SInce I felt that I was reusing old printouts too much I have made a new collection. The main method is the usual: I put a word into Google and do a search restricted to one language ... and then I avoid the items at the top of the hit list since they are dominated by dictionaries and Wikipedia (which I would be culling all the time even without help from Google). The second to main method is of course to look at the old sources again, but I haven't always remembered to include them in my printouts. Often the translation isn't strictly necessary, but then I have fun using a variety of translation language just to spice things up. If I'm sure I can understand almost evertyhing then I will of course just make a monolingual printout - but in that case I might also just be reading at the screen.
This time the result goes as follows:
A Russian collection with texts from a site called evolution.powernet.ru, section 'history' . My Google 'nucleus' this time was "триасовый" and this gave acces to a rich collection of texts that stretch from the big bang to modern times. My Russian is at a level where I
could drop the translation(s), but I kept them for the odd unknown (or forgotten) word, and thee are translations into Danish, English, French, Dutch, Afrikaans, Spanish and Portuguese. It wouldn't be practical to use other Slavic languages since the words I don't know in Russian might be found in those languages too (or be explained with even more unknown words).
In Polish I found a fairly long article on sputniknew.com about the genetic side of the spread of the Indoeuropean language family - a theme which readers of this log will know has been on my agenda for quite some time. The language choice here is utterly boring (English and Danish), but this is logical since I have been neglecting Polish for some time and need more help to get through the text.
In Bulgarian I need less help so here the choice of translation languages has already become more varied. I first looked for things about the same theme as in Polish. I did find an article that claimed that Bulgarians had been there for at least 10.000 years - I'll have to look at the precise haplogroups mentioned in the article to check this. Their Slavic language and culture came with a comparativelyy recent invasion, but an invasion doesn't necessarily imply that the old population is totally replaced. Apart from this I included an article about an ongoing excavation and an article about Alzheimer in the collection.
For the Serbian collection I copied the transcript of a video about national parks from prezi.com (maybe I'll listen to the video itself later), and I added a number of texts about pretty places from Danube-cooperation.com, including one about the Kotor Bay area, where people are supposed to speak Montenegrin and use the Latin alphabet - but in Serbian I try to stick to Cyrillic texts, and this one in Cyrillic looks to me as a genuine article in Serbian.
In Slovak I first checked out the homepage of my hotel in Žilina and then went on to places I visited, like the castle in Trenčín and the Open air museum in Martin (whose homepage is called skanzenmartin.sk - Swedes may recognize this name).
And finally I found some more material on dark holes and the cosmological constant in Greek.
I have reached page 235 in my Musicophilia book in Romanian by mr. Sac
ks. About a third left ...
Yesterday I participated in a meeting in my travel club, and one of the other participants mentioned that she had become an avid listener to e-books (in Danish), and it seemed that this also was common among the others. I was the odd one out since I never listen to literary readings in any language, I don't ever visit theatres and I rarely read literature - I can't say I never do because I did read "2061" in Portuguese and "3001" in English recently - but it wouldn't occur to me to listen to any literary e-book, not even sci fi or something spoken in one of my target languages. On the other hand I do listen to documentaries - unless they are dubbed according to the abominable 'double' German principle or the music becomes too irritating or the speaker is a selfpromoting jerk, which is more and more often the case.
While I have been reading the last 100 pages or so of Sacks the thought did cross my mind that I might have a blind spot in the interval between language and music. One of the others at the meeting asked me whether I really didn't love hearing Ghita Nørby (a Danish actress) reading literature aloud, and when I said "no" she was thoroughly flummoxed. But for me language - and in particular the spoken language - is a means to communication (and a study subject),
not a vehicle for histrionics. I do prefer nice voices to raucous screaming, but
not when the owners try to be artistic - then I would prefer hearing them scream in agony. The happiest time in Danish TV ever was the period during the 60s where the Actor's Union went on strike so that not a single actor was heard on TV for several months ... what a release!
I do appreciate short and wellwrought poems like those of Mallarmé or Baudelaire, but I definitely don't want to hear anybody read them aloud. I might learn something about trades and different cultures from prose literature (like the novels of Balzac), but mostly the relevant stuff is mixed with irrelevant fictional babble about unpleasant or otherwise pitiful persons and their fictional personal affaires. A solid historical account is much more my thing - even though truly unpleasant characters also are common in real history. And I prefer instrumental music, so maybe I do miss some kind of intertwining mesh in the interval between language and music which other people enjoy - but I wouldn't want to change places with them. "Skæg for sig and snot for sig", as we say in Danish (="beard on one side, mucus on the other" - and not "Be shy and snuggle" as proposed by Google Translate).
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