that it meant "as", just not in Slovak - somewhere else. Then it dawned on me that the source might be in Slovenian, which I haven't studied. But I have a Slovenian Langenscheidt in my collection too, and then suddenly everything fell into place - the missing words were all found there.

However because of this 'accident' I now know that my study of several Slavic languages has reached a point where it spills over to the remaining languages in the group, which means that I'm close to being able to read them all with just a few lookups. It should however be said that the texts I have used are culled from Wikipedia and similar sources, not from novels with more informal registers, more idioms and fewer international terms.

Below I quote the first sentence from the article about pectin which I now have studied in Slovenian plus the main part of the pitifully short article from the Slovak article about the same subject. And just for your information: pectin is the stuff in apples that makes it possible to make a gelatinous jelly, but you can also buy it in small paper bags and use it with berries to make jam. And I should know - I have done that many times at my mother's place.

Slovenian:
Pektin je strukturni heteropolisaharid, v katerem se izmenjujejo odseki galakturonske kisline z ramnozo. V rastlini ga najdemo večinoma v obliki protopektina (enaka sestava kot pektin, le daljše molekule), ki je del rastlinske celične stene. (....)

Slovenian:
Pektíny sú skupina polysacharidov vyskytujúcich sa v bunkových stenách a medzibunkových vrstvách všetkých suchozemských rastlín. Ich tvorba prebieha v Golgiho aparáte rastlinných buniek.(...)

F6041a09_jam.jpg
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Iversen
Black Belt - 4th Dan
Posts: 4768
Joined: Sun Jul 19, 2015 7:36 pm
Location: Denmark
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 » Tue Aug 10, 2021 8:40 am

Yesterday evening I used some old Russian printouts as goodnight reading, but apart from that (and some foreignese television watched with subtitles) I didn't do aught with my language studies yesterday. The reason: I am listening through my music collection, and Sunday I finished A - that is, I listened to the files Auric 1a and 1b, and now I'm looking forward to getting through the immensely productive Bach family. However while listening through A I have jotted down the main themes where they missed (or seemed too untrustworthy in my theme collection), in some cases with the help of the note site IMSLP. And yesterday I then spent several hours writing nice copies of my ballpoint notes, using a good old fountain pen with good oldfashioned black ink. And then I integrated them into the existing theme collection. If I should start from the beginning building up the theme collection from scratch then I would probably use some software like "Sibelius", but for now I stick to handwritten notes.

So while I can't point to any studies yesterday I still haven't mentioned the ones I have used the previous days, apart from those in Ukrainian and the unplanned Slevenian one. So here goes:

The rest of the Slovenian article about pectin (which had been erroneously coupled with a Slovak article about butterflies, which I studied long ago)

The rest of the Ukrainian article about the Burgess Shale fossils. After that I'll have a go at an article about some "оніхофори" (onichophores) - and to be frank, I don't even know anything about them in English or Danish, so I see forward to being told what they are - plus an article about sponges, all in Ukrainian which I haven't studied.

An article about the Devonian from the Indonesian Wikipedia. I have returned the long, but almost certainly machine translated article about the history of the Earth to my background storage because I wanted something less dubious. And I have also some more stuff about proboscids waiting for me, but this time in Indonesian

The continuation of the Serbian Wikipedia article about the Serbian kingdom from before the Ottoman onslaught.

An article about Indonesia from the Albanian WIkipedia - but it is slow going, my Albanian has become somewhat rusty.

The continuation of the article about Poland from the Greek Wikipedia...

And these are just the texts I have used during the past weekend, but I have at least as many more on my notestand which I haven't had time to study since my latest one-week excursion, including some in Dutch, Afrikaans, Icelandic, Polish and Slovak - and contrary to expectation they aren't all snatched from Wikipedia.

RU: Сборник русских текстов состоял из коротких статей по астрономии с сайта astronet.ru, и они были довольно старыми - была, например, статья об открытии пятой луны Плутона, а здесь Плутон упоминается как единственный 'объект' в Солнечной системе, которую еще не посетили рукотворные гаджеты. Но, во-первых, есть миллионы 'объектов', которые рукотворные заметки не посещали , а во-вторых, в 2015 году появился американский спутник "New Horizons", который наблюдал за Плутоном и его лунами. Так что старше статьи. Кстати, удивительно, что пятая Луна имеет ширину всего 15 километров, но ее все еще можно увидеть с помощью космического телескопа Хаббла с расстояния в миллиарды километров.

SW: Nedan följer några utdrag ur mina anteckningar för de Gottländske Dansar av Tor Aulin - endast för att visa anledningen till att de behöver skrivas om i svart bläck. Förresten hittade jag senare originalversionerna för piano på IMSLP, så jag kunde ha skurit dem därifrån - men det skulle också ha tagit tid, och ibland liker jag mina egna anteckningar bättre

Gottländska danser by Thor Aulin - before and after the application of black ink.jpg
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