Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby Iversen » Mon Dec 09, 2024 8:18 pm

I have just returned from seven days in Copenhagen (København) and its neighbourhood. I first stayed in a hotel near Elsinore (Helsingør), where I had a discussion with some tourists who wondered were Amled (Hamlet) ACTUALLY lived - and then I told them that he probably didn't exist, but if he did it would probably have been in Jutland, and it would have been centuries before Kronborg was built. We know the history from Saxo Grammaticus, who wrote his Gesta Danorum in the mid 13. century.

After that I stayed four nights at floor 23 in a hotel on the island Amager (where also the airport of Copenhagen is situated), and here I had Youtube -more about that below. But here i visited the 'Royal Collection' in one of the four buildings of Amalienborg. The royal family lives here, and each new generation are assigned one of the four buildings in rotation. They moved to this complex, which originally was built by riche nobles, when their castle Christiansborg burned. It has since been rebuilt, then it burned once more, and the castle was then rebuilt once again, but now it has been used for the parliament and the supreme court and and some ceremonial rooms and a cellar full of ruins. OK, the public part of Amalienborg is a museum with leftovers from former kings and queens, including some impressive original interiors, and here I heard a couple of Dutch tourists discuss whether we had a queen or a king now. And then I couldn't resist the temptation to tell them in Dutch that our queen Margrete followed in the footsteps of the Dutch collegues and resigned - the first Danish monarch to do so since Erik Lam resigned in 1146, probably due to bad health (he died later the same year). In contrast our much estimate queen Daisy is buzzing around like a fly in a bottle, and she has left all the boring stuff to her son Frederik.

Just minutes later I overhead a group of Germans discussing the numbering of our kings. We have had a sequences of alternating Christians and Frederiks since 1448, but the father of Frederik IX (Frderik X's grandpa) was numbered as Christian X, so what happened? I couldn't resist the temptation to tell them (in German) that no.2 in the Oldenborg dynasty was called Hans (or Iohannis in Latin), and he called his heir Christian, but Christian II was toppled and replaced by a Frederik who couldn't even speak Danish ... and then the numbers have been silly ever since, until Margrethe got the throne and got the brillant idea to call her firstborn son Frederik. And Frederik has named the next in line Christian, so the next century or so the numbers fit again.

F5844b03_Amalienborg.jpg

Apart from that I took a lot of photos and drew a dozen of museum drawings which now have to be organized, so I have to stop writing now.

By the way: PS, one thing more: I heard a tour guide claim that our monarchy started with Gorm the Old in the mid 900s. When he let his listeners loose and had a couple of minutes free, I couldn't resist the temptation to remind him that we have a lots of names of kings before Gorm, including the mighty Gudfred around 800, who dared to stand up to the fearsome emperor Charlemagne. And after him a Hemming and a couple of Horiks, but we have very little contemporary sources that mention those guys in detail. Gorm got famous because he had a stone hewn where he mentioned his wife Thorvig (Thyra) - else nobody would have seen him as the first Danish king. And I asked politely the guide to tell his meek flock the truth instead of hiding it...
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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby Tumlare » Tue Dec 10, 2024 7:46 pm

Iversen wrote:
By the way: PS, one thing more: I heard a tour guide claim that our monarchy started with Gorm the Old in the mid 900s.


This is everywhere in the museums in Copenhagen--thanks for the information on the older ones!
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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby Iversen » Wed Dec 11, 2024 9:08 am

BU: Тази сутрин се събудих след сън, в който (почти) отивах на курс по български език. Имаше още трима или четирима души плюс една учителка, но когато тя попита (на немски) дали всички говорим немски, се отказах от курса. След това се замислих какво мога да кажа на български - и не беше много. Например, не можах да си спомня как се казва "zu groß"- и опитах на няколко други славянски езика, но не - не се получи.

... so of course I looked it up when I had woken up: "твърде голям" (literally 'stronger big'). And "příliš velký" in Czech - totally different words!

EN: My goodnight reading yesterday was Assimil's small guide to Indonesian, and I found that months of neglect of course had left me with some weak points. For instance I had totally forgotten the following small curiosity: you say "Jam berapa" (quelle heure est-il?/what time is it?) and "tanggal berapa" ("quelle date sommes-nous"/what date is it (today)?), but "berapa jam" (combien d'heures/how many hours (=how long..)?) and "berapa lama" (combien de temps..?/how much time) - and if that isn't funny enough, then consider the following: "Tanggal berapa" (quelle date sommes-nous) and "tahun berapa" (quelle année?/ which year), but "hari apa?" (quelle jour? - literally 'day is'?) and "bulan apa?" (quelle mois?/which month - literally 'month is'?) - where did 'berapa' go??

FR: Mais en effet on pourrait aussi dire que c'est le français qui est le plus illogique ici: pourquoi "sommes-nous" un date ou jour, mais les heures n'ont pas besoin de nous- là on dit "quelle heure est-il?". D'ailleurs l'Indonésien a quelque chose de très pratique: un 'nous' que inclut votre interlocuteur (ou interlocuteurs) et un autre qui ne le fait pas: "kita" vs. "kami".

EN: Apart from that: I spent almost the whole day yesterday organizing my photos and museum drawings, and I haven't even finished yet - so it will be seven days away followed a cleaning up operation that will last almost two full days - one good reason not to take extremely looooooong holidays! I took 375 photos, out of which I kept 124 (plus 4 oldfashioned postcards) and made 16 drawings (including two in black-and-white, which I then coloured at home) - and then I added one drawing more which I made at home based on new and old photos. On trips to new exiting places I would probably go for more than roughly 20 photos per day, but I already have a lot of photos from Copenhagen. The drawing below is however from a museum which I haven't visited since 2011 (Øregård), so there I of course took some more photos - and made the following drawing:

F7025a06_øregård.jpg

Btw; the bottom part left shows the British terror bombardment of Copenhagen in 1807 - allegedly the first fullblown bombardment of a totally unprepared and defenceless town in the world history* (with rockets invented by Congreve). And afterward Nelson stole our fleet.. and soon after the powers at the dancing congreess in 1814 i Vienna traded Norway to the Swedes (under their new French king) as a replacement for Finland, which they gave to the Russians. And then Denmark went bankrupt in 1814 and the period we somewhat ironically call out golden age (Guldalder) started... :?

* .. apart from the episode in the history of Kievan Rus, where queen Olga besieged the capital of another power- the Drevlians - in the area, who had recently killed her greedy husband, and demanded a couple of pigeons from every house in the town as part of the ransom for lifting the blockade. And when she got the pigeons she had burning twigs tied to their feet, so when the scared birdies flew back home to the old homes the result was that the whole town burnt down. Hahahahahaha - don't mess with queen Olga!

UK: Пізніше вона поїхала до Константинопол і прийняла хрещення. Тому вона стала святою набагато пізніше.
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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby tarvos » Sun Dec 15, 2024 11:35 am

He leído un par de páginas de tu bitácora con mucho interés. Pero veo que ahora los viajes han sido sobre todo dentro del territorio danés. ¿Hay algo programado para otros rincones bonitos del mundo, o ya no te hace tanta ilusión como antes, ya que has viajado casi por todos lados?
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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby Iversen » Sun Dec 15, 2024 11:41 am

My main activity the last couple of days has been to watch videos, either in some non-English language or in English with subtitles in something - like for instance one in Russian with subtitles in Afrikaans (which wouldn't have been possible on the app in the hotels). The topic was once again colour perception and the title was "как вы различиваете цвета и оттенки". One thing that puzzled me was that the lady in the video showed a rainbow and asked how many different nuances one could see - above 39 and you were lying, but I got them all. And then she proclaimed that people at that level were tetrachromats, which shouldn't be possible for men. The mechanism ought to be that some women (!) get slightly different red and/or green cones from their two X chromosomes, while men only can get one set from their one and only X chromosome. So it was almost a relief to do a test where you had to find out which of eight circles was slightly different - and then the background was given the colour of the seven,and the weirdo could be seen - luckily I made several errors at the fourth and haardest level so I don't have to get my chromosomes checked. But maybe my eyes.

Some of the last videos I watched yesterday were about art, including one about "Lowbrow Art and Art surrealism" in English (with Czech subtitles), and even though the artworks didn't quite match mine I did feel that we were in the same boat. After that a video about a surrealist exhibition at the Met in the big Appletown and, lo and behold, then

IT: .. il grazioso tubo mi ha offerto di guardare un video in italiano intitolato "Surrealismo Artescuola". Ok, non è stata la cosa migliore che abbia mai visto sullo topico, dato che hanno preso come punto di partenza lo stupido manifesto surrealista-communista-freudiano di Breton, ma almeno non fu fatta in inglese. La realtà è che tutto ciò che è meglio in quella corrente artistica venne creato senza concordanza affatto col manifesto. Le linee di faglia vanno infatto tra la parte del surrealismo che si avvicina alla pittura mainstream (la quale adorano i cuatori dei musei d'arte) e la parte folla che si avvicina alla street art, ai fumetti migliori e... beh, ai miei umili prodotti. :D

SW: Och här kan jag knappast låta bli att nämna en jätterolig video om Arne Anka, som drack, svor och horade på svenska – kort sagt allt som Disneygruppens moralväktare inte gillar. När DIsney's advokater hotade skaparen af denne figur med ruin lät han Arne Anka plastikoperera, men snart började Arne bära en mask som fick honom att se ut som en riktig anka igen. Jag gillar denna sorts begavat upprör!

ArneAnka.jpg

Jag såg också en video om de skandalöst dåliga 'översättninger' av Tolkiens mästerverk, som i fyrtio år var de enda som gick att köpa på svenska. Ersättaren för verket kom inte förrän 2005. Stackars svenskar som fick lida under ett enda perverst individs lust att omskriva de böker som det fick i uppdrag att översätta!

Platt: Ik höff ok seen een Reeg videos op Platt (aka Leeg Düüts). Dit hett anfangen mit een video op Friis (ik bün nich zeker wat Soorte vun Friis), und ik höff dat seehn mit Nederlandse untertitels. Un ik höff dat meeste verstahn. Aver achterno höff ik een video vun die Serie "hören Kieken Snacken" op Platt funnen, un ik warr mit der Tiet zeker meer vun dit Kanal sehn.
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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby tarvos » Sun Dec 15, 2024 3:09 pm

In Oost-Nederland is het dialect ook een soort Platt, maar het dialect is heden ten dage wel wat minder sterk. Wel is het accent altijd merkbaar... (een Twents drankje met 15 letters: cooooooolaaaaaa)
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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby Le Baron » Sun Dec 15, 2024 4:38 pm

Iversen wrote: Mais en effet on pourrait aussi dire que c'est le français qui est le plus illogique ici: pourquoi "sommes-nous" un date ou jour, mais les heures n'ont pas besoin de nous- là on dit "quelle heure est-il?".


En fait ça existe aussi en anglais. 'Are we Friday or Saturday?' or 'Are we the 23rd?' est aussi courant que 'Is it Friday or Saturday?' or 'Is it the 23rd?'
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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby tastyonions » Sun Dec 15, 2024 7:32 pm

Le Baron wrote:
Iversen wrote: Mais en effet on pourrait aussi dire que c'est le français qui est le plus illogique ici: pourquoi "sommes-nous" un date ou jour, mais les heures n'ont pas besoin de nous- là on dit "quelle heure est-il?".

En fait ça existe aussi en anglais. 'Are we Friday or Saturday?' or 'Are we the 23rd?' est aussi courant que 'Is it Friday or Saturday?' or 'Is it the 23rd?'

Pas de mon côté de l'Atlantique. ;-)
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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby lingohot » Sun Dec 15, 2024 8:22 pm

Le Baron wrote:
Iversen wrote: Mais en effet on pourrait aussi dire que c'est le français qui est le plus illogique ici: pourquoi "sommes-nous" un date ou jour, mais les heures n'ont pas besoin de nous- là on dit "quelle heure est-il?".


En fait ça existe aussi en anglais. 'Are we Friday or Saturday?' or 'Are we the 23rd?' est aussi courant que 'Is it Friday or Saturday?' or 'Is it the 23rd?'


En allemand on dit quelque chose de comparable : Haben wir Freitag oder Samstag? ("do we have Friday or Saturday") Wie viel Uhr haben wir? ("what time do we have")
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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby Iversen » Thu Dec 19, 2024 9:22 am

The last couple of days it has been fairly wet here so I have at lots of times to spend indoors. And I have spent some of that time on Youtube videos, but this has caused a minor problem.

Last year I got the idea that I could use Wikipedia and other sources to make a list of all proboscids now and in the past. OK, I may not have reached the goal, but instead it ended up in an ambitious plan of making MSWord files with names and a short text and a picture of THOUSANDS of vertebrates, from salps and up. As a teenager I did something similar (without the 20.000 or so fishes and no salps), but now there is such a fancy new invention as Wikipedia, where some extraordinarily savvy persons have made long lists of presumably every critter in the known universe - albeit in some cases not with an article to themselves, and in even more examples not with an image (it may be hard to find one in the public domain with they can use, and especially with dead critters the only information may be hidden away in expensive scientific magazines - and thus not in the public domain).

OK, I finished that program and ended up with 39 files. But later in the same year I felt that I need more information about WHY the learned ones had structured their taxonomies as they have done - and sometimes also why there are divergent opinions, which may even lead to contradictioary information within the Wikipedia system itself (and just as an added information: much of the taxonomy has been turned on its head since my youth because of the use of genetical information, which wasn't available in the 60s). And then I made a corresponding system of 39 "snak" (babble)-files with that kind of information - i.e. fewer species and more babble. My main source has always been the Anglophone version of Wikipedia, but this secondary series allowed me also to have a discrete peek into the Wkipediae in other languages - and there I could see that the Danish version is rather dismal on zoological nomenclature, whereas for instance the Ukrainian one is surprisingly good (although I cant't understand all of it). And for Latin American critters the Spanish and Portuguese Wikipedias are obviously worth consulting - although I try to stick to English common names and Latin scientific names.

But then a week or so ago disaster struck: I watched some videos about dead dinos and other dead animals, and then it occurred to me that my lists from 2023 might have holes - not in the sense that I hadn't included each and every species which never had been the intention (that's WIkipedias's job!), but entire groups were missing. OK, I had to a large extent relied on cladograms, which are tree diagrams that show the relations between different groups of animals, but these aren't always complete, and sometimes they conflict. So for examples I suddenly stumbled over a Youtube video about the Sebecidae ... AHem, WHAT???? I didn't remember those guys, but according to the video they had not only survived the KT event (where a meteor struck the Earth and killed the non avian dinosaurs and a lot of other life forms while it was at it), but they had grown to ginornous sizes (up to 6 meters long) and become top predators in South America up to at least the mid Miocene. How could I have overlooked THAT group in 2023 ??

OK, I looked into the matter. I had noticed the Nothosuchia to which they belong, but without noticing that a group named the Sebedosuchia had included a subgroup called the Sebecidae, which had survived the extinction event. Actually it was the same thing a small group of feathered toothless dinos had done, and as a result I have birdies flying around in my garden today. But the Sebecidae eventually died out, and then the world just forgot about them.

So I made some remarks in my old files, but then got the disastrous idea that I would run through those files to see what else I had forgotten - and also to stock up on groups which I had been rather leisurely about because they had a lot of almost indistinguishable members. Like the rodents. Not only did I find some forgotten groups, but lazy me had also cut down on the number of species mentioned if there were too many of them. And therefore my old 39_gnavdyr.doc file had to be split into two, so that I now have 40 files x 2 (plus an overview) in the system. Right now I'm doing the same thing with the bats. Did you know that there are around 1400 species of bats in the world? :shock: I intend over the coming winter months to run through all of my 2023 files to check and stuff them with new species, and I am fairly sure that in particular the damned boney fishes will have to be added to. As I remember it there were literally thousands of tetra and cichlids (even though the voracious tilapia in the Victoria lake have brought down the number of extant species there), so I only included some representative ones in the first places - but that won't do. I'll have to do something about that when I have worked my way through the remaining mammals and birds and reptiles and not-reptiles like the dinosaurs and the amphibians and a number of extinct orders ... so presumably not in the near future.

Sebecidiae-according-to-Wikipedia.jpg

And what consequences will that have for my language studies? Well, less time for intensive studies, and my video viewing will be skewed toward languages which I can understand without looking at dictionaries or subtitles while I'm studying the taxonomy of vertebrates on my old computer. Or I will be listening to music - for instance I have just listened to around four hours of music by the Czech composer Martinů - but that didn't teach me a single word of Czech... :(
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