Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

[Iversen]

I had planned to add to this log thread already yesterday, but each time I tried I got caught up in writing in another thread - long messages like the two in the thread about the level og the language in newspapers and the one about using computers to model syntax. OK, now I'm here, and I have not written anything anywhere else yet since I woke up.

So to cut it short: the last couple of evenings I have used Blakeley's old TY Old English as goodnight reading, even though I would have preferred a real Anglosaxon grammar. The texts in the book are mostly are mostly religious, but there are also some from chronicles. The one I read yesterday was the Christmas tale about the shepherds in the field who saw an angel (or alien from outer space if you believe certain television channels) who told them to hurry to a nearby stable to see something interesting. Another early text in the book is the one about the prodigal son, who asked for his share of the inheritance from his father while the father still was alive, went out and squandered it and returned to the familiy to wail and ask for more money - which a younger son didn't sympathize with. Jesus apparently thought this behaviour was OK, but I don't.

I saw a TV program about the Roman emperor Aurelian, who succesfully battled against queen Zenobia from Palmyra, the Goths, the Alemans and a military guy in Gallia who had separated Gallia and Britain from Rome, and he also ordered the construction of the still visible walls around Rome - but while relaxing back home in Rome he was unexpected murdered while taking a walk after just five years of rule. Unfortunately the Latin Vicipedia biography was rather shortwinded so I had to resort to the English one. After that I also read several articles about Karl Martel and the Karolingians on Wikipedia, but in English so that doesn't count.

F0318a02 Porta Pinciana, Roma.jpg

RU: И, наконец, я изучил (из глубины моего кресла) трехъязычный текст о черных дырах, который я упоминал здесь ранее. Первоначальный текст был на польском языке, но я добавил вкрапленно русский машинный перевод, а в отдельной колонке справа датский машинный перевод. Всегда сомнительно изучать неоригинальные тексты, но русский текст в этом случае выглядел достаточно надежным - и я понимаю русский лучше, чем польский, но польский лучше, когда я уже сначала прочитал тот же текст на русском языке.

Самым неожиданным в тексте было объяснение, что вы меньше чувствуете гравитацию, когда падаете через горизонт событий на огромную черную дыру, чем когда падаете в дыру меньшего размера. Это потому, что горизонт событий у большой дыры намного дальше. Часто говорят, что люди, попадающие в черные дыры, растягиваются, как спагетти, потому что на одном конце вес больше, чем на другом - но, возможно, вы больше похожи на макароны, когда попадаете в сверхмассивное разнообразие. отверстие.

GR: Έχω επίσης επανάληψει περίπου μισά από τα 29 γλωσσάρια μου, και τα τελευταία (στις ρομαντικές και γερμανικές γερμανική γλώσσες) αναμένω να κάνω σήμερα. Ο καιρός εξω είναι γκρίζος και υγρός - αλλιώς θα είχα πάει για μια βόλτα. Τόσο κατά της θέλησής μου, κάνω ακριβώς αυτό που νόμιζε η κυβέρνησή μας θα κάνουμε - καθόμαστε στο σπίτι χωρίς να μιλήστε σε κανέναν. Και όλα τα μουσεία και οι ζωολογικοί κήποι και οι βιβλιοθήκες και τα γενικά καταστήματα είναι κλειστά επειδή οι υγειονομικές αρχές φοβούνται την αγγλική παραλλαγή του κινεζικού ιού.

IT: A proposito, ho cercato "maccheroni" su Wikipedia per trovare una buona immagine, ma ho avuto uno shock: tutte le immagini raffiguravano pezzi di pasta tubolari corti, ma il tipo di maccheroni a cui io stavo pensando era lunghi di venti centimetri (ma sempre tubolari). Controllerò al più presto nel supermercato più vicino se questo tipo di maccheroni sia estinto anche in Danimarca.

EN: By the way, I found an informative illustrated list of pastatypes here (in English) - but long hollow macaroni as I knew them from the old days are conspicuously absent even from that site. So feel free to jump into a supermassive black hole - you may die, but not in the shape of oldfashioned macaroni.

Pasta (Google).jpg

[Montmorency]

I was tempted to reply to several of your posts above, but don't want to clutter your log too much Iversen. May I just say that your log is always interesting, entertaining, and above all instructive, in language matters and much else. And of course the art work is a joy. Even your word lists are a form of artwork - the multi-coloured ones, certainly. So, thank you for all this.


In sort of reply to one of your posts, where you were taking photos in a dream, if you are anything like me, you may still be half expecting to find those photos somewhere in your camera or smart phone.

[Iversen]

To Montmorency: I don't fear that this thread will become cluttered anytime soon so feel free to comment. And thank you for the very positive words.

I have written before that I tend to dream dreams where I behave like a tourist, i.e. I buzz around and explore some unknown place - and one of the funny things that I already during the dreams is to compare the dream scenario to previous dreams or to places in reality,I do see a tendency to revert to the house where I lived with my family during my childhood and youth long ago (which probably is quite normal), but other existing locations also pop up - with no recognizable reason for the choice. On the other hand there are a fair number of dreams where there isn't any speech at all, not even Danish, and I have not read or heard about other people who regularly see Google-like maps in their dreams while they move around in them.

The problem with dreams is that there apparently is an inborn mechanism that serves to make us forget them - or inversely, no mechanisme that helps us to remember them. Which means that the dreams which are remembered probably aren't representative in any way. I studied the subject of dream content yesterday on the internet and found references to a few research projects where attempts were made to quantify dream content and moods, but for some reason I didn't think of recording the links. One of the better overviews referred to a number of experiments where people had been awakened right at the end of a REM episode in order to maximize the recall, and the basic overall result was that there are slightly more persons in women's dreams, more anxiety in dreams of young persons (except in cases of illnesses or extreme stress), but at least as much variation based on things like job experience - and one experiment actually suggested that people who by some inventory were classified as rather fantasyless in waking state also had less creative dreams - but they did dream. And there was no clear indication that dreams should have a compensating let alone healing function. Unfortunately much of the available material on the internet is provided by people who firmly believe in the interpretation of dreams (or even get their income from it) - including old man Freud, whose ideas about dreams now mostly have been dropped, but also more esoteric types whose idees still flourish.

One of the things I didn't find was a large repository of actual dream reports. Such collections must have been obtained during research projects, but apparently they have not been made public. I found one German lucid-dream wiki where the usual tips where reiterated, and there was an attached forum with a section for dream reports - but only visible to members and I had no intention to become a member just to read something once.

As for lucid dreams (i.e. dreams where you know that you are dreaming and maybe even can influence the content deliberately) I personally have them fairly regularly - in fact more often that I have dreams with speech in foreign languages. Lucid dreams are sometimes seen as very rare (and some incompetent 'researchers' even deny that they exist, referring the reports to things like daydreams), but I did also find a claim that half the population have had a least one such experience, and some have them several times a week. Best of all: research carried out by people by LaBerge and Tholey has proven long ago that some test persons actually can report back to the researches by thinking about moving objects, which can be observed through the eye movements. And newer research has shown that certain brain regions that have something to do with self perception and deliberate decision making are functioning during lucid dreams, but not during other dreams (including the kind of bleak ruminating that takes place outside the REM episodes, occasionally interrupted by night terrors) - so if you see somebody denying the existence of lucid dreams then you have located a fact resistant fool.

I'll describe a dream below which took place two days ago - rather short, but with deliberate action of the kind that only could be possible during lucid dreaming - but unfortunately also without any speech at all (at least in the part I remember).

LA: Somnium de tempore memeor ubi Colosseum Romae vidi, quasi quam photocartula infra. Et ex hoc tempore iam lucide fuit. Nescio qua de causa, sed decidi picturam Colossei findere et partes repellere. Post hoc - quasi ut in tempesta captus - per aerem circumegi et dextrem de turba iactus sum. Potestam rursus recuperavi et stante pede appuli - et vidi quod juxta ruinae Fori Romani eram, in Via dei Fori Romani. Ante me vidi ruinam fori (hodie via sub Mussolini facta per ruinas secat, sed ego ruinam ante me videbam). Ad ruinam veni, et hic cogitavi: cur non forma sua classica revocare, et tunc quasi hortus inciperunt nasci - muri alteriori fierunt, et simul pallescebant. Ante me nunc muram plenam vidi cum porta, et per portam in atrium magnum intravi - quasi ut in ecclesiam cathedralis, sed cum romaniis in toga ambulantes pro italianiis hodiernibus. Et nemini me notare parebant - ego navem traversebat quasi spectrum, sed ex somno experrectus sum antequam ad altram partem navis adveni. Somnium interum verosimile modo unas-duas minutas durebat, et tempus non erat communicandi.

P1003a01 Colosseum (postcard).jpg

Ruinas (ex Google Earth).jpg

PS: I just did the experiment of letting Goggle Translate do its thing on the Latin text above, and the result was no less ludicrous than I had expected. So for those of you whose Latin has become slightly rusty here is a summary in Italian (the second-most relevant language for this tale):

IT: Ricordo il sogno dal punto in cui ho visto il Colosseo davanti a me, quasi come una cartolina (vedi sopra). Ero già lucido quindi immagino che l'immagine sia stata divisa in medio, e le parti si sono allontanate l'una dall'altra. Questo ha innescato una specie di tornado in cui sono volato in aria ma ho ripreso il controllo e sono atterrato in piedi in Via dei Fori Romani a Roma, vicino al Foro Romano. Ho visto davanti a me le ruine di un forum (non c'è, perché la strada di Mussolini taglia la zona della vecchia zona della basiliche). Sono andato presso loro e ho pensato che sarebbe più divertente vedere l'edificio com'era nell'epoca romana. E i muri allora comminciano a crescere velocemente come piante in un giardino in time-lapse, e sono anche diventati imbiancati. Alla fine c'era un muro intero con una porta, e sono entrato in un'enorme sala simile a una cattedrale dove una folla di romani in toga hanno iniziato a vagare. Ma non sembravano accorgersi di me e non sono riuscito a iniziare una conversazione - mi sono svegliato prima di raggiungere l'altro lato della sala.

[Iversen]

By the way, I forgot to mention that I finished the first (and probably only) repetition of the 29 wordlists yesterday.

This evening I have been studying the passage about the Devonian era in the text in Bahasa Indonesia I once found in a blog somewhere on the internet. I can see that it probably is a revised version of an Anglophone article or booklet because there sometimes appear isolated words in English, and I have also a few examples where my dictionary lookups fail to give a convincing result - but if you assume that a translation program has made an error then you understand why the Indonesian text ended up looking as it does. But I keep using it because it is the most interesting text I have got in the language.

Before that I first tried to find the page with summaries of reports from research into lucid dreams I mentioned a couple of messages ago, but in vain. I did however find that the Danish site Videnskab.dk has a lot of short articles about brain function (in Danish), and one of the more interesting was one that told about a student named Than Pierre Doan who discovered that the prevailing theory about the information stream to the hippocampus was wrong - it had been assumed for 25 years that there were two isolated routes, but he could prove that there only is one, and that all the information first is evaluated in a center called the lateral entorhinal cortex - which ought to completely change the research strategies for things like Alzheimer and other memory related illnesses. Among other things changes to this center predate the measurable occurence of Alzheimer by up to ten years. I love to see such cases where a Kuhn'ian paradigm suddenly is overturned by new evidence. Another article told that there probably are two very different Parkinson's diseases, one that starts in the guts and spreads to the brain and another that starts in the brain and often stays there.

But then I felt bad about reading so much in Danish and learning nothing (I already speak that language fluently), and therefore I watched a couple of videos in French instead, including a 50 minutes long interview about lucid dreams. Since I haven't visited a French speaking country since 2017 (Guyane Française) I have not spoken to anybody in that language and not listened nearly enough to spoken French, but here I got more than an hour of unmitigated French speech for free.

Kunst161.JPG

PS: the red thing at the back is the cerebellum - we have recently discussed the function of that part of the brain in another thread.

[Iversen]

It has rained all day long and all our museums and libraries and restaurants are closed because the authorities are scared to death due to the new English corona variant, so I have stayed indoors the whole day and studied languages much of the time - mostly in the form of copying/studying snippets of texts as described earlier in this thread. But I have also watched television some of the time, even though most of the programs on flow TV are utterly hopeless and irrelevant, if not downright disgusting. Right now I watch a fairly OK Danish quiz with subtitles on the screen, while I'm listen to piano music by the talented Russian weirdo Scriabin.

Among the languages I have been through today are several Slavic ones - i.e. more Polish and Russian black holes plus something about the Frenchman Laplace in Polish, an article obout furniture in Slovak, something about the mysterious Tunguska event in Russian, something about fermented dairy products in Bulgarian (several pages, actually), some Sinaia sights in Romanian and elasmobranch critters (sharks, rays etc.) in Indonesian - I hesitate to call them "fish" because (as pointed out by mr. Dawkins) according to current cladistics they are as far from bonefish as bonefish are from you and me.

I can't comment on all of this without boring you to death so let me just take a few cautious dips into the murky waters of foreign language learning.

BA I: Dalam bahasa Indonesia, saya membaca tentang era Devon, tempat ditemukannya hiu, pari, dan ikan bertulang rawan lainnya. Saya telah menyebutkan bahwa teks aslinya telah dalam bahasa Inggris, karena muncul kata-kata yang belum diterjemahkan. Contoh jelek di sini: "The Devonian nen moyang ikan yang hidup saat ini milik dua kelompok nonarmored utama. The tulang rawan ikan, disebut demikian karena tulang rawan membentuk kerangka mereka (...)."

Nama "tulang rawan" menarik karena mengungkapkan adanya masalah dengan kamus saya, yang sebaliknya saya cukup percayai. "Rawan" sendiri berarti, menurut kamus, sesuatu yang berada di garis 'tidak pasti', tetapi "tulang rawan" tidak termasuk. Namun, saya tahu bahwa ada referensi ke ikan bertulang rawan (hiu, pari), jadi saya mencari di bawah "cartilage" di bagian Inggris-Indonesia - tidak disebutkan! Tapi sekarang aku duduk di komputer saya, dan tentu saja kelompok Elasmobranchii disebut ikan bertulang rawan - dan 'cartilage' diterjemahkan menjadi (tulang) rawan. Hiu dan pari sudah tua, tetapi ikan bertulang rawan terbesar dan paling berbahaya adalah ikan lapis baja dalam Devon, yang tidak memiliki gigi kecuali tepi tulang dengan taring palsu. Spesies terbesar berukuran hingga 10 meter.

x04a_Devon.jpg

BU: Най-неочакваното в българския те кст за ферментирали млечни продукти беше исторически анекдот. Френският крал Франсоа 1 имаше хронична диария, но след това османският султан му изпрати експерт в производството на кисело мляко и кралският корем беше излекуван от този особен продукт. От този момент Французите произвеждат кисело мляко (Danone е френска компания). Предпочитам обаче кремообразните кисели млека от Германия - с плодове и много захар. И не е задължително те да са биологични - органичните кисели млека в Дания са нещо тънка помия.

Kunst063.JPG

[Iversen]

Two days ago I had a dream where the lingustic content was in English (a foreign language for me, albeit my best one).

The dream had three episodes: in the first I was inside a spacious cathedral in a town on a rock. In the next I had somehow left the town and returned in a small propeller plan to an airfield just beside the rock and at the same level as the 'high town' (with a connecting bridge across the chasm). In the third I had already crossed the bridge and now wanted to find a suitable hotel. I knew that there was a hotel right beside the cathedral, but for some reason I also knew that it was closed for repairs. Instead I chose one where I had to walk through a corridor to the reception, and there I saw a seated lady at a computer. When I got to the counter she stood up and asked "Austrylia?" (with a very open a + y at the red 'y'). I answered with these exact words (which I wrote down when I woke up): "No, I'm a member of the Danish group which arrived here ten minutes ago". Unfortunately I remember absolutely nothing about any such group, nor about the rest of the conversation.

A few minutes I woke up from a short afternoon nap, where I dreamt about the dream report above (!). I looked at the words I had written down, and I knew the meaning, but the text now was written in some weird, incomprehensible language so I thought I had better write it down again, and then I added the English version again and woke up (in the sense that I suddenly felt and saw my actual environment again). I didn't actually write the English words again, but just saw them pop up to the right of the incomprehensible text, which was written in Latin letters.

Apart from that: I got wind Monday that my mother had got an appointment for her first covid vaccination, but without transportation, and I then hired a car for a few days so that we could get that fixed. So I have spent those days away from my computer, and as usual that meant less study activity. But not zero activity since I had brought some old bilinguals along for goodnight reading.

SER: Прва збирка текстова садржала је, између осталог, неколико исечака са веб странице БеоЗооа, зоолошког врта у Београду, смештеног у углу тврђаве Калемегдан. Посетио сам га неколико пута. Прво сам мислио да је застарео, али је постао бољи. Посетио сам Београд у вези са конгресом Полиглота у Новом Саду.

DU: De volgende tekstbundel bevatte biografieën van twee Nederlandse schilders: Pieter de Hooch en Jan Vermeer. Er is niet veel bekend over hun leven. De Hooch werd geboren in Rotterdam, woonde enige tijd als arme kunstenaar in Delft, verhuisde daarna naar Amsterdam waar zijn interieurschilderijen 'rijker' en helderder werden (misschien een teken van succes?), maar toen werden de schilderijen weer somberder en het laatste teken van leven over hem was een bericht dat zijn zoon was opgenomen in het gekkenhuis van Amsterdam. Vermeer verdiende zijn geld als kunsthandelaar & kunstenaar, en net als van Gogh was hij het meest succesvol in het verkopen van andermans schilderijen, maar probeerde dat deel van zijn leven te laten vallen. Hij was zo traag als schilder dat er slechts zo'n 35 authentieke werken van hem vandaag worden gerekend. Gelukkig kocht een weldoener namens van Ruijven de helft - en na de dood van de schilder betaalde de weduwe met twee schilderijen een schuld aan de bakker van 600 gulden. Waarschijnlijk werd dit ook vooral uit medelijden gedaan, want Vermeer werd pas lang na zijn dood beroemd.

AF: Die laaste versameling tekste (sonder vertaling) begin met 'n teks oor fossiele uit die Karoo, geskryf in Wordpress in 2008 deur 'n Rosalind Franklin. Dan volg haar afskeid van Wordpress as gevolg van die feit dat die meeste ander skrywers daar (in afrikaans) net geskryf oor godsdienste, Bybelverse en gebede en soos wat - wat 'n jammer! Maar dan volg die hele paleontologiese geskiedenis van die aarde in 'n teks uit Wikiwand - 'n soort eweknie vir die Indonesiese teks wat ek onlangs (weer) genoem het. Gelukkig word Afrikaans nie net deur godsdienstige mense geskryf nie, dus kan 'n mens steeds leesbare inhoud vind. Anders sou ek nie die moeite doen om dit te leer nie..

x06a (Permian).jpg

[Iversen]

Only a short update this time (I hope..)

I have studied a few texts, including one in Bulgarian about Чингис хан (Genghis Khan). And almost simultaneously there was a program on TV about archeologists who try to locate his grave, but so far without much success. But he has left his imprint in other ways, like ruined cities and depopulated swaths of land ... genes. A study from 2003 found that "Thus, a single male line, probably originating in Mongolia, has spread in the last ∼1,000 years to represent ∼8% of the males in a region stretching from northeast China to Uzbekistan. If this spread were due to a general population expansion, we would expect to find multiple lineages with the same characteristics of high frequency and presence in multiple populations, but we do not (...). The star-cluster pattern is unique." So Mr. Khan must have been as active raping women during the night as he was murdering men AND the remaining women during the day. But the short article in Bulgarian didn't mention this tidbit of information.

And with a Wikipedia article about iron in Albanian I have restarted my Albanian studies.

... see, I CAN write short messages!

[Iversen]

Yesterday I continued my Albanian ressuscitation attempt by jumping from the metal iron to the Illyrian iron age, but it is still slow going - and I still have to look far too many words up. I also studied a short biography of the Russian composer Shostakovich, the reson being that I had finished listening to my Shostacollection earlier in the day (and continued the alphabetical listening project by listening to music by Sibelius). And since I can't read Finnish the only possible choice was to read about the Russian composer.

However I then somehow got the idea that I would have a peek at my musical history in this thread, and it starts at page 130 with a Hurrian hymn. The Hurrians lived in an area that went from Northern Iraq to Armenia and Northern Syria, and they formed states like Mitanni and (later) Ugarit. Their language(s) were not Indoeuropean and not Semitic, but maybe related to some of the language families from the Caucasus region - however it seems that the scholars can't even agree on this claim. The extinct Hurro-Urartian languages were staunchly ergative, and there is an interesting comparison between Hurrian and Urartian in Wikipedia - and I'm in awe of the scholars who have learnt so much about two (maybe three) almost isolated languages from a distant past, which only are known from a limited number of cuneiform tablets!

One of the most surprising finds from the royal palace of Ugarit (now in Northern Syria) was a 'songbook' from around 1400 BC with at least 36 songs, with no. 6 as the best preserved one and therefore also the one scholars have spent most time on. There are at least five different reconstructions available today, so right now you shouldn't consider any of them as hewn in stone (or rather: scribbled into clay), but the details about the reconstruction work are quite fascinating - actually more so than the dubious reconstruction results.

I have read an article by musicologist Marcelle Duchesne-Guillemin about the topic, where she first summarily states that the first assumption about a pentatonic scale can't be correct since it would lead to reconstructions that would sound like hell (my words, not hers), and several later attempts must be dropped because the number of syllables can't be matched to the presumed notes on the tablet. It seems that the key to understanding the notational system is a heptatonic system with modes based on the presumed intonation of the strings of the lyre in use at the time. The whole things is as complicated as hell as you might expect from a culture that still used the Cuneiform writing invented by the Sumerians a thousand years before and suited to their language, but not really to anything else.

And now I just wonder whether the musicians at the Ugarit court themselves could read the clay tablets that contained their songs, or whether the tablets were made by specialized scribes purely for documentation purposes. They probably couldn't..

Ugarit-hymn 6.jpg

Finally today's entry from dreamland:

RO: Am ajuns la gara dintr-un oraș anonim românesc. Gara se afla la sud de centrul aproximativ circular (similar cu o versiune aplatizată a orașului Alba Iulia fără meterezele) și exista un drum circular în jurul centrului orașului. La est se află o suburbie cu un cimitir mare. Nu-mi amintesc de mersul pe acolo, dar amintiți-vă că am mers în jurul cimitirului, căutând pietrele funerare cele mai vechi și mai acoperite cu licheni. Era o stradă de-a lungul părții laterale a cimitirului și aici am intrat într-o casă - dar am observat patru paturi cu pacienți din spital și am închis repede ușa. Am intrat și într-o mică capelă de pe aceeași stradă unde am vist un raft cu argintărie. Mai târziu, m-am uitat din nou într-o altă casă pe aceeași stradă și și erau, de asemenea, patru paturi cu pacienți în ele - nu am intrat.

Direcția visului și-a schimbat acum: am vrut să merg în centru să mănânc la cină. Dar, când mă plimbam acolo, am ajuns să mă gândesc la ce aș putea de fapt comanda în limba română (în afară de pizza). Cu toate acestea, nu am ajuns în oraș (și nu am avut ocazia să comand o masă), dar îmi amintesc că mă gândeam dacă o "karbonade" daneză ar putea fi numită "carbonadă" în limba română.

Rumænsk_drømmeby.jpg

EN: .. and now we have to revert to English because the rest takes place in the real world (after my awakening), and things may become slightly complicated if you have to pass them through a machine translator.

So first I looked "karbonade" up in my Danish-Romanian dictionary from Gyldendal, and it said 'cotlet' (there is no dish called "carbonada" in Romanian, and it's a totally different thing in Latinamerica). Ahem, let's first note that a Danish "karbonade" is a circular slab of pork-farce fried on a pan. You use the word "hakkebøf" if the farce (spam) is of bovine origin, and just "bøf" if the slice of the ox hasn't been minced (although you can say "bøf" about "hakkebøf" if everyone knows that you can't afford a real steak). On the other hand, a "kotelet" in Danish is an un-minced piece of pig ass meat (from French "côtelette", although a French "cotelette" also can be made from other animals), and cannot be made from minced meat, which is called "carne tocată" in Romanian. Further investigation has shown that a Romanian "cotlet" likewise must be made from un-minced meat, so it is essentially the same as a Danish "kotelet" - and the dictionary is WRONG!!!!!

OK, how would a Romanian cook then call a circular piece of ground porc fried on a pan? Well, probably something in French, but let's cut out the professionals (and save a lot of money). What about a good oldfashioned Romanian gospodină? I found something called "pârjoală" on the internet, but when I looked it up in the Romanian Wikipedia the article showed - hahahahaha - a picture of Danish "frikadeller" (singular form: frikadelle). The point is that "pârjoală" contains eggs, and the Danish 'frikadelle' does too. Actually my mother's 'frikadelle-fars' contains 400 grams of finely ground pork (or poultry) meat, one ground onion, a couple of spoonfuls of flour, one egg plus pepper and a pinch of salt (sometimes also other condiments), and each 'delle' is oval and around 4-5 cm long. Wikipedia claims that we have got the word through German from Italian "frittatella", and if that's true then the word isn't related to "fricassee", which is some kind of stew containing pieces of meat.

Cotlet_Schabowy cu oiure (wikipedia ro).jpg

By the way, in Danish we also use the word "frikadelle" about pompous histrionic actors, whereas a "bøf" is a male person who does the irons and get totally oversized muscles. But neither is meant for human consumption. And 'deller' (in the plural) refer to the fat deposits that occur around the waist of slightly overweight people.

So in essence I still don't know what I should have ordered if I had reached the city centre in my dream. The Romanians (and Moldovans) do eat fried ground pork, but then they apparently mix it with other ingredients and form it into cylindrical 'mici' (similar to the Slavic Ćevapi) or small meatballs with lots of condiment.

Karbonade (Arla).jpg

[Iversen]

I was running out of study texts in a number of my languages, and since my recent research concerning Danish 'karbonader' had shown me that my kitchen vocabulary might be slightly less than overwhelming even in languages I know well, I decided to focus on one of my preferred kinds of food: pizza. So I first printed a fairly long Wikipedia article in Romanian (without translation), followed by a number of other culinarian items with a translation. Then I tried to do the same with Albanian, but the Albanian Wikipedia was shorter so I had to add some pizzalogical items from other sources. Finally I printed some articles in Polish, but since I now found that pizzas already had got more than their share of my ink and paper I chose to print one article about the extinct Aurochs and another about beef.

Yesterday I studied a Polish text about the French mathematician d'Alembert and today I have made a modest start with the first paragraph of the Albanian article about pizzas which I mentioned above.

AL: Dhe tani mendoj: Unë kam qenë në Shqipëri dy herë, por çfarë hëngra atje poshtë? Përgjigja është: Unë thjesht nuk mund të kujtohet. Unë nuk jam një udhëtar i kuzhinës. Por ndoshta pica...

P6902b01_muzeum_Dürres.jpg

But earlier in the day I was going to put the used texts aside together with the corresponding handwritten copies and wordlists, and gosh ... then I found several pages with wordlists that never had been through even one single repetition! So since this was the last chance to do it I have been filling out repetition list with at least 600 words (see below). In a normal wordlist there is one column in the target language, one with a translation and then the first column again. In a repetition list I first write the translations, one block at a time, and when I know I can get back to the original foreign word for every item in the block I fill out the corresponding part of the second column. And then so forth. And even though the wordlists were from sometime in 2020 I still remembered why most of the words were on the list.

Diehard SRS'ians may think that it is some kind of cheating to see both the foreign word AND the translation before filling out the lists, but that's actually the idea. The repetition is one more chance to see both and then show that you can recall the foreign word with its translation covered, it is NOT meant to be a third degree interrogation. And when the first column is covered up in one of my repetition sheets you do have to show that you remember the foreign words, and that's not a given thing, even if you have seen it briefly a minute earlier. The only debatable point is whether one repetition is enough, and OK, if I feel that I'm struggling I may do two repetitions, but never more - I don't want to burn out and get bored.

This activity took several hours, but when I then started working on the Albanian pizza article I could feel that I was much more at ease with the language than just a few days ago. But Albanian is not even near the stage where I would dare to use it in a discussion - which is OK since it is extremely unlikely that I will be able to visit Albania or Kosova in the near future.

My goodnight book is for the time being a collection of French idioms. It functions admirably well for this purpose ... Z ZZZZZ

Albanian_repetition.jpg

[Iversen]

Yesterday I did manage to do some studying before I was diverted to other activites - but more about that below. I studied four texts. The first was the long article about pizzas from the Romanian Wikipedia which I have mentioned earlier in this thread:

RO: Nu am rostit cuvântele acestui text, dar pentru că eu pot face fără o traducere, poate fi de două ori mai mult de cuvinte pe pagini. Și pot constata cu satisfacție că a trebuit să caut doar două cuvinte. Articolele menționează că originea pizzele la Italia a fost Napoli și că cuvântul „pizza” (scris în felul acesta?) este folosit pentru prima dată într-un text latin din 997, dar deja romanii aveau pâine rotundă plată cu mezeluri - cu toate că brânza nu este nemenționat explicit. În Pompei, lângă Napoli, erau brutării de pizza, și romanii cu venituri mici din clădirile înalte au folosit "take away" în stil mare pentru că nu aveau bucătării acasă. Dar Napoli a fost inițial o colonie greacă, și se știe că și grecii antici făceau pâine rotundă cu ceva deasupra, deci ....

GR: ... και πραγματικά θυμάμαι να εχω φάει πίτσα στην Ελλάδα. Ένα από τα καλύτερα που πήρα από πολλά χρόνια στο Ρέθυμνο στην Κρήτη. Είχε μια τραγανή επιφάνεια και ανακάλυψα το κόλπο αργά. Στην αρχή νόμιζα ότι λειτούργησε ελαιόλαδο που λειτούργησε, αλλά δεν το έκανε. Τότε ανακάλυψα ότι πρέπει να πασπαλίζουμε τυρί με πλήρες λίπος κάτω από τη γέμιση (στη Δανία μπορείτε να χρησιμοποιήσετε 60% 'fløde-havarti') - τότε παίρνετε την ίδια ζύμη με την Κρήτη. Έφαγα επίσης πίτσα δύο φορές σε μια πιτσαρία στη Θεσσαλονίκη, όπου δεν υπήρχε μενού. Και όχι, το ελληνικό λεξιλόγιό μου δεν ήταν αρκετό για να προτείνω 'toppings' σε μονογλωσσικά ελληνικά.

EN: The second article was from my Albanian collection, but I have already mentioned that one. I would just like to add that it refers to "pica e pjekur", which Google Translate translates as 'grilled pizza'. Well, that's one variant I haven't seen yet..

From there I went to an article in Russian about mammoths (мамонты). I have already mentioned the funny fact that mastodons - which are proboscideans ('trunk animals') as the mammoths, but not really close relatives - belong to the family "Mammutidae", while the mammoths belong to a genus "Mammuthus" which isn't even a member of Mammutidae. The problem is that once you have given a scientific name to something, you can't just recant and come up with a better name - unless you find an even older name or obtain new cladistic information you have to keep using the old idiotic name. Anyway, the main focus in this article was that Clovis proto-Indians were responsible for the extinction of the wholly mammoth in America. Some researchers have claimed that it was the result purely of climatic changes, but then you have to ask yourself why the animal didn't perish at the onset of earlier interglacial periods where similar climatic changes must have happened. The wholly mammoth only went extinct when those murderous Clovis hunters were added to the equation. The same thing happened to the giant sloths and wholly rhinos - they survived earlier interglacial upheavals, but then man came with his deadly weapons and huge appetite.

OK, wiseguy, why did the elephants then survive in Africa and Asia? Well, in Africa their saviour may have been sleeping sickness among the humanoids, and in Asia the elephants could hide themselves in dense jungles, and maybe the tundra is less favorable to oversized tasty animals, but on top of that the few remaining proboscids in Africa and Asia had a long time to get accostumed to a series of more and more bloodthirsty and dangerous humanoids. In America the critters may even have walked up to the newly arrived humans to check them out without realizing that this maybe not was such a good idea. On the other hand, there has been an avalanche of weird-looking proboscids earlier in the paleontological record (before the Ice age), and most died out long far too early for casting the blame on us humans. So the role of the Clovis may just have been to topple the buckle in an already difficult setting for the megafauna of North America, but still - it would have been fun to have wholly mammoths and rhinos walking around today (and Steller's seecattle roaming the cold waters around Sakhalin).

The fourth and last article was in Polish and told me just about anything you ever would want to know about ground/minced meat ("mięso mielone") ... but then I accidentally ripped the cover on one of my homemade rectangular pillows and decided to sew new covers/make patches from an unused bed sheet to all the pillows I have got of that kind. So no more studying that day.

P3713a04_Mammoth_Ottawa (Canada).jpg