Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby Iversen » Tue Jul 24, 2018 9:25 pm

I have a very old (light blue) Teach Yourself book that teaches a rather conservative Munster variant of Irish. I don't know whether it ever has had audio, but given the timeframe it would have been in the form of LPs or cassettes. And it is definitely out of print now. Instead it seems that there now are three different TY's: Speak Irish, Complete Irish and Irish Grammar. I own the Irish grammar, but I hate the format. A grammar should give me informations, not cross-examine me, but the Irish Grammar from TY is a textbook that focuses on grammar, not a true grammar. And I have never seen or used the other two.

The Assimil booklet is just a language guide, not a textbook, and I don't think that Assimil has published a full course.

There are some suggestions about Irish courses with audio in this thread.
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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby jeff_lindqvist » Tue Jul 24, 2018 10:22 pm

Iversen wrote:I have a very old (light blue) Teach Yourself book that teaches a rather conservative Munster variant of Irish. I don't know whether it ever has had audio, but given the timeframe it would have been in the form of LPs or cassettes.


From which generation are the light blue TY courses? Perhaps you can use the 1961 audio:
http://www.indiana.edu/~celtie/irish_archive.html
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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby Iversen » Wed Jul 25, 2018 12:13 pm

It is in fact precisely that generation of TY (and thanks to Jeff for the tip)- but the book itself may be hard to find.

I can see that there are newer courses from the same company. One edition from 1994 (shown here) by Diarmuid O Se and Joseph Sheils has a very gaudy exterior, but the one from 2011 offered by the almighty Amazon, also by by Diarmuid O Se, is mainly white - and it gave me the shock of the day when I clicked on "paperback": $429,41 - no wonder that mr. Bezos has become one of the richest men in the universe!

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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby Iversen » Wed Jul 25, 2018 8:31 pm

POR: Quando eu quis testar se eu ainda conseguia entender o português, foi lógico pesquisar no Youtube, e aqui encontrei um vídeo em brasileiro com uma duração de aproximadamente 17 minutos. A primeira coisa que você nota é que os dinossauros são soletrados com dois s'os no meio, a segunda coisa é o velociraptor fica pronunciado /velosiHaptor/ no brasileiro, a terceira é que é muito facil entender o vídeo embora que eu ouvisse quase nada no portugues por meses (exceto a palestra sobre a pronúncia brasileira em Bratislava um mês atrás). Quando o tiver ouvido, experimentarei com alguma coisa no português europeu, mas não é certo que seja uma palestra sobre dinossauros - a selecção portuguesa neste campo não é tão grande quanto a selecção no inglês.

RU: Я также изучил путевой отчет на русском языке, но он описывает поездку в Португалию.

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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby Iversen » Thu Aug 09, 2018 3:57 am

I am now back from the Esperanto conference in Lisbono, which I supplemented with touristical activities in that town, and afterwards I went to to Tomar and continued my tourism in Tomar, Coimbra and Entroncamento ... actually to such an extent that I now have several hundreds of photos waiting for me to be selected, sorted, edited, integrated into my system and supplemented with a travelogue and maps. So it may last a couple of days before I have time to write about the conference and the touristy things - or the weather for that matter: in Tomar we reached 45 C, and half of the time in the Portuguese news reports on TV were dedicated to the disastrous wildfires in the woods of Monchique at the Algarve.

I have to admit that my Esperanto in this moment is so fluent (though not correct in all details) that I am thinking about promoting it to 'spoken on a holiday'. But I suspect that it soon may return to its semi-rusty state.

My Portuguese has also benefitted from the event, and I would like to mention that I have brought home four issues of "Super Interesante", out of which I have so far read two, and that I spent around 4 hours reading the 180 pages of the Portuguese translation of Arthur C.Clarke's novel "2016" at the municipal library in Tomar without using a dictionary. I'm not a habitual literature reader, but long ago I read "2001" and "2010", so I was slightly curious about this sequel. Much of is was fairly OK, not too boring, but the end was disappointing. Mr. Clarke miraculously converted the planet Jupiter into a miniature star named Lucifer near the end of 2010, so it is somewhat strange that he now just lets it disappear without a whimper in the epilogue of "2061". It also worries me that there has been imposed a strict ban on visits to the Jovian moon Europe, but when a spaceship does land nothing really happens - except that they find some homegrown, but apparently extinct (or VERY reticent!) intelligent lifeform roaming that moon. I mean, they don't get crushed or exploded or converted or anything like that... I have read in Wikipedia that there is a fourth book in the series (3001), and the description sound like something out of "Childhood's End", but I don't want to read "3001" in English if there is a translation in some other language which is more in need of training.

Finally: I brought along some bilingual prints in a variety of languages, but didn't use them. I did however study the first half of the old TY Irish once again as goodnight reading in Tomar.

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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby zenmonkey » Thu Aug 09, 2018 11:19 am

Iversen wrote:It is in fact precisely that generation of TY (and thanks to Jeff for the tip)- but the book itself may be hard to find.

I can see that there are newer courses from the same company. One edition from 1994 (shown here) by Diarmuid O Se and Joseph Sheils has a very gaudy exterior, but the one from 2011 offered by the almighty Amazon, also by by Diarmuid O Se, is mainly white - and it gave me the shock of the day when I clicked on "paperback": $429,41 - no wonder that mr. Bezos has become one of the richest men in the universe!



Try ebay.com, they are going for a lot less.
(those prices are posted by people outside of amazon to screw up the book value bots that post used books sales on other sites.)
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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby Iversen » Fri Aug 10, 2018 12:08 pm

EO: Ĉi tiu jara Universala Monda Konferenco sub UEA okazis en la en la universitato de Lisbono kun proksimume 1500 partoprenantoj. Mi loĝis en bonan hotelo kelkaj minutoj de la kongresejo, kie ankaŭ logis multaj aliaj partoprenantoj. Krome, tie estis bona senmuzika matenmanĝo, do mi parolis al kelkaj el la aliaj partoprenantoj tie - sed dum kongresoj mi ne vere parolas tiel, ĉar la plejmulto de la tempo daŭras aŭskultante prelegojn.

La plimulto de la partoprenantoj jam parolas Esperanton, kaj prefere neniu alia lingvo estas parolata (kvankam iuj partoprenantoj parolas en siaj propraj lingvoj - kvankam tio ne estas dezirinda konduto). Sekve, ne estas la sama intensa fokuso pro lingvolernado generala kiel dum la poliglotaj kunvenoj kaj konferencoj, Sed ĉiam estas fulmokursoj en Esperanto kaj en la loka lingvo. Mi kutime ne partoprenas ĉi tiujn, ĉar miaj preferaj lernaj metodoj ne inkluzivas team-bazitajn paroladokursoj. Sed ĉi-jare mi fakte partoprenis unu kurson: mi venis al prelego pri la famaj tramoj de Lisbono, sed ĝi estis nuligita pro la malsano de la preleganto - kaj tiam la persono kiu donis la mesaĝon ofertis dari fulmokurson en la portugala (aŭ legi poemojn, sed la asembleo elektis per granda plimulto auskulti kurson) ... kaj ĝi efektive estis amuzinta, ĉar mi jam povas paroli portugalan kaj do ne devas fari penon lerni ion.

Estas malsamaj specoj de prelegoj, kaj tiuj kiuj interesas min estas precipe tiuj, kiuj ne estas koncernas la Esperantan movadon. Mi fakte venis pri auskulti prelegon je modernaj metodoj de edukado, sed efektive temis pri savi la mondon. Mi ĉesis aŭskulti tiam la preleganto volis ke ni tutaj fariĝus vegetaranojn, kaj prefere eĉ veganojn. Mi ne havas infanojn, do mi ne zorgas ĉu 50 vegistoj streĉus la mondon malpli ol unu fanatika karnomanĝisto aŭ nu - mi ne havas karnomanĝintajn infanojn (kaj infanojn de infanojn ktp), kaj ĝi ne estas mia kulpo se aliaj homoj produktis 50 malsanajn kaj malnutridajn veganojn. Ankaŭ estas prelegoj por membroj de malsamaj sektoj, naturistoj, trejnistoj, paperoplektistoj (origamistoj) ktp, sed la prelegoj kion mi preferas estas tiuj, kiuj estas pri scienco - kaj feliĉe oni povas paroli pri scienco ankaŭ en Esperanto. Ekzemple, mi aŭskultis bonajn prelegojn pri verda energio kaj alian pri planeda astronomio. La centra fajristulo en ĉiu-ĉi agado estas certa Amri Wandel.

Iuj paroladoj estas tre seriozaj: ekzistas kotizo, oni prefere havu doctorado kaj tre tempo pasiĝas. Oni povis ankaŭ povas legi ĉi-tiujn prelegojn en libro vendita dum la konferenco. Bedaŭrinde, la metodo signifas ke plej multaj prelegantoj sidis kaj legis manuskripton anstataŭ paroli libere. Mi preferas ke la prelegojn estu registritaj sur video kaj surmetita en la retejo. Fakte, ĝi estis menciita ke almenaŭ kelkaj el la kongresaj prelegoj registritigis kaj metitos en la UEA retejo, sed mi ne havis jam tempon por esplori ĉu ĉi tiu estas vere la kazo.

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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby Iversen » Sun Aug 12, 2018 11:26 am

The other side of my recent trip to Esperantistan was of course the chance to delve into the touristical opportunities of the surrounding country, Portugal. I have visited its capital Lisboa four times: in one afternoon on an interrailtrip in 1976, on a one-week charter voyage in 1092, on af Porto-to-Lisboa trip in 2007 and now again in 2018 - and there are still sights I haven't had time to see. In 1981 I also found time to visit Cascais/Estoril, Tomar and Coimbra, and I visited Sintra in both 1981 and 2007. This time I wanted to revisit Tomar and Coimbra plus a couple of places in Lisboa itself which I hadn't seen since 1981 ... and when an employee of such a place asks whether I have been there before, it is always fun to say to say yes - thirty seven years ago.

It can't come as a surprise that it took me two days to make integrate the trip into my personal travel documentary intranet system - alone the task of selecting and editing 200 photos took most of a day, and writing the travelogue took another. So evidently I can't go into details with all the things I have seen, but I would like to mention a few new and interesting places which weren't even there during my last visit.

The first of these is the moon. OK, it has been in the sky for longer than I can remember, but this time it was eclipsed, and the sky was totally clear so I manage to see it. Unfortunately the manual distance thing on my camera has never functioned properly, else I would have put it at 384.000 km and got a clear picture, but even a somewhat fuzzy picture is better than no photo:

F5827b05_luna_reclipse.jpg


POR: Portugal também tem alguns novos museus. Em Tomar, visitei o privado Museu dos Fosforos, uma coleção cativante de caixas de fósforos de todo o mundo. E não, isso não é ironia, realmente isto é o que eu pensa ... uma caixa sozinha de fósforos pode ser útil, mas nada mais, os próximos dez caixas serão bem chatas, mas quando você tem MILHARES de caixas a coleção ficará interessante. Por exemplo, eu não sabia que a Holanda já teve literalmente centenas de suas molinas retratadas em caixas de fosforos, e pensar no tempo que deve ter levado para encontrar uma de cada.... estou a ficar cansado apenas pelo pensamento!

Outro museu: o Museu Ferroviário Nacional do Entroncamento, inaugurado em maio de 2015. Entroncamento era até então apenas um nó ferroviário importante, e infelizmente as grandes multidões de transitantes ainda não se descobriu que poderem eles haver uma boa razão para sair do comboio e caminhar ao longo da longa passarela através dos trilhos até o museu. Se isso acontecer, o museu provavelmente terá que inventar outra maneira de levar os visitantes do primeiro edifício ao resto do museu. Porque você tem que passar por alguns trilhos pouco empregados mas principalmente ativos, você é acompanhado por um funcionário do museu - eles não confiam em você olhar para a direita e para a esquerda na frente dos trilhos.

E em Lisboa, quero mencionar o Museu do Oriente, inaugurado em 2008. Nos museus mais antigos, os hóspedes andam em salas iluminadas, e se as coisas estão em janelas de vidro, pode ser difícil fotografá-las. No Museu do Oriente (e alguns outros novos museus) as salas são escuras e as coisas para olhar estão em janelas iluminadas, e deste jeito a impressão visual se torna muito melhor. Quando eu estive lá, metade da área de exposições era dedicada a ternos da ópera e do teatro chineses e, infelizmente, o museu não resistiu à tentação de incluir amostras de vídeo com som, mas essa foi a única desvantagem desse novo museu. Ah, tem mais uma coisa: fica do 'outro lado' dos trilhos que levam ao longo do Tejo, do centro de Lisboa ao Estoril. Eu cruzei em baixo os trilhos na estação de metrô Alcantará-Mar, mas deve haver outros lugares ...

F5828b03_BuddhistMonk_from_ChineseOpera.jpg


And by the way, the weather ... it was not one of those holidays where you get cold feet (44.4C = 112F):

F5832b08_44,4 C--in-Tomar.jpg
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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby Iversen » Mon Aug 13, 2018 9:39 pm

A few weeks ago I had a few comments to Irish copula constructions, and during my stay in Tomar I reread the chapter about them in the old TY Irish. This evening it occurred to me that the verb "is" ("ba" in the past tense) in some ways behave as a verbal particle, and it is symptomatic that the book without hesitation claims that (p.55) "the negative of is is ni (...) the interrogative is "an" ... the negative interrogative is nach; dependent gur; dependent negative "nach". The copula itself disappears after the particles. The negative of ba is níor (...)".

This is of course selfcontradictory - either the copula IS the words mentioned - which all happens to be the usual verbal particles with other verbs - or the particles are what they are and the verb "is" simply vanish when they are present. The verb is elsewhere said only to have to forms, is and ba (present resp. past tense), but since particles also have different forms in the past tense this is not an argument for accepting "is" as a true verb. And actually nualeargais.ie states that "there is an separate copula (in the simple form is), that does not count as a real verb, although it is related to the German "ist" or English "is" and is also so translated. It is seen more as a particle, in the best case as a defect verb". Same page has a somewhat opaque formulation "If a "normal" verb is the predicate, one does not need an additional copula", with the following footnote: "The subject forms of the personal pronouns sé,sí,siad count as a combination of the copula is and the pronouns é,í,iad. This is how in every sentence with these pronouns the copula couples the predicate and subject. Also the relative form of the verb ending in -as in the combination with the copula is explained". Well, not explained in a way I can understand, even I know the words involved. Does the author use the words 'predicate' in the sense Chomsky gave it, but in a way that doesn't make sense?

What I can sense is that at least some constructions with "is" (or the other forms) has a whiff of cleft sentence-ness about them, which shows itself in a tendency to include 'additional' pronouns in the sentences. TY states that there are two main types of copula constructions (at least in its preferred Southern dialects):

a) sentence of definition: is fear i (translated as "it is a man", but more literally "is man he/it")

b) sentence of identity: is é an fear é (translated as "it is the man", but more literally "is he/it the man he/it")
Quote: "Here the pronoun occurs twice (...) unless the subject is a demonstrative", as in "is é sin an leabhar" "that is the book" (type 3)

But then the book reveals that with a demonstrative there is another, apparently more common form, where the demonstrative is allowed to initiate the sentence: "sin é an fear". And even more: there are constructions with an old neutral pronoun "ea" where the predicate always comes first, as evidenced by the following collection from Google (with machine translations):

EA_irish.jpg

Nuachtair writes: "In an Irish sentence, the predicate comes first, then the subject, then the object (P-S-O). In copular clauses, the predicate is introduced by the copula. So: copula - predicate - subject. An object is not used." So a sentence like "sin é an fear" according to this wouldn't be a
copular clause since it doesn't include a copular verb... but there is a catch: the (object) pronoun is used with the demonstrative just as if the demonstrative itself was a copular verb. And by the way, I would find it clearer to avoid the word 'predicate' because come use it to refer to the verb and everything that hinges on it except the subject, but then the 'O' shouldn't be mentioned separately. It would be simpler to say that the normal order is the one given by Wikipedia:

Preverbal particle
Verb
Subject
Direct object or predicate adjective
Indirect object
Location descriptor
Manner descriptor
Time descriptor

Please notice that the word 'predicate' here refers to the part of the sentence that some call 'predicative' in English ... and Prädikat in German, prædikat in Danish and 'prédicat' in French, so I'm sick and tired of seing it used in English to signify the VP thing in a Chomsky universe.

BUT ... and this is the point: in some of those copular constructions with a copular "is" or "ba" it seems that something is coming before the sentence proper (which starts with the verb and its particles), namely the predicative (or whatever you choose to call it). Or could you claim that these constructions also somehow adhere to the normal wordorder? Well, only if the word "sin" is seen as a combination of a copula "is" and a demonstrative. An actually I remember havings seen somewhere a claim that the demonstratives include a copula - but it would take some serious etymological studies to investigate this claim, and I'm so far not equipped to do that.

As for the sentences with "ea" they generally have nominal predicates, like in "Gréasaí ba ea a athair Garret" ('Her father was a friend of Garret'), which I see (maybe a little far out) as expressing the logic of "friend of Garret it-is which father Garret's (was)". I looked through three pages of Google hits with "agus" + "ea" through without finding a single question or full negative example, but "ea" is used in replies like "ni hea" ('not it' = no).

TY complicates the situation even more by mentioning that a sentence like "is cunámh mór comhairle mhaith" ("good advice is a great help", or literally "is help-great advice-good") more often than not would be expressed as "is mór an cúnamh comhairle mhaith" (is great the help advice good) or with pronouns and ea: "is maith an rud é" (is good the thing he/it) rather than "rud maith is ea é" (thing good is it he/it - my translations, and please notice the wordorder of the "ea" example).

Nobody promised that Irish would be easy...


'Nuff about Irish, and 'nuff about grammar...

I visited the public library in my town today to find and borrow the sequel to Clarke's 2001, 2011 and 2061. It is named "3001" and starts out with a claim that some rather physical beings passed by this planet long ago and did some genetic wizardry on the species they found, and then they placed some dark objects on the moon and in Africa and near Jupiter and left for good .. whereupon they transmogriffed first into machines and later into some kind of space structures. The funny thing is that I have a socalled 'history' channel where a group of alien researchers in full earnest claim that this actually happened, although closer to our time (or maybe also much earlier and maybe also now). Ok, let them try to prove it . So far I would accept that the old folks around the world knew more than we may have thought they did, but the fact that the proposed 'evidence' for aliens is scattered all over the planet and occurs through the whole human history back to Göpekli Tepe (and maybe even back to before the Ice age) suggest to me that aliens ought to be more visible to ME if they were so omnipresent throughout the history. Mr. Clark wrote a novel called "Childhood's end" where the aliens finally manifested themselves in their final shape, and they looked like Satan. Fine with me, but so far the 'aliens' of the History Channel havent' given TV interviews so I guess they don't exist.

One thing more: So far I have read half the book in two hours, and the funny thing is although I ought to know English better, this is about the same time it took me to get through the first half of 2061 in Portuguese in the municipal library of Tomar. Though there I didn't also listen to music and watch silent TV with subtitles at the same time. I'll try reading the second half without those distractions to see how much faster I can do it - maybe as goodnight lecture.

But there was another thing at the library, namely a 'Language café', where people can sit down and discuss in different languages. But there weren't many participants -just four (plus me). I did have a conversation in Italian, followed by one in English (partially about languages), but I guess that it needs a more rigid structure and some more publicity to get a larger audience.

Kunst142.JPG


(PS: more about Irish copulas here - beam me down, Scottie... no more Irish today)
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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby Iversen » Wed Aug 15, 2018 12:12 pm

Monday evening (or rather 'night') I finished "3002" as planned, but contrary to expectation it also took about 2 hours to read the second half - even without TV and music. Maybe I read slower when I lie down. Anyway, the ministar Lucifer (formerly known as Jupiter) still existed, so I think Clark must have regretted that he switched it off in the last sentence of "2061". And the lifeforms on its moon (or should we say planet?) Europa had developed like mad during the last 939 years. As for the Earth there now were giant towers up to an artificial world in the geostationary orbit, and somehow people had found out to use something called vacuum energy. And this is where my interest was aroused. Clarke wrote something about this in the footnotes (yes! a novel with footnotes!), but since his time a few things have happened which even he hadn't anticipated .. though we still have absolutely no clue as to how such an energy source could be tapped.

The point is that a a famously taciturn British physicist named Dirac in 1930 put forward the theory that a vacuum isn't empty: it is a seething froth of virtual particles that pop out of nothing and disappear again before the spacetime authorities have had a chance to discover and catch them. And even this sounds like madness gone berserk it has some consequences which have forced the scientific community to accept the idea. For instance the Hawkins radiation from black holes depends on it: if a virtual particle pair pops up at the border of a black hole one of the particles may be swallowed and never be seen again since it has sunk below the event horizon - but the other may escape and suddenly the event has resulted in some real radiation emanating from the border of the black hole. Quote Wikipedia, "the Dirac sea is a theoretical model of the vacuum as an infinite sea of particles with negative energy." And later in the same article: "The existence of the sea implies an infinite positive electric charge filling all of space. In order to make any sense out of this, one must assume that the "bare vacuum" must have an infinite negative charge density which is exactly cancelled by the Dirac sea. " For some reason this makes me think of a swimmingpool filled with frogs.

So nearest thing to a machine that could extract energy from the Dirac sea would be a black hole, but I can't see how we can use that idea for practical energy production here on the planet Terra. And I don't want anybody to experiment with black holes in my neighboorhood during my lifetime.

DIrac equation.jpg

And what has this to do with language learning? Well, for me a lot since it lured me into searching for articles in other languages than English and Danish about vacuum energy, Higgs fields, black energy and similar themes, and now I have a nice little collection of printouts waiting for me. One of the interesting sources I tapped was the homepage BBC service for Bahasa Indonesia, where there is a whole pageful of articles about "sains" (science), so yesterday I was buried up to my neck in science articles in Indonesian. The irony is that the one I printed out first wasn't about one of the ultra exotic corners of contemporary physics, but about something as oldfashioned and classical as lunar eclipses. And just before I wrote the following rant I also noticed an article about the recent earthquake on Lombok so now that has been added to the collection.

BA I: Artikel tentang gerhana bulan 28 Juli, tidak mengatakan apa pun yang saya tidak tahu sebelumnya, termasuk fakta bahwa itu adalah gerhana terpanjang abad ini (jadi saya sangat beruntung karena cuaca cerah di Lisbon!). Gerhana matahari adalah karena bulan datang di antara matahari dan bumi, dan secara kebetulan mereka memiliki ukuran yang hampir sama yang terlihat dari tanah. Ini berarti bahwa Anda harus menjadi dalam tempat tertentu di bumi pada saat tertentu untuk melihat gerhana matahari total, dan titik ini berkelana dalam rute spesifik di dunia. Gerhana bulan berbeda: Bulan memasuki bayangan Bumi dan tinggal di sana selama beberapa waktu - dalam hal ini 1½ jam. Oleh karena itu, semua orang yang dapat melihat bulan sama sekali akan melihatnya sebagai merah gelap "blood moon" (bulan darah). Atau jika tidak seluruh bulan memasuki bayangan, maka semua orang hanya akan mengalami gerhana bulan parsial.

GER: In den folgenden 53 Minuten werde ich es jedoch ablehnen über Wissenschaft zu lesen und stattdessen ein Programm auf 3SAT über Schloß Neuschwanstein sehen. Obwohl sie jetzt Murmeltiere und Adler statt pseudo-mittelalterlicher Prachtsäale zeigen ...
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