Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

[Iversen]

I'm still working on my music collection. I finished a major job on it recently, but then realized that I had trusted my casual 'normal' listening to demonstrate errors and examples of miserable sound along the way so I didn't go through the first part of the collection with the same diligency as the middle and last section. I was wrong - I have found abominable errors, and I have identified many pieces with an abominable sound which need to be replaced. As an abominable error..

SW: .. Jag måste nämna min fil Larsson_1b. Lars-Erik Larsson var en svensk kompositör som skrev konserter för alla instrument han kunde tänka på, och den nämnda filen bör börja med hans pianokonsert och omfatta även de två huvudverk, Pastoralsvit och Vintersaga. Men jag upptäckte att filen endast innehöll konserten. Lyckligtvis har jag haft de andra två verk i min samling åtminstone sedan 90-talet, så därifrån kunde jag ladda ner dem och retablera filen i den avsedda formen.

EN: And then I have had to replace a number of items, partly because of problems with the equipment I have used in times gone by. For instance I once had a grammophone with a too light pickup, but no adjustment facilities, so if a vinyl disk was just a little bit wobbled the pickup would jump up and down. I found a cure insofar that I glued a a piece of eraser to the pickup which made it just a bit heavier - but before that I had already made several recordings on cassette tapes, and they passed right into my new digital collection. But now it is the time to kick them out, along with some recordings that were made from scratchy LPs or wobbly tapes. I don't expect super hifi quality of everything - being a perfectionist would simply block my project, and in a few cases I have sentimal attachments to some of my old items ... like for instance the pieces I got from my first doctor (mentioned earlier in this thread) or some of the records I cherished most and therefore also played most in my youth. But in some cases the sound is so bad that I can't accept it, nostalgia or no nostalgia. And all that takes time.

DK: Jeg har inkluderet skrevet mini-biografier (på dansk) i mit registringssystem, og dem læser jeg også sommetider. Nogle af dem er ret underholdende, når jeg selv skal sige det. Her er for eksempel den om den velkendte engelske renaissancekomponist John Dowland:

Engelsk komponist. Ungdom ukendt ( sandsynligt fødselsår kan dog udregnes). Som knap tyveårig ansat hos hr. Cobham. Blev katolsk under rejse i denne herres følge, hvilket var mildt udtrykt upraktisk efter reformationen i England. Rejste i stedet rundt og rundt i Europa. Blandt andet ansat hos Chr. IV i Danmark 1598-1606, her fyret p.gr. af økonomiske uregelmæssigheder. Katolskheden blegnede noget efter mødet med 'these most wicked priests and jesuits'; måske derfor mulighed for at kunne rejse hjem til England fra 1606 (med kort afbrydelse i 1622- 23), uden at han dog nogensinde opnåede en position, der kunne bortvejre hans kronisk melankolske sindsstemning.

EN: And the remark about his general sombre mood may be founded on the names of some of his works, such as

Complaint, Doeland's adew, Forlorne hope fancy, Fortune my foe, Go from my window, Lachrimae 1 to 7 (named Antiquae, Antiquae Novae, Gementes, Tristes, Coactae, Amantis, Verae), Melancholie Galliard and last, but not least: Semper Dowland semper dolens. And then I haven't even mentioned his song titles, but "Flow my Tears" would not be atypical. Maybe not the kind of guy you would invite to your party - and Fontex hadn't been invented yet. Poor man...

IT: Sedende presso il schermo, leggo anche brevi biografie sulla rete su alcuni dei compositori e, per quanto possibile, lo faccio nella lingua del compositore, tipicamente utilizzando le diverse versioni di Wikipedia. È un buon allenamento linguistico e non richiede molti minuti. Ma alcuni dei compositori sono così oscuri che persino Wikipedia non ha un articolo, nemmeno nella lingua del compositore. E poi il metodo si chiama Google.

GR: Και βέβαια πάντα έχω κάποια ανάγνωση κοντά στο κρεβάτι μου, και το τελευταίο πράγμα που διάβασα εκεί ήταν ένα άρθρο σχετικά με το Γκλάστονμπερι (Glastonbury!), όπου ανέμπιστοι μοναχοι ισχυρίστηκαν ότι είχαν βρει το πτώμα του βασιλιά Αρθούρου. Έφερε πολλά χρήματα στο μοναστήρι αν μπορούσατε να πάρετε περισσότερους επισκέπτες - και ακόμη και ο βασιλιάς Έντουαρντ Α ήρθε εκεί. Αλλά ανεξάρτητα από αυτές τις απάτες και την ποίηση των διάφορων συγγραφέων, νομίζω ότι ο Άρθουρ πιθανότατα έζησε, αλλά ίσως το "Άρθουρ" ήταν ψευδώνυμο. Αυτό το θέμα ανέφερα νωρίτερα σε αυτό το νήμα.

Επιπλέον, όπως τον ύπνο ανάγνωση μπορεί να παρατηρήσετε τα στοιχεία της γλώσσας - και εδώ δε μόνο σκέφτομαι την ελληνική ορθογραφία ξένων ονομάτων. Για παράδειγμα, αναφέρεται σε αυτή τη διατύπωση:

Απο τον 11ο μόλις αιώυα ...

Τι κάνει ο "μόλις" σε αυτό το διάστημα;;

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[Iversen]

I am still working on my music collection, and right now I'm in the middle of Scriabin ... which raises the interesting question of transliteration of Russian composers' name. A general problem is the numerous composers whose names end in "-ский". The normal transliteration choice in both English and Danish i "-sky", but I refuse to accept that since the obvious logical transliteration would be "-skij" - and that's how I write all these composers in my registration system. There are also problems at the other end, mostly with the ubiquituous"Ч-" as you can see from the transliterations shown below (from the site IMSLP) - and I have even seen some that aren't on the list.

However those problems aren't really among the time robbers since I mostly have decided long ago what to do. It's more things like pieces with an intolerably bad sound, missing items and 'divided' composers whose works aren't collected on a few files. After all, this collection is probably the one I'll be living with the rest of my life, and I don't want to be shocked when I have become old and frail and less computer savvy than now.

But I also try to do a bit of extensive language training, and to that effect I have read the latest and the preceding three issues of "Esperanto", the 'club magazine' of the International Esperanto Union. I'm not going to summarize the whole kaboodle, but..

EO: Ekzemple, en la lasta eldono estis artikolo pri la ĵurnala situacio en la Rusujo de la Caroj. Zamenhof vivis eĉ en tiu sfero. Kaj kial? ne pro la enhavo, sed ĉar ne ekzistas unu dungita cenzuristo en la cenzurejo kiu povis legi la lingvon. Poste sajne venis (pli-malpli hazarde) unu esperantokapablo kaj tiam oni subito povis subite publikigi revuojn en la lingvo.

La antaŭa kopio ankaŭ havas artikolon pri Rusujo: Esperanta scienca konferenco okazis en Moskvo. Krome estas prezentado de la reta versio de la revuo, kaj oni mencias, ke interalie la artikoloj pri gramatiko (kaj lingvo ĝenerale) verŝajne estos publikigitaj en la interreto anstataŭ en la gazeto. Fakte, mi maltrafis la lingvajn artikolojn kiuj antaŭe estis en la revuo, kiuj nune pli kaj pli koncernas pure organizajn aferojn. Liberigi tiajn artikolojn al lareta versio estas pli bona ol lasi ilin tute, sed ĝi ankoraŭ ne idealas.

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[Iversen]

Report from the music studying department: I have now finish the alphabet. My last big problem was dropping down into the last part of the file Zemlinsky 1b file, where I had expected some Alban Berg as a filler - and then I heard the end of Mahler's 5 symphony. I then had to go back to my notes and check what the heck I had done to poor old Mahler, and I did find the explanation. Once upon a time I had filled out the part of the B-side of an old-fashioned cassette tape with the end of Mahler's Symphony plus a piece by Berg which had the right length - it was back in the medieval period where I had to buy cassette tapes with fixed lengths (the really dark ages were those of scratchy old vinyl records with fixed content decided by somebody else). OK, then later on, when I wanted to get all my Berg items into the same corner of the digital universe I divided the Mahler 3b file into two - and copied the wrong half to Zemlinsky! At least I still had Mahler on the Mahler file, but followed by something else which I still haven't identified, but it could be another work by Berg or something by Zemlinsky or some piece of junk dumped from a space ship above me, but I simply don't remember now. One day I may wake up in the middle of the night and suddenly remember EXACTLY what the piece with the timpani from my Mahler file was - and then I may reuse it somewhere. But right now it is a mystery.

I'll still be doing small tasks on the collection since I have noted down a lot of pieces that should be replaced by better versions, but that won't happen in one day. And they make up only a fraction of the whole thing. The rest is either OK or at least OK enough to be tolerated ... for now (as I have said before: don't EVER let me become a perfectionist).

So now I can get back to studying languages. I did read a bit of reading during my musical extravaganza, but mostly as the obligatory goodnight reading task. And the last item used here was...

IT: La mia ultima lettura della buona notte è stata una vecchia brochure del castello di Christiansborg a Copenaghen, dove sono ospitati il nostro parlamento e la Corte Suprema e alcuni musei, e dove la nostra regina riceve talvolta ospiti ufficiali nelle cosidette Sale Reali di Rappresentanza. L'intero castello viene bruciato alcune volte, e pertanto tutte le sale sono del XIX secolo o dopo, ma fatte nello stile vecchio - a parte una serie di tappezzerie con motivi della storia della Danimarca, realizzati da un artista di nome Nørgaard. E ho acquistato principalmente la brochure per le spiegazioni di questi arazzi. Ovviamente ho scelto di evitare il danese, cioè ho comprato l'opuscolo nella versione italiano.

By the way: I have had some internet trouble the last couple of days, but now it seems that my provider has reestablished my connection. You really feel cut off from the world when your connection is down so I hope that it was a one day fluke and not something more sinister.

Christiansborg.jpg

[Iversen]

I have been away for a few days, but at least I did manage to read some texts in bilingual versions in the train back home - one in Irish, one in Catalan and one in Russian. The Irish one was from the same series of printouts that comprised the texts about lucid dreams which I have mentioned earlier - and which were somewhat suspect of being slightly edited machine translations. The text I read today is no less dubious - any Irish text with a majority of prepositional clauses at the start of its sentences must be deemed dubious - but I still learn some useful words along the way, this time about Asperger's syndrome.

IR: Ní scríobhfaidh mé i bhfad i nGaeilge as siocair go nglacfaidh mé go leor ama liomsa ag mo leibhéal reatha - ach táim ag dúil go bhféadfadh na daoine a dhear Google Translate córas a dhéanamh a ghluaiseann na briathra Gaeilge tosaigh go lár abairtí Béarla , ach ach gan a bhogadh an briathar Béarla go dtí an chéad suíomh nuair a aistríonn sé go dtí an treo eile.

The Catalan one ("La 'Globalització Europea") was about one of my pet peeves, namely the linguistic aspects of the migrations into Europe. The noteworthy thing about this one is that ..

CA: .. el seu autor havia cregut en la hipòtesi Anatolià (és a dir: que les llengües indoeuropees havien estat introduïdes a Europa des de Anatòlia al costat de l'agricultura), però la nova evidència genètica el va fer canviar de parer. Ara reconeix que els transportistes de R1B1 i R1b1 van convertir la composició genètic en la major part d’Europa, i que el hipotèsi més lògic sigui llavors que també llevaren les llengues indoeuropees ... tot i que encara considera que sigui possible que les llengues predecessors del grup hel·lènic vinguin de la Turquia (i que em deixessi afegir: potser també el grup albanès, que és un poc com un genet solitari entre les llengues d'Euròpa). Es posible, però no hi ha cap raó convincent per suposar res de això.

Finally, the Russian article (from Evolution.powernet.ru) was a fairly long rant about the Precambrian fauna, including critters like DIckinsonia from the Ediacarian period, which was flat and slow and primitive and lived all its pitiful life wallowing in mud mixed with detritus from above (what a life!) but at least it was multicellular. However the article writes about several kinds of worms as if they had existed already back then. Didn't worms evolve later? Btw. One small surprise from a Russian article about this topic is that ..

RU: в русской статье упоминается эдиакарская фауна без упоминания о предшествующем вендическом периоде, который обычно рассматривается в русской палеонтологической традиции отдельно. Но животные из Эдиакары вымерли, и следующий период расцвета пришел с фауаном Берджесса, и большинство животных из этой линии тоже вымерли, а затем наступила кембрийская революция с трилобитами и так далее. когда я был ребенком, не предполагалось, что животные когда-либо будут найдены до трилобитов, но развитие также сильно в этой сфере. Фауна из Эдикарии еще не была обнаружена, когда я нарисовал картину ниже!

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[Iversen]

FR: Ceci sera une communication assez brève puisque j'ai passé la plupart du jour à réviser la section thématique de l'administration de ma collection musicale, c'est-à-dire la partie où j'ai écrit le thèmes pour chaque pièce. Je n'ai pas noté les sources, mais la plupart des thèmes viennent de partitions et livres de musique dans les bibliothèques de ma ville, quelques-uns d'un dictionaire de thèmes qui se trouve dans la bibliothèque publique, mais qu'on ne peut pas emmener à la maison, certains sont pris des collections du site de IMSLP (que j'ai pourtant découvert trop tard) .. et le reste sont notés à l'écoute, avec toutes les erreurs que cela entraine.

De plus il y a sur chaque 'feuille digitale' une copie de la liste du contenu ... et c'est surtout ces listes qu'il faut maintenant éditer après tous les changements que j'ai fait ce dernier mois.Tous ces feuilles sont stockées sous forme d'images JPG, et il y a heureusement des outils pour éditer de tels images, mais ce n'est pas une opération simple. D'abord les demenagements des pièces demandent-ils une planification presque sur le niveau d'une opération militaire. Par example j'ai découvert que beaucoup des pièces d'orgue de César Franck proviennent de deux collections, une avec trois pièces, l'autre avec six pièces "pour grande orgue", et maintenant je voudrais que les pièces de chaque collection soient placées ensemble (dans la mesure que c'est possible en observant les limites de durée pour chaque fichier que je maintiens contre tout sens commun puisque c'était ainsi dans ma collection de cassettes) - et ce but déjà difficile à atteindre. Après il faut aussi que les thèmes changent de place, et que les registres soient mis à jour.

Et tous cela prend terriblement longtemps.

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[Iversen]

I have been away on a family visit for a couple of days, and as usual that means that my study activity went down. I sometimes try to remember how I survived school many years ago, since I back then was living with my family. IS it really possible to do serious studies with other humans around? For me the efficiency skyrockets when I'm alone - and while I still worked I mostly avoided taking courses because I simply don't learn anything if I listen to the teacher - I only learn things if I ignore the teacher and do my own things with the study materials I have received, so during my working years I only took those courses to prove that I still was learning new stuff - but IT courses were insanely expensive so with the full consent of my bosses I restricted my course participation to the bare minimum. It didn't prevent me from being a specialist IT consultant for almost 30 years, and I might have stayed with the business if it weren't for all the new gadgets and increased bureaucracy.

The same obviously applies to my musical activities. I have almost completely stopped going to live concerts with coughing and rattling and the obligation to remain in your allotted seat for hours, and I cannot see any benefit in listening to concert recordings with the same noise problems. Many years ago I did play music with other likeminded people, but I mostly felt it as exploitation rather than a pleasure - especially since I realized that the last group of chamber musicians I assisted as a cello servant never ever intended to play my compositions. So for more than 20 years my cello case (still with the cello inside) has served me as the piece of furniture where I hang my coat, and one of my violins has been hanging untouched as a decoration on a wall between my paintings. I also own a piano, but I have only plucked a few notes on it to check the tonality of a couple of pieces. I have totally ceased to play music myself, and in a sense that is a loss of the same kind as the loss of my last venue for doing lectures on linguistics. I'm becoming a recluse, and frankly that's a role that suits me like a glove.

OK, back to my language studies during the weekend. I did bring along a small Assimil Indonesian, in which I read a few pages every night just before falling asleep, and in the train back home I read an old astronomical magazine in Spanish.

SP: El nombre de la revista fue Espacio (de diciembre de 2011), y cubría tanto la tecnología espacial como la astronomía 'pura'. La página de título preguntó qué sucede cuando los satélites vuelven a caer a la Tierra sin ningún control. Afortunadamente, la mayoría de las piezas se queman antes de golpear la cabeza de alguien (aunque aparentemente un camello ha muerto en Omán debido al caído de una basura espacial), y la mayoría de las piezas que sobreviven caen en el Océano Pacífico o en algún otro lugar acuoso, pero la cantidad de basura espacial que tenemos encima de nosotros es un genuino problema, y solo se ha vuelto más grave desde 2011.

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[Iversen]

I have not logged in since Tuesday, and for once I have a splendid excuse: I HAVE BEEN STUDYING !!!!!!!

This was the sequence of events: Tuesday in the late afternoon I got through the update of my music collection registration system, based on the changes I have done to the actual music files during the last month or so. And at the same time I also got through the editing of the pages with themes - albeit with the proviso that there are some new pieces for which I haven't yet found (or constructed) the themes (I'll do that later when I return to those files to listen to the content). At the same time I looked at the list with pieces that should be replaced or at least edited with Audacity, and I realized that I had gotten rid of most of the really bad old items so it wouldn't be an unbearable pain in the *** to listen to the rest later - which doesn't mean that I can't replace some items later if I find something to replace those pieces with.

In short, it was time to temporarily declare ceasefire and return to active language learning. And so I did - with a vengeance. First I thought it would be really nice to do a good old three-column wordlist, based on a dictionary. And then I had to choose a language. Hmm... There are several languages that might benefit from a bit of attention, but I ended up with Bulgarian, and I did a wordlist with three triple columns on a folded A4 sheet - all in all around 100 words with translations.

BU: По някаква причина избрах да започна с думите, които започват с "на-". Това е типичен глагол-префикс, така че аз завърших с много глаголи в моя списък.

When I had finished the first half-page I could have continued with one half-page more in Bulgarian, but then I thought that it would even more fun to do a Russian wordlist, starting at the same point in the alphabet, namely at "на-". Then I might be able to spot some of the differences and similarities in the vocabulary of these two Slavic languages, I thought. But lo and behold, when I had finished the same amount of words in Russian it occurred to me that it would be totally hilarious to continue through the rest of the Slavic languages I have been studying - i.e. Serbian, Slovakian and Polish. I added Albanian and Romanian and Modern Greek for geographical reasons (meeting old friends like naphta and naked and the Turkish waterpipe narghile again and again), and then sometime during the afternoon of Wednesday I got the splendid idea to make wordlists for each and every of my L2's - all starting from na- and onwards until I had filled one halfpage with columns in a variety of colours (see the images below).

And this took most of Thursday too, excluding a brief excursion into town. I skipped Danish (my native language because I realized (while making the English wordlist) that most of the Danish words I didn't already know were old or regional or for other reasons not really worth learning. This was already bad enough for English, and the problem would have been even more evident with Danish. But when I finished the wordlist project (phase 1) sometime during the evening yesterday I had made wordlists for the following twenty seven languages:

Bulgarian, Russian, Serbian, Polish, Slovakian, Albanian, Modern Greek, Romanian, Latin, Esperanto, Bahasa Indonesia, Italian, Catalan, Castillian, Portuguese, French, Old French (my first list in this language), Irish, English, Scots, Low German, High German, Dutch, Afrikaans, (New) Norwegian, Swedish, Icelandic and ... no, not Danish.

I could of course have continued with lists based on dictionaries for those languages which I only have studied on a theoretical level, for instance by reading a grammar or a language guide, but that would feel like cheating ... and besides I wouldn't be finished with phase one before sometime tomorrow, so I decided to call it a day when I had finished the Icelandic orðalista.

And now there is a problem: I also have to do phase 2 (repetitions) because otherwise the whole exercise won't have the intended effect. But doing repetitions for 27 lists with around 95-100 words on each list will take time, and normally I would do them within a day or two. Not this time, but I expect the effect on each individal language to be more pronounced if I do the repetitions and study a bit of text in one and the same language along the way, starting with those that are most in need of immediate attention. And yes, Albanian and Irish and Slovak: I'm looking at you! Better be ready!

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[Iversen]

I could of course have continued with lists based on dictionaries for those languages which I only have studied on a theoretical level, for instance by reading a grammar or a language guide, but that would feel like cheating ...

And what did I then do? Make a wordlist in Finnish which I haven't studied yet (apart from reading a grammar). And because Finnish is a fairly nice and wellbehaved language when it comes to word formation it wasn't as hard as I had feared. Normally the rule is that the better you know a language the easier it is to memorize new vocabulary in it, and it helps when long words can be decomposed into their components. I know that there is something called vowel harmony, but in a dictionary somebody already took care about that, and in compound words the consonants don't seem to change much. The only clear example I can remember out of my head is "nauto" for a bovine critter and "naatokarja" for a whole herd of bovines - but then the 'd' in "naudanliha" (beef) and "naudanpaisti" (beef steak) puzzle me - why this difference?

I used a big Finnish-Danish dictionary which I bought some years ago for no reason at all, and I have recently bought a tiny yellow German <--> Finnish Langenscheidt, but now it is starting to bother me that I didn't also buy a regular Danish-Finnish dictionary while I was at it. I went to town today and visited three bookstores, but in one I couldn't even find a shelf with dictionaries, and the two others had only miserable selections of dictionaries in the main languages for sale - definitely nothing as exotic as Finnish. So maybe the classical paper dictionary is at the end of its thether, but I still think I can buy a good something-into-Finnish on the internet . And then I may also be able to find a two-way Estonian dictionary somewhere - I bought nice big dictionaries for Latvian and Lithuanian in a large bookstore in Berlin last year, but it didn't have anything for Estonian - not even one of those microscopic Langenscheidts.

I did however study Albanian yesterday evening as planned - although I didn't have time to make a repetition of the list I wrote a couple of days ago. What happened was that I found an old wordlist in my most recent Albanian text collection, and it didn't seem that I had done any repetition of it. So I decided that the most efficient thing to do would be to run through the original text again and then relearn the words I had written down during pass one. The first text was about the town Gjirokaster (which I have visited). It was Hoxha's birthplace so it has been relatively well preserved compared to other Albanian towns. And after that I studied a text about the bay at Vlorë (where I also have been, albeit without knowing the language - see the picture below), and I made a wordlist based on that text too so now I have three Albanian wordlists with all in all around 200 words which all crave attention.

ALB: Megjithatë, këtu nuk shkruaj asgjë në gjuhën shqipe - gjuha është shumë e ndryshkur!

Today I visited our local archeological museum, Moesgård (or MOMU as they call it), and because it's Easter they had some guided tours plus an expert from the museum waiting for questions about the Viking age. I ask her when the viking age according to her really started, and just as me she found that it was utter sheer nonsense to nominate the year 793 as the beginning of that age. In 793 some vikings raided the monastery at Lindisfarne and whacked a few monks, and the survivors wrote an indignant complaint that has become as famous in its day as if it had been written on Twitter - but there is no clear change in Nordic culture around that time.

LA: Gregorius Turonensis facte regem danicum Chlochilaicum (danice sermone: Hugleik) mentionavit in annalibus suis qui dum expeditionem ad franciam interfectus est anno DXV - diu ante exitium Lindisfarnense, sed eiusmodi impetum.

I even managed to stady a bit of Esperanto, since I got the latest issue of 'Esperanto' a few days ago.

EO: Jen mi ĝojis kun lingva artikolo verkita de S-ro Moerbeek, kiun mi renkontis dum la Kongreso en Lisbono pasintjare. Mi maltrafis liajn lingvajn artikolojn en la lastaj numeroj de la revuo, do tre kontentigas rividi ĉi tion. La subjekto ci-foje estas konstruoj kie A posedas ion X, kaj B ankaŭ posedas unu X. Ĉu oni devas tiam skribi ke A + B perdis sian Xon aŭ sian Xojn? Eblas diri "Ili perdis ĉiu sian domon", sed S-ro Moerbeek preferus la formon " ĉiu el ili perdis sian domon". Mi preferas la unua formuliĝo.

Alia artikolo parolas pri nova grandega Esperanto-Germana vortaro, kiun unu Erich-Dieter Krause pasigis kvindek jarojn de lia vivado kompilinte. La libro enhavas 175.000 artikolojn - kaj mi tre ĝojas ke povas esti tiom multaj vortojn (kvankam la nombro inkluzivas proprietajn nomojn). Iuj en la Esperanto-movado opinias, ke la nombro de vortoj estu kiel eble malgranda, sed laŭ mi ili prefere studu Toki Pono.

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[Iversen]

Yesterday I did start repetitions of the bonanza of wordlists in 28 languages which I produced a few days ago - and it's about time to do so. So far I have done repetitions of the Slavic languages plus Indonesian, and I'm halfway through Greek in this moment.

As you can see below I have opted for the easy version of the repetition, namely to copy the target language words blockwise and then asking myself what they mean. It would be more efficient to quote the translations and then expect to deliver the foreign words, but with so many lists in different languages on my agenda that would be a fairly hard task.

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[Iversen]

FR: Notre Dame de Paris a brulée. Merde!

Les deux seules choses positives (si on peut utiliser ce mot du tout dans cette situation) c'est que - selon les premières évaluations - c'était des artisans insouciants qui ont causée cette tragédie plutôt que des terroristes, et que Macron a affirmé qu'on va reconstruir l'église. Mais cela va coûter des milliards d'euros, et on peut craindre que 1) les tirelires fidèles des tableurs dans les ministères (ou dans le parlement) vont proposer une reconstruction bon-marché (ou aucune réconstruction du tout), ou bien qu'on va laisser quelque architecte fameux, mais dépourvue de sens historique, décider, et qu'on aura alors une coulisse de Disneyland ou encore un pompe hideux au centre de Paris. La seule reconstruction qui vaut la peine (et les dépens) est une reconstruction exacte - comme on l'a fait par example avec le palais royal de Varsovie - où même l'intérieur et les vitraux garderont leur aspect historique.

Ce disant, j'avais presque prévu un catastrophe de ce genre, comme vous pouver le voir sur page 25 de mon blog. Et je le trouve étonnant qu'il n'y avait pas de système d'extinction d'incendies dans léglise, bien que - avec les mots d'un commentateur - le bâtiment était tout aussi inflammable qu'une boîte d'allumettes avec toutes ses boiseries médiévales. Quelqu'un expliqua qu'on avait peur que les eaux d'un tel système puissent gâter les objets historiques dans l'intérieur de l'église. Eh bien, maintenant ces objets sont brulés, et quand (ou si) on reconstruit le tout je suis presque sûr qu'on va trouver un system convenable pour éviter une seconde désastre.

D'ailleurs nous avons eu un cas parallèle au Danemark en 1968, ou la cathédrale de Roskilde a été ravagée par une incendie causée par des travaux d'entretiens sur la flèche. Et là on réconstruit les parties brûleés exactement comme elles étaient avant - mais probablement avec une protection intégrée invisible contre des futures incendies. Sinon quel'qu'un est un idiot.

EN: I have of course spent a lot of time watching French television yesterday evening. All the normal programs on TF2 and TV5 were suspended and instead the fire was shown on direct TV with comments. And even on Danish television the channel called TV2 News transmitted the fire, hour after hour.

In spite of this I did manage to do a little bit of study, insofar that I made repetitions of my Greek, Esperanto, Albanian and Indonesian wordlists from last week. I expect to get through the Romance languages later today and the Germanic languages (and Irish) tomorrow.

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