Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

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Iversen
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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby Iversen » Sun Feb 28, 2021 7:57 pm

I have written in several other threads since Thursday, but not here, and the main reason is that I have spent a lot of time doing repetitions of the 29 wordlists I did a couple of weeks ago, and at least today I can also blame it on the weather which was excellent for a wee walk - and luckily my remaining kidney stones haven't troubled me today (yesterday was different). Tomorrow I'll do some shopping - the 'small shops' are due to reopen March 1 after more than two months of forced closure - but museums and libraries stay closed until after Easter in spite of the fact that the risk of getting infected there is close to zero.

OK, word lists - importantant, yes, and I like doing them, but it is hard to write any captivating about them. You do stumple over small curiositíes in one or more languages, but it is hard to know whether others also might find those observations interesting. Like for instance that pharmacists in several Slavic languages are called 'magister' - here it can only be an academic grade, typically in the 'arts' (mag. art. = magister artis). However my own trade union has always been called "Magisterforeningen" even though most members just are cand. something (like "cand.mag. = candidatus magistris).

The doctor title is here used both for people who have written a 'doktordisputats' and got it accepted by a commitee, but also for medical doctors in general - and I don't think they all have written a thesis. By the way,, ahem, excuse me dear medics, but I have seen a number of theses, and thoses written by 'humanists' (i.e. people from 'humaniora') were typically monster thick, while those written by medics were tiny weeny small booklets. Maybe that's why there are so many medical doctors?

Apart from that, I have just read the first half of the report about language learning which Kraut mentioned in another thread, namely the "Sciences cognitives et apprentissage des langues" by Heather Hilton - and even if it didn't really shatter my opinions on anything it was well worth the hour I have spent on it so far - I'll read the rest later.

FR: Eh bien, qu'est-ce que j'ai appris alors? Laisse-moi commencer avec un passage sur la prononciation (p.27) :

Pour James Flege, il y a trois types de sons en langue étrangère: les sons identiques à ceux de la L1, pouvant donc être traités selon les catégories déjà disponibles sans nécessiter d’apprentissage ; les sons tout à fait nouveau x (absents de la L1), qui s’avèrent assez faciles à apprendre avec un entraînement explicite régulier; et les sons qui sont proches des phonèmes de la L1. Ceux-ci sont difficiles à apprendre, car ils seront automatiquement perçus et produits selon la catégorie proche qui existe pour la L1.

C'est-à-dire: les sons familiers sont faciles, et on arrive à apprendre les sons tout à fait nouveaux parce qu'ils sont tellement difficils qu'on va prendre le temps et l'effort qu'il faut pour les apprivoiser, mais - dit ce monsieur Flege - on tend à oublier les sons qui presque sont familiers, mais pas tout-à-fait identiques aux sons de la langue maternelle. Je me suis souvent demandé pourquoi, selon certains linguistes, il serait tellement difficile d'apprendre à prononcer des sons complètement nouveaux - j'ai, par exemple, appris à parler français, même s'il n'y a pas de voyelles nasales en danois. Mais il y a un point en ce que les petites différences sont plus insidieuses, précisément parce qu'on a une tendance à ne pas les remarquer - et alors des fautes tout-à-fait remédiables peuvent continuer pour toujours.

D'ailleurs ceci m'a fait penser à une observation du monde de la circulation: si un lieu est connu pour être extrêment dangereux les usagers de la route sont plus susceptibles d'être attentifs et prudents - et puis les accidents se produisent plutôt dans des endroits moins dangereux, où les automobilistes se détendent et parlent aux autres passagers ou se grattent le nez ou regardent leur téléphones ou boissons.

GER: Dies erinnert mich an eine Beobachtung von einer Mietwagenreise in Deutschland im Jahre 2014. Ich besuchte ein Dutzend Zoos und Safariparks zwischen Neumünster und Hannover und war erstaunt, daß die Deutschen einfach mindestens die Hälfte aller Ampeln außerhalb der Stadtmitten ausgeschaltet hatten - wahrscheinlich in dem Versuch, die verfluchten Verkehrsteilnehmer dazu zu zwingen, sich an die Straße und die anderen Verkehrsteilnehmer zu konzentrieren anstatt nur versuchen durchzukreuzen, ehe die Ampel Zeit hätte wieder auf Grün umzuschalten..

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Iversen
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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby Iversen » Tue Mar 02, 2021 9:47 pm

The small shops below 5000 m2 (apart from those in shopping centers) opened again yesterday, and since then I have spent a fair amount of time downtown to buy stuff. It was also the first time on several months that I had the chance to renew my discount card for retirees to public transportation - or, rather, I could have renewed over the internet, but would then have to wait two weeks to receive it. Today I got it renewed in five minutes because there was a real human being to do it, hidden behind a plexiglass pane for safety, but alive and happy to work again. Hairdressers etc. and larger shops and shops in shopping centers are not happy at all, and to boot it seems that our mindless and culture-deprived government will open up for sports first and let museums, zoos and libraries wait until after Easter (or Christmas).

OK, this morning I woke up this morning to a dream with a bit of Greek in it:

GR: Έφτασα με λεωφορείο σε μια μικρή ελληνική πόλη, βγήκα και κάθισα στα σκαλιά ενός σπιτιού. Η ιδέα ήταν προφανώς ότι πρέπει να αναζητήσω έναν τοπικό επιστήμονα και ήξερα ότι είχα τη διεύθυνση του στην τσάντα μου, αλλά δεν μπορούσα να το βρω. Τότε άρχισα να επαναλαμβάνω ορισμένα πράγματα για τα οποία ήθελα να μιλήσω στο άτομο για αυτό, και παρόλο που δεν ήταν μια μακρά συνεκτική ομιλία, αποτελούσε τουλάχιστον τουλάχιστον ελληνικά θραύσματα και μεμονωμένες λέξεις. Αλλά τότε παρατήρησα ότι υπήρχε κάτι στα παπούτσια μου, και όταν τα έβγαλα ήταν λάσπη - μπορούσα να φτυάρω ολόκληρες χούφτες. Σε αυτό το σημείο, ήξερα ότι ήταν ένα όνειρο, και την ίδια στιγμή, περίεργοι άνθρωποι άρχισαν να περνάνε στο δρόμο μπροστά μου. Αυτό κράτησε μέχρι να ξυπνήσω και για μια φορά θυμήθηκα να κάνω επαναλήψεις - αλλιώς θα τα ξεχάσω όλα τώρα.

F3448b03_Monastiraki.jpg

EN: I have studied a couple of texts, one in Afrikaans about the section of the Karoo called the Ecca-groep, the other (in Icelandic) about the reason that teenagers are weird. One study showed that their day rhythms on the average is two hours late, which explains that not all of them are happy to get up with the Sun. But society forces them to willy-nilly get up and damn-it go to school whether they like it or not, and with time some of them develop into society-favoured 'A-people', while the rest stay oppressed and abused B-people ... or that's at least how we would call them in Danish. I tried to look them up in the Danish Wikipedia and switched from there into the English one, but landed then in a long article about chronotypes which didn't use derogative terms like A and B, but instead called them "larks" and "owls" ...

F5627b01_Brown Wood Owl (Strix leptogrammica) _ Tommerup, Denmark.jpg

SP: Hay algo parecido en español, donde también se les llama alondras y búhos, respectivamente. Y yo pertenezco a la familia de los búhos; mi ritmo circadiano ciertamente cuenta más de 24 horas al día, pero afortunadamente mis ritmos circadianos son tan flexibles que puedo ponerlos en su lugar tomando una sola noche corta de sueño. Y no recuerdo haber sentido nunca el famoso 'jet lag'. Cuando subo a un avión, configuro mi reloj a la hora del lugar de llegada, y luego es lo que cuenta.

Recuerdo que cuando visité Nueva York por primera vez (en un tour grupal), obtuve la llave como uno de los primeros, y antes de que los últimos habían recebido sus llaves, yo ya dejé el hotel par ir a la noche abierta del Museo de Historia Natural. Afortunadamente, vivíamos cerca de Times Square, por lo que necesitaba simplemente hacer un trayecto corto en metro hacia el norte. ¿Y por qué escribo esto en español y no en inglés? Bueno, solo quiero mencionar que la mitad de los comerciales en el metro estaban en español. Más tarde, vi muchos caracteres chinos en Chinatown,
IT: ... ma in Little Italy non c'era francamente più molto italianità.

Kunst198.JPG

IC: Og nú gleymdi ég nánast að nota yfirskini til að skrifa eitthvað á íslensku, svo ég leyfi mér aðeins að nefna það úr greininni að rannsóknir hafa sýnt að táningar sem líta stöðugt á farsímana sína og sofa hjá þeim á nóttunni, hafa lakari getu til þykkni. Kemur það einhverjum á óvart?
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Iversen
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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby Iversen » Fri Mar 05, 2021 6:54 pm

EN: It has been splendid weather for walking today, so I trotted along for something like 14 kms straight around some nearby lakes. I know that some people listen to target language babble while they walk, using some kind of gadget, but I'm slightly technologically backward so I don't - which means that I haven't studied today. When I walk I walk.

Kunst122.JPG

EO: Kiam mi enlitiĝis hieraŭ vespere, mi uzis la plej novan numeron de la revuo Esperanto por endormiĝi. Kaj ĝi funkciis, sed finfine mi sukcesis legi ĉion tuton. Kutime temas pri kunvenoj inter samideanoj, sed nuntempe dominas sufiĉe virtualaj kunvenoj, kaj kiel unu el la artikoloj trovitaj, ĝi estas sufiĉe logika kunveno por komunumo disvastigita tra la tuta mondo. Do verŝajne estos pli da ĝi. Tamen mi ne partoprenis tiajn kunvenojn - mia sola kontakto kun UEA (en kiu estas membro ekde la granda universala kongreso en Kopenhago) estas la ne tre ekscita revuo.

EN: My other time consuming endeavour yesterday was to get through some more pages of Harry Potter in Irish. I copied a lot of grammar lately and then studied the first page or so ... but somehow I then got distracted and left Harry dangling in the air until yesterday.

I have decided this time primarily to work on my feeling for the rather exotic Irish sentence constructions and only secondarily on vocabulary (which I can learn as efficiently from a dictionary). My method is to do copies by hand as usual, but now with interlinear hyperliteral translations. I have of course the English original standing beside the Irish translation, but I can assure you that my version and mrs. Rowling's don't look terribly alike - the wordorder, for one thing, is very different, and I write my translations of the Irish idioms as closely to the original as possible (in a mixture of English and Danish). For instance nominal expressions are used far more often in in Irish than in English, so I have to get accustomed to that.

Of course this is a slow process, but because it can be standardized (down to the problem of getting to books to stand side by side on one notestand) it is one thing I can do on and off, and I can feel that the Irish way of putting things together is beginning to feel almost logical, albeit still a tad weird. I have a rather incompetent Irish gnomon speaking in my head when I read Irish texts, but I have decided that since I probably never will get a chance to speak the language it can carry on making its thing as is wont - that is: with a pronunciation that would make a native Irish person cry. Well, that's life...

PS (IR): Fanfaidh mé ag scríobh aon rud i nGaeilge !
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Iversen
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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby Iversen » Sun Mar 07, 2021 10:48 pm

Today I have taken a walk before noon and since then worked on first the Irish Potter project, then on a Polish text about the extinct aurochs, and after a page of bovine studies I proceeded immediately to do the respective wordlists, supplemented by around 100 other words directly from the dictionary - while watching Spanish TVE with Spanish subtitles (text TV p.888) and listening to organ works by Charles-Marie-Jean-Albert Widor and some of his collegues. Who said men can't multitask?

I described my use of hyperliteral translations on Potter in my last message, but without giving any examples - so here is one, but redone for the occasion since the original version was written mostly in Danish with English elements. And why mix two languages, you may ask? Well, for instance I use the English "the" because Irish also uses prepositioned articles - although as you might expect, they are inflected. And there are other cases where it feels more natural to use an Englich word, for instance with loanwords that come from English - like "oifig" for 'office' (in Danish it is "kontor", which wouldn't help me to remember the Irish name for it). When I first took on Irish a cúpla bliain ago I had to to put an exclamation sign after the verb in my translation because Irish puts verbs in initial position, and that strongly suggested questions to me - but at least that quirky wordorder has become so 'normal' to me now that I don't need the extra marking. And just as well, because there are enough other things to take heed of.

An example from p. 5 in the Irish version (11 in the English original) - situation: Mr Dursley has just bumped into a small man inn the street and is surprised that the man doesn't get mad:

Irish: Go deimhin féin, thainig aoibh gheal ar a aghaid í *....
me: [adv]certain self ("in fact"), came smile white/happy to his face
Google T: In fact, a bright smile came over her face
Rowling: On the contrary, his face split in a wide smile

... agus ar seisean de ghnuth caol
and said (he) by voice thin
and on him of a narrow manner
and he said in a squeaky voice

a tharraing aird na ndaoine a bhí ag dul thart: (...)
which drew attention of-the people that be at walking around
which attracted the attention of the passers-by: (...)
that made passers-by stare: (...)

* í's rolle her er lidt uklar - it suggests feminium, but there are no females around

POL: Najbardziej zaskakujące o polskim tekstem o tura (Bos primigenius) jest jego nazwa w języku polskim. W języku angielskim zwierzę nazywane jest "aurochs", z zapożyczenia z języka niemieckiego, a po duńsku "urokse", co prawdopodobnie oznacza "bardzo stary wół". Ale skąd wzięła się nazwa "tur"? Ostatni zmarł w Polsce w 1627 roku, Ale próbowano wyhodować coś podobnego, łącząc "konserwatywne" rasy wołowiny - a rezultat można zobaczyć w Zoo Hellabrun w München i Zoo Neumünster. Myślę ja jednak, że nadal są za małe - prawdziwy stary byk może sięgnąć prawie dwóch metrów w ramię.

SP: La televisión española mostró dos retransmisiones de la serie "Españoles en el Mundo", una con españoles que se habían mudado a Tallinn en Estonia, otra con españoles en Monterrey, México - y aquí aprendí una nueva palabra: los habitantes nativos de Monterrey se llaman "regiomontanos ".

F3001b04_Neumünster_urokse.jpg
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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby Iversen » Thu Mar 11, 2021 11:17 pm

LAT: Salvete ..

EN: I had intended to write here both yesterday and earlier today, but then I got distracted by the profusely growing thread about 7-day language courses (the linguistic version of snake oil selling) and never found time to write anything in my own thread. But now I'm here, and since I just finished listening to my collection of music (with Zipoli as the "rosin i pølseenden" as we say in Danish - the raisin in the sausage end) I'm at last free to listen to speech videos again.

In my last post in the 7day snake oil thread I mentioned a Youtube channel where poor innocent people are quizzed upon their ability to understand related languages, but it seems that the link I gave leads to a sub-series focusing narrowly on the Slavic languages.That is however not everything you can get from the Eco-guy, and the first video I have chosen to listen to presents three Latinists speaking in Latin to one Romanian lady who answers in her own language - hurray! I can't really concentrate on listening to speech at the same time as I write text (music is not a problem), but I'll take the whole thing one time more when I have pressed 'Submit' here. The good news is that I so far have been able to understand both languages and also cogitate a wee bit in both of them inside my own head - in spite of being severely distracted by my attempt to write something comprehensible in English.

And now I am going to press the Submit button

RO: La revedere...

Ecolinguist - 3x Latin vs 1x Romanian.jpg

LAT: PS: Et hic Latine, Lusitanice, Hispanice ac Italice loquuntur, id quod mihi valde gaudet quia omnia intellego !

CAT: PS PS: I ara vaig escoltar un vídeo amb un parlant de l’occità (papalhon blau) donant tasques a una dona catalana, un home francès i un home italià. Malauradament, no puc escriure això en occità, però és prou fàcil d'entendre -fins i tot sense mirar la traducció a la pantalla. Però probablement sigui útil mirar una transcripció i escoltar-la alhora; per exemple, ara he après que 'u' es pronuncia com en francès (/y/ danés) i no com en català o castellà, fins i tot en paraules com 'ùei"(jo ) i "luòc" (lloc) i també que un vocal final divingui fosca (-a -> / o /), (-o-> / u /) - però -r final és muda com en català. La veu que parla al interior del meu crani s'ha per tant convertit en un ajudant lleugerament menys enganyós.

Ecolinguist _ occ cat fr it.jpg
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Iversen
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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby Iversen » Sun Mar 14, 2021 1:00 am

The last couple of days I have listened to an avalanche of speech videos on Youtube, whereas I hardly listened to one single one the previous months because I was busy listening through my music collection back then. Normally I write which texts I have worked on, but this time I'll list the videos I have watched instead. And let me first mention the video I'm listening to now I was listening to (and periodically also watching) when I started to write this message:

Slovak Language | Can Polish speakers understand it? | #2

SLK: Odpoveď: áno, môžu. Oba jazyky sú pre mňa slabé, ale našťastie existujú titulky keď niekto hovorí. A slovenská dáma a traja Poliaci sa spolu bravúrne rozprávajú - dokonca hovorí, že majú telepatické schopnosti (minúta 3:50). Mám väčšie ťažkosti s porozumením.

Ecolinguist _ Slovak vs 3xPolish.jpg

EN: But I didn't start with the Slavic languages yesterday. I have already mentioned a couple of Romance/Latin videos in the message from Friday (see above), and that's also where I started out yesterday:

Sardinian Language | Can Italian, French, and Spanish speakers understand it?
I learned here some unexpected Sardinian words hee, like mata=tree, mraxani = fox, cenàbura = Fridag (with a word derived from the meal prepared by Jews uop to a 'Shabbat') and also a lot about the spelling. But in spite of being reckoned a language in its own right Sardic didn't turned out to be overly hard to understand for me.

Brazilian Portuguese | Can Spanish and Italian speakers understand it?
Well, it seems so - and metoo

Italian Language | Can Spanish and Portuguese speakers understand it?
Of course they can

Neapolitan Dialect | Can Catalan, French, Spanish, and Latin speakers understand it?
The dialect spoken here was Abruzzesë. Notice the trema, which is almost as common in Abruzz as in Albanian (for instance: "lu corpë humànë"= the human body)

Romanian vs Latin Speakers | Can they understand it?
If you listen to the NeoLatin speakers here you wouldn't suspect that they spoke an officially stonedead language.

Dialect of Venetian | Can Spanish, Catalan, and Portuguese speakers understand it? | #2
Basically yes, and I could too. I actually found Venetian easier to understand than the Neapolitan and Sardinian in the previous videos.

Catalan Language | Can Spanish and French speakers understand it?
Piece of cake, it seems ..

Galician vs Portuguese | Can they understand it?
Here one Galician man challenges two Brazilians and 1 Portuguese speaker, but the most troubling thing here was that I actually didn't find Gallego as challenging as expected, given that I haven't studied it. Well of course there are a few surprises, like for instance that "lume" in Gallego means fire ("fogo"), but I concur with commentator Thiago P, who writes that "Galician is like: Vc fala português ou espanhol? Sim!"

Today I have also listened to a couple of longer lectures in Iberoromance languages:

El misterio de los vascos resuelto por la ciencia
Here Eneko Uriarte explained how it it possible to elucidate the problems about the Basques by using recent genealogical information, and the conclusion is that the Basque people (and presumably also their language) goes back to the invasion of agriculturors about 5000 years ago. I had expected also to hear about the Y-chromosomes from the Yamnaya invasion 4000 years, but the focus was on the arrival of the farmers. By the way, one important archeological site is the Portalón cave in the Atapuerco complex, which is more known for its early human remains (Home antecessor et al.) - so I also read some articles in Spanish about that ... and ended up also reading about Seqenenre Tao, who rebelled against the Hyksos in Ancient Egypt. He was grievously murdered, and it fell to his son Ahmose to kick the Hyksos out of Egypt for good and initiate the 18. dynasty and New Kingdom.

After that I have watched the following four videos:

Passeig de Gràcia, l'escenari burgès - Sense Ficció
(52 minutes in Catalan)

Cròniques de Barcelona - La Sagrada Família, l'últim projecte de Gaudí

As cidades fantasmas brasileiras que você não imaginava que existiam
A video in Brazilian Portuguese about abandoned cities - and with a sentence knot in its name

A ilha brasileira mais próxima da África que vai desaparecer
About the remote Brazilian island São Pedro i São Paulo (one saint apparently wasn't enough!)

El misterio de los vascos (47 min).jpg

And methinks it now has become about time to call it a day...
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Iversen
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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby Iversen » Tue Mar 16, 2021 9:42 pm

Time to update, but I haven't done much I haven't done before - like falling into the music trap again. I listened to piano music by the Norwegian composer Agatha Backer-Grøndahl from my own collection, and then I followed the trail to Youtube and stumpled over a couple of other totally forgotten female composers, like one Hilda Sehested who wrote a fair amount of music for the cornet (a relative of the trumpet) and other instruments - I wonder whether she played it herself during the silent night hours when everybody else tried to sleep. She wrote one opera, which was accepted by the opera in Copenhagen, but the 1. world war broke out and it never was staged. Another, the Swede Hilda Thegerström got private hours with Berwald and Liszt, among others, but became 'only' famous as a pianist - with just two short piano compositions to her credit. But with those teachers it is hard to believe that she didn't write more things which just got lost because she didn't show them to anybody.

I did work on my Irish, using the concept I wrote about recently: I copy passages from Harry Potter and write hyperliteral translations between the lines - and the surprising thing is how little help I get from having the English original open. The Irish simply think in linguistic patterns that are very far from the English ones. One important thing is that I don't note all new words down in the margin - that would divert my attention from the ways the sentences are constructed.

I have also studied the Russian Wikipedia's article about the extinction event between the Triassic and the Jurassic - not as famous the one where the dinosaurus minus the ptitsi were wiped out or the one after the Permian where just everything except the hardy little guy with the canines perished miserably (Lystrosaurus - do you remember him?). The main result of the Triassic-Jurassic extinction was that the dinosaurs became the dominent group of animals - and among the victims were several other groups of reptiles. Our own ancestors went underground to await better times - but it became a very long waiting time... around 120 million years.

RU: Я читал о группе под названием Круротарзы, которая, по всей видимости, была среди жертв - но при ближайшем рассмотрении вещи является сложнее. Это были отчасти какие-то странные 'крокодилы' - у некоторых были ноги под телом (не горизонтально в стороны), а у некоторых можно было даже бегать на задних лапах. Эксперименты однако вымерли в конце триаса.

До изобретения названия круротарси говорили о псевдозухиях (включая современных крокодилов). Но это забавное название, потому что оно означает псевдокрокодилы, и здесь вы также нашли настоящих крокодилов (а также аллигаторов и гавиалов). Но путаница в названии все еще существует. Если сравнить английские и русские статьи о крурозаврах, то они совершенно не согласны - за исключением одного, а именно того, что настоящие крокодилы являются подгруппой псевдокрокодилов.

Я также подготовил новый набор двуязычных текстов на русском языке Но когда я достаточно хорошо знаю язык, я начинаю играть с языком переводов. Первая статья в тексте посвящена балалайкам, а вот перевод на испанский. Другой - про деревенских ящериц (скоморохи), а вот перевод на голландский, а это на африкаанс из последней статьи о российском городе Петрозаводске (который бывала моя мама, но я видел только ее фотографии. ). Я использовал эти текстовые наборы не только для учебы (с копированием с почерком), но и для спокойного чтения перед сном. А на самом деле я, наверное, мог бы прочитать их без перевода, но тогда мне нужно было иметь словарь под рукой.

F0214a03.jpg

EN: I have also made a new text set for Albanian (with absolutely nothing about pizzas). The first one tells about an alcoholic by the name of Edi. Maybe I should have stuck to pizzas and steaks. More about booze later.
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Iversen
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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby Iversen » Sat Mar 20, 2021 6:50 pm

I have been on a family visit once again, and that always leads to less study activity and more gardening. But this time I happened to find some bilingual printouts based on Bulgarian in my bag, and I used those as goodnight entertainment. I can see that I have commented on at least one article here, namely one about Yetis from fakti.bg, where the claim is that the few physical remains seem to point to brown bears rather than some kind of ape (or humanoid being). However the bears in question are not typical for the area, but more likely a branch that allegedly diverged from ordinary brown bears some 650.000 years ago (heaven knows how they can measure that). Another short article from the same source mentions that somebody has compiled a list of mobile phones according to their electromagnetic radiation levels, but all were solidly below a level dicated by the WHO - 2.0 W/kg (and now I wonder whether you have to weigh people to judge the actual impact they a subjected to). A third one quotes Kasparov for the prediction that Russia will lose some land areas .. well, so far this hasn't been the case,

One fairly old printout illustrated a thing that puzzled me quite a bit years ago:

BU: "С помощта ха друг метод - т. нар. дендрохронологиа,"
was originally translated as
EN: "with another method - t. pomegranate. Dendrochronology"

Actually "т. нар." is an abbreviation of "така наречен", and Google Translate has been now been corrected so that the new (and correct) translation goes as follows:

EN: "Using another method - the so-called dendrochronology,"

But there are still some things to amuse users. The bilingual Bulgarian-German translation of an article about the Silurian which I produced a few years ago would probably confuse anyone, as in the following passage:

BU: "Тяхната поява била още една бажна предпоставка за окончателното ислазане на животниския свят от морето на сышата."
GER: Ihr Auftauchen was eine weitere wichtige Voraussetzung für den endgültigen Ausbruch der Tierwelt aus dem Meer der Dürre

Ahem, a dry Sea? Where did all the water go?

The current translation into English is different, but not better:

EN (GT): Their appearance was another important prerequisite for the final disappearance of the animal world from the sea.
My version goes as follows:
EN (me): Their appearance (=the fact that they appeared) was another important prerequisite for the final exit of the animal world from the sea into the dry (land)

... one major extinction event averted! All sea animals did NOT disappear overnight - hurray!

The event alluded to was of course that a few adventurous sea animals during the Siluran period (from 447 to 416 million years ago) found out that you actually could leave the sea and survive - as already proved by some hardy plants. However most stayed behind, which the Bulgarian original forgot to mention.

So Google translate is not only an indispensable tool for me to produce bilingual study materials fast, but also a source of hilarious fun and a mechanism that teaches me to be sceptical about translations in general. As I have written before I don't trust GT enough to use it from a wellknown language into a weak or even unknown language where I can't immediately spot the errors, but in the other direction it is less important whether there are a few errors - and the more glaring the better, because it then will be easier to spot them. The translation only serves to help me to get through the original text without looking everything up, and if the translation is rotten then I can normally see that it doesn't function - and then I use my dictionary.

The big guy below is a sea scorpion (an Euryptid), and the largest of those could be more than 2 meters long. Some lesser scorpions were among the pioneers to make the landfall, but I never got around to paint those too - for a special reason: when I painted the paintings below for my mother's dining room during my youth everybody still assumed that the first land animals arrived on dry land during the following epoch, the Devonian - and that's how I illustrated the event.

x03a_Silurian.jpg

x04a_Devon.jpg


PS: right now I'm listening to one Russian and one Polish guy trying to understand one Bulgarian lady. But I think I'll have to listen at least twice to this video to understand it - and NOT simultaneously try to write in English while I listen.
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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby Iversen » Wed Mar 24, 2021 8:05 pm

I would have written here yesterday, but every time I came here something new had been added to the thread about learning a language in one day, and then I wrote something there instead of in my own log thread. Well, now at last I'm here.

I'll just mention that I have listened to a few more videos in the Ecolinguist series, including one that confronts speakers of Polish and Serbian and another where speakers of French, Catalan and Italian try to understand Occitan, and they succeed in communicating - but there are some unexpected pronunciations (I'm sorry that I can't write about this in Occitan). For instance the word "objecte" is pronounced like /u-tjett/, and "volar" (to fly) like /bula/ without the final -r (as in Catalan) and with the bilabialal /b/ of Castillian. So Occitan is definitely one of the languages which you can understand if you know its neighbours, but you have to 'tune in' to the pronunciation.

LA: Etiam auscultavi videotaenias latinas, una cum Aloisio Miraglia, qui admirabile verbat, sed valde iratus videtur - et ergo non totam videbo. Potius videotaeniam videbo ubi John Kuhner initio Anglice lingva abulator, sed postea latine loquitur ... et ille non iratus parebat.

Apart from that I have produced some more bilingual text sets, including one in Polish to replace the one about minced meat and aurochses, plus a Greek set with texts about ivory and mammoths and the Polish astronomer Copernicus. I wonder why I didn't include this last topic in the Polish set, but logic isn't always my main concern when I choose texts for closer scrutiny. Instead the main focus of the new Polish set is the small town Stargard Szczecinsky - or just Stargard (even the local inhabitans have apparent found that the full name was a little too much), which I visited in 1990.

POL: Tam byłem właściwie w 1990 roku, zaraz po upadku komunizmu, do Świnoujscia dotarłem promem z Kopenhagi i jechałem do Krakowa - a ponieważ Świnoujcie nie wydawało się już bardzo interesujące, czekałem w Stargardzie. A Stargard to ciekawe miasteczko ze starymi domami z epoki hanzeatyckiej i dobrze zachowanymi murami miejskimi. Ale Polska była w tym momencie dziwnym doświadczeniem, bo wszystkie ceny były śmieszne. Na ostatni dzień miałem kwotę odpowiadającą 25 koronom duńskim (3 €) i zjadłem stek w trzech restauracjach - i nie udało mi się całkowicie wydać tych pieniędzy. A kiedy chciałem wykupić rezerwację miejsca do Krakowa (miałem już bilet na pociąg, 2 klasa ), dostałem kwotę i zapłaciłem - nie wiedząc, że bilet też jest wliczony w cenę. Od tego czasu ceny stały się bardziej normalne, ale nadal niższe niż w Danii.

P3101b03_Brama_Portova,Stargard.jpg
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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby Iversen » Thu Mar 25, 2021 11:46 am

I started out using my latest Greek printouts yesterday, but soon discovered something annoying: the first text was a machine translation from English. The proof is that several animal names weren't translated at all - like"warthog", which is left untranslated by Google Translate, but has a real name in Greek: "Φακόχοιρος". My translation in this case is in Esperanto, and a warthog is called "fakoĉero" in Esperanto so it is weird that the parallel Greek word isn't known to GT.

By the way, I pre-read the whole collection yesterday as goodnight reading in my bed, and with a few exceptions I could have done without the translation - most of the words I didn't already know could be guessed from the context, like φιλντισένιος for 'made of ivory', with φίλντιση as the corresponding noun (GT proposes "sucking" for φίλντιση, but has ivory as a second choice). The normal word for ivory in Greek is however ελεφαντόδοντο, and the description in the article for φιλντισένιος (should have been φίλντιση) looks more like a reference to the stuff tusks are made of, i.e. enamel (σμάλτο)(: "φιλντισένοις (SIC) είναι η φυσική ύλη που συνθέτει χαλιόδοντες θηλαςτικό (SIC) και τα δόντα."

GR: Όταν έχασα την εμπιστοσύνη μου στο πρώτο άρθρο, προχώρησα στο επόμενο, το οποίο πραγματευόταν τους λόγους για την εξαφάνιση των μαμούθ. Η συζήτηση έχει χωρίσει τον κόσμο των παλαιοντολόγων σε δύο αντίπαλα στρατόπεδα: σε εκείνους που κατηγορούν τις κλιματικές αλλαγές και σε εκείνους που παρατηρούν ότι τα μεγάλα ζώα εξαφανίστηκαν ακριβώς όταν έφτασε ο παράφρων δολοφόνος πίθηκος και πιστεύουν ότι υπάρχει σύνδεση. Το άρθρο παραθέτει μια ερευνητική ομάδα για την παρατήρηση ότι τα τελευταία μαμούθ είχαν χαμηλά επίπεδα σημαντικών ιχνοστοιχείων στα οστά, αλλά προσθέτει ότι αυτό θα διευκόλυνε το κυνήγι τους.

Μετά από αυτό θα προχωρήσω στη μελέτη ενός άρθρου σχετικά με απροσδόκητα ευρήματα φωσφινών στην ατμόσφαιρα του πλανήτη Αφροδίτη και τους ισχυρισμούς ότι αυτά υποδεικνύουν βιολογικές διεργασίες. Πράγμα που προκαλεί έκπληξη, δεδομένου ότι η Αφροδίτη έχει κακή φήμη ως μελέτη για να ζει κανείς.

F5254b03_dead-mammoth_(Mus-of-Nat-Hist, Aarhus).jpg
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