Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

[Iversen]

I spent most of last evening watching the enlarged German quiz "Wer weiß doch so was XL", where two teams of two persons compete - and in the enlarged version this happens three times in a row with new guests on each teams - and then there is a grand finale. The thing that always has irritated me about this quiz is that each team has a socalled "Publikum joker", which consists in letting a member of the audience behind the team answer the question. The problem is that the answer will be binding, and that almost all of those audience members that answer haven't got any knowledge at all - they just make wild guesses (as the team members could have done), and nevertheless they are lauded for their 'courage'. 'Courage' in quizzes is overvalued.

In the BBC quiz "Pointless" people are also encouraged to make risky choices. OK, sometimes that's the right thing to do when any mediocre answer would have lost, but taking a risk is not in itself a positive thing - you need to make a probability analysis that tells you whether a given risk is worth taking or not. And of course I don't play in lotteries. I can understand that people like suspense and might be willing to pay for it, but there is a reason that the owners of lotteries earn money on them. The higher the premium in a game is, the more money the losers will have lost. Is that fun? Do your calculation before making a commitment: possible gain times the minimal chance of getting it...

When I went to bed I read some more in my Low German book "Dit un dat beschnackt op Platt", where Fru Andersen told about sound differences between High and Low German which should make it easier to guess how a word sounds in Platt when you know corresponding word in Standard German. But after that there is a series of chapters about Platt in Ostfriesland, which in some ways differs from mainland Platt - and in some cases this makes it closer to Dutch and Anglosaxon/English, like for instance in the pronouns. Quote (p.61):

Oostfreesen selvst seggen, seehrs Spraak hett vell mit dat Holländsche gemeen. Ik mutt bi de Spraak uk an't Englische denken. "Ik heff hum/hör sehn" is doch neger bi "him" und "her" as bi unse "Ik heff em/ehr sehen".

"Unse" ('our')refers of course to the kind of Low German that is spoken in Schleswig-Holstein where the author lives (or lived - ah dunno). And in the same chapters it is also revealed that there is an association formed by descendants of Low German immigrants to the USA plus a number of people in Germany, and they do annual conferences. I didn't know that.

Later in the night I woke up again and instead of trying to fall asleep right away I read a small tourist guide to the town Erice that lies on a hilltop near the somewhat bigger town Trapani. In 2012 and 2013 we had a direct Ryanair connection from Jutland to Trapani, and of course I couldn't resist this chance to learn more about Western Sicily.

IT: Ci sono due modi per andare da Trapani a Erice: di autobus o per funivia. In entrambi i casi si arriva alla porta della città, e proprio all'interno di questa c'è la cattedrale e l'ufficio turistico nella sua campanile dove ho acquisto una piccola guida chiamata "A friendly walk around Erice" - ma è scritta interamente in italiano. Indica due percorsi a piedi attraverso la città, ma la cosa strana è che menziona quasi tutte le sue chiese, ma non i castelli "Venere" e "Balio". Nel tempo ho raccolto molti opuscoli di destinazioni (per quanto possibile nella lingua locale se lo capisco), e generalmente ho conservato solo quelli che avevano buone mappe delle città. Il punto rilevante è che Google Maps può mostrare (quasi) tutti i luoghi del mundo, ma per vedere i nomi delle strade devi ingrandire e ingrandire finché perdi completamente la visione d'insieme. Le carte vecchio stile mostravano generalmente solo i centri cittadini, ma d'altra parte indicavano tutti i nomi delle strade - e si era gentilmente sbarazzato di tutte le stupide pubblicità di Google maps. Per lo stesso motivo, ho conservato le mie vecchie guide turistiche, anche se gran parte delle informazioni in esse contenute son obsolete.

F4412b03 - Castello di Balio, ERice.jpg

[tungemål]

Do you move to a bigger house than your previous apartment? more space for language books then. Did you really throw away that Grove lexicon?

[Iversen]

Yes, I threw it away. Maybe it could have found a home by some ardent music lover, but I couldn't see how I could have identified and contacted the person that might want to have one meter of Groves standing in his/her homely abode. But it was an eerie feeling to throw the beyond dispute best lexicon in its genre into a container.

I have more space in my new house than in the old flat, but that flat was stuffed with ladder racks so when I could occupy my mother's shelves I had suddenly some left-over racks which I have given away. My mother was a voracious bookworm so she had lots of shelf meters filled with books dating back to the late thirties plus translated novels galore from a bookclub named Union, and now I have filled them with my own books instead. I have kept some gems like B.S. Ingemann and H.C.Andersen in old editions and a few books printed in Fraktur (nothing really expensive, though), but I couldn't see myself reading the rest.

[Iversen]

Yesterday I found the small wordlists in 30 languages which I have used several times to get through a bunch of languages without too much trouble. WHen I did them the first time I did 2 or 3 columns, each one with around 30 words, but since then I have just done one column per language. And that means that I have been able to do the Germanic languages (EN, SCO, DU, AFR, LowG, HighG, IC, NO, SW) plus Latin and Old French yesterday evening, and today I have done the rest (FR, POR, SP, CAT, IT, RO, ModGR, AL, SER,SLK, CZ,POL, UK, RU, IR, EO and INDO) - even with time to spare. The idea behind this seemingly idiotic exercise is to let me have a look at all the languages I have studied and some I have dealt with on a lower level, and thus it functions as an antidote against linguistic blinders.

On my night-chair I still have got the Low German book, but yesterday I read half a book about cathedrals (Théodore Rieger: Les Cathédrales - in French of course), and I intend to finish it this evening.

FR: La plupart des cathédrales dans le livre sont français, mais il y a aussi par example celles de Seville et de Cologne - et même une de Bogotá. L'auteur déplore que si peu des cathédrales pré-gothiques ont survécu, et même les cathédrales gothiques médiévales ont subi beaucoup de changements durant les siècles, mais il nous restent tout de même une série d'églises d'une hardiesse éblouissante de cette periode lointaine.

Le livre commencent avec quelques chapitres generaux qui explique l'histoire de ce type de bâtiments - et retrace cette histoire en arrière vers la basilique de Saint-Jean de Latran en Rome qui fut entreprise vers l'année 313 et existe encore de nos jours, bienque transformée au XVII siècle. Après cela j'aurais espéré voir le nom de l'abbé Suger qui au XII siècle a transformé la basilique carolingienne de Saint-Denis près de Paris dans une église franchement gothique avec de grandes vitraux et trois portails de grandes dimensions - et ce faisant, il a donné le coup d'envoi à toute une série de constructions de plus en plus hardies - un processus qui seulement a été partiellement freiné quand la toute nouvelle cathédrale de Beauvais a écroulé. Comme le dit la Wikipédia française: De 1569 à 1573 la cathédrale de Beauvais fut avec sa tour de 153 mètres la plus haute construction humaine du monde, et même ce qui reste encore possède le plus haut chœur gothique au monde (48,50 m). L'ironie c'est qu'un style de construction plus résistant avait effectivement été testé avec la cathédrale de Bourges, mais les leçons apprises là n'ont pas été appliquées aux autres bâtiments.

Kunst093.JPG

Je n'ai pas vu le chiffres exact pour les bâtiments décrits dans le livre, mais j'ai l'impression que j'en ai probablement visité au moins la moitié, et l'une des choses qui m'a ntéressée le plus sont les immenses mosaïques de verre, y compris les rosaces qui ornent maints portails principaux, mais parfois aussi les pignons latéraux, comme par exemple aux Notre Dames de Paris et de Chartres. L'auteur utilise d'ailleurs le mot 'rose' pour les vitraux rondes, mais tant que je sache, 'rosace' est correct aussi- et on évite l'ambiguité de 'rose'..

F3250a01 Rosace Nord, Chartres.jpg

[Iversen]

Around March this year I read some texts about elephants and their extinct proboscid relatives, and I decided to write an overview over those animals. That project exploded into an overview over all vertebrates from a critter called Pikaia from the Carmbrian Burgess shield to Homo sapiens - of course not with all the species that ever have existed in the system (I leave that to Wikipedia and some groups of dedicated nerds that keep such lists on a authoritative basis), but it nevertheless ended up in 39 MSword files plus an overview. I have no idea what the total number of species in those 39 files is, but some of the space is taken up by cladograms, i.e. tree diagrams that show relationships among the groups. And choosing and harmonizing those was an arduous task in itself.

In November I got the idea to include all the fish from a book by Hans Hvass named "Alverdens Fisk" from 1964 in my system, and then I discovered that the taxonomical classifications have changed quite a lot since 1964, mostly because genetical information now can be taken into account, and therefore many of the fish in the book have got new names - and it took some time to find their new names and their place in the new order (after all there are now around 30.000 recognized fish species). But there are more books in the series, and the last week I have extended the inclusion project to the amphibians and reptiles (minus the file with the lizards), but I have still the dinosaurs and other birds plus the mammals left.

As for languages: I still have to do a repetition of the 30 wordlists I wrote a couple of days ago, but at least I have read something every evening. I have already mentioned my Low German book with the short chapters abut Platt, and on top of that I I have read the guidebook to the Burgers' zoo in Arnhem (in Dutch) and yesterday I found a curious brochure from 2001 detailing a host of "touristische attricties en musea van België". It covers the whole country plus Luxembourg, although it is written entirely in Vlaams. I have visited some of the places, but far from all of them, and there are some quite curious ones among the selection, like a Bakkerijmuseum" in Veurne (wherever that is) or the "Stedelijk International Apimondia Bijenteeltmuseum" in Mechelen (a must for bee friends). Actually I have already seen such a museum, namely in Slovenia, but if I get back to Mechelen I just might want to see its Belgian counterpart.

DU: De dierentuin in Arnhem was al innovatief toen het werd opgericht, gebaseerd op het principe van Carl Hagenbeck om tralies te vermijden en in plaats daarvan te vertrouwen op fysieke grenzen voor de dieren. Maar sindsdien werd dit tuin een pionier als eerste voor het idee om safarigebieden te creëren, waar je alle dieren onder elkaar laat rondlopen die zouden kunnen afzien van elkaar eten of schoppen, en dan grote binnententoonstellingen te maken, waarbij je elke hal een klimaattype laat vertegenwoordigen - en ook hier laat je de dieren zoveel mogelijk tussen elkaar rondrennen. Het laatste fase van het project was een grote aquarium-hal. Ik ben er al meerdere keren geweest, maar zou graag nog een keer teruggaan. De laatste keer dat ik in Nederland was (in 2017), heb ik 6 dierentuinen gezien, waarvan vijf nieuwe (alleen Artis in Amsterdam was oud), maar Burgers heb ik niet meer te zien gekregen. En bij een vorige tour en 2014 heb ik 7 dierentuinen gezien, waarvan er vier nieuw waren, maar ook hier trok Burgers helaas een niet in de loterij. Dus deze tuin staat zeker op de lijst voor een nieuwe bezoek..

F4406b02_Burgers.jpg

[MorkTheFiddle]

Je n'ai pas vu le chiffres exact pour les bâtiments décrits dans le livre, mais j'ai l'impression que j'en ai probablement visité au moins la moitié, et l'une des choses qui m'a ntéressée le plus sont les immenses mosaïques de verre, y compris les rosaces qui ornent maints portails principaux, mais parfois aussi les pignons latéraux, comme par exemple aux Notre Dames de Paris et de Chartres. L'auteur utilise d'ailleurs le mot 'rose' pour les vitraux rondes, mais tant que je sache, 'rosace' est correct aussi- et on évite l'ambiguité de 'rose'..

A rose by any other name is a . . . rosace!

[Iversen]

I have been back to my old flat to empty it, and there I just brought along some newspapers to read after dark. But the evening before that I started to read a Romanian book which I bought in Cluj, "Prima mea călătorie în străinătate", as goodnight entertainment. The idea is to ask a number of cultural persons from the country to describe their first travel abroad - and since that in most cases happened before the end of Ceaucescu's dictatorship not all could travel where they wanted, nor under the circumstances they might have wished. For instance one author tells that his family had planned to overnight in a tent at the outskirts of Praha to save money, but a forester or something like materialized out of the blue (or black) to tell them to scram. Then they tried to put their tent in a park somewhere, but no, the same thing happened. Then they had to use a hotel, and they really couldn't afford it. Actually the fact that the family even owned a car must have been a big thing at time.. A few of the authors could for various reasons (like sport) go to for instance Paris, but that was certainly out of the question for almost all their compatriots at the time. I may take a couple of journeys more this evening, but it's not the kind of book you read in one go.

I have also watched a couple of TV programs with some relevance for languages, namely the history of writing 1 & 2. In the first episode a couple of days ago I learned one new fact, namely that the first attestation of an alphabetical writing system was in some kind of temple on Sinai (Serebit), where workers from Kanaan had jotted down something using Egyptian hieroglyph signs, but luckily for history they hadn't quite grasped the idea behind them. The Egyptians used a complicated system that mixed pictoral, phonetical and determinative uses of each individual sign, but the Kanaanites just let each sign symbolize the initial sound of the word denoting the image in their OWN language (not even Egyptian) - and then hurray, they had invented the alphabetical writing system! And they went back to their home and taught this to the Phoenicians, who spread the message all over the Mediterranean sea. In the second part, which I saw today, the topic was the invention of printing with movable types - but I knew it all because of my visit to the Gutenberg museum in Mainz last summer.

Today I have spent a lot time on revising my species lists, and since I finished the reptiles before New Years eve I now had to deal with the ratites, ducks and poultry, which according to the learned ones are the most primitive birds among those that live today. Actually this means that I skipped two Word documents with dinosaurs and other Mesozoic fauna because the books I try to integrate into the system don't deal with paleontology - or rather: there was a "Alverdens fortidsdyr" in the series, but it referred to the poor extinct animals with mostly homemade Danish names instead of the correct Latin ones, and even as a teenager I found that idea was an unwelcome dumbing down. One funny fact is that there is a group of dinos called Saurischians and another called Ornithischians (because their hips reminded the paleontologist pioneers about those of birds, 'ornith-' in Greek), but the ancestors of the birds did NOT belong to the group that shared their name - instead they were 100% Saurischians, and now it has been proven that many of those dinosaurs actually had feathers. So in my Saurischians document there are lots of ancient birds, but today's birds must have developed from just a few survivors, and by some quirk these survivors all were toothless.

And after I had finished that I turned to a linguistic exercise which I have ignored for too long, namely to copy a short text in a target language while I make sure that I understand everything and can repeat phrases and discuss with the text in my head - new or forgotten words go into a margin to the right, and eventually they are supposed to end up on a wordlist.

INDO: Potongan teks saya hari ini berasal dari beberapa dua panduan ke Singapura yang saya bawa pulang - satu dalam bahasa Inggris, yang lain dalam .. saya telah pikir .. Bahasa Melayu. Tapi ternyata bahasa Indonesia, dan karena itu bahasa Indonesia yang saya coba pelajari sekarang. Hari ini saya membaca, antara lain, tentang parade Tahun Baru China Imlek dan tentang pulau Sentosa, di mana pada tahun 2010 mereka ingin akan menciptakan area kesenangan baru yang besar, antara lain, enam hotel, taman hiburan dan sebuah oseanarium. Dan tentu saja itu semua untuk semua anggota keluarga - rumusan itu diulang beberapa kali. Tapi saya sudah dua kali ke sana tanpa keluarga. Ngomong-ngomong, saya telah mengetahui bahwa kongres Polyglot berikutnya akan diadakan di Singapura pada musim gugur, dan saya berpikir untuk berpartisipasi - tanpa keluarga.

P5808b02 _ sentosa.jpg

[Iversen]

In my last message I wrote that I expected to read more in my Romanian travel book, and I did - I read one chapter. And it was a reasonably positive tale about a father that got a Humboldt stipendium of some sort in 1983 for studies in Heidelberg, and after an initial total refusal to leave the country he was suddenly allowed to travel with his family. However it turned out that he wasn't allowed to bring along his wife so instead he invited his son to accompany him - and that was the first time his son left Romania.

RO: Prima oprire a fost la gara din Budapest, iar aici fiul era deja uluit că ai putea să cumpăr sprite și cola. Când au venit mai târziu la München în timpul oktoberfestului, copilul era pe cale să explodeze de uimire la selecția de mărfuri din magazine. Acasa nu era așa! Pe drumul de întoarcere spre Bucureşti, tatăl şi fiul au luat avionul, iar fiul a primit un pachet de bun venit pentru copii de la compania aeriană – şi a rămas aproape fără cuvinte. Dar pe interogatoriu direct, a spus totuși copilul că ar prefera să meargă acasă la mama decât să rămână în Occident.

I have also read some more in my Low German book, and I have even done a bit of text study on a Polish text about - as they claim - the zoo of Gdansk. But..

PO: właściwie byłem w tym zoo, ale nie w samym Gdańsku, ale w pobliskim, mniejszym miasteczku Oliwie. I warto go odwiedzić.

F4202a05 _Oliwa zoo -administration building.jpg

Apart from that I have done more bird taxonomy work, but also something else that is directly language oriented. I recently added one new column to each of my 30 wordlists in different languages, but I have not had time to do the obligatory repetition round. And when I yesterday sat down to do so it occurred to me that I have 4 sheets per language, and only two of those are 'active'. The other two are from earlier rounds years back, so I decided to scrap them. But first I did something to refresh my memory of those rounds: I have filled one half-sheet with words from each of the lists I was about to scrap. That means some 8 columns with 30 words each in each language, and in this moment I have done the nine Germanic languages (EN,SCO,DU,AF,LowG,HighG,IC,NO,SW), i.e. almost a third of the whole package, and the funny thing was that the two languages where I had forgotten most words were Laeland Scots and (mostly) New Norwegian. I suspect that this is more an expression of the original choice of words: in the Scottish list I had deliberately avoided anything that looked too much like English words, and the Norwegian list was taken from a list in the back of a Norwegian-Danish dictionary that otherwise mostly catered for the variant called Bokmål - and there were many arcane words from the traditional farmer and fisher communities among those I used, words that I haven't seen or heard since in any variant of the language. In comparison it was piece of cake getting through the Swedish list because I here had notated words that I might want to learn.

And in case anybody asks what the purpose of this activity is: it brings me into contact with all the languages I know and some I don't know quite as well yet. In round one I had included Finnish just for fun (I may study that language later, but I'm not there yet), but I stopped adding to that list during an intermediary activity phase, and now the 30. language is of course Ukrainian, which I actually do study.

[Iversen]

I spent the time before noon watching TV, and quite by accident I first opened 3SAT in the middle of a program where the moderator spoke High German, but everytbody else spoke Swiss German - I don't hear that too often, not even on 3SAT even though it's supposed to be a cooperation between TV stations in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. Actually the whole programmed had been supplied with subtitles, so the 3Sat redaction apparently didn't expected people in Germany or Austria to understand that lingo, but I tried not to look at them. After that I watched episode 3 and 4 of a series from Schönbrunn Zoo at the same channel, and a few of the animal keepers had a slight Austrian accent, but this program was generally spoken in High German (PS: every time I see that name I think of Tolkien's High and Low Elwish - how can that be?).

GE: Schloss Schönbrunn habe ich neulich erwähnt, aber tatsächlich ließ die örtliche kaiserliche Familie 1852 auch eine Menagerie in ihrem privatem Park errichten, und als das kaiserliche Herrschaft in 1918 endete, wurde diese der Öffentlichkeit zugänglich gemacht – und zählt damit heute als ältester noch existierender Zoo der Welt. Allerdings gab es auch schon früher Zoos – wahrscheinlich hatte Nebukadnezar einen - aber sie sind nicht mehr da. Die Gebäude in den zentralen Teilen sind geschützt, aber es wurde immerhin die Erlaubnis erteilt, die Tiere aus dem zentralen Pavillon 'raus zu werfen und ihn als Fütterungsinstitut für menschliche Gäste einzurichten. Es gibt tatsächlich auch außerhalb des Zoos eine selbständige zoologische Einrichtung, nämlich das Tropenhaus (auch im Park) – und natürlich habe ich beide mehrfach besucht (und das Schloß, now I was in the area).

F1608a03 - Schönbrunn 1999.jpg

IT: E da lì sono passato a RaiUno, che sotto il titolo Linea Verde raccontava qualcosa sugli artigiani del norte di Sardegna. Ci sono venuto anch'io, ma non ho visitato nessun artigianato e non ho comprato nessuna chincaglieria. Ma ho visitato il museo di Olbia più alcune rovine, e nella biblioteca ho letto un libro sulla grammatica del dialetto sardo logudorese e ho persino visto uno dei film di Harry Potter in un cinema locale. In altre parole, c'era molto da fare, ma non molto di quello che la trasmissione mostrava. E questo è un problema con molti programmi di viaggio in TV: i giornalisti amano parlare, quindi si concentrano sulle persone con cui possono chattare e non sulle viste fisiche che anch'io posso visitare.

F4236a05 _ Sardo.jpg

And apart from that I have reached the end of my music collection with two files dedicated to the Italian baroque composer Domenico Zipoli, and before I start all over again with Adolphe Adam and his Giselle I'm going to fill in some holes in my theme collection - and I did some of the work today, but still have a couple of hours of attentive listening lying ahead of me.

And I have finished my Low German good-night book, but not the Romanian one.

[Iversen]

Since I wrote here the last time I have finished my copying-words-from-defunct-multiple-wordlists project - i.e. the one where I several years ago decided to make wordlists in some 30 languages,a which I later added to when I didn't have better things to do (or maybe I had). I have recently added one new column to each wordlist (around 30 wordlists), but when I was about to do the essential repetition round I ended up copying a halfpage per language (some 240 words) from the oldest sessions instead. That's what I have finished doing that today so now I can with good conscience throw both these old wordlists AND the new copies away. I didn't copy the translations so these last ones will in any case be useless, and the purpose was not to study them later - so there's no readon to keep them. I do however keep the later generations of additions of wordlists, and I might add some more columns before long - it's simply fun to look at almost thirty languages within a few days! And even though this exercise may seem like a total waste of time is serves n important goal, namely to remind me of (almost) all the languages I have juggled with in recent times.

In my integrate-the-animals-from-a-book-series-from-the-60s-into-my-recent-MSWord-animal-names-files project I have finished the birds and some of the files on mammals, but since these were the first I produced they are slightly different from the ones I later did for the birds, reptiles, amphibians and fishes - for instance by including more extinct species and skipping more of of the living ones so even though there are few fewer mammals than for instance birds it will take some time to get through the remaining files. But I am determined also to finish this project within a reasonable time - and then it will have to take the time it need.

One problem is that my old, but trusty PC with all the programs I use for my projects is showing signs of weaknesses and may die soon. I did buy a new one, but it seems that its harddisk isn't particularly big, and besides my old programs may not even be available any longer (at least not in a version where my old macros etc. still works). That's one of the things that worries me most now (having finished the bulk of my time consuming relocation project). Most of the problems occur when I switch it on so now I sometimes just leave it running all night over.

And finally languages: at my earlier location I had some French, Spanish, Italian and German programs which were missing in the beginning at my new location (because I took over my mother's account and her TV set, and she didn't need those channels). Now I have got the missing ones added to my current account - but it's of course still the same rubbish they send most of the time.

My goodnight reading is running smoothly: the last two evenings I have been reading an Italian magazine "Focus Extra" from 2010, and the theme is "Le origini dell'uomo". Of course the learned ones have found some new things since 2010 (like the mysterious Denisovans from Siberia and the Australopithecines in South Africa that left their deads at the far bottom of a narrow cave - and those guys definitely didn't have lamps!) , but this magazine is still splendid entertainment, and I even learn a few things along the way. Sometimes there is cluster of words I don't understand, but I'm too lazy to look them up.

x13a.jpg

the first tiny bit of a Denisovan (March 2010, Wikipedia).jpg