Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

[Iversen]

I would have written more here today, but then I ended up writing stuff in a couple of other threads.

Suffice to say that I basically finished the reerection of my book shelves yesterday (barring the musical sheets, which I would like to purge before they are put back unto the sacred boards - after all I stopped playing my instruments more than twenty years ago). I have decided to get rid of some old grammophones and printers which took up some of the space, and I'm also going to throw a meter or so out - but the bulk has been put back on the shelves. The good thing about this it that I now don't have to place books at the top level, and that lessens the risk of a new tumble. I have also hanged some objects in strings along the vertical boards so that I easilly can see whether the shelves begin to droop again - and I have now assigned a reserved space on a shelf to my spirit level in case I want to check the orientation of the system once more.

During the operation I noticed several items which I'm tempted to study soon, like for instance a Neolatin wordlist with suggestions for new words (or compounds) for the things that weren't invented yet in the antiquity. Like for instance 'virus', where the suggestions are "germen virosum, morbus virosus, pathogonum" (from Modern Greek, which only is possible because the Romans imported their medical staff from Greece). My other principal source for such expression is the "New College" Latin <-> English dictionary, which I once acquired in a bookstore in Manila. But weirdly enough it doesn't have a word for virus, only "virulentus" for 'virulent'. But my big fat Latin -> German Schulwörterbuch from Langenscheidt has the word 'virus' (a deficient substantive with just nominative and accusitive singular). The problem is that according to this source it has the following three meanings: "Schleim, (Schlangen)gift, 'salziger Geschmack von Seewasser' (slime, snake poson and the salty taste of sea water) - and of these three it is particularly no. 2 that is a problem because it makes it harder to defend using the simple word "virus" for a virus in Neolatin.

"morbus virosus" is unacceptable because it suggest the meaning of the malady caused by virus, not the virus itself. But before we blindly accept "germen virosum" for 'virus' in the modern sense, let's check the meanings of "germen" in the same book: 1) 'Liebesfrucht' (love fruit !?), 2) "Keim" or "Knospe". OK, using "germen" to signify small nasty malady inducing thingies then would constitute a totally new third meaning, but it would be sufficiently far from the other two to avoid conflicts - especially in combination with 'virosum', which also would have to add a new meaning, since the old two were 'mannstoll' (about lusty ladies) and 'übel riechend' (smelly). So using 'germen virosum' for 'virus' in the modern sense could be done without conflicting with any existing word meanings. The only problem is that I still don't feel the problem has been solved in a satisfactory way. We need a one word designation for something so small and so important.

I have already restarted my text studies (with copying and subsequent production of wordlists), and the first text I used for the purpose was one in Albanian about the city Gjirocastra where the hated dictator Enver Hoxha was born. Actually I have studied this text before, but long ago, and my level in Albanian has plummeted to a level where it makes sense to resuscitate it with the help of reused texts.

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PS: I have one more set of shelves, which stands against a wall to the right of the one shown. There I have placed Groves' Dictionary of music, 60+ photo albums, hundreds of VHS tapes, one meter of CDs and my collection of sci mags in various foreign languages. But luckily this piece of furniture seems to be more stable than the one that toppled over. And now we are at the subject of invisible shelf content: at the backside of the freestanding shelf system shown above I have placed all fiction and other semirotten books which I for some reason have hesitated to throw out. The really rotten and superfluous items have of course been disposed of along the way, but for some reason I can't really get myself to throw a set of German <->Latin dictionaries in Gothic letters out even though I haven't used them lately. Nor the New Testament in 19. century Romanian, just to mention another example...

[Iversen]

Yesterday I focused on Albanian, and it seems to come crawling back - but not more than that. I studied some more of the Gjirokastër text, and that's a deliberately slow process where I make sure that I know all the words and understand all constructions and the choices of all the 'little grey words' that are such an important element in that language. I have also done hyperliteral translations of some sentences, and here I use a few tricks - like translating all 'connectors' into the Indonesian "yang" since we don't have anything similar in Danish. I also use the English "of" to indicate possessive particles and things like that. The result is a sentence that make me remember the original sentence more than a normal free translation would have done. I have also made a wordlist with some 130 words from the text, and I have located the green sheets with Albanian grammar which I made some time last last year. And now I should write something in Albanian, but I think I'll postpone that step for a day or two.

Apart from Albanian I had also planned to do a wordlist based on the defunct Neolatin lexicon at facweb.furman.edu, but when I went into details with it the plan fizzled out since things turned out to be slightly more complicated than expected:

LAT: Pars tabulae legi sub expectationem vocabula invendiendi pro communicationibus neolatinibus de phenomena hodiernibus, et saepe vocabula anglica translationes recte amba bona sunt: 'acid rain' (pluvia acida), 'airplane' (aëronavis), 'airport' (aëroportus), 'anesthesia' (narcosis), 'astronaut' (astronauta) atque 'audiovisual' (audivisiticus) - vel minus aperta, sed tamen blanda: 'atomic bomb' (pyrobolus atomicus), 'accountant' (rationcinator), 'babysitter' (gerula), 'bank' (in the economic sense: mensa argentaria (aut modo argentaria)), 'ball-player' (sphaerista) atque 'binoculars' (perspicillum) - sed alia magis quam circumlocationes appareant quam sicut translationes. Exempla gratia: 'air conditioner' (instrumentum aëris temperandi), 'air travel' (navigatio per aethera - cur non 'aëronavigatio'?), 'autograph' (autographa nominis scriptio, - cur non tantummodo 'autographum'?) aut 'broadcast' ("per aetheris undas dimittere" - puto 'emittere' aut ''dimittere' satis esse).

Etiam considerandum est impressio vocabuli hodie in isto mundo moderno. Non credo translationem optimam vocabuli anglici 'bill (received monthly per mail)' "menstrua ratio" esse.

Apart from that my life continues 'as usual' - if you still can use that expression..

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[Iversen]

These days we have blue skies and lots of sun so I took a walk of some three hours yesterday and four today. But it may be less splendid weather the next couple of days, and then I may have more time to study. But I still manage to do something, and even it wasn't really a proper study activity yesterday it did have something to do with my languages: I threw all my old wordlists and text copies out, and I have distributed all my mono- or bilingual printouts into folders according to their main language. And I was not only amazed at the sheer number of texts I have been through, but I also found some items that deserve a closer look. And now I'm ready to build new piles...

My goodnight reading yesterday was the latest issue of the magazine Esperanto, and ..

EO: .. ĝi finiĝas per pluraj paĝoj nombrantaj planitajn eventojn, kiuj nun transformiĝas en nenion pro la viruso. La revuo ankaŭ enhavas kontribuon reklamanta la planitan poliglotan kunvenon en Terezino en majo, kiu probable ankaŭ devas esti nuligita (feliĉe mi ne subskribis). La poliglota kongreso estas planita por oktobro, sed eĉ ĉe tiu malfrua dato la limigoj internaciaj sur vojaĝoj povos ankoraŭ esti en la mezo.

FR: En ce moment j'écoute un programme en français sur la Louisiane, jadis colonie française (jusqu'à ce que les États-Unis l'ont achetée). Certaines persones parlent Anglais et évidemment elles seront doublées, mais il est plus surprenant - et un peu triste - que les gens de la télévision ont jugé nécessaire de dupliquer également certains des participants de langue française. Bon ben, les francophones de Louisiane parlent généralement un dialecte semblable au Québecqois, mais si moi je le peux comprendre, c'est honteux que les francophones de langue maternelle ne soient pas censés être capables de le faire aussi. Soit dit en passant, juste maintenant on montre des scènes du Mardi Gras d'une année précédente - ce qui est hautement ironique étant donné que la ville et ses environs ici en 2020 sont devenus un `hot spot' du virus Covid-19, et que cela pourrait être dû au fait que le Mardi Gras a été mis en œuvre comme d'habitude à la fin de février.

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[Iversen]

Yesterday I put some order in my note sheets (and threw some of them out). The day before I did something similar with my collection of old printouts about linguistics ('old' because I nowadays just keep them in a digital copy), and there I hit upon some of my all-time favorites, like J-A. Mondria's wholesale debunking of "Myths about vocabulary acquisition" and W.Decco's entertaining article "On the mortality of language learning methods" (where the overriding conclusion was that the best thing language teachers could do was to go for an eclectic mix of methods instead of subscribing to the passing fads). As the author writes: "The 30 years cycle has a witty side to it. If somebody accuses you of being 20 years behind in your methods, just answer: "That's wonderful. It means that I'm 10 years ahead of you"".

Apart from that I'm in the middle of the fourth cycle of my multi-wordlist campaign. I have written about this earlier, but the point is that I have a heap of dictionary based wordlists with repetitions in 30 languages (including a few which I don't actually study right now), and I did those in English, Scots, Afrikaans, Dutch, Low and High German, Icelandic, Norwegian, Swedish, Latin, Ancient and Modern French plus Portuguese yesterday. Today I have so far done Castillian, Catalan, Italian and Romanian, and with a bit of luck I'll manage to do the remaining thirteen later today. It can go so fast because I this time only do one column with around 30 words per language. After all, the main purpose is so to say to dip my toes into each language to maintain a feeling for it, and if I then learn some words along the side that's just fine, but if I really wanted to boost my vocabulary in any particular language then it would be more efficient to do for instance a page dedicated to that language - which would be around 90-100 words.

I also watch TV with subtitles while listening to items from my music collection simultanously. If I only made wordlists I might have to do more pauses in order not to get bored, but with this combination things just go fine.

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[Iversen]

I still haven't done the last four four wordlists (Irish, FInnish, Esperanto, Indonesian), and the reason is that I got caught up with something different, namely the Roman soldier or 'garrison' emperors. It began when the emperor Elagabal was mentioned in a quiz on TV. This man, who was known for his dissolute life style and eventually was murdered by unconvinced Romans, became the last member of the socalled Severan dynasty that started with Septimius Severus .. but to see the perspective you have to go back a bit.

Let's start with Nero who was the last emperor in the Julian-Claudian dynasty and likewise was murdered. In the turmoil following this sadly necessary act there was one year with three emperors (Galba, Otho and Vitellius), but then a fourth emperor Vespasianus stabilized the situation and founded a dynasty who recruited new members by adoption of able persons rather than by blood lines .. ahem, until the next but last emperor in the dynasty, the philosophically inclined Marcus Aurelius, who made a serious blunder by appointing his no good son Domitianus to his heir. This person was a bloodthirsty and unpredictable murderer, so he was also murdered, and then once again Rome saw a sequence of shortlived emperors, first Pertinax who was murdered when he tried to sweet-talk a bunch of fairly unhappy soldiers, then Didius Julianus who simply bought the title - but that was a bad idee because he was murdered by a soldier from the Pretorian Guard. And between the three main contenders Septimius Severus - who was acclaimed by the Eastern armies - proved to be the stronger.

Septimius was also murdered and was succeeded by the brute and murderous Caracalla, who was murdered after 6 years of terror. He was succeded by a soldier named Macrinus, who was murdered, and then the Severans returned with Elagabalus, who under the name Sextus Varius Avitus Bassianus had been a priester in some kind of Sun cult in the town Emesa, now Homs in what remains of Syria. Upon becoming emperor he took the name Marcus Aurelius Antoninus Augustus - the name Elagabel (or Heliogabalus) only was used after his death. And quite importantly, he was the son of Julia Soaemias, who was the daughter of a certain Syrian Roman noblewoman named Julia Maesa, who was sister-in-law to Septimius Severus and aunt of Caracalla. And it was apparently also grandma who eventually pulled the plug on Elagabalus when he had made his position in Rome untenable. The replacement was his nephew Severus Alexander, who still was a child - and the youngest emperor yet, but not a bad choice. But when he tried to bribe some Germanic tribes instead of fighting them his own soldiers murdered him. And then followed a string of soldier emperors with very short reigns - the soldier or 'garrison' emperors. One died in battle, one died from some kind of epidemic illness, the rest were murdered.

And of course I should have written this in Latin, but I read the whole caboodle in English at Wikipedia.

[Iversen]

Since I wrote the message above I really haven't studied languages, but for a good reason: my mother has had a air-to-water heat pump installed, which meant that she should have an antique oil-and-coal burner and a 25 year old oil container removed - that part alone took half a day, and the installation of the new miracle machine took two days more. The system functions like some kind of inverted fridge with a big fan plus some tubes and a motor in a box outside the house and a circulation pump inside that distributes the heated water to the radiators. And since my mother ain't exactly no chicken any more I had to supervise the whole process for her, and on top of that I have had to do several things in relation to the installation myself, like laying down some heavy cement tiles, repairing a concrete floor and moving furniture back and forth - and hoovering because everything left near the craftsmen got covered by red brick dust. Besides I have walked tours, solved sudokus, made food, eaten and slept - but after all that there simply wasn't energy left for studies. But now I'm back home and today I have produced the few remaining wordlists (cfr earlier messages about this) so that I can start making the corresponding repetition sheets tomorrow. And since it only is 20:40 here I expect to do some real hardcore study this evening.

As for the corona the authorities here are now so confident that it is under control that they have sent kids back to their kindergardens and schools, and they have just decided that some businesses are allowed to reopen- like hairdressers, podiatrists, tattooists and probably also dentists (these have been closed down except in acute cases - one dentist estimated on TV that she had lost 90% of her work load during the lockdown). Shopping centers stay closed apart from food stores and pharmacies, and against my sincere hopes and common sense also museums and zoos and aquaria - it would have been enough to ban guided tours and the public sealion feeding sessions. As for the libraries they stay also closed until May 10, but that's less absurd since visitors there do touch the books and (even more) computers with their dirty fingers.

Nevertheless we have achieved all this without ordering people to stay closed up within their own four walls or closing all shops except supermarkets and pharmacies as in many other countries, and the conclusion is that if you can convince the general population to do 'social distancing' (1½-2 meters or more), observe strict hand hygiene etc. etc. that is enough! We have not even had to wear face masks since the authorities here don't really think they are efficient unless they are switched regularly and worn in exactly the prescribed way. The question then is why this wasn't enough in the other countries I mentioned. I deeply symphathize with those of you who have had to endure even harsher restrictions this past month.

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[Iversen]

Since yesterday I have studied texts in two languages: one article about nobel laureated neutrino researchers in Serbian and the first page of a long article about the etymology of the word chocolate in Albanian. I had also announced that I would start reviewing my latest multilingual wordlists today, but I have changed my mind ever so slightly. Last year I started a sheet with wordlists for each of 30 languages, and this month I continued this endeavour with one triple-column per language on new sheets. But as you may remember from earlier reports my main wordlist format has three columns, whereas the repetitions have two (typically one for the translations and one for the original words) - so simple arithmetic considerations will tell you that I now have an empty half page on each and every repetition sheet.

I have decided to use all that empty space for a belated re-repetition of as many words as I can squeeze in (300 original words per halfpage, leaving around 60 unrehearsed), and this allows me to gauge my memory of the new and unknown words I tried to memorize last year. So far I have only done this exercise for language no. 1, English, and there it seems that I have forgotten about about a quarter of the words - and of course only a fraction of the rest has entered my active vocabulary. But it is still a quite satisfying result since it seems that I have added at least 270 English words to my passive vocabulary. It has to be acknowledged that this isn't a scientific result since I am the sole judge of whether I actually have remembered a given word correctly, but it still gives an indication of the usefulness of the technique.

In weaker languages I'll almost certainly have forgotten a larger proportion of the words, but time will tell how much. I'll continue the exercise with Scots, Afrikaans, Dutch etc etc as soon as I have finished writing this message.

SER: Српски чланак говори о причај о истраживању које је додијелило Јапанцима Такаки Каџиту и Канађанину Артуру МекДоналду њихове нобелове награде. Дуго се мислило да неутрини немају масу, али су двојица научника открила да имају врло малу масу - и то заиста није ирелевантно. Постоје у ствари три различите врсте неутрина са сваком 'бојом', и њихове масе су различите.

EN: OK, it is apparently interesting that neutrinos have mass because this wasn't immediately clear from the equations of the standard model. One simple consequence of this discovery is that we now can distinguish three different kinds of neutrinos, and their oscillations explain why the scientists only have measured a third of the neutrinos they expected to come from the sun - those tiny bastards simply skip from the state that was supposed to be measured to the other two states (maybe just to annoy the scientists, but probably for a more fundamental reason which so far is unknown). But the discussion goes on among the physicists what exactly the masses are and what consequences the discoveries have. I found a page in English about the problem, but sadly I don't even understand what they are talking about there - my math savvy has sadly gone down the drain since the 80s where I last did something to keep it alive.

AL: Artikulli shqip nga ana tjetër është lehtësisht i kuptueshëm - problemi i vetëm është se është shkruar në shqip. Tema është veçanërisht etimologjia e fjalës "çokollatë".

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[Iversen]

If you take the bird's eye perspective then I have done nothing memorable today - except filling 11 halfsheets with repetitions of multiwordlists, each with something like 250-270 headwords in a certain language (from Scots to Portuguese). Actually I just copy each word from the original lists, but I also ask myself what the words mean - and sometimes that's more fun than it sounds like.

FR: Par example un ralentisseur ('speed bump' en anglais, 'vejbump' en danois) s'appelle selon le dictionnaire aussi "dos d'âne" en français (vide infra). Et un trou dans une route (une fondrière) s'appelle selon le même dictionnaire aussi "nid-de-poule" ('pothole' en anglais) - pauvre de poule d'ailleurs qui place son nid au milieu d'une autoroute. Un "boeuf de nature" est expliqué comme un boeuf sans sauce - mais si je connais les français bien c'est alors une pièce coupée au vivant de l'animal nommé boeuf - les français sont des vrais omophagues, i.e. des personnes qui se livre à l'omophagie, i.e. consommation de viande (presque) crue. Seule l'addition de sauce (et de légumes) laisse supposer qu'un chef ait mis ses mains dessus. Laisse moi à cet effet citer le vénérable Pierre de Macassus (1647):

(..) il falloit premierement attaquer les Apodotes, puis les Ophionees, & puis les Eurytanes, qui sont des peuples, dont le language s'entend presque point, qui mange la chair sans la faire cuyre, & et qui pour cet effet sont appellez Omophagues.

Certains des mots sur ma liste sont assez rares, mais on ne peut pas vraiment juger à quel point cela est vrai pour tel ou tel mot puisque le dictionnaire utilisé ne donne pas cette information. Mais par exemple j'ai de bonne foi y inclu le mot "labedens", qui signifierait quelque-chose comme comrade d'école. Bon ben, je l'ai mis dans la machine de Google avec le français comme langue de recherche, et le seul résultat qui ne vise PAS à un nom de famille était une article de Wiktionaire, où l'on explique que le mot a été "Tiré d'une comédie L’affaire de la rue de Lourcine (1857) d’Eugène Labiche où l’action démarre à un banquet d’anciens élèves de l’institution Labadens." Et alors je ne puis m'abstenir de penser qu'il fallait peut-être éliminer certains mots dans les dictionaires pour ne pas leurrer des âmes faibles comme moi à les adopter dans le dans la conviction erronée qu'ils font encore partie de la langue françoyse.

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[Iversen]

I have been away for a couple of days, but after my return I have resumed the repetition of the notorious 30 wordlists, and after nine Germanic and eight Romance languages (including Latin and Old French) I have now added Modern Greek and Albanian.

GR: Ένα από τα προβλήματα της ελληνικής είναι ότι οι λέξεις έχουν αλλάξει τη σημασία τους μεταξύ τής αρχαίής της ελληνικής και τής Δημοτικής, αλλά εν τω μεταξύ άλλες γλώσσες έχουν δανειστεί τις λέξεις με μια έννοια που μπορεί να βρεθεί στη κοινή. Για παράδειγμα, το «doryphoros» σήμαινε κάποτε ένα ένας άντρας που ρίχνει δόρατα (στην πραγματικότητα, τα συστατικά της λέξης εξακολουθούν να ισχύουν). και ένας γλύπτης στην αρχαιότητα χάρασε ένα πολύ διάσημο άγαλμα αυτού του ονόματος από έναν γυμνό άνδρα με ένα δόρυ στο χέρι του. Αλλά τα λεξικά μου λένε ότι σημαίνει τώρα 'satellite'. Πώς συνέβη αυτό;;

Είναι ευκολότερο να καταλάβουμε ότι η λέξη για την εργασία προέρχεται από τη λέξη για σκλάβους (' δουλός') - αλλά υπάρχει μια διάκριση που πρέπει να σημειωθεί: η λέξη 'δουλεία' σημαίνει τη χρήση σκλάβων, ενώ η λέξη 'δουλειά' σημαίνει εργασία γενικά - και όταν πρέπει να το κάνουμε εμείς οι ίδιοι.

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EN: I have also spent some time studing linguistics in the form of an article about the futility of searching for universals. It was actually Saim who lured me into searching for material about articles by writing " I'm not aware of any examples of languages losing articles, but I'd be very surprised to hear that there are none." I never found any such thing either, but ended up reading the article named "The Myth of Language Universals: Language diversity and its importance for cognitive science." I'm not surprised to see the Chomskyan variant of this idea debunked (including the naive idea that you could deduce the universals by studying just one language), but the more empirical Greenbergian version is also criticized, mainly on the grounds that the first version of it (from 1991) was based on just 30 languages. But being empirical rather than philosophical, it is less fragile, and even rules of thumb that only include the majority of languages are worth considering.

The article also advocates the use of dependency structure grammars rather than constituent structure grammars (p.26), which is just grist to my mill - especially when it comes to languages with a loose word order like Latin. But maybe it is wrong just to say that Latin word order is loose - point one because the word order in common speech definitely didn't reflect the complicated word order in poems or speeches by Cicero, secondly because many examples show that one syntagm so to say has been split by another element, which is different from total chaos (there is a technical term for this, but I have forgotten it). The example used is

ultima Cumaei venit iam carminis aetas
last(Nom) Cumae(Gen) come(3spast) now song(Gen) age(Nom)
‘the last age of the Cumaean song has now arrived’

A simpler word order might be "ultima aetas carminis Cumaei iam venit" - but this would also be a much more boring formulation. Of course the heavy morphology of Latin serves to make such complicated entangles formulations possible, but it is not only a question of what can be decoded (like a rebus), but also of stylistics.

CAT: A més d’això, vaig tenir el meu televisor a TVE d’Espanya durant tot el matí, però amb subtítols (al teletext pàgina 888). Ha estat corona corona corona covid covid covid covid i covid, hora rere hora, però la principal notícia era que als nens petits se permite finalment de sortir para jugar, però com a màxim una hora diària i sota la supervisió d’un adult - i amb mascarilla, i es va demostrar com es pode escurçar els cordons de una màscara per adults, perquè encara no s'ha produït cap màscara infantil.

CAST: El gobierno de las Islas Canarias ha sugerido que los niños podrian tener permiso de salida en la mañana y los viejos por la noche, luego están bien separados. ¿Y cuánto tiempo debe/pode durar esta situacíón?

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LAT: Et quare feles? Bene, etiam feles de corona infictari possunt, et picturam non habeo cum parvulis domo incarceratis.

[Iversen]

Yesterday it was nice weather, but the meteorologists have predicted unstable conditions for at least a week or so so I spent almost 4 hours walking around outside in the sun while I still had the chance. And today ... well, so far it is grey and humid so I think there will be lots of time to study.

I did however finish my thirty language wordlist bonanza yesterday - except for Finnish. I don't actually study Finnish and originally just included it to get a feeling for the language (and for fun), but it won't be included in the next sessions. On the contrary, I keep Czech and Ukrainian in the set because they are closely related to languages which I do study, like Slovak, Polish and Russian. And speaking about Russian: Ivan Groznyj ('the terrible') is just now preparing to attack the Kazan khanat:

RU: Когда недавно мои полки упали, я заметил книгу, которую купил много лет назад: " Странитсы Истории" Сырова (с 1987 года). Это учебная книга, которая необычно показывает давление на вокале, но, хотя в ней также есть объяснения слов, они редко бывают уместны - и нет достаточно для начинающего. Поэтому я отложил это и переключился на двуязычные распечатки. Но теперь я снова посмотрел на это, и времена изменились - я могу в значительной степени прочитать это. Но просто чтения недостаточно, поэтому я скопировал и изучил одну страницу - и речь идет о подготовке Ивана к казанским татарам. Русские уже дважды пытались победить их, но тщетно. Но Ивану это удалось. Может быть, он нападает также на хананат в Астрахане - увидим на следующих страницах (иначе я посмотрю в Википедии).

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