Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

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Iversen
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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby Iversen » Tue Aug 30, 2022 6:49 pm

I have done a wee bit o' text study since last time, but this time I'm going to write a few things about my goodnight reading stuff. I am too busy and too distracted and too far away from my dictionaries and my home computer to do much text study during my family visits, but goodnight reading is still possible since it per definition should be done just with some sheets of paper or a magazine or booklet in my hands, and therefore I can also do it while visiting my mother's place. Among the things I have used lately is one complete issue of "Asterix" in Latin translation (I only own one Asterix in Latin), the Occitan printout collection I mentioned a few weeks ago, a few pages of A.Sigurðson's Icelandic-Danish dictionary and an old issue of "Esperanto". But then I tried F.Caradec's Dictionnaire du français argotique et populaire from 1977, and well, I could read it even lying in my bed -but there was something that bothered me: I could feel the words and expressions pass through my head without leaving any trace whatsoever. :cry:

IC: Tilfinningin var önnur þegar ég las nokkrar síður í íslensku orðabókinni: hér naut ég þess að sjá tengsl orðanna og auðvitað skildi ég allar dönsku þýðingarnar. Til dæmis eru kýr og kindur klaufadýr og orðið fyrir klaufaskap kemur náttúrulega þaðan. Á dönsku höfum við orðið "klov" fyrir klauf, en ekki notum við afleiðurna þess - flesta okkar orð fyrir klaufaskap koma frá rótinni fyrir viðarkubbur, "klods", hvort sem er erfiðara að útskýra.

FR: Dans le dictionnaire d'argot français, je comprenais généralement les explications, bien que certaines explications avec un astérisque faisaient référence à d'autres mots clés du livre, et celles-là n'étaient pas toujours compréhensibles sans consulter l'article en question. Mais le problème était autre: la simple lecture du livre me démangeait les doigts pour écrire quelque chose sur papier, et c'est difficile quand on est allongé sur un lit. Et au lieu de au lieu de résigner et perdre mon temps j'en ai fait un exercice-de-fauteuil-du-soir, que je pouvais exercer même au dehors de ma domicile.

Le problème avec les expressions est qu'elles peuvent être non seulement longues, mais aussi varier en longueur (de phrases entières jusqu'aux mots simples). Et ils ne conviennent donc pas à mon format standard de liste de mots en trois colonnes. Mais il y a une simple solution: on fait deux colonnes sur une feuille de papier plié, l'une avec trois tiers de la largeur du papier et l'autre sur le reste. Je ne comprends pas vraiment pourquoi je n'ai pas eu cette idée banale il y a de nombreuses années - alors peut-être mes études d'expressions auraient-elles étées plus effectives. Le tout premier soir, j'ai remplit 6 demi-pages avec un total d'environ 350 mots et expressions. Maintenant, ce qui m'inquiète le plus, c'est que je ne sais pas lesquelles sont obsolètes et lesquelles inciteraient quelqu'un à suggérer de me laver la bouche avec du savon.

Argot Caradec.jpg

DA: Jeg er i øvrigt den lykkelige ejer af et højdepunkt i dansk leksikografi, mester Jens Bom's Slangordbog fra 1957. Lad mig citere et par relativt uskyldige betegnelser for kendte musikværker: "Barberen i sin Villa" (il Barbiere di Sevigla af Rossini), "Dans med kager" (Dance Macabre af Saint-Saëns), "De skønne myldrer ind" (Die Schöne Müllerin af Schubert), Fest-pil-i-næse (Festpolonaise af Johan Svendsen), "Kavaleren i den rustne kane" (Cavalleria Rusticana af Mascagni) samt "Lus i lammelåret" (Lucia di Lammermoor af Donizetti) - samt ikke at forglemme "Bækkenpartiet af Regimentets datter" (også Donizetti) - vide infra.

EN: PS I just ran the Danish slang-names through Google translate, and I was not really impressed by its way of rendering them so here you get the names in my translation:

"Barberen i sin Villa": the barber in his villa (il Barbiere di Sevigla by Rossini), "Dans med kager" Dance with cakes (Dance Macabre by Saint-Saëns), "De skønne myldrer ind" the pretty ones swarm in (Die Schöne Müllerin by Schubert), "Fest-pil-i-næse" Festival-pick-your-nose (Festpolonaise by Johan Svendsen), "Kavaleren i den rustne kane" the cavalier in the rusty sleigh (kane: slang for 'bed') (Cavalleria Rusticana by Mascagni) plus "Lus i lammelåret" Lice in the lambs' thigh (Lucia di Lammermoor by Donizetti) - and, last but not least: "Bækkenpartiet af Regimentets datter" The pelvic part of the Daughter of the Regiment (bækken = pelvic, bækkener = cymbals) (Donizetti) - vide infra.


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Iversen
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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby Iversen » Thu Sep 01, 2022 9:43 pm

Since my last message in this thread I have worked on something like half a dozen languages (not counting language used on TV, nor the transltion languages in my bilingual print-outs). Among those where I did the classical textcopy-and-understand-everything-please thing wre Ukrainian (where I studied a short article about the last emperor in Western Rome, Romulus Augustulus), Romanian (with cuts from the homepages of some of the hotels I have stayed in), Indonesian (with an article about chili peppers) and Albanian (with an article about the great Flood), and I have used my paleontological articles in Occitan and the French argot book as goodnight reading. But the language I have spent most time on since the message above is Italian.

And why Italian? Well, in a thread about the number of words you need to be a fluent reader I recently quoted some numbers from my wordcounts, and there I noticed something that made me slightly uneasy: a wordcount percentage of just 52% for Italian - rather low for a language I have known and used fairly often since the mid 60s. :oops:

At closer inspection the mystery grew: during my last two Italian counts in 2021 I had got 67% and 52%. OK, I had used two different dictionaries, and there is always some slack in the numbers according to which random pages you end up counting, but this difference is unexpected at best. Besides I normally expect to get at least around two thirds known words in my 'old' Romance and Germanic languages, so I decided to do some wordlists based on the dictionary that had delivered those paltry 52%. And then I ended up doing some 250 words in one evening plus a number of expressions which I notated down in the format described above with reference to the French argot dictionary. I have not yet decided how the review of such expression lists should be done, but it is actually nice to have a place to jot down the expressions and compounds that are part and parcel of any decent dictionary instead of just skipping them.

And even in an Italian dictionary there are some surprises. For instance I had forgotten that "morbido" means soft and "morbidezza" means softness - influence from English had sadly misled me to believe they meant "morbid" and "morbidity" respectively. And the painting "L'embarcation de Cythère" by Watteau (set in music by Poulenc) had lured me into believing that the Italian word "imbarcazione" meant something entering a boat and expecting it to take you somewhere (like Cythère), but no: "imbarcadero" is in fact a landing-stage, but "imbarcazione" means a small boat ("a remi" for a rowing-boat, "a vela" for a sailboat). And I could mention several other 'false friends', plus all the words I simply didn't know. But by and large I do think/hope that those ignominous 52% were a one-time fluke. I haven't done a new wordcount yet, but when I have been through a few thousand words more from the dictionary it may be time to see whether the effort has had an effect.

Ital-count.jpg

RO: Am vizitat România de 4 ori și Moldova o dată. Prima vizită a fost ca parte a unui tur interrail în 1976 (sub Ceaucescu) și am stat acolo trei nopți într-un hotel destul de ponosit lângă Gara de Nord. Standardul în hotelurile de mai târziu a fost ceva mai ridicat, pentru că nivelul prețurilor în România a fost întotdeauna scăzut, așa că ai putea la fel de bine să stai în ceva cu clasă. Și când ai locuit undeva și te-ai întors acasă, este destul de interesant să vezi cum a fost istoria sa de-a lungul timpului.

După cum am menționat, prima călătorie a constat în doar trei nopți (cu zile între ele), printre altele pentru că la acel moment era un sistem de schimbare obligatorie pe zi. La a doua excursie (2006) am venit din Ungaria si am vizitat in special centrul tarii plus Moldova, iar in a treia (2009) am inceput din Bucuresti si apoi am urmat Dunarea in Serbia. Iar la a patra și ultima călătorie – singura în care nu am vizitat capitala – am folosit o rută directă cu Wizz din Danemarca până în Cluj-Napoca. Iar în ultimele trei excursii am vorbit doar în română - cu excepția a două cazuri: au fost doar tururi în limba engleză la Palatul Poporului lui Ceaucescu din București, iar recepționerul de la hotelul meu din Timișoara în 2009 vorbea italiană - și asta a fost destul de frumos pentru o schimbare.

Rareori aud sau vorbesc românește astăzi, și îmi amintesc un episod din timpul unei "gathering" în care o conversație în limba română a eșuat mizerabilmente pentru că cineva vorbea tare în engleză chiar alături. Dar totuși cred că a mea limba româna încă este funcțională, și am obținut 68 și 69% la ultimele două inventari al mei de cuvinte din anul 2021 - mai mult decât limba italiană!.
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LupCenușiu
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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby LupCenușiu » Fri Sep 02, 2022 3:19 pm

Iversen wrote:[ Dar totuși cred că a mea limba româna încă este funcțională, și am obținut 68 și 69% la ultimele două inventari al mei de cuvinte din anul 2021 - mai mult decât limba italiană!.


Este mai mult decât funcțională :D . Just some minor errors, if I may:
"Ceaucescu" is spelled "Ceaușescu"
"apoi am urmat Dunarea in Serbia" while technically correct and will be understood, to express the idea a much better way would be "apoi am urmat cursul Dunării în Serbia"
"asta a fost destul de frumos pentru o schimbare" I guess that's the "was nice for a change", except this is not really a thing in Romanian. Maybe " a fost o schimbare frumoasă", to keep the same terms and somewhat the same idea.
"mizerabilmente" is Italian sneaking in :) ; the proper form is "mizerabil"
"a mea limba româna" this word order works, and is used for emphasis or in literature (with proper diacritics "a mea limbă română"), in natural speech is "limba mea română"
"ultimele două inventari al mei de cuvinte" could be used "ultimele mele două inventarieri de cuvinte", understandable, but a bit odd sounding , possessive can be skipped altogether, is implied in this situation. Also, you can use "ultimele (mele) două teste de vocabular" for a
better and more natural way of saying the same thing.
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Iversen
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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby Iversen » Sun Sep 04, 2022 9:07 pm

RO: Îi mulțumesc lui LupCenușiu pentru comentarii, care arată că româna mea poate fi funcțională, dar destul de clar nu suficient de bună - dar în ultimii ani nu m-am ocupat suficient de limba română și desigur asta are consecințe. Ceea ce ruginește mai întâi într-o limbă sunt abilitățile active, în timp ce vocabularul și capacitatea de a citi În cazul meu par să fie intacte - și apoi devine nepăsător pentru că nu se simte grosimea stratului de rugină.

EN: I have spent the last couple of days at my mother's place, where I have copied more expressions from the French dico argotique de monsieur Caradec and done long delayed repetitions of Greek wordlists. My goodnight book was the Danish slang dictionary by Mr. Bom, so there are not many new things to report. I had planned to visit an aquarium and three zoos tomorrow (while they still are open for the season), but one of them is closed on Monday, so instead I expect to get some proper studying done -maybe read some Romanian. And then I hope that it will rain at the end of week - my mother's garden needs the water, and we were ignominously cheated last week where the rest of the country was soaked.

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Iversen
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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby Iversen » Mon Sep 05, 2022 10:17 pm

In my newspaper I read a long article about the troubles Ukranian refugees have to get proper interpreter assistance. Because their language has been ignored for a long time there aren't many qualified interpreters, and the result is that they risk being confronted with Russian interpreters instead. And even if these try to be fair and objective the fugitives have to use a second language which they may not speak as well as their native Ukrainian, but the article also mentioned some fairly grotesque examples about the Russian interpreters - like for instance that one interpreter flatly refused to translate the essential information that the Russian troops had bombed the house of the fugitive. It was not clear whether the situation still is as bad as it was during the first months, but it takes time to train a professional interpreter, and in the meantime the void has to be filled out by bi- or multilingual non-professionals among the fugitives themselves.

When I decided to have a look at Ukrainian soon after the invasion I discovered that the Danish libraries (even at the university level) simply don't possess any suitable dictionaries or grammars (apart from one old and mediocre grammar which I have a seen and one dictionary which can't leave Copenhagen). Luckily I own a Slovnik myself which I bought in Lviv just before Corona, and there are enough texts on the internet to provide study texts which then can be translated by Google Translate. But the situation is not optimal, and the Danish librarires should be deeply ashamed of neglecting a European language with around 40 mio speakers.

Today I first made a wordlist with some 300 words (see below for a third of it), and then I made one for Albanian with around 100 words. I then thought that I ought to make a word count for both languages, but in the case of Albanian the percentage would clearly be so low that it wasn't worth the effort. In contrast, when I did one for Ukrainian I found that I 'knew' 41% - but in many cases because I knew the words from other Slavic languages or other sources and could predict their form in Ukrainian. But I have also made wordlists before so many or the words were learnt there - I'm not always sure whether I actually have seen a certain word in Ukrainian or somewhere else.

Anyway, it might be worth looking into the distinction between 'known' and 'guessable' words. WIth totally new and exotic languages it is pretty clear when a word is known and when it isn't, but the Slavic languages are so closely related that the distinction becomes fuzzy.

There are words in Ukrainian which are really 'international' (i.e. not specifically Slavic) - like for instance "маларія" (malaria). But not all of them are known from English - for instance "макіяж" (makeup) which is a loan from French "maquillage". Then there are the words which are spelt in a special way but otherwise perfectly transparent, like "маневр" (maneuver). I have counted "мамонт" (mammoth) as a known word because it would be very surprising if it didn't have that name, but maybe I only know it from Russian - and then it should in principle be categorized as a guessable word. I do have a group between the known and the unknown words which I sometimes for want of a better name call 'guessable', but I prefer using that category for words that either are vaguely known OR transparent, but with an unexpected form - like "марафон" for 'marathon'. But ф for Greek th is a regular occurence so a better example might be "манґуста" (mongoose) - where did the final 'a' come from? I have probably not seen this name in an Ukrainian text, but I'm tempted to define it as a known word because it's almost the same in my own language (DA "mangust").

And then there are the purely Slavic and (inside that group) the purely Ukrainian words. It's "м’асо" (meat) widely across the Slavic languages so it would be a surprise not to find it in Ukrainian too - but if I should have guessed I might have forgotten the ' after м. However in this case I'm fairly sure I have seen it in Ukrainian because I have worked with texts about cooking - but I had to be reminded about the ' so maybe the word belongs in the middle category. A word like "мармелад" definitely belongs there because I know it, but not that it means 'jelly beans' in Ukrainian. As for totally unknown words they are probably also unknown in my other Slavic languages, but I don't remember "лічба" (calculating, calculation) from any of them.

All these choices makes the classifications somewhat arbitrary, and it would be silly to compare figures from one person to the next withut more precise criteria (or even from language to language), but as long as I only use the results for my own entertainment they are good enough.

By the way, I checked my Romanian book collection earlier today and found a collection of "Proverbe și zigatori românești" with parallel comments in both French and Romanian - it will have to serve as my goodnight reading tonight.

Ukrainsk-ordliste.jpg
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Iversen
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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby Iversen » Wed Sep 07, 2022 9:32 pm

Several years ago I got the silly idea to make short wordlists in all the languages I know and a few more (of course with repetitions). I have added to them since, and apart from Finnish (which I never have studied) I have at least a modicum of passive skills in them all, but I can only speak about half of them. You could ask: why do wordlists in for instance English or German or French, where I already know a lot of words - why not in the Slavic languages or Greek or Albanian where my vocabulary still is fairly limited? The answer is that I do it for fun - and to get through the whole lot. Actually I can read a few language more at a very basic level, but to do this kind of quick-and-dirty miniwordlists you need a dictionary, and I haven't got any for for instance Frisian or Sardic or Gothic. On the other hand I could have done wordlists for lots of exotic languages, but I limited myself to Finnish - and I have stopped adding to that list long ago. I have not included Danish because the words I don't know there mostly are technical and/or dialectal.

Today I got through the Germanic languages: English, Laeland Scots, Afrikaans, Dutch, Icelandic, Bokmål Norwegian and Swedish. After that I'll have a session with the Romance languages, followed by the Slavic ones plus Irish, Greek, Indonesian and Esperanto - all in all some 29 or 30 languages, but I only do one column with about 30 words in each to get faster through the lot.

I have tried to find out when I last updated those wordlists, and I vaguely remember that I took a photo of 30 partial halvsheets on a floor - but I have seached in vain for that picture on my PC, and even the almighty Google couldn't find it. But I found something I didn't expect - a possible link to my Guide to Learning Languages on http://www.scribd.com. However I didn't see it when I clicked on the title in Google - my old computer seems to have a problem with that homepage, so I still don't know whether the site has included my guide or not.

AF: Een newe-effek van hierdie projek is dat ek gedwing word om te werk aan tale wat om een of ander rede onlangs afgeskeep is. Dit geld onder meer vir Afrikaans, en die rede is dat daar nie vreeslik baie aanloklike materiaal op die internet is nie, aar dit geld ook vir 't Nederlands, en hier is dit nie moeilik om materiaal te vind nie. Ek sal 'n oplossing vind, en dan sal hier 'n storie wees oor een of ander.

CA: Tinc un full de Excel en el qual anoto il·lustracions i idiomes utilitzats al meu registre multiconfós, i aquí acabo de notar que fa molt de temps que no vaig escriure en català. Això també s'ha de posar remei, però primer tinc que visitar la meva mare -i la previsió meteorològica diu que plourà durant els propers dies. També ho farà en el sud d'Europa, i tot i que sens dubte implicarà desastres locals per inundacions, hi ha esperança que tornarà a haver aigua als rius.

GER: Ich besuchte ja neulich den Rhein und dir Mosel, und es wäre keine schlechte Idee, diese Flüße wieder zu bewässern. Die Schiffsanlegestellen auf dem Rhein waren bei meinem Besuch schräg nach unten geneigt, und das is wahrscheinlich nicht mit Absicht. Andere Flüsse in (unter anderem) Südeuropa sind laut einige Berichten fast ausgetrocknet.

F5337a01 - Bonn am Rhein.jpg

EN: Which reminds me of the Henley-on-Todd regatta in (or close to) Alice Springs in central Australia. The river is mostly bone-dry so they have cut holes in the bottom of the boats and then the participants run along in the sand. But shortly before my visit in 1994 they had to cancel this annual event due to water in the river ... Which again reminds me of the Ghan, i.e. the North-South railway from Darwin through Alice to Adelaide. The original track was placed in a dry riverbed, and the company had to make a totally new track beside the old one because of rare, but severe floods.

AF: Wat my laat dink aan iets wat ek in 'n koerant in Namibië gelees het: dat sommige kampeerders hul lewens verloor het omdat hulle hul tente in opgedroogde rivierlope opgeslaan het - en toe dit ver daarvandaan reën het 'n vloedgolf onverwags in die middel van die Kalahari-woestyn hulle weggewas.

P3906b02 - Henley-on-Todd Regatta , Alice Springs.jpg


EDIT: I finally found the image with all the wordlists on the floor (p.153, jan 3, 2021):

Image
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Iversen
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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby Iversen » Sat Sep 10, 2022 11:05 pm

... and this evening I have added mini-wordlists in the Romance languages, i.e. Latin, Ancient French, French, Portuguese, Castilian, Catalan, Italian and (Daco)Romanian. Over the next two days I expect to complete the series with Greek, Albanian, Serbian, Bulgarian, Slovak, Czech, Polish, Ukrainian, Russian, Esperanto, Irish and Indonesian. I'm not actually studying Czech, but it's close to Slovak and I have a decent dictionary - that's why it is included. When I did the first round of these wordlists I also included one sheet with Finnish words - just for fun and to get a sense of how the Finnish vocabulary is structured. But I have stopped adding to it now because I don't study that language and it's not closely related to anything else on my agenda. However 'thirty' is such a nice round number (unlike ugly 29) so I'm thinking about making a sheet with a few columns in some other non-Indoeuropean language - just for fun. Hungarian would be the logical choice because I have a fairly comprehensive Langenscheidt dictionary, but there are a few other options. I'm severely tempted to read up on the Georgian alphabet and then do a few words in that language.

And one thing more: when I did the first round of these wordlists I included several triple-columns per language - but this became too cumbersome and time-consuming. With just one column (around 30 words) the whole gamut of languages can be dealt with in just a few days, and then I can return to my other projects.

And by the way: I have now finally dared switch on my new PC (with Windows 10) and the ovaloid thingy that can connect it to the internet, and lo and behold - I got through and was able to check the radar maps from from meteox.com (and my mother's garden has finally got some rain) - but the speed is not too impressive. I opened this thread and saw the images appear one by one instead of seeing the whole lot pop up in one fell swoop. Nevertheless it's progress that I now can access the forum from my mother's place.
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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby Iversen » Mon Sep 12, 2022 7:44 am

I (almost) finished my mini-wordlist project yesterday evening, and you can see the result below. From bottom left to top right the languages are:

English, Scots, Afrikaans, Dutch, Low German, High German, Icelandic, Norwegian (Bokmål), Swedish, Latin
Old French, Modern French, Portuguese, Castilian, Catalan, Italian, Romanian, Modern Greek, Albanian, Bulgarian
Serbian (Cyrillic), Slovak, Czech, Polish, Ukrainian, Russian, Irish, Esperanto, Indonesian and ... ahem, Finnish

The void left by Finnish irritates me. I have mentioned the possibility that the space could be reserved for a series of non-studied languages, and I have looked through the candidates. The prime ones among those were Hungarian and Georgian, but I also have sizeable dictionaries for Lithuanian and Latvian (but not Estonian - I did search for one in a number of large bookstores) plus Croatian and Turkish - but Croatian is out because it would interfere with my Serbian, and I haven't got grammars for neither the Baltic languages, nor forTurkish. I have however got good grammars and old dusty textboks for both Finnish and Hungarian (and Basque), and it should be easy to find genuine texts in both languages. I have got smaller dictionaries for half a dozen languages from Southeastern Asia (each with its own writing system), which I bought as souvenirs with no intention of ever learning the languages, and I think I'll stick with that decision. The main candidates among those would be Tagalog (Filipino) and Bahasa Melayu, but Malayan would with interfere with my fragile Indonesian and the Pinoys are notorious for mixing their language(s) with English. And Chinese and Japanese are no-go because of their writing systems.

So now I decided to cut the Gordian knot by adding more Finnish words, but to give that a shimmer of meaning I'll have to learn the language :lol: . And maybe also Hungarian and Georgian, since I have enough resources to get started in both...

Mini-wordlists sep 2022.jpg

RO: În afară de asta: am citit cartea "Proverbe și zigatori românești" de Ovidiu Bîrlea (1966 - deci î şi nu â!) ca lectură de culcare de câteva nopți și acum am terminat-o. Cartea asta este bilingvă, deoarece în stânga ește o traducere franceză, dar textul în limba română la dreapta nu a fost greu de citit - cu excepția exemplelor. Vocabularul din aceste e mai "autohton" și vechi și nu sunt traduse literal, ci combinate cu expresii în alte limbi romanice cu același înțeles - dar nu întotdeauna aceeași alegere de cuvinte! Și nu-mi aduc un dicționar în pat - ideea este că ar trebui să pot să-mi citesc textele fără asistență.

Proverbes & zics.jpg
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Iversen
Black Belt - 4th Dan
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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 » Tue Sep 13, 2022 4:55 pm

Iversen wrote:So now I decided to cut the Gordian knot by adding more Finnish words, but to give that a shimmer of meaning I'll have to learn the language :lol: . And maybe also Hungarian and Georgian, since I have enough resources to get started in both...


I have still not added the Finnish words. One of the other languages I mentioned was Georgian, and I have visited Georgia twice - in 1988 and again in 2001. In 2001 I even managed to learn the alfabeth - which isn't too hard since the current version of it only has 33 letters and no distinction between upper and lower case. Its nearest neighbour to the South, Armenian, has twice as many and distinct upper and lower case letters - so I didn't really get a grip on that one, which of course was a problem, but I survived. OK, I went to my book shelf to fetch one of my Finnish dictionaries, and my eyes feel on the 10 cm or so of Georgian books ... well, and then I ended up trying to relearn the Georgian alphabet.

Before I tell more about this case of aberrant and unmeditated behaviour I would like to mention that the current alphabet is the third in the row (not counting minor adjustments). The oldest alphabet, named 'Asomtavruli', dates back to at least the 5. century, and it almost certainly was created as a result of the Christianization which took place quite early (although legends scribe it to a spurious king King Pharnavaz I (3rd century BC). The other two (Nuskhuri and Mkhedruli) are slightly younger, and one of them, the Mkhedruli became the modern standard. The two oldeest ones (Asomtavruli and Nuskhuri) are allegedly still in use within the Georgian church, and inside old churches you can see some rather angular inscriptions in them. In contrast, the Mkhedruli is dominated by mellow round shapes (the differences are more pronounced than the table below suggests).

So to learn the Mkhedruli I first printed a copy of it, and then I made a bilingual version of the first part of the article about the language (which by the way isn't named Georgian, but Kartuli Ena - ქართული ენა). And one of the nice things about Google translate is that when you insert a text in some exotic writing system it shows you a transcription into Latin letters, and fortunately it turned out to be in complete accordance with the printout of the alphabet - hurray. This trick was not possible when I learned the alphabet the first time in 2001 (and fragments thereof already in 1988, including the name of the capital Tbilisi: თბილისი). So first I transcribed some pages (with translations of the words on the first page, but I soon dropped that), and later on I retranscribed the Latin version from Google back into Georgian. Wikipedia has tips as to how you ought to write the letters of the three alphabets, but I couldn't care less. I have already now decided how I am going to write them. And just as with Cyrillic and Greek I try to write the letter shapes I see in printed sources, since chances are slim that I ever will need to decrypt, let alone write the handwritten versions of them.

I read a Georgian grammar several years ago, but I can't see it on my shelves - maybe I borrowed it from the local library. I do however own three dictionaries, one Kauderwelsch and a tome nommé "Parlons Georgien" en Français, so I can also get started with the cryptic language behind the dead-easy alphabet. However that would take time away from the languages I already am studying so for obvious reasons I have to limit my involvement with this language, fascinating as it may be...

By the way, I had a medical examination today and came way too early, and in the waiting room I read about half of the Irish Kauderwelsch booklet. This language may be on the shelf for the moment, but my arms are long enough to reach the shelf, haha. And it was nice to have some of my faded memories about the Irish language refreshed.

Georgian alphabets (Wikipedia).jpg

Georgisk.jpg

PS: and now I'm going to write that single triple-column of Finnish words which I have been twaddling about the last couple of days, but for the moment I'm not going to work more intensely on Finnish - I first have to decide what I'm going to do about Georgian.

EDIT: and now I have written no less than three triple columns with Finnish words - that's also a funny language. It's almost like playing with Lego..
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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 Sep 18, 2022 6:00 pm

Yesterday I got home from one more family visit. As usual my study activity diminishes when I'm away from home, but I did some more French expressions on paper and finished my book about Danish slang and used Assimil's Occitan sans peine as goodnight reading - although I didn't get far (only to lesson 20 out of 100) because I tend to fall asleep when I lie down to read in the evening. Actually that's the purpose of goodnight reading.

I did however learn that "v" in Occitan is pronounced as a hard b, and I did get the chance to notice that the very first greeting in lesson 1 started with "Adieu" (meaning "hello"), which is just one of many differences between Occitan and French. The language in the book seems fairly lowbrow - nor what I'm just to from my usual fare of Wikipedia and popular sciences articles (or the texts in Ancient Occitan I read during my study time), but maybe I learn more about the language by investing my time in another register than those I'm wont to access. I bought the book during one of the Gatherings, but haven't opened it before now.

And today I first spent some time getting used to the Georgian alphabet. As you can see earlier in this thread I first transcribed a text from Georgian into normal Latin letters, using a list from the internet, and in the beginning I included the meanings of the words. but I soon dropped the translations because the main objective right now is to learn the alphabet and I have already seen all the words I know. The next step was then to transcribe the transcriptions provided by Google translate back into Georgian - and actually I felt that this was the direction that was most efficient. The fourth and final step could be to transcribe some texts in other Georgian fonts to something Latin, but I'm not there yet. The goal must be to learn the alphabet so well that I can read the words fluently (without necessarily understanding them), and for that purpose I need to insert a third stage: listen! And most of all I need to learn to hear the difference between aspirated and ejective consonants, but unfortunately Google Translate can't speak Georgian .. yet. I'll have to find some other system that can - references to suitable systems are welcome...

And after that I have worked on the end of my article about the Middle ages in general and the beginning and middle of a long article about Romulus Augustulus (allegedly the last Western Roman emperor, 475-476), both from the Ukrainian Wikipedia. I read the beginning of the Romulus article a couple of weeks ago, but the repetition wasn't wasted. I noticed one funny thing:

LA: commentatio Wikipediae Ucrainensi affirmat 'ultimum imperatorem' Romae Occidentali non puerulus Romulus esse, sed predecessor suis Julius Nepos (qui depositus in Dalmatiam fugi, ubi anno domini XXD necatus est). Romulum Augustulum de patri suis Oresti imperatorem factum est post expulsionem Julii Nepotis, sed Odoacer (sive Odoacar sive Audoachari, linguis Germanicis antiquis Audawakrs et rex Herulorum atque dux confoederationi tribuum Germanicarum) venit, Orestem vicit et necavit - filium quamvis viventem ad castellum Lucullanum apud Neapolem misit. Et secundum textum in linguae Ucrainae Odoacer tunc nuntium rerum Zenoni misit, agnitionem quam dux Italiae rogans. Zeno ei istud accedit, sed modo si Odoacer Nepotem quam imperator agnoscit - et hoc factum est, sed Odoacer numquam reditionem Juliis Nepoti in Italiam permisit, et praeterea ille in re incerta anno XXD interfectus est.

Si verum facte est quod Odoacer pro forma Iulium Nepotem quam imperator accepit, tunc Romulus Augustulus non ultimus imperator Romae Occidentis fuit, et Imperium Romae Occidentali non anno domini CDLXXVI cessavit sed XXD. Et obiter anno VIID Odoacrem a Theodorico, rege Ostrogothorum, occisus est.

Romulus Juliusque.jpg
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