Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

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Iversen
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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby Iversen » Fri Nov 01, 2019 9:01 am

As you may notice this thread has been idle for a week - and for a reason: I have hardly done any language study. I spent the weekend at a my mother's place, and there I just read some pages in Russian as goodnight reading, and since Monday I have worked on my musical collection. As I have written earlier here I finished my global check-up on this collection several weeks ago as planned, but in the process I noted down some works that ought to be replaced due to tape hiss, needle noise or coughing concert goers, and I have spent several days now on that. And even though I have tried to study some texts along the way I can't really focus, except in very long works like symphonies where I don't have to be ready to react fast - so I now just read things at the screen. OK, that includes biographical texts or other music related stuff on the internet, and I have deliberately made it into a multilingual activity, but it doesn't count as studying. Neither does the fact that I have read Oliver Sacks' book on Hallucinations. It did when I read the Musicology book of the same author because I read it in Romanian, but English ... nah - that's too easy. So my only real study activity this week has been to go through Jack Feuillet's small Bulgarian grammar (in French) once more, but this time as goodnight reading. Unfortunately it functions too well in this capacity -I tend to fall asleep after something like 10 pages. So by and large this week has been sacrificed to music at the expense of languages. But there is light ahead: I'm at the letter L now, which means I'm halfway through this round. And after that I'll be studying Spanish like a maniac because I have booked a holiday in Las Palmas on Gran Canaria, but I'll return to that topic later.

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Iversen
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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby Iversen » Sun Nov 03, 2019 12:52 am

I'm in the middle of Mozart right now, and because he is such an important composer (and easily to acquire) I have a lot of very old and fairly dismal stuff from in in my collection. Contrary to composers which I first have met after CDs and the internet were invented. When I made my second tape collection (the first one to be really systematic) in the early nineties I tooke pains to include every singel work I had in my record collection or one tapes from my first, rather msessy collection. And now I'm kicking out a lot of the old stuff, and that hits the 'big wigs' harder then most of the more peripheral composers.

But sometimes you need a break, and after watching a program about exoplanets (with subtitles and no sound) I got an idea: I decided to check how much content different versions of Wikipedia had about this subject - and it turned out that some languages had more than expected. So after a planetary tour through English, Latin, Afrikaans, Bulgarian, Letzeburgisch and half a dozen other languages I ended up at Bahasa Indonesia, where there was a good long article, and I have now printed that out with Google translations into German, Esperanto and French. I can definitely read this as goodnight reading, but once I'm through the musical quagmire I can also do a more acribic study of this material - my Indonesian has been understimulated and undernourished for some time, but it has not completely disappeared.

INDO: Sebenarnya, saya sudah menemukan bahwa saya dapat memahami banyak artikel tanpa menggunakan kamus karena saya tahu topiknya dengan baik. Tetapi bahasa Indonesia membutuhkan beberapa kegiatan belajar.

Artikel itu juga menyebutkan hal-hal biasa, seperti meningkatnya jumlah planet yang ditemukan dan spekulasi tentang kehidupan yang mungkin. Dan semua orang setuju bahwa ada miliaran planet di luar sana, dan beberapa telah ditemukan yang pada dasarnya dapat mengandung kehidupan. Tetapi apakah kehidupan terjadi di semua sisi? Jika bumi Terra tidak terkena sejumlah peristiwa yang tidak terduga, tidak akan ada air cair dan medan magnet dan kondisi klima yang cukup konstan, dan demikian juga tidak akan ada kehidupan di sini. Jadi, meskipun ada banyak sekali planet di alam semesta, mereka yang paling dekat dengan kehidupan primitif mungkin sangat jauh.

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FR: J'ai choisi la peinture ci-dessus comme illustration de ce que je viens d'écrire à cause de l'apparition du planète Jupiter dans le coin à droite derrière le toile formé par le luth constellé - mais en effet la peinture a un thème assez different, à savoir la poésie française. Ceux entre vous qui connait les oeuvres de monsieur Gerard de Nerval ont certainement déjà reconnu le prince d'Aquitaine à la tour abolie et le soleil noir de la mélancolie...
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Iversen
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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby Iversen » Tue Nov 05, 2019 3:25 am

Yesterday I went to the usual language café at our main library. It lasted two hours and happened to be nicely divided into two phases. First we had a round in English round because one participant was an Italian lady who came as a tourist with her friend and the child of the friend, and another was a Danish young man who wanted some training in English. Then there was a lady who also mainly goes for English and a French man who speaks excellent English and me. And the theme was schools forms and the names for them in different countries and languages - a topic which actually is more complicated than you might think. For instance we discussed the Danish 'højskoler' which are private institutions built on ideas formulated in the 19. century by people like Grundtvig and Kold. You don't get an exam, it is more like places for development of your personality and socialising. On the other hand, a high school in the USA is really a university, just as the 'Háskola' in Iceland. We also discussed the word 'college', where the funny thing is that its counterpart in Danish ("kollegium") is reserved for places where students live - but it is not the place where they study. As far as I could understand, a "collegio" in Italy is like a boarding school in England or a 'kostskole' in Denmark ('kost' = food, eating).

IT: La signora italiana e la sua amica dovettero andarsene dopo un'ora, ma poi arrivarono un'altra donna italiana e una donna francese, ed esse volevano entrambi avere un poco exercizio nella lingua danese. Anche l'uomo francese - che può anche parlare danese sebbene non perfettamente - si unì a quella parte del gruppo mentre gli altri due passarono a parlare il tedesco. Questo potrebbe sembrare una perdita di tempo per me, ma si è rivelato piuttosto impegnativo perché ho dovuto tradurre alcune parole in francese e italiano. Abbiamo anche discusso diversi problemi grammaticali, come lo scopo di avere una morfologia completa contro una morfologia ridotta - con esempii dell'uso del genitivo contro l'uso di preposizioni come "di" in divere lingue. Ho citato anche il "genitivo di garpe" che si può incontrare in norvegese e olandese, ma chi è particolarmente comune nel afrikaans: "die vrou haar fiets" (the woman her bike). Ho usato Bahasa Indonesia come esempio estremo di come non è necessare piegare i verbi in tempus perché ci sono altre metodi per indicare l'ordine temporale delle azioni. Tuttavia la donna italiana ha apprezzato tanto di aver la possibilità di soggetto implicito nella sua lingua...

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DA: Billedet ovenfor illustrerer egentlig en skolekomedie fra det 16. århundrede ved navn "Karrig Nidding", skrevet af en skolemester Hieronymus Justesen Ranch. Men det kan også ses som en afbildning af livet på en amerikansk campus, hvis man ellers kan stole på realismen i visse populære spillefilm. I begge tilfælde er der en forbindelse til begrebet 'skole'.
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Iversen
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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby Iversen » Wed Nov 13, 2019 9:33 pm

¡Hola!

As you may notice this thread has been idle for a week - and for a reason: I have spent a week in Las Palmas on Gran Canaria, speaking Spanish and only Spanish from I came till I left. All the biggest Danish travel agencies have trips to the island, but if you buy a charter holiday you will end up at the South Coast, where there are more tourists than Spaniards. So I arranged my own accommodation in a hotel in the area called Santa Catarina - actually on the narrowest spot where there is 5 minutes' walk from the beach promenade to the West and over to the bus station, the aquarium Poema del Mar and the Elder science museum to the East - plus of course the harbour. Did I write 'bus station'? Shame on me - it is of course the 'Estación De Guaguas Santa Catalina', and a guagua is of course pronounced wa-wa by the local people. But I already knew the word from an earlier visit to Tenerife.

My Spanish served me well - I could speak to people without problems, and they didn't slow down or do other concessions. And the last day, where I had visited everything I had planned (except the mountains, where it drizzled), I spent the afternoon at the biggest municipal library, the one just North of the 'Estación de Guaguas de San Telmo' some five or six kilometers further South. Here I looked in a Spanish-Sanskrit version of the Mahabharata, but I found it fairly uninteresting. I have a weird television station at home which tries to convince viewers that aliens from outer spaces fought nuclear battles over old India from flying vimanas, but the parts of the poem I saw just looked like ordinary boring new age confabulations. I also read maybe half of a book about the history of the Earth, but it was written for geologists and not for me. But then I found a book named "El collar del neandertal" and read the hole caboodle from A to Z. Well, actually it told the whole story of the humanoids back to the Australopithecines, but Spain is important in the Neanderthal chronicles because it was there the last ones died - actually the very last individual gave up the struggle in a cold and windswept cave at the Gibratar rock, but before that they had been pressed further and further South until there wasn't any more land- and even though they now are granted slightly more intelligence than earlier, they apparently didn't have the kind of brain to invent ships when they needed them.

Actually there is a cave in Northern Spain called Atapuerca (near Burgos) which is one of the most important sites for prehistoric bones, and some of these bones seem to be related to the Denisovans that were identified by one pixie bone from a girl that died in a cave in Siberia many years ago - so how can there be a connection? This isn't discussed in the book for the obvious reason that it was published in 1999, and the Denisovans weren't yet discovered back then. But I also bought the latest issue of a magazine called "Muy Interesante" with - among other things - an article about human development in Asia, and it seems that a lot of things were going on in both Asia and Spain which nobody even suspected in 1999. As for the Neanderthals it is now commonly accepted that they could speak, but due to the shape of their throat probably with a highpitched and fairly shrill tone - several simulations can be heard at Youtube, and they sound quite scary.

And now back to Spanish.

SP: No tengo la intención de hacer aqui un cuaderno de todo mi viaje, pero quería mencionar mi expedición temeraria al jardín zoologico de Palmitos. Como ya he indicado, elegí intencionalmente un hotel en Las Palmas al extremo norte de la isla, lejos de las trampas para turistas a lo largo de la costa sur. Peró para visitar Palmitos tuve que organizar una expedición allí. Entonces, con corazón tembloroso abordé una guagua para Playa del Inglés, desde donde pude llevar otra guagua al jardín, que se encuentra en una garganta rocosa a cierta distancia del mar. Y luego se paga 32 € para un adulto (ningun 'precio special' para ancianos, peró si por los residentes y por los chicos. Hay delfine allí, pero escuché unos minutos de una prueba de altavoz por la mañana y decidí que tuve que salir antes del espectáculo a las 13:30. Pero cuando salí del jardín, descubrí que el primer autobús de regreso a la costa salió a las 2:30 pm, es decir: quedaban 70 minutos. Y luego comencé a caminar y puedo llegar bastante lejos en 70 minutos. El primer autobús que vino condujo hacia Puerto de Mogán, y luego conduje allí, bebí un litro de leche y retorné en una ultima guagua del dia a Las Palmas sin parar. Pero de esta manera, no solo vi el hermoso (pero seco) paisaje lejos de la costa durante mi paseo rural, sino también los horribles sitios de almacenamiento turístico junto a las bahías a lo largo de la costa. Y me alegré de que no fuera allí que yo tuviera que pasar mi semana canareña.

RU: И, кстати, я составлял русские словарные списки два вечера и один час на самолете домой. Лучше это, чем смотреть программа выборов в Испании!

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Iversen
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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby Iversen » Thu Nov 14, 2019 8:47 pm

The magazine I mentioned in the message above "Muy interesante" is part of a family of magazines that deal with topics like history and psychology - but I prefer the one that deal with science and technology. There is a magazine with almost the same name in Portuguese, which seems to be slightly more experimental in its tone, but I like both. I mention the Spanish one again because of an article about cyborgs, i.e. mixtures between humans (or animals) and machines - and especially those that are built on mechanisms that interfere with the functioning of the brain. Actually we are very close - millions of youngsters seem to be fused with their smartphones to such a degree that they show signs of abstinence symptoms just like drug addicts or heavy smokers if they run out of battery power or can't connect to the internet. But there are already now gadgets like cochlear implants for deaf people which effectively replace a human organ.

The crucial step is to connect the gadgets directly with the human brain with some kind of wiring, and the big questions here are 1) will the brain tolerate foreign wires in the long run? and 2) can the brain learn to understand signals from an external system? There are already artificial eyes, but to replace normal vision you need to send megabytes of data into the mind, and how can the brain learn to decode and organizer those systems (and throw most of it away in an intelligent way)? I have read about vision replacement systems that sent maybe a dozen bits into the brain at any one time, and as far as I remember the test person (or persons) managed to discover that something was going on - or maybe it was just one of the usual TV dubious channels that gave me that information. But if you can deal with 12 bits it should potentially also be possible to deal with 144.

Next question: if you can send black and white signals into the brain of a person that has lost his/her eye sight, can you then also make that brain perceive color, and will the color sensations correspond to those the person had before? Is the brain flexible enough to decode a new signal that arrives in an unaccostumed way? If yes, will the new sensations actually be perceived as vision, or will it be something new? What if we sent in signals that corresponded to ultraviolet or infrared light? Or X-rays?

There are already systems that can detect the brain wawes that correspond to specific movements of the limbs, and with that possibility it suddenly become possible to get artificial limbs that can move when and as you think they should move. Other experiments have measured the electrical currents at the outside of the brain, and the researchers could then guess which of a series of images a test person was visualizing - but only after lots of testing on each individual brain. But that process could probably be left to computers, and then the development will really take off. However the real problem is to get signals into the brain from articifial systems and have them merge with the activity that already is there.

So now I'm wondering when people can get wired up directly to the internet, and how many will be willing to have it done? And how can you then avoid that they get hacked? Nevermind, I still carry an old Nokia around with me, and I still write wordlists on oldfashioned paper with ballpoint pens that were invented more than a century ago so I won't be in the avantgarde. But I can't see why others shouldn't choose to become real cyborgs even in my lifetime.

Or maybe I should stop reading sci mags...

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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby Sarchta » Mon Nov 18, 2019 6:37 pm

Have you ever heard abut a guy named Neil Harbisson? I think he is a real life example of what you are talking about - a cyborg! He has a small device implanted in his head which allows him to "see" colors. It looks like an antenna. He looks kind of weird. When I see photos of him I'm always kind of scared his body modification feels a little bit loose.
Anyway I have a question for you. What do you think about learning texts by heart in order to practice foreign language?
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Iversen
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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby Iversen » Mon Nov 18, 2019 8:48 pm

Neil Harbisson is mentioned in the article. Most people have thre kinds of cones (L,M,S), and in most daltonists one one type is deficient. If it is L (which mainly detects red light) og M (which peaks in the mid range) then the result is a person who has problems to separate red and green. If it is S (which is a much rarer case) then the person will have problems separating yellow and blue hues. But a few persons can't separate any colours and they will then see the world in black and white - or rather, they see an absence of colours which for normal people would be interpreted as different shades of grey. But can you speak of grey if there isn't anything outside the white-grey-black spectrum? As far as I understand Neil H sufffers from complete acromatopsia, and he has got an implant that detects colours and transforms them into sound, but according to the Spanish article his gadget can also detect ultraviolet light and signals from satellites, and he "asegura que ya no es capaz de diferenciar su actividad cerebral de la del software" (: he claims that he can't differentiate between his brain activity and that of the software").

The article isn't very specific about the way his brain is connected to the antenna which protrudes from the back of this head, but the quote above seems to indicate that it actually is some kind of implant with rods going into his head. And I expect that more people may follow in his footsteps, but not the first couple of years. Neil H has got his antenna since 2004, but it has not become a fad yet.

As for learning texts by heart ... well, I'm sceptical about the effect of learning whole books by heart, but you may be able to use for instance poems or short quotes from prose texts to train your pronunciation. The point is that if you have learnt something by heart you can use it far away from your books and your smartphone to keep your brain ruminating in a target languages instead of letting it slide back into your native language because of a lack of 'things to think'. But it is is not something I have used much myself - at least not in languages. When I still played cello and violin and (to some extent) piano I ended up learning long passages of the most important concertos by heart simply because I kept playing the same pieces again and again. But I basically don't want to keep reading the same texts again and again so I won't ever learn them by sheer repetition, and I reserve my memorization exercises for single words and idiomatic expressions, not entire texts.

And now to something completely different:

Cavesa recently mentioned an Asterix thing called "La maison qui rends fou". It puzzled me because I didn't know any book or film by that name, but after a bit of Googling I found out that it is one of the 12 tests in "Les douze travaux d'Astérix" (which confusingly is called "Asterix indta'r Rom", Asterix invades Rome, in Danish), and the madness inducing house is of course a public bureaucratic institution, which Astérix and Obélix only conquer by asking for a form that doesn't exist.

FR: Les douze épreuves des deux Gaulois sont évidement basées sur le récit des douze épreuves de Hercule, le héro Grec par excéllence, bienque précisément la maison qui rends fou ne ressemble pas à aucun des travaux de monsieur Hercule. Tant que je sache c'est le seul exemple d'une conte Astéricienne qui ait été conçue comme film avant d'être refaite comme livre. Je l'ai vu il y longtemps, probablement dans un avion, mais à mon avis il est un peu trop schématique et irréaliste. Or, lisant l'article de Wikipédia en français sur ce sujet j'ai eu l'idée de lire ce qu'il y avait dans quelques autres Wikipédias, et j'ai continué l'étude avec presque tout qu'il y avait sur la Wikipédia Grecque sur le sujet d'Astérix. Mais avant d'écrire un peu plus sur ces textes je voudrais signaler qu'il y un article court sur la Wikipedia dans la langue 'pontiaka' (Grecque Pontique), ..

GR: Η Ποντιακά είναι μια ελληνική διάλεκτο που προέρχεται από την τουρκική ακτή της Μαύρης Θάλασσας, αλλά τώρα χρησιμοποιείται ευρέως στη βόρεια Ελλάδα. Θεωρείται η πιο συντηρητική διάλεκτος λόγω αιώνων απομόνωσης, αλλά έχει επίσης καταγράψει πολλές τουρκικές λέξεις - και πρέπει να ομολογήσω ότι δεν μπορώ να το διαβάσω. Αλλά έχω την αίσθηση ότι υπάρχει έλλειψη διόρθωσης στην αντίστοιχη Wikipedia, γιατί αρχίζει έτσι (με μια ισπανική έκφραση):

Αστερίκον - chupa pico de mierda (σ' ελλενικά: Αστερίξ, σα γαλλικά: Astérix le Gaulois ) εν ο τίτλος εινός κόμιξ τη Ρενέ Γκοσινί (γραφ') και Αλμπέρ Ουντερζό (ζωγραφίζ'). Τ' όνεμαν ατ' εβγών' ασον ήρωαν τη σειράς: τον Αστερίκον.

Εκτός από το κύριο άρθρο σχετικά με το Αστερίξ, υπάρχει μια σελίδα στα ελληνικά με τον τίτλο "Κατάλογος χαρακτήρων του Αστερίξ", και μερικές φορές μου αρέσει καλύτερα το ελληνικό όνομα ενός ατόμου της σειράς - όπως ο βάρδος του χωριού, το οποίο στην ελληνική γλώσσα ονομάζεται Κακοφωνίξ -

FR: .. (cacophonix) ce qui est beaucoup plus amusant que le nom original en français, Assurancetourix (de "assurance tous risque"). De même le poisonnier s'appelle 'Ordralfabétix' en français, mais je préfère son nom Danois, "Hørmetix" ('at hørme' : puer - une allusion à l'odeur pénétrante qui émane de sa poissonnerie). Les Grecques ont pourtant conservé le nom "Αλφαβητίξ". Le barde s'appelle 'troubadourix' en Danois - ce qui n'exige guère une explication. Et le chef est "Majestix", ce qui à mon avis fonctionne mieux que le nom français "Abraracourcix", qui n'est pas amusant si on ne connait pas l'expression française "à bras raccourcis" (: très violemment) - et cette fois les grecs sont d'accord: il lui ont accordé le nom "Μαζεστίξ".

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Iversen
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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby Iversen » Tue Nov 19, 2019 7:06 pm

LAT: Aestimates sodales fori, avete!

Museum archeologicum arosiense Moesgaard hoc tempore expositionem ostentat rerum ex Pompei atque Herculano. Pars loci quam cubicula cum statuibus imaginisque in parietis ac vista cavaedii villae, alia ostentat mortuos in gypso encapsulatos, et tertia pars constituat vicus, ubi praeconia negotium videnda sunt (exempli gratia illa lupanariae, oeci potorium atque illi XL pistricii urbi) - sed etiam locus est etiam vox populi sine ulla reticentia in parietia legenda est (hodia quam 'graffitti' in lingva italica noti). Facte studiosi lingvae latinae tales inscriptiones assidue studiunt quia modus optimus est lingvam populi romani investigare, potius quam lingva culta autorium administratoriumque librium. Sed istud etiam lectionem difficilior facit, et quam proxima iterum expositionem visitabo mehercle glossarium meum adducam!

EN: .. or in sermone anglica: there is an exhibition going on in the local archeological museum with stuff from Pompei and Herculanum, and I visited it today. As for the original places I have visited both ruin towns, but Ercolano far back in the 70s, Pompei somewhat later. Maybe it is about time to return to see them before the supervolcano beneath the Phlegrean fields explodes, which will make the Vesuv eruption of anno 79 look like a mere burp.

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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby Iversen » Thu Nov 21, 2019 10:17 pm

I have spent one week abroad, several days at my mother's place and now two days visiting neighbour cities, which has the effect that I return home with photos that need to be registrated in the bookkeeping system for my photo and postcard collection. So I have actually been busily occupied with my computer the few days I have spent at home, but I have compensated for this by NOT dealing with my classical musical collection - any attempt to do this might have sucked me into the vortex of updating that kept me busy before my Las Palmas voyage. I have not even listened to anything in it to avoid any temptation.

Instead I have watched TV with sound, which had become a quite rare occurrence the last few months, and that means that I have had the chance to listen to some of my Romance and Slavic channels. For instance I have just watched the news on SAT1 from Crna Gora (Montenegro). My level of understanding isn't quite satisfactory due to lack of training, and it definitely doesn't reflect the size of my passive vocabulary according to my word counts, but when I stop tapping on my keyboard and instead simply listen 'like a bloodhound' (i.e. without deliberately trying to understand anything, but just parsing the stream of sounds into words and phrases) then I can almost understand the main points of whatever they choose to say. And now there is a cooking program, and then I can watch what they put into the pots. I would probably not watch a similar program in Danish or English, but this is in Montenegrin (which is very close to the kind of Serbian I have studied), and then I have a reason to watch it.

SER: Нисам љубитељ спорта ни на који начин, али сада сам слушао безначајне активности као што су џудо (у Qатару) и тенис и фудбал, и било је мало горких алузија на некога Маkрона, који очигледно тамо није популаран. Прије сам слушао хрватске вијести, а овдје сам открио да су очито доље били избори -нисам то знао јер су овдје медији код куће тешко причали о било чему осим о предстојећим изборима у Великој Британији. ..

SP: .. excepto por la semana que pasé en Gran Canaria, donde durante horas se discutía las elecciónes parlamentarias españolas, la cuarta vez en cuatro años, y con un resultado que no ha hecho nada en absoluto mejor o más claro que antes.

SER: Порука је, наравно, да колико год чак и досадан садржај та тема била безнадна, подношљивија је кад је тешко схватите - али радије бих чуо за науку или културу, историју или туризам, него за спорт и политику.

Тренутно се прича о култури, нешто о Луксембургу и Босни-и-Херцеговини и књигама. Али те књиге нисам читао.

Kunst029.JPG


GER: PS: Jetzt habe ich auch etliche interviews auf Deutsch mit 'Sprachheld' und verschiedenen Polyglotten gehört (die Inspiration hierzu kam vom Forum), aber sie erinnern mich von den 'gatherings', und ich kann sie deshalb nicht länger hören, ohne von einer verlorene Welt erinnert zu werden. Anders gesagt, ich fühle mich nicht länger als Mitglied dieser Welt, sondern eher als ein Exilierter - gerade wie ich mich fühle auf den Gebieten Malerei und Klassiche Musik (Komposition), die ich auch praktiziert habe, aber dann aufgab aus Ekel.
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Iversen
Black Belt - 4th Dan
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Languages: Monolingual travels in Danish, English, German, Dutch, Swedish, French, Portuguese, Spanish, Catalan, Italian, Romanian and (part time) Esperanto
Ahem, not yet: Norwegian, Afrikaans, Platt, Scots, Russian, Serbian, Bulgarian, Albanian, Greek, Latin, Irish, Indonesian and a few more...
Language Log: viewtopic.php?f=15&t=1027
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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby Iversen » Sat Nov 23, 2019 6:45 pm

... but in spite of all my efforts the unfathomable thing happened: I couldn't resist the temptation to listen to some items from my music collection and as expected I got sucked into the dreaded vortex of eternal updating that kept me busy before my Las Palmas voyage.

I have however taken a few pauses to watch television with sound, and in this moment I'm watching the German station Sat1 because it shows a film about the Torajas on the island Sulawesi in Indonesia, whose territory is called Tana Toraja (land of the Torajas) - and I have actually been there, but only once, and that was before I decided to learn Bahasa Indonesia. Since then I have studied the language intermittently for several years, but my last serious bout with this language dates back to before Las Palmas, and I'm not at a level where I could have a conversation in it. But it is still on my agenda, and each time I wrestle with it I get a wee bit further.

The torajas are known for two things: their peculiar houses and the way they celebrate burials. The family of a deceased store the dead corpse until they have enough money for at least one buffalo (which can take several months), and then this animal is killed publicly with a cut to the throat, and you see it stomping around with blood pouring out of its body while it emits strange wheezing sounds until it falls to the ground (maybe not an event for the fainthearted or strict vegetarians) and lie stonedead in a pool of blood. The meat is then distributed to the members of the tribe according to rank. The family also has to provide pigs for consumption, so a good burial can seriously harm the economy of the family and almost ruin it, but it has to be done according to local customs. At the burial I witnessed no less than three buffalos were slaughtered to honour an elderly deceased lady, so her burial must have cost a fortune. I have shown the locality where the event took place below, but to avoid causing nausea among the more delicate minds of this forum I have selected the least blood-dripping of my photos.

BA I: Saya mengunjungi Sulawesi dalam tur dengan pemandu lokal, yang tahu di mana peristiwa segala hal terjadi, tetapi kemudian kami pergi ke Bali, di mana rencananya akan tinggal selama dua minggu. Saya sudah berarti ini agak terlalu banyak, jadi saya membeli tiket pesawat ke Jawa dan mengunjungi Surabaya dan Yogyakarta (keduanya memiliki kebun binatang), dan saya juga melihat candi yang terkenal Borobodur. Lain kali saya mengunjungi Indonesia, saya harap saya bisa berbicara sedikit bahasa Indonesia.

F2219a04_Tana_Toraja.jpg
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