Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

[jeff_lindqvist]

I just read the SYJY text aloud (in the best Danish I could) - no need for that translation. That usually works for less transparent Romance languages too.

[Iversen]

SW: Jag är inte förvånad över att Jeff kan läsa Synnejysk - han är en utmärkt polyglot med ett annat skandinavisk språk som modersmål, men jag måste arbeta med hypotesen att vissa av läsarna av denna logg använder Google Translate, och standarddansk fungerar trots allt bättre i GT än en fastan ukännt dialekt från södra Jylland.

GER: Übrigens habe ich den Jahreswechsel mit Bravour überlebt. Wie gestern angekündigt, blieb ich um Mitternacht mitten in der Innenstadt, und ich habe noch nie so viel unorganisiertes Feuerwerk in dieser Stadt wie dieses Jahr erlebt. Als ich noch arbeitete (bis vor 3 Jahren), reiste ich an den Neujahrstagen oft ins Ausland (um jeden freien Tag für's Reisen zu benützen), und ich erinnere mich daran, daß es in Delft in den Niederlanden extrem viele Feuerwerke gab - in Sevilla in Spanien dagegen nichts. Die Spanier gingen mit blitzenden Mickey Mouse-Hütchen durch ihre Stadtmitte und sprachen ganz leise mit ihren Freunden - das war alles, und dies war für mich eine große Überraschung (oder sagen wir bloß: Enttäuschung), weil die Spanier sonst nicht gerade lautlos sind.

SP: Pero luego tuve que irme a casa a través de Málaga, y así logré quedarme en España durante la Epifanía el 6 de enero, y esto fue el puro caos, con desfiles y carros y música de latón por todas las calles. Quizás los españoles están tan callados en Año Nuevo para tener mas pólvora en reserva para el día de los Reyes Magos?

GER: OK, zurück in die Gegenwart. Ich habe wie gewohnt das traditionelle Neujahrskonzert aus Wien gesehen, diesmal auf ZDF. Ich habe seit langem damit aufgehört dieses Konzert im dänischen Fernsehen anzuschauen, weil DR jahrelang nur die erste Hälfte gezeigt hat - und danach gab es immer Skisprung aus Garmisch-Partenkirchen. Im deutschen Fernsehen werden die Skisprünge über die ARD gezeigt und das Konzert im ZDF, and dann können die Zuschauer selbst wählen. Das Konzert wird aber auch von vielen andern Fernsehsendern in vielen anderen Ländern einschließlich Frankreich übertragen, und so habe ich entdeckt, ...

FR: .. que les Français de TF2 ont envoyé l'excellent Stéphane Bern à Vienne pour explorer des lieux moins connus de la ville. Par exemple il a visité Schönbrunn. Moi aussi j'ai visité Schönbrunn en 2018, et 'ai eu trois nuits dans un hotel de luxe si proche à l'ensemble Schönbrunnien que je pouvais voir la porte par laquelle il faut entrer pour visiter le jardin zoologique de ma chambre. Et évidemment j'ai aussi visité le célèbre château - mais contraire au monsieur Bern je ne n'avais pas le moindre soupçon qu'il y aie dans le château même des appartements tour à fait privés qu'on n'a pas même besoin d'être employé au château pour louer - seulement chanceux (et probablement aussi bien à l'aise, puisque Vienne n'est pas exactement une ville pour les pauvres).

F5249b02-4 Fyrværkeri.jpg

[Iversen]

When I wrote my multilingual New Years Eve rant the texts in some languages almost came by itself so fast that that I hardly had time to write them down. In other languages I had to laboriously construct the sentences using a dictionary and green sheets or a grammar. This was as expected, but I noticed that my Polish had become more rusty than expected so I spend most of my study time yesterday on a ressuscitation attempt which started out with the study of an old text, namely the one on the R1A1 haplogroup in Eastern Europe which I already once have commented on, and it continued with a text on a related theme, name the arrival of the Slavic Polabians in the territory of the former DDR, which according to the article should have happened as far back as 2600 BC - i.e. basically at the same time as the R1B1 invasion of Western Europe.

In my lecture in Bratislava last year I did mention that the arrival route of the bearers of R1B1 didn't seem to be through Eastern Europe, but rather via a corridor through Central Europe and from there spreading out towards the Iberian Peninisula, France, the British Isles and Southern Scandinavia. If Poland etc. already was full of R1A1ians almost 5.000 years ago then it is unlikely that the R1B1ans first invaded the area and then saw their genetic traces wiped out by another group of other steppe nomads a few years later. It is a well known fact that the Goths ruled a vast territory in Eastern Europe up to 375, where Attila the Hun beat them. But ruling a territory is not the same as being the majority tribe there, and the Goths subsequently also ruled parts of Italy, Southern France and Spain without hardly leaving a trace of their genes (or language) for posteriority.

When I had worked my way through this article I intended to do a wordlist right away with its new words, but then I found an old dictionary-based wordlist sheet among the printouts, and I ended up a repetition round with its words instead of those from the 'Polabian' article - all in all around 350 words. The illustration below only shows a quarter of them (one half page). Normally I would do a repetition round something like one day after the original list, but it seems that I forgot to do so in this case. Most of the words do however look familiar, and if I do an extra check-up on them tomorrow I expect to reach the usual 70-80% of known words. And I could feel my fragile Polish coming slowly back to me during these activities.

Besides I have now booked airtickets and hotel stays for a trip to Recife and Natal in Brazil later this year, and I'm vaguely thinking about presenting a lecture in Portuguese at the next gathering in Bratislava - maybe on the topic of hyperliteral translations. As for Japan .. well, the jury is still out concerning that one. I would hate to study something hard and compose a lecture only to see it rejected because there aren't as many lecture slots to fill out.

PS Isto foi a minha mensagem numero 2000

Polish-wordlist.jpg

[Iversen]

When I woke up this morning I came to speculate about a couple of topics from the forum. The first was the discussion about red books, where I introduced the polar bear in a footnote to one of my messages. This morning it struck me that we could illustrate the different roles of "the" by comparing to superficially parallel sentences: "the polar bear is white" and "the black bear is white". The point is that any clean polar bear looks white (although its skin is black and the white color only is due to its hollow hairs), whereas black bears come in a whole gamit of colours, including white. So when we say that polar bears are white we are probably stating a fact about a whole species, but when we say exactly the same thing about the black bear we must be referring to an individual bear from a subpopulation of black bears, namely the one which also is called the 'spirit bear'. So the sentence "The black bear is white" is an exact parallel to "the book is red".

The other thing I remembered this morning is that if people representing the R1A1 haplogroup came to Poland and the former DDR already around 2600 BC and the R1B1 haplogroup was spreading in Western Europe at the same time or even a century or two before, then the languages each group spoke probably may have been ProtoEuropean, but their latest common ProtoProtoEuropean ancestor must be at least 5000 years old. Which matches the basic division of the Indoeuropean languages into centum and satem languages, where the Balto-Slavic and Indian ones belong to the seatem group and the Italo-Celtic, Germanic and Tocharian belong to the cemtum group (named after the presumed forms the word for "100" took in each group). But what then is the role of the Slavic invasion in Eastern and South-Eastern Europe that happened after the turmoil caused by Attila and his huns, i.e. from around 500 AC and onwards? Could the separation between Western Slavonic and Eastern (and Southern) Slavonic languages really go several thousand years back, to a time before the Huns - and when did the Baltic languages then separate from the common stem?

According to Wikipedia "The Book of Henryków (..) contains the earliest known sentence written in the Polish language: Day, ut ia pobrusa, a ti poziwai (pronounced originally as: Daj, uć ja pobrusza, a ti pocziwaj, modern Polish: Daj, niech ja pomielę, a ty odpoczywaj or Pozwól, że ja będę mełł, a ty odpocznij, English: Come, let me grind, and you take a rest), written around 1270." Actually the author would be Henryk rather than Henryków, which is a genitive form, but that's a minor detail. The main point is that we don't have any attestion whatsoever of what the language in Poland was before centuries after the Hunnic episode, so we don't even know whether the invasions around 600 AC really brought the Polish language (or its ancestor) to Poland - it could already have been there long before - and then it isn't strange that I have so much trouble with exactly that language!

As for the Sorbian language (or rather dialect bundle. since it is comprised by a North and a Southern branch) it is supposed to go back to the language spoken to the Wends, who inhabited the old DDR area in the Medieval period (Saxo Grammaticus wrote extensively about the wars between Denmark and these Wends - and we won, hurray!) - but Wikipedia in all the versions I have checked assumes that they only arrived there during the Great migrations - so now I wonder, what the heck did the populations in old DDR and Poland speak during the two thousand years from 2600 BC to around 600 AC?

Last night I was lucky to hear a lot of Icelandic, because ..

IC: ... STV2 fra Svíþjóð sendi nefnilega útvarpsþáttur á íslensku með sænskum texta um álfa, huldafolk og trölla, sem sumir Íslendingar telja ennþá í dag - en tilhneigingin er sú að þeir verða meira efins um það bil - jafnvel út í landinu. Island urðu formlegt kristin fyrir 1000 árum, en fólkið í sveitinni trúði ennþá að skrýtnar bjuggu í hrauni og storum steinum og vatni, ogað þeir dansa á ákveðnum sviðum. Þetta er einnig þekkt frá öðrum löndum, þar með talið Danmörku, og það eru gríðarlega mikið af skýrslum um rafmagnsbrautir og aðrir óg í Danmörku. En Íslendingarna hafa alltaf verið söguvitundar og hafa augljóslega notið þess að halda í gömlum hefðum.

Black bear (Kermode bear), Wikipedia.jpg

[Iversen]

LA: In filo de libro rubeo scripsi ut mihi glossaria casae editoriali danicae Gyldendal placebant, sed exceptio singularis exstat: glossarium suae ex lingva danica in lingvam latinam pessimum erat et eum abjeci. Paret ut autores glossarium altri directioni ceperunt et directionem reverserunt, ita ut modo verba expressionesque familaria romaniis in translata suorum apperuerunt - sed vera multitas verborum ac expressionium familiaris daniis in libro absens erat, et tunc non instrumentum utile constituit utentibus. Glossarium omnium pida maxime essere debet lingvas 'profectionis' et in alia lingva quam fideliterrime vertere - non satis est quod linguam explicationium reflectat.

EN: Apart from that I have mainly been busy with an old text collection in Indonesian from BBC.com (!) about dark matter and sundry astronomical and/or space exploration related topics. I have already commented on the quite long first article, which explained that some very big (and shortlived) stars in the early univers perhaps got so big because dark matter helped them to collect the necessary stuff - but also that dark matter in principle could form blobs without the presence of ordinary matter.

BA I: Saya menyalin dan mempelajari artikel ini sekali lagi - selalu menyenangkan untuk merasa bahwa Anda memiliki kendali atas teks dan memahaminya, dan teks daur ulang sangat baik untuk tujuan ini. Dari sana saya melanjutkan artikel tentang gerhana matahari dan pesawat ruang angkasa Cina. Kali berikutnya orang Amerika datang ke Bulan, mereka mungkin harus melalui kontrol bea cukai Cina.

Akrobatik.JPG

[Iversen]

In spite of my mediocre speaking level I'm a member of the international Esperanto organization UEA, and as such I regularly receive a magazine called Esperanto. Earlier it had articles about the language itself, but this has stopped - I don't know why, since I accidentally met the man who used to write them in Lisboa last year, and he was definitely alive. Most of the articles tell about conferences in different locations or about writers or their works, and this is not always very attractive reading material. There are however a couple of interesting topics in the latest issue, such as ...

EO: ... la artikolo pri io delegita vojaĝo al Nord-Koreio, kie la partoprenantoj surprize trovis esperantistojn (aŭ samideanojn, kiel ili nomiĝas en la internacia lingvo). Alia artikolo diras, ke la internacia organizo de la internacia lingvo provas fariĝi sin eĉ pli internacia por fari pli malkara la membriĝo al UEA por homoj en malriĉaj landoj, sed eĉ pli multekosta kie mi vivas. Do nun, hinda aŭ ĉina miliardulo povas iĝi membro je 2 € al la jaro - ili devus esti kapablaj inkludi ĉi tion en iliaj buĝetoj ! Sed ĉefe, ekzistas serio da artikoloj pri Lahti en Finnlando, kie okazos la sekva monda kongreso. Mia ĉefa problemo estas, ke mi ne povas realiste sukcesi lerni la finnlandan lingvon antaŭ septembro 2019, kaj ke mi finfine ankaŭ havas aliajn vojaĝoplanojn.

GR: Η νυχτερινή ανάγνωση μου είναι τώρα ένα παλιό άρθρο του περιοδικού Geo (το οποίο πωλείται σε πολλές διαφορετικές γλώσσες). Δεν θέλω να χρησιμοποιήσω ένα λεξικό όταν διαβάζω τη νύχτα, αλλά ευτυχώς έφτασα μέχρι στιγμής που καταλαβαίνω σχεδόν τα πάντα. Αυτό δεν συνέβη το 2009 όταν αγόρασα το περιοδικό. Το κύριο άρθρο αφορά την κατασκευή του Παρθενώνα μετά τη νίκη επί των Περσών, και ο συγγραφέας είναι πολύ εντυπωσιασμένος που οι Αθηναίοι υπό την κυριαρχία του Περικλή μπορούσε να καλύψουν ολόκληρη την Ακρόπολη με κτίρια σε μόλις 30 χρόνια.. Είδα πρόσφατα ένα τηλεοπτικό πρόγραμμα αγγλικής γλώσσας σχετικά με τη συνεχιζόμενη ανασυγκρότηση του Παρθενώνα, και οι σύγχρονοι εργαζόμενοι χρειάστηκαν αρκετές ώρες για να τοποθετήσουν μόνο ένα μέρος μιας στήλης στους υποκείμενους κυλίνδρους.

Herodes Atticus & Parthenon.jpg

[Iversen]

POR: (Continuação Noturna) Como mencionei antes, espero viajar ao Brasil mais tarde neste ano e talvez também daré uma palestra em português em Bratislava, e portante foi relevante para mim saber se eu entendo veramente a versão brasileira da lingua. E parece ser o caso, pois eu entendo praticamente tudo (triunfo!).

Para escuchar a lingua procurei transmissões sobre as cidades de Recife e Natal no Youtube, mas casi tudo era lixo com música ao invés de falar, e eu não podia usar isso. Mas depois de trobar as carragedas do usuário 'TvBrasil', tenho visto várias coisas que se encaixam melhor no meu propósito do que canções sentimentais com imagens de praias e palmas.

Estou a ouvir neste momento uma transmissão sobre a presença holandesa no estado de Pernambuco, e apos cerca de 12 minutos o programa menciona algumas pinturas raras no Museu Nacional da Dinamarca, retratando indigenos brasileiros. Estas pinturas são os últimos sete sobreviventes de uma mais larga série de pinturas, e é pura sorte que não pereceram com as outras quando os holandeses foram expulsos. Abaixo se ve um detalhe de uma das pinturas.

Brasileiro indigeno.jpg

[Iversen]

I visited our main Municipal Library today. It is called Dokk1 and has cost an insane amount of money, and each Monday they have something called Sproghjørnet (the language corner) where people can come to discuss in various languages - or in Danish if they are foreigners and want advice from native Danes. In practice very few persons come, mostly because the only language that almost certainly will be represented is English. If you came there in the hope of finding people desirous of conversing in French or German or Italian or Spanish or any other language, then it would be sheer luck to find another person with the same wish. So even though it is a great idea it doesn't really function - except for English.

One of the things we discussed today was whether firefighters are called the same in the States and in Britain, and then we discussed whether the word "drone" comes from English - but if you mean the small things that fly around in the sky over the suburbs (to photograph naked sunbathers) or over airports like Gatwick (to wreck havoc on the transport system), then we almost certainly did get the word from English. We do however have the word with the meaning "male honeybee" in both languages, and according to etymonline.com it is a heritage from PreGermanic *dran-" (and maybe even older than that, though I'm not sure that the Yamnayas had apiculture yet). And to boot it refers to bagpipe pipes with a constant tone, which some may have thought sounded like a buzzing male bee - but the bagpibe would have to be really far away to make as faint a noise as an average bee (even a heavy and horny one).

And finally we discussed the words for the parts of an average street which is reserved for pedestrians - sidewalk in the States, pavement in Britain. But one of the participants in the discussion then consulted a thick Danish-English dictionary and we got a shock since it also mentioned that a sidewalk/pavement ("fortov" in Danish") could be called footpath. No way, I said, a footpath is a path reserved for pedestrians in forests or such places, i.e. essentially a trail (though possibly slightly wider and prettier) - but it can never be in an ordinary street because then it then would be called sidewalk or pavement. So now we had the problem that a trusted standard dictionary might contain a piece of disinformation. But luckily Wikipedia solved the problem: in exotic places like Australia and Ireland you can use the word "footpath" for pavements/sidewalks. Which just goes to show that even wellknown communication systems like the English language can challenge your linguistic knowledge. The picture below shows a footpath near the Danish queen's summer castle, and in spite of the Australians and Irelanders that's only type of footpath I am ready to accept.

F5803b0x_footpath.jpg

[Iversen]

As I have mentioned earlier I now ride the local busses on a senior card that isn't valid between 3 and 5 PM on workdays. A side effect of this is that I now read more books in Danish (or English) than before I picked up the language learning bug, simply because I have found out that sitting in the main library reading a book is a pleasant way to survive those two hours. And the library has got a fair number of books in other languages than Danish (and English), but almost all of them are literature - and literature isn't my cup of tea (actually tea isn't my cup of tea either - I prefer milk).

Today I picked up a dissertation in English about perfect pitch and a book in Romanian about how to become rich and succesful. Normally I would avoid that kind of books, but as I mentioned, there are relatively few choices in other languages than Danish (or English, which is found on the shelfes along with books in Danish) so now I see how long I can stand reading such a book (not very long, if I can extrapolate from my experience with a certain book by a certain Dale Carnegie). More about that experiment later.

The book I read today was a biography of professor Eske Willerslev, who is a key figure in modern paleogenetic research - I have mentioned him several times in connection with the Yamnaya invasion and the R1A1 + R1B1 haplogroups, but since the book is from 2015 there is not really anything about that topic - that's how recent the really earthshattering research within the field is, and how unbelievable fast the progress is. There are however (in between all the personal stuff) fairly long and sober summaries of the man's most important research results, and one thing in particular was new to me. His team in Copenhagen once examined DNA from a 24.000 year old child from the Mal'ta area near the Baikal lake, and it turned out that a fair part of the DNA of that child was of European origin. In other words, if you find European genes in an old skeleton from America then that individual doesn't have to have had ancestors that crossed the Atlantic - he/she could have got his/her 'European' genes from extremely old tribes in Siberia.

I don't know whether the controversial three Huron teeth which I mentioned on Dec 26 2018 share their haplogroups with the Siberian child (whose remains are stored in a secret vault under the Hermitage Museum of St. Peterburg), so it can't be excluded that some intrepid Aurignac cave dwellers arrived directly from Europe in small homemade boats from Ikea, but the bulk of the native Americans got their genes from Asia - though possibly through several invasions instead of one single one. For example the Paleoeskimos that lived in Northern Greenland until around 700 years ago had different genes from the other inhabitants of the Americas so they must have come as a separate wave through Northern Canada. But then the Inuit arrived and the old tribe mysteriously disapppeared. This too is one of the research results of professor Willerslev and his team. They are busy people ...

Willerslev.jpg

But I have of course also done my nightly reading stint, and I'm still plowing through a Greek issue of GEO - through now I have also put a little yellow Langenscheidt Greek <-> German dictionary on my 'night table' chair so that I can clear up the most irritating mysteries on the spot. Such a small dictionary can be used while you are lying down.

GR: Στο GEO, έχω φτάσει σε μια συλλογή άρθρων για την σπηλαιολογία, δηλαδή την εξερεύνηση των σπηλαίων, και μία από ένα από αυτά τα άρθρα μιλάει για τις σπηλιές του Kαρλσμπαδ (Carlsbad) στο Νέο Μεξικό στις Ηνωμένες Πολιτείες, ένα από τα μεγαλύτερα συγκροτήματα σπηλαίων στον κόσμο - μέχρι τώρα χαρτογραφημένα περίπου 190 χιλιόμετρα. Έχω επισκεφθεί το Νέο Μεξικό, αλλά δεν πήγα να επισκεφτώ αυτις τις σπηλιές. Ωστόσο, επισκέφτηκα ένα μικρότερο σύστημα σπηλαίων στη Γιούτα (Utah), τον Τιμπανόγο (Timpanogo) - δείτε την εικόνα παρακάτω.

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[Iversen]

I haven't really been studying today, but I have done something else which is relevant enough: making new text collections for intensive studies. First I search for the word "Dewon" in Polish and found an article in the Polish version af Nat Geo and another in another source, which I forgot to indicate. But no problem, if I need to comment on it later then I'll do a Google search on the title. I also hit upon an article about extinct volcanoes in Poland, and that reminded me of a piece of information gleaned from a TV program: a volcano on the Indonesian island Lombok called Samalas (according to old palmleave scrolls) exploded in 1257 to the extent that it disappeared from the surface, leaving just a lake and its neighbour volcano Rinjani. So then I found a couple of articles in Bahasa Indonesia about that, but since the 'child of Krakatoa' recently has been active I also included an article about that in my Indonesian collection.

Then back to the Paleontological trail: I copied some passages from the homepage of the Serbian Natural history Museum in Beograd about their collections, plus an article from a site called Pomagalo specifically about the Silurian epoch. And since I now was firmly situated in the Slavonic corner I made a Google search for "йети" (yeti) and expected to find some Russian articles about the subject, and well, I did, but the one I chose to copy was in Bulgarian (and the yeti remains examined turned out to be from a bear - OK, a weird extinct bear, but still no ugly snowman). No problemo, I also have to study Bulgarian. I supplemented with an article about possible radiation from mobile phones and one about about Kasparov expecting Russia to lose some territories (yes, lose, not add). But all these were in Bulgarian. To get some genuinely Russian stuff I did a Google search for the town Magadan in the far East of the country, and I got a nice little collection of texts, including one about its honorary citizen, kosmonaut Pavel Vidogradov.

And then I compiled a Catalan antology consisting of printouts about the ancient genetic landscape of Europe, with a special focus on its South Western corner. You might expect that the Basks were direct descendants of the cave dwellers that arrived just after the end of the Ice age, but they have about the same quota of R1B1 as the rest of Western Europe, so the steppe people apparently also paid that area a visit. On the other hand, the Basks have a surprisingly high proportion of citizens with the relatively rare Rhesus negative bloodtype, which must be a heritage from an earlier population - and the genes for bloodtype must consequently be situated on other chromosomes than the one called Y.

So together with those texts I already have waiting for me on the notestand where I keep my materials for intensive study, these new printouts will keep me busy for some time ahead. I just have to add something about... well, maybe not tonight. Tomorrow...

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