Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

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Iversen
Black Belt - 4th Dan
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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby Iversen » Thu Oct 21, 2021 6:12 pm

luke wrote:... Perhaps the language list is related to some sort of adaptive user interface..


I can't see why the situation then should be different in different language versions. I suspect that someone is tinkering with the interface ... But the important thing is that I can continue to jump between languages - it has become more complicated, but now I can also see the link in the upper right corner (I didn't even look there!), and that's definitely a simpler route than the one I found (through WIkimedia).

Apart from that: I have been working with the part of my music collections that is devoted to late Medieval and Renaissance composers, and I have consulted Youtube where many of the same pieces can be found. Most importantly: I found the good ol' record (or was it already a CD?) with "Les Musiciens de Provence on Youtube - which I actually also had access to around 1990 when I constructed my second cassette collection. And then it was of course a natural thing to read something about some of the troubadours and trouvères and trobairitz and ... As part of this I also stumbled over a multilingual poem by Raimbault de Vacquiras. He didn't live long - the reason being that he followed his patron Boniface of Montferrat as a shadow, even to the ill-fated and misdirected 4. crusade where both died in an ambush.

I also found a lot of Munrow's old recordings on Youtube, which likewise were part of my musical fare during the 90s and long before that. I know that there are vinyl lovers out there, but for me real music started when we got rid of the old LPs with their hiss and scratches. OK then we got music cassettes with faint echos and hum and periodical 'salad attacks', but at least I could choose myself what to put on them. If we now also could get rid of live recordings, especially the pirate ones from down among the public - I can't see the positive side of coughing and sneezing and rambling listeners in the same room as the musicians. The best New Years Concert ever was the last one with Muti, because the Musikverein was empty (apart from the musicians and the recording technicians, of course - and the flowers).

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Iversen
Black Belt - 4th Dan
Posts: 4768
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Location: Denmark
Languages: Monolingual travels in Danish, English, German, Dutch, Swedish, French, Portuguese, Spanish, Catalan, Italian, Romanian and (part time) Esperanto
Ahem, not yet: Norwegian, Afrikaans, Platt, Scots, Russian, Serbian, Bulgarian, Albanian, Greek, Latin, Irish, Indonesian and a few more...
Language Log: viewtopic.php?f=15&t=1027
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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby Iversen » Sun Oct 24, 2021 9:31 am

When I woke up this morning I realized that I had wasted an opportunity to speak Indonesian in a dream. I had entered a place opposite my hotel where you could walk up a narrow ladder to a jungle (no less), and I had walked around there without meeting anyone. I came down again to the first level, but now there was a broader staircase, and on top of that there was a café - luckily without music. And somebody said "free". OK, early in the morning I thought, and then I asked an employee "yesterday?" - meaning that there might be a free breakfast with things that hadn't been sold the day before - including some orange fruit nectar in open tetra packings. I tried it, and it tasted slightly like mango or papaya. I woke up shortly after with a cramp in my leg while still munching away at free fruit and cakes and juice and ... Well, the dream contained two words in English, which at least isn't my native language so in principle it still ranges as a dream in a foreign language - but still slightly disappointing, given that I haven't neglected Indonesian lately: I still regularly check whether the Indonesian Wikipedia has an article about some topic, and lo and behold it often has, although I sometimes have the suspicion that the articles are machine translations because of words and expressions that aren't translated. And last week I also used the Assimil guide to Indonesian as goodnight reading, but since then it has mysteriously disappeared - maybe forgotten at my mother's place.

Another language that has loomed large on my agenda the last couple of days is Esperanto. I have received one more issue of the magazine Esperanto from UEA (the Esperantean world organization), and ..

EO: ... kaj kiel atendite, estis multaj indiferentaj artikoloj, du el ili pri Unesko. En la unua konstatas oni ke letero estis sendita al Unesko, kaj la vicdirektoro de tiu ĉi UN-filio afable respondas (franclingve) ke oni certe agnoskas ke UEA kaj la Esperanto-movado faras utilan laboron, sed la vic-direktorino de Unesko bedaŭrinde ne havis tempo por partopreni en la malfermon de la Universala Universala Esperanta Kongreso en julio 2021 (kiu cetere estis nuligita kaj anstataŭigita per virtuala kongreso). Sed poste sekvas paĝo post paĝo, kie altrangaj reprezentantoj de UEA preskaŭ larmoplene diskutas, kiel oni tamen povas altiri iom da atento de Unesko, ekzemple en formo de internacia Esperanto-tago. Poste en la revuo sekvas artikolo pri la urgenta bezono redukti la organizon de UEA por ŝpari monon (post jaroj da deficitoj). Unu el la proponoj estas transloki la bibliotekon de Nederlando al la Esperanto-Muzeo en Vieno, kiu estas parto de la Aŭstria Nacia Biblioteko – ĉi tio havas sencon. Mi havas ankoraŭ unu sugeston: fermi la tutan branĉon de la organizo kiu panike provas kontakti Uneskon. Eĉ se ĝi sukcesas, Unesko estas alia superflua aĉa skatolo, kies solaj celoj estas 1) konservi liston de konservindaj lokoj, 2) ĵeti monon tra la fenestro.

EN: Apart from that I have also listened to several Youtube videos in Esperanto. First something that seemed to be an online enquiry about learning methods for people from Australia, then most of a long interview with Michael Bronstein, who apparently has worked a lot with Russian songs. And I understood most of it, even though my mind principally was on preparing a meal and consuming it. However the Esperanto magazine also contained one useful article about "la scienca virtuala kongreso", which apparently has been held this year, and the article contains some links to lectures on the program and a book with scientific articles in Esperanto - maybe something that could be worth investigating.

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Iversen
Black Belt - 4th Dan
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Languages: Monolingual travels in Danish, English, German, Dutch, Swedish, French, Portuguese, Spanish, Catalan, Italian, Romanian and (part time) Esperanto
Ahem, not yet: Norwegian, Afrikaans, Platt, Scots, Russian, Serbian, Bulgarian, Albanian, Greek, Latin, Irish, Indonesian and a few more...
Language Log: viewtopic.php?f=15&t=1027
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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby Iversen » Mon Oct 25, 2021 6:34 pm

I have just returned from the weekly language forum at the main library. Last time was a total disaster - 2 x 2 individuals around me who spoke rather loudly in Danish, but no one coming for the language café itself (except me, of course) - and grey moist weather outside. So I left after less than half an hour.

Today went much better. At 16 o'clock sharp a lady turned up with who seemed to be interested, and she definitely was - in speaking Danish. But she was an Iranian dentist who needed to learn Danish (and take some exams) to be allowed to practice here, and she already spoke passably well after one year at a language school so I could see that I might be of use to her - and maybe so more than a casual person out in the streets with little experience in language learning.

We spent an agreable half hour together, but then she had to leave. However just minutes before another woman had passed by, and I had asked her what she wanted to do - well, Spanish, French... At that time I still was speaking to the Iranian dentist so she chose to sit down with an English speaking group who had formed around the neighbour table, but when the Iranian lady left I gave the other woman a sign, and she was indeed interested in 'charlar un poquito en español''. So thats's what we did for half an hour, and she spoke fluently and with a good accent - probably better than mine. But she had also mentioned French, and there she was less confident of herself - which I took as an excellent reason to switch to French :lol: . Actually she also spoke French quite well so we spent the next half hour 'à bavarder en français' - and we agreed that if any of us had forgotten a word then we would say its equivalent in Spanish (or any other language but English or Danish) and then we would find a solution. And after an hour she surprised me by asking whether we could switch to German because she also would like to refresh her German. Among other things, we discussed the German dialects so I used the occasion to say a few things in Low German (and in passing mention de bannig unnerhallsame "Dörp reggae" vun Ina Müller -aver sien hoogdüütsche Lieder sünn Schiet). I also mentioned Schwiizer Düütsch, but I know less about that than about Platt - mostly because the Swiss keep it as a secret and never write stuff in it. Finally we returned to Spanish for a short while to sum up before we ended the session after 1½ hour of incessant speech.

When the neighbour group (who had stuck to English) was biggest there were six or seven persons around the table, so all in all the language café this time was a clear success. I got the chance to use some of my non-English languages, I could help a lady who needed some polishing of her Danish and there were enough English speakers around to suggest that it might be worth turning up again next week.

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Iversen
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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby Iversen » Fri Oct 29, 2021 1:33 pm

I have found my Assimil de Poche for Indonesian again - it had been squeezed in between other (and bigger) books so that it was invisible from the outside - so now I can get on with my wordlist based in words and (short) expressions from the book. In the meantime I have done wordlists with items from my recent text copies, and I guess there are around 280-290 words on those lists which I intend to review today or tomorrow. The last text in Indonesian I have worked on told me something about the island Halmahera which I haven't visited so far, but now I have to find something to replace it..

Halmahera.jpg

Speaking of islands, yesterday I watched a program in German about the island Corsica, which seems to be an interesting place - and for once with sound. I actually own a Kauderwelsch to Corsican (in German), but I have never read it - maybe it's about time now. Its language is said to resemble Italian more than French.

And then I have started to work with a text about Indonezia in Albanian (weird how things run in circles ... maybe there is an article about Albania in the Indonesian Wikipedia -that would close the circle): I have not done much about Albanian the last couple of months, but it has not become as rusty as expected. I need to refresh my morphological tables, but luckily I have my own green sheets so that will be easy. And I still remember the majority of the words.

I have put the Irish Kauderwelsch on my 'night-chair' (which serves as a nighttable). I don't intend to memorize anything, but the good thing about this series (and the Assimil, which seems to be the same thing - just in French) is that it has original sentences, hyperliteral translations, 'pretty translations' and a reasonably simple rendering of the pronunciation, and I can see that having the pronunciation with the original orthography coupled like that helps me to educate my inner voice, which seems to be somewhat unreliable when it comes to Irish words. Years ago I would stuff things into Abair.ir to hear them, but for some reason it doesn't run on my slightly antique computer any more - and there is no Irish speech on Google Translate.
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Iversen
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Languages: Monolingual travels in Danish, English, German, Dutch, Swedish, French, Portuguese, Spanish, Catalan, Italian, Romanian and (part time) Esperanto
Ahem, not yet: Norwegian, Afrikaans, Platt, Scots, Russian, Serbian, Bulgarian, Albanian, Greek, Latin, Irish, Indonesian and a few more...
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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby Iversen » Sat Oct 30, 2021 3:43 pm

Those of you who have been following this thread for some time may remember that I once wrote about an exhibition at our local art museum Aros with paintings of a peintress named Elisabeth Jerichau-Baumann. At the end of the exhibition one could sit down and draw people with her paintings minus the central persons as a background. And I did so and ended up with a surrealistic fantasy, which I have been told was put on the board in no less than the cantine of the personnel (which probably is the closest I ever will get to being represented in any museum). Later I did one painting based on figures from the artist's works and another which was closer to the original drawing, but with a heavier bottom part. Since then I have had the naggin' feeling that something had to be done about the empty bottom left of the first painting - but I only found the solution today: an extremely faint shadow of a lady who's looking away from all other other miserable creatures. The motiv was taken from a painting of a woman reading aloud for a wounded soldier - very sweet and romantic, but I'm neither sweet nor romantic in my paintings.

And now you may ask: what has that to do with language learning? Not much, so I have found a solution: I'll write more about these paintings ... in Latin. However because of the limitations of Google Translate's Latin I have supplied a human-made translation - into Esperanto. After all, GT knows Esperanto better than Latin...

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LAT: Elisabeth Jerichau-Baumann pictrix Polonica erat qui ad Daniam venit et uxor sculptoris danici Jerichau fuit. Ille professor Academiae Artium factus est (ubi feminae non admissae erant), illa pictrix erat et - non obstante matrimonium - permansit, et ita sibi et novem filiis substentavit, sed etiam peregrinatrix assidua fuit. Cum primam tabulam pinxi habebam photographias ex exhibitioni atque librum, itaque plerique in pictura ab operiis pictricis sumuntur — praeter viridis dinosaurus et capita magna: nigrum dextre et collega sua in frutices floriis sinistre. Homo unus est - hic in angulo sub aqua, sed apud EJB in grado scalarum cum infante sedens. Feminae dextre plerumque ex Oriente proximae sunt (ut dixi, EJB peregrinatrix assidua fuit), sed sirenae ex imaginationis populi (HC Andersen jam fabulam suam de parva nympha scripsit). Prima tabula continet paucas figuras ex opere creationis EJB'ae, quoniam praecipuae figurae a picturis de operariis musei remotae erant.

EO: EJB estis pola sinjorino kiu venis al Danio kaj geedziĝis kun dana skulptisto. Li iĝis profesoro ĉe la Akademio de Belartoj (al kiu virinoj ne havis aliron), ŝi estis kaj fariĝis pentristo (kredu la geedziĝon) kaj per tio nutris sin kaj ŝiajn naŭ infanojn - sed ŝi estis ankaŭ diligenta vojaĝanto. Kiam mi pentris la unuan bildon, mi havis fotojn el la ekspozicio kaj libron, tial la plej multaj el la figuroj prenitiĝis el la verkoj de la artistino - krom la verda dinosaŭro kaj la kapoj: la nigra dekstre kaj lia kolego en la florarbustoj maldekstre. Estas unu viro - sidas subakve en la angulo ĉi tie, sed en la originalo sidas sur la ŝtupoj kun infano en la brakoj. La virinoj dekstre estas plejparte el la Mezoriento (kiel mi skribis EJB estis persista vojaĝanto), sed la sirenoj estas fantazioj de la gehomoj (kaj HCA jam skribis sian fabelon pri la virineto de maro). La unua pentraĵo enhavas nur kelkajn homojn el la kreaĵoj de EJB ĉar la ĉeffiguroj en la pentraĵoj estis forigitaj de la dungitoj de la muzeo.

PS: I just stuffed the Latin text above into Google Translate, and to my surprise it actually managed the job rather well - except the reference to the sitting man's original place in the original work of the artist ("apud EJB") and the misleading "of" instead of "by" in the last sentence - plus "dextre" which can mean "cleverly", but here it means "to the right", and "left" is correct in the context, except that it is ambiguous and could suggest that somebody accidentally left the grinning head in the bushes in the upper left. But still - better than last time I tried:

EN (Google): Elizabeth Jerichau-Baumann was a Polish painter who came to Denmark and was the wife of the Danish sculptor Jerichau. He became a professor of the Academy of Arts (where women were not admitted), she was a painter and - notwithstanding his marriage - continued to support herself and her nine children, but was also a frequent traveler. When I painted the first picture I had photos from the exhibition and the book, and so most of the pictures are taken from the painter's work - in addition to the green dinosaurs and big heads: black on his right and his colleague left in flowery bushes. There is one person - here in a corner under the water, but with an EJB sitting on a ladder with a child. Females are mostly cleverly from the East (as I said, EJB was a frequent traveler), but sirens from the people's imagination (HC Andersen already wrote his story about a small nymph). The first picture contains a few figures from the work of the creation of EJB'ae, since the main figures were removed from pictures of the workmen of the museum.

Tegning og tegnestue.jpg
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Iversen
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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby Iversen » Mon Nov 01, 2021 7:34 pm

The German channel 3Sat has sent programs about railways all day long so for once I have been listening to my TV rather then reading subtitles. The program right now is about Swiss railway lines with a touristical aspect, like the Glacier-Express - however the glacier is not visible from the train any more. The Swiss have started to cover their glaciers in summer to minimize the melting, but for the Rhone glacier it is too late. One particularly interesting passage told about a school where the Romantsch language still is taught, and the teacher said that 50.000 persons still have Bündnerromanisch as their native language (excluding pockets of Ladin and Friulian speakers in Italy) .... in the villages. Ahem, whenever I hear the thing about a language being spoken in villages I know that the language is doomed, but so far it is not dead. I have a couple of small books in Über oder Unter-Engadinisch, but Romantsch is not on my to-do list.

Rhaeto-Romance map (Wikipedia).jpg

I just interrupted the railway bonanza for the trip to the library, where I once again participated in the weekly language café. First I spoke in Spanish to a lady I have met before there, then a Spanish man came who wanted to train his Danish - so then we spoke in a mix of Spanish and Danish. But then a young lady from Somalia arrived who would like to speak a bit of French. OK, I took it on me to talk to her and the two others joined a couple of young men at the neighbour table. But alas, the French of this last lady was limited bordering on non-existant - she said (in Danish) that she had had Spanish in school for four years and now had a teacher through the internet - but not on a regular basis. However it became soon clear that she couldn't even read a simple text aloud, and she didn't understood neither me, nor the book. I must say that this was a truly miserable result of so much school teaching, and I couldn't see what I could do about it in a flash - except telling her how to make bilingual texts with Google Translate or Deepl + Word, and how to let the machines read short passages aloud while she was following along in the text. In other words, I had to teach her how to do home study in the absence of a Francophone bubble.

So she left, and I went over to the four persons at the other table, and lo and behold, they were speaking in Spanish (interpunctuated by passages in Danish and English).

SP: Dos de los participantes a la mesa redonda eran daneses, y tambien havia un hombre español y otro argentino. Ya estos lugares de origen dieron algunas ideas para temas de discusión, también porque el señor español era de Valencia - luego tuvimos una charla sobre el valenciano y sobre otras lenguas y dialectos al interior de la 'hispanofonia' del mundo. Y también a veces afuera: yo logré mencionar Scots y Neederdüütsch - y con dos hispanohablantes nativos a la mesa, la conversación transcurrió a toda velocidad sin ningún problema de comprensión.

EN: Apart from that I am now studying the Indonesian Wikipedia article about Albania, but the first part is not too captivating - a list of bordering countries and some numbers. Things will probably become more lively when I reach the time of the national hero Skanderbeg up to the harsh stalinist dictatorship of Enver Hoxha. The article ends with the pyramide companies that almost toppled the entire economy of the country, but right now things seem to have stabilized. I have been there twice and liked the country both times - and not least the TV selection I got in Tiranë by hiring a TV box from my hotel. I didn't understand anything, but there were lots of good documentary channels on the screen.

AL: Artikulli përmend edhe shqiponjën me dy koka, e cila është pikë referimi e Shqipërisë - është një trashëgimi e Bizantit, por mund të ketë një histori më mbrapa. Shqiptarët mendohet se e kanë prejardhjen nga ilirët, por askush nuk e di se nga kanë ardhur - ndoshta Azia e Vogël.

F3919a02_Skanderbeg and twoheaded eagle.jpg
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Iversen
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Ahem, not yet: Norwegian, Afrikaans, Platt, Scots, Russian, Serbian, Bulgarian, Albanian, Greek, Latin, Irish, Indonesian and a few more...
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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby Iversen » Fri Nov 05, 2021 7:48 pm

I have spent some days at my mother's place - no internet (though I now have a socalled smartphone that in principle could access it... if it had an equally smart owner), but cooking, gardening - moving falling leaves around - and well, a certain amount of socializing. And wordcounts.

Earlier this week I mentioned this kind of activity in another thread, and this triggered off a new series of wordcounting. In a wordcount I take sample pages from dictionaries and divide all headwords on those pages into known, not known and a lala middle group.In the beginning my main goal was to assess the percentage of my passive vocabulary in English that conceivably might be recalled if need be - a number that should be higher than the percentage of the words I actually have used in writing. In other words my active vocabulary should correspond to the 'middle' group rather than to my actually attested vocabulary, but it turned out that I couldn't do the assessment as intended. In the majority of cases where I looked at an English 'known' word I thought that I might remember it, but of course I couldn't prove that this was possible. Actually the words which I was sure I would never be able to come up with were mostly placed in the 'lala' group, i.e. not as known words. On the other hand we probably all have experienced that we can't remember some perfectly simple word even in our own native languages so you can never be sure. So after all this work I still don't know how big my real active vocabulary is!

Anyway, I continued to count words, using my mother's dictionaries (leaving aside the "Mrs. Byrne's dictionary of rare and preposterous words" which I once gave her): twice the Concise Oxford and once an old red Gyldendal. I have used the Concise once before, but then only counting one-word headwords. This time I took those two word compounds that looked more like two-part words than idiomatic expressions - which of course is a rather subjective dividing line, but whatever the definition: if I know 65 % of this it's still 65% of something, and then the absolute numbers aren't important. And my 'known' percentages went from 78% (in 2014) down to 66% resp. 61%, which is logical: earlier I categorized the headword of a whole dictionary article as know if I just knew one of the meanings or compounds or expressions, but by considering each compund by itself the percentage of unknowns or 'lala' items is bound to rise - and it did, but not to a frightening low level. Knowing two thirds of the content of the Oxford Concise is still quite OK.

I did an extra count on a Gyldendal (a Danish series), where there are fewer strange flowers and worms (which often have two-part names), and my 'known' percentage rose to 72%. But then I got the idea also to do counts in the German and French and Latin books in the same series (and all in old editions). The Germans are famous for joining strings of elements to long words which should make the number of one-words items in a dictionary swell at the expense of two-words compounds. And therefore a page in the German dictionary has more, but shorter headword articles than the corresponding page in the English one. But since I this time included two-word compunds in my English count the data should this time be more similar than when I just looked at single words. I got 70 % known words, although from a very limited sample - but my older results are at the same level or higher.

French is more like English in this respect - many compounds with "de", few long composite words. Result 74% - i.e. somewhat higher than my English results, which is surprising - and probably misleading. I did once study French at the university, but these days my English is definitely better than my French.

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Iversen
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Ahem, not yet: Norwegian, Afrikaans, Platt, Scots, Russian, Serbian, Bulgarian, Albanian, Greek, Latin, Irish, Indonesian and a few more...
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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby Iversen » Sun Nov 07, 2021 10:43 pm

This weekend I have done several things that had something to do with languages: I have added to my pile of wordcounts, I have watched program on Arte about Louvre with French subtitles and I have read an Italian book about Ötzi, the famous body that was found in a mountain pass between Italy and Austria. Last week, during my family visit, I tested English (trice!), German, French and Latin, yestderday I added Dutch and Afrikaans, and today have have done Modern Greek, Romanian, Italian and Portuguese. The lowest percentage but one of known words came for Greek, which can't come as a surprise - but 56% known words and 20% lala is OK. Portuguese reached 74% known, and the rest were spread between these two. Italian came in at just 52%, which was lower than expected (60% and 67% the last two times) - but since the samples are quite small a certain amount of fluctuation is to be expected. However it irritated me enough to send me to the back of my bookshelves, where I keep a number of books in sundry languages, and here I found the small book about Ötzi I mentioned above - and with just 120 pages it just took a couple of hours reading it (while listening to Händels Watermusic and and Fireworksmusic and some other works - I'm at his 7. concerto grosso right now while I'm writing this, and there is a program about Benjamin Franklin with Danish subtitles on my TV).

IT: Furono una coppia di alpinisti dilettanti che passeggiavano ad un'altitudine di 3210 metri sul Tisenjoch il 19 settembre 1991 che notarono alcuni resti umani nel ghiaccio. Hanno comunicato it fatto un'ora dopo all'ospite del loro alloggio, e egli ha informati sia le autorità italiane sia quelle austriache perché il luogo era così vicino al confine - stabilito nel 1922 allo spartiacque, e si è scoperto che Ötzi era a soli 96 metri della frontiera. Inizialmente furono gli austriaci quelli che raccolsero le parti del corpo e qualche oggetti e le esaminarono a Innsbruck, e solo qui un archeologo qualificato poteva vederle e determinare che avevano un età di almeno 5000 anni. Poi gli italiani hanno comminciato ad interessarsi del caso, e hanno anche costruito un museo speziale con congelatore a Bolzano, ed è qua che il signore Ötzi si trova oggi (l'ho visto durante un viaggio nel 2010).

La cosa interessante del cadavere è che risale al tempo appena prima che l'Europa fosse invasa dai popoli della steppa, e anche poco prima che il rame fosse utilizzato nell'Europa orientale. Era un uomo anziano (almeno 50 anni), alto 1,60 metri, con i capelli scuri e gli occhi azzurri - e mi chiedo che diavolo facesse in quel passo di montagna. Ci sono segni che sia stato aggredito ed morì durante la fuga, ma il Tisenjoch probabilmente non era la scelta più facile per scapparsi.

Ötzi - l'uomo venuto dal ghiaccio.jpg

DA: Det minder mig om en udstilling på Stiftmuseet i Maribo i Danmark, hvor man fortæller om 'Lola', en pige fra samme periode og med samme fysiologiske kendetegn: mørkt hår, blå øjne (dog ikke på plakaten nedenfor) - og ingen aner hvilket sprog hun talte, men hun tilhørte i alt fald de gamle slægter. Man har kun fundet hendes knogler, så hvorfra kender man så hendes øjenfarve? Jo, hun havde tygget på et stykke harpiks, og heri fandt man nok DNA til en analyse. Og her er forbindelsen til Ötzi: man fandt også en klump harpiks hos ham. Bogen siger ikke klart at det var stenalderens svar på tyggegummi, men der tegner sig et mønster.

F6037b09_Lola.jpg

FR: Je viens de mentionner le Louvre. Lorsque Napoléon avait volé des oeuvres d'art de toute l'Europe (comme plus tard Göring), le butin fut exposé au Louvre. Mais quand elles ont dû être rendues après sa défaite, les paroisses semblaient étrangement vides, et le directeur de l'époque a décidé d'organiser des expositions d'œuvres nouvelles, et on a même acheté quelques unes. Tant que les artistes étaient vivants, leurs oeuvres étaient pourtant exposées dans le premier musée d'art moderne au monde, mais dès leur mort, les œuvres sont passées au Louvre - et c'est pourquoi le musée compte aujourd'hui autant de peintures de personnes comme Delacroix et ses contemporains. Le musée s'est également vu proposer des objets d'Egypte, mais au début on était un peu réticent, et le premier envoi important a donc abouti dans un musée de Turin. Plus tard on a acheté un tas de choses, et monsieur Champollion qui a déchiffré les hiéroglyphes était un employé du musée.


UPDATE: ... and just one day after I wrote about my low Italian wordcount (just 22.412 headwords or 52% known ones) I got some reassurance that my Italian hasn't become too old, rotten and delapidated after all. I went to the weekly language café at the library, and the turn-out was minimal this time, but I met a lady from Bergamo who had come to Denmark to learn a culture and a language from Northern Europe. So we talked about the particularities about the Danish language and how easy its grammar is - first in Danish, but when she mentioned that she was a native Italian she got the rest of the explanation in Italian. And from there we went to language learning in general and to the town Bergamo, which I have visited about ten years ago. In other words: one full hour in Italian with a native speaker with no concessions of any kind, so my Italian definitely passed the communications test. However it does worry me that there weren't more people there.

F3806b02&4 _ Bergamo.jpg
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Iversen
Black Belt - 4th Dan
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Languages: Monolingual travels in Danish, English, German, Dutch, Swedish, French, Portuguese, Spanish, Catalan, Italian, Romanian and (part time) Esperanto
Ahem, not yet: Norwegian, Afrikaans, Platt, Scots, Russian, Serbian, Bulgarian, Albanian, Greek, Latin, Irish, Indonesian and a few more...
Language Log: viewtopic.php?f=15&t=1027
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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby Iversen » Thu Nov 11, 2021 3:21 pm

I have done a few more wordcounts, and as a minor surprise it was Portuguese that came out as the winner with 74% known words using a Langenscheidt dictionary with at least 25.000 headwords - and 69% in Romanian is also quite OK. But there is a lot of random fluctation because I don't count more than between 100 and 150 words per session. And the logical question then is: if the data aren't more trustworthy why then do those counts at all? Well, one reason is that I mostly know why a certain measurement has jumped way up or way down so I still get a feeling for my current level, and the other reason is that it is a good excuse for looking closely at ALL words in a certain part of the dictionary - instead of selecting a subset as when I do wordlists.

The last couple of days my main focus has been on Russian, and it started Monday when I had some time to spend before the language café at the library - and I just grabbed the Russian translation of the first book in J.Auel's monumental bear clan saga - up to the point where a small girl who somehow got lost in the wilderniss girl is studying some extinct cave lions. And my main thought was that if the lions had been really hungry then the book would have been much shorter.

In the evening yesterday I grabbed ...

RU: ...одна статья об очень быстрых раках и другая о пауке, который может вращаться быстрее, чем вы можете моргнуть (с переводом на португальский). У самцов раков Dulichiella appendiculata есть огромная клешня, которая может хлопнуть всего за 50 микросекунд - мгновение ока длится в 100000 раз помедленнее . Но этот вид питается только растениями воды мертвой, поэтому исследователи предполагают, что щелчок был установлен только для того, чтобы произвести впечатление на самок - развитие пошло наперекосяк! Есть также креветки, которые могут щелкнуть так сильно, что могут разбить стекло в своем аквариуме, образуя маленькие горячие пузыри, которые могут убить добычу, но размножаются до человеческих размеров ... э-э-э-э ... спорт бокс быстро исчезнет! Повернутый паук не строит сети, а находится в засаде, чтобы поймать мелких животных, поэтому вполне обосновано, что он быстрый ... но почему он может вращаться вокруг себя более 8 раз за секунду?

Dulichiella.jpg
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Iversen
Black Belt - 4th Dan
Posts: 4768
Joined: Sun Jul 19, 2015 7:36 pm
Location: Denmark
Languages: Monolingual travels in Danish, English, German, Dutch, Swedish, French, Portuguese, Spanish, Catalan, Italian, Romanian and (part time) Esperanto
Ahem, not yet: Norwegian, Afrikaans, Platt, Scots, Russian, Serbian, Bulgarian, Albanian, Greek, Latin, Irish, Indonesian and a few more...
Language Log: viewtopic.php?f=15&t=1027
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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby Iversen » Mon Nov 15, 2021 10:13 pm

Just a short notice this time ...

I went as usual to the Language café, but there were very few people. However I got a very interesting discussion with a man from Iran, who also knew Turkish and some other languages which I don't speak. So we started out in Danish and then switched to English just to have some fun. The discussion became really interesting from the moment we discussed the position of Farsi among the Indoeuropan languages. I have focused a lot on the Europan branches of this group and less on the Asiatic ones, but I knew the thing about the centum/satem distribution: "centum" expansion from North of the Black sea Westwards to form the Hellenic, Italoceltic and Germanic families, Eastwards to Central Asia where Tocharian languages for a time were spoken .. and "satem" Northwards to form the Baltoslavic family and South/Southeast-wards to the Middle East and India. Hittite must have arisen from an earlier phase of Indoeuropean expansion, but it died out.

And then the picture was complicated by a Turkic expansion from Central or even Eastern Asia Westwards, which cut through the Indoeuropean area like a knife. Today there are large Turkic speaking populations in Asia (like for instance the Uzbeks and Afghans), and the Azeri of Azerbaijan form a bridge down to modern Turkey, which is the most populous Turkic speaking area today. And then we got to discuss what language Cyros II the Great or Elder of Persia ( (c. 600 – 530 BC) actually spoke. We used the computers of the library to ascertain that he and the later rulers of Achemenid did indeed speak Ancient Persian, which i surmise was a satem language, and that the Achemenid rulers wrote their inscriptions in Cuneiform, which is a system originally invented by the Sumerians (who spoke a linguistic isolate) and passed down by mostly Semitic speaking peoples to the Indoeuropan speaking Hittites and Persians.

And the Turkish people then came rather late, but I didn't know the exact chronology - only that the Ottoman empire was established after the empire ruled from Bagdad had been squashed by the Mongols. And that the expansion through South Eastern Europe was delayed by the Byzantinians, but they were seriously weakened by the fourth so-called crusade, which was rerouted at the proposal of the alarmingly shortsighted Venetian doge Dandolo (actually he was blind physically, but here I'm considering his political level). Maybe the Ottoman expansion couldn't have been halted completely, but the stupidity and greed of one Venetian doge potentially resulted in the Balkan area being under Ottoman rule for one or two hundred years more than necessary.

I don't think I actually said anything wrong during this discussion, but afterwards I felt somewhat uneasy about knowing so little about such a large and complicated topic, so I have spent several hours this evening reading about the languages and peoples of the Middle East up through Central Asia, and I noticed some things I hadn't suspected - like connections between proto-Mongols and Proto-Turkic people and the possibility that Attila's Huns actually spoke a Turkic language (where most other sources assume they spoke something Uralic). Other Turkic connections go down to India, where Wikipedia mentions Hyderabad as the last survivor among a string of small states governed by people of Turkic extraction - I remembered Hyderabad mainly for the fabulous riches of its last 'nizam', who was deposed in 1948, but not for being a pocket remnant of Turkic expansion.

PS: see also my comments in Kraut's latest thread about the Yamnayas - I mention the Hungarians there, and Árpád apparently led a genetially mixed group of warriors into Hungary, some of which may have been of Turkic stock, others of Uralic.

Apart from that I am in the process of preparing for my first trip abroad since February 2020 - a wee trip to Mecklenburg-Vorpommern in Germany, where a group of chamber musicians is going to play a "Rostocker Trio" for clarinet, viola and cello which I wrote for them earlier this year. It is a rare combination of instruments, but I had - almost by accident - already written a small trio for that combination a few years ago, and when they found it at the site IMSLP they contacted me, and I decided that they deserved to have something more substantial to play. During the 80s I played cello with two flutes, and I remember that I had to make transcriptions and write new works myself to get something to play at all for those instruments, so it can't be easier for musicians playing clarinet, viola and cello together. I am quite curious to find out what the people from Rostock have played until now - and also curious to hear some of my own music played by others for the first time in thirty years.

Rostocker Trio.jpg

DE: "Trio" is in der Tat ein Neutrum-Wort auf Deutsch, aber wenigstens für meine Ohren hört sich *Rostockes Trio" ganz unmöglich an, nur "Rostocker" geht hier - und ich weiß nicht genau warum! Ich weiß aber, daß "Blatt" auch Neutrum ist, aber trotzdem heißt es "Hamburger Abendblatt" und nicht *"Hamburges Abendblatt", so vielleicht liegt darunder einen alten Dativ Pluralis - etwas für Rostocker bzw. Hamburger geschrieben. Wie wird dies von den einheimischen Experten erklärt?
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