Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby Iversen » Sat May 15, 2021 5:40 pm

The Wikipedia text seems to imply that the 'salat' forms (from Latin 'ipse') were exported from mainland Catalunya to the Balearic Islands during the Catalan push under king Jaume in the 13. century, but unless a number of older sources from the islands can be found that that contain the l-forms (from Latin 'Ille') and these suddenly disappear in favour of 'salat' forms, I find it at least as likely that all the islands (including Sardinia, but excluding Corsica) originally used 'salat' forms. However it would take some study to find out about the sitution, and I'll postpone that for later. Right now there is a push from Spain because of all the employees in the tourism industry which eventually may kill the 'salat' forms.


GR: Εκτός από αυτό: Έχω διαβάσει αρκετά κείμενα στα ελληνικά για την κατάσταση της πανδημίας εκεί κάτω. Ξεκίνησε να παρακολουθώ στην Δανική τηλεόραση ότι οι χώρες της Νότιας Ευρώπης αρχίζουν τώρα να προσελκύουν τουρίστες εκεί, και αφού σκέφτομαι να καλλιεργήσω την ελληνική μου γλώσσα "in situ", αυτό είναι αρκετά ελπιδοφόρο. Επομένως, έχω ακούσει εν μέρει μερικές ελληνικές ειδήσεις στο Youtube, έχω μελετήσει εν μέρει κείμενα από το in.gr και το tovima.gr σχετικά με την κατάσταση. Και αν το έχω καταλάβει σωστά, οι Έλληνες έχουν πλέον τη δυνατότητα να συναντηθούν σε εξωτερικούς χώρους, αλλά ακόμα να μην επισκέπτονται ο ένας τον άλλον ελεύθερα στα σπίτια. Ωστόσο, τα σύνορα με τη βόρεια Μακεδονία έχουν ανοίξει στενά, και αυτό είναι αρκετά θετικό, δεδομένο της άποψης των Ελλήνων σχετικά με τον βόρειο γείτονα.

BU: От друга страна, сега изглежда, че българите са започнали да тормозят македонците, защото всъщност не вярват, че Северна Македония трябва да бъде независима държава. Не е лесно да си македонец!

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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby tractor » Sun May 16, 2021 12:08 pm

Maybe it`s impossible to find out how they spoke before the Conquest of Majorca. The invasion and subesquent repopulation were rather brutal:
https://ca.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repoblament_de_Mallorca
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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby Iversen » Sun May 16, 2021 3:28 pm

Yesterday I extended my ongoing set of Greek wordlists so that it eventually reached something like 900 words (not all shown below), and today I have spent some time doing the repetition of about the first half. The first few hundred words came all the way back from my studies of the members of the trunk-bearing extinct animals (Proboscidea, from Ancient Greek προβοσκίς) and showed funny things like the use of the word "φίλντισι" (filntisi) which two of my dictionaries didn't know, but my Greek-Danish one did - as work by the admirable Rolf Hesse, who also compiled an equally good dictionary in the opposite direction. The common word seems to be "ελεφαντόδοντο", which simply means elephant tooth.

GR: Αυτό μου θυμίζει την ονομασία για το συνδυασμό χρυσού και ελεφαντόδοντου, χρυσοελεφαντίνης. Νομίζω ότι ο Δίας του Φιντιά στον Παρθενώνα κατασκευάστηκε έτσι, αλλά έχει εξαφανιστεί. Ωστόσο είδα τον απόγονο του Λητώ στο μουσείο των Δελφών - αλλά θα προτιμούσα να δείξω τα γλωσσάρια μου από μερικά παλιά, φθαρμένα αγάλματα του Απόλλωνα και της Άρτεμις.

Greek_wordlists.jpg

EN: Last night I also felt a sudden urge to to listen to some Romanian, and I looked up "restricții corona" on Youtube - and there were lots of short clips from the news about the current situation, but then I found something more interesting, namely ...

RO: .. o lungă emisiune despre sistemul feroviar românesc degradat. Nu mai era încurajator, dar au fost menționate mai multe întinderi pe care eu însumi le-am condus - cum ar fi parcursul de Craiova la Drobeta-Turnu-Severin. Poate că șinele erau mai bune atunci (în anul 2009), dar și poate că nu. Pe unele întinderi acum conduceți cu 10-15 kilometri pe oră și astfel îl puteți depăși cu bicicleta, și avem văzut încă un alergător lângă tren pe pista paralelă, care desigur nu mai este utilizat. Cu toate acestea, am avut o vacanță excelentă, inclusiv o noapte în orașul cu numele lung Drobeta-Turnu-Severin - care era de fapt locul podului lui Traian peste Dunăre (rămășițele există încă). Apropo, banii pe care romanii i-au furat de Dacii au finanțat construcția Colosseumului din Roma.

F3904a01_train-heading-for-.jpg

IT: Inoltre, ho letto l'articolo di Wikipedia sulla lingua della Corsica, ed è assolutamente incredibile quante varianti ci siano della lingua tradizionale del luogo, la quale è chiaramente italiana, non francese. Alcuni hanno dibatito se i Corsicani abbiano parlato qualcosa come il sardo prima che l'isola fosse ripopolata dall'Italia, ma questo non è mai stato dimostrato. E ora è il torno della lingua corsicana ad essere soppiantata dal francese.

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RO: Pictura de mai sus descrie o poezie numită "câmp îngrijit" unui poet românesc anumit Vrînceanu.
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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby Iversen » Tue May 18, 2021 8:41 am

Nothing much to report this time. I have finished my repetitions of Greek words (around 800), and that couldn't be done in a flash. I have watched TV with sound from a number of countries, but since my cable provider cut out all the Slavic ones on my list I only have TV in languages I can understand without really concentrating, so it only counts as maintenance. I have read a little bit in my Polish grammar from Routledge, and I have looked at some of my old study texts in a number of languages, partly as goodnight reading. And that's all. When I last logged in here I ended up writing about the tsunami of English speech in Denmark instead of reporting about something in some other language - never mind which one. And yesterday when I had planned to do stome hardcore studying my sister called me to ask me to buy a new semismartphone for my mom, because the old one has gone mad - we can hear her, but she can't hear us - and then I lost an afternoon. And I still hate and distrust my own newly bought socalled smartphone because I can't see the logic in its functioning - I hate it!

I thought about showing a photo of my disgusting and irritating and deeply resented socalled smart phone, but this report about distractedness and lack of focus doesn't even deserve to be illustrated - not even with a horror photo of a telephone. The only good thing from yesterday is that the Danish corona pass may be changed to show the first vaccination so that I can stop queueing (<-- funny word by the way) up for covid tests. And from next week I can again visit the interior parts of zoos and aquaria, which the authorities for some reason have seen as more dangerous than football matches with thousands of spectators. But that doesn't explain why I haven't done more good oldfashioned study from the depths of my comfy chair the last couple of days..

Things have to change back to normal...
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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby Iversen » Fri May 21, 2021 7:41 pm

Slightly more to report this time, although ... I still don't like my new 'smart'phone. One example: I received an e-mail, somehow found a way to write an answer and ... where the heck was then the send button?? Luckily my sister, who has longer experience with small devilish contraptions, found out that there was a microscopic green thingy in the upper right corner, which turned red if you somehow managed to hit it - and then you had sent the answer (no confirmation, though). And it is like that all the way through. But my finger is probably ten times the width of the green thingy. And I have still not found out how to put my covid pass one step (swirl? swipe? touch?) away from the front page.

So using my phone for language learning ... no, not now... I prefer keepin' my usual mental composure intact.

I have been an a family visit once again, but this time armed with some suitable goodnight easy-reader stuff: the essential Serbian grammar from Routledge (by Lila Hammond). Of course I didn't read all of it since the purpose was to fall asleep, but I did nevertheless get through much of the Serbian verbal morphology and a weird chapter about "enclitics" (p.249ff). These are small words that are dependent on the word before them, contrary to proclitics which are said to depend on the following word (i.e. prepositions). And there are - according to the book - four types of enclitics: the interrogative particle "li", 'verbal enclitics' (auxiliaries, see below), the pronominal enclitics (unstressed personal pronouns) and the reflexive enclitic "se", which is the short form of the pronoun "sebe".

I have a suspicion that this is a system cooked up by the author herself since I haven't seen it used anywhere else, and frankly I can't see the point in mixing up parts of compund verbal forms with unstressed pronouns and the item "li", which looks more like an interrogative adverb at the same level as the negation "ne". The main thing to remember about the socalled 'verbal enclitics' is that the past tense in Serbian is composed of a present tense form of "biti" (to be) plus a past active participle, unknown to English, but used on its own as a past tense form in Russian and used in Serbian and most other Slavic languages as part of a compound verbal form that is used to denote the past tense. And the simple rule is that the biti-element can't stand in initial position, but elsewhere it is costumary to put it in front of the participle. And this grammar succeeds in bungling this totally up.

By the way, one of the examples is this sentence "Да ли бисте желели парче торте?" ("Would you like a piece of cake?, my translation: "(Question) methinks [you] wanted part of-cake?"). English has got lots of interrogative pronouns that have a specific target, like identity (who) or time (when), but not really a Yes-no question word. "Methinks" is the closest approximation to this, but not really the right thing. Danish has "mon" (an fossilized form of an old verb "at monne"), Esperanto has got "ĉu" - and as the example shows, Serbian has got the combination of "da" and "li" to fill out the same function. But in English you have to use an inversion and add a form of "to do" - or let the intonation do its thing.

During my stay a close family member started to take a new pill, and lo and behold, the package insert was written in Icelandic and Danish. So of course I proceeded to use it as a language learning tool, that introduced me to a world of medical Icelandic which I haven't really explored until now.

But medicine isn't everything (apart from covid, which actually seems to be everything). One divergent angle on this text was to study the interplay betwen personal and impersonal verbs and expressions. Of course I should have written this in Icelandic, but then there wouldn't be many readers, and those that read it would just say "and so what?" and proceed to eat their daily dose of hákarl with skýr.

Let's take a few examples:

Lesið alla fylgiseðlinn vandlega áður en byrjað er að nota lyfið ("read all follow-sheet-the carefully before begun is to use medicine-the")
Nauðsynlegt getur verið að lesa hann siðar ("Necessary may-get been to read him later" (..may be to...))
(...)
Verið getur að læknininn hafi ávisað lyfinu við öðrum sjúkdómi eða í ödrum skömmtun en tiltekið er i þessum fylgiseðel (...) ("been (maybe-)got that doctor have prescribed medicine-the at other illnesses or in other dosage than specified is in this follow-note"

Google Translate translates this last sentences as follows: "Your doctor may have prescribed the medicine for another illness or in a different dosage than specified in this leaflet" And this is actually a quite decent translation, but as you can see the Icelandic author has tried hard to keep her/his text in an impersonal mode ... which makes it seem like a kick in the face when you reach this sentence:

þú mátt ekki taka XXX samtímis lyfjum :twisted: :twisted: :twisted: ... ("Thou art not to take XXX at-the-same-time (as) medicin .." (and then some other kinds of medicine)). It would be necessary to add a few harsh swearwords in the translation to get the proper tone of the Icelandic original. Woe the forlorn soul who transgress such a clear order!

IC: Við the vegur, ég hef eytt verulegum hluta vikunnar á garðrækt. Illgresið vex eins og .... tja, illgresið á þessum tíma þar sem veðrið bliknar á milli sólar og rigning, og þar að auki stöku sinnum hef ég líka hellt fötu af blómafræjum í jörðina í von um að lágmarks brot reyndar lifi í raun og spíri. En það er líklega of bjartsýnt...

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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby Iversen » Sat May 22, 2021 11:40 am

I tend not use the same goodnight reading stuff for weeks on end so yesterday I grabbed a new book - or rather booklet, since the item in question is "Japanisch Wort für Wort" from the German Kauderwelsch series. So yesterday I read about the pronunciation of Japanese and its infamous writing system, and then I fell asleep. But I woke up at six o'clock this morning and carried on reading about the grammar, and that was actually so fascinating that it prevented me from falling asleep again (which had been my original plan). I'm NOT tempted to start studying Japanese, but it is nce to know something about the way it is constructed.

As for the writing I'll generally leave it alone (or leave it to the gadgets that surely already exist), but it may be worth mentioning that I borrowed a Japanese-English dictionary from the library last year, and it struck me that there were lots of partial homonyms, i.e. words whose roots looked the same in Latin letters, but were nicely separated by the Chinese signs. So should one be say hurray for the strange mixture of Chinese signs and two different sound writing systems? Nope. When people speak they don't have the Chinese signs dangling in front of them, so it can only be a 'nice to have' thing, not something absolutely essential.

OK, and now the grammar, chapter by chapter.

According to the booklet there are four cases, and the Germans insist on putting them in the order Nominative, Genitive, Dative, Accusative. And it seems that Japanese operates with definite articles (called 'particles'), which however are put after the substantives. At this point I'm already slightly suspicious. For instance it is noted that movement from something calls for the socalled 4. case, which in this German book denotes the accusative: "Densha o oi-masu" (Zug4 aussteigen - ich steige aus dem Zug aus)). A few pages further on there is another example with a movement back to something: "Kaimono o shite kara, uchi ni kaeri-mashita" (Einkauf getan nach, Haus in kehrte-zurück), and here 'ni' marks "uchi" (house) as the 3. case, the Dative, while 'o' marks the 'shopping (done)' as Accusative. So the word order is different, but it seems that there is something like prepositions that govern specific cases, albeit without case ending - the effect is only seen on the articles, if you can call them that.

The word order in constructions with the genitive (case 4) is called 'umgekehrt' (inverted), but only from a German perspective: "Bunka no hi" (Kultur2 Tag - Tag der Kultur). For us Danes the order is the usual one: "kulturenS dag", and for an even better approximation you could point to the 'garpe genitive' (with a Norwegian loanword), which is found in Low German, Dutch and first and foremost in Afrikaans: "die kultuur sy huis" (the culture its house).

The plural can be marked with "-tachi" for things and "-gata" or you can do a reduplication - or just assume that the listener/reader is clever enough to guess the number. And likewise there is no inherent gender markings, but you can precede the word for a person with "onna" for woman and "otoko" for man. So gender may appear to be a secundary feature, but given what I have heard about the Japanese society I'm sure that the language users will take care to indicate which gender they are referrring to. But what do they do with mixted groups? They have the possibility of ignoring the problem, or they can use the male markers as done in most languages - which solution is the preferred one in Japanese?

The adjectives can be attributive and then stand before the substantives, but they can also be predicative and then stand somewhere later in the sentence (but before the verb, which stands last in Japanese sentences - if there is one). No problems in that, except that some adjectives are different, allegedly mostly loanwords from Chinese. In a 'normal' predicative construction it seems that you can omit the copula: "hana wa chilisai" (flower the .. small), but not with one of the weird ones - here you need to put a verb: "hana wa kirei desu" (flower the pretty is) [my examples]. And attributively: "eiji-shimbun" (englische-Schrift Zeitung), but "kirei-na hana" ((eine) schöne Blume) (examples from the book). And then I miss an example with the definite form and a 'weird' adjective. The definiteness in the nominative would be marked with "wa" or "ga", but where do you put it? I would generally not trust Google Translate in cases like this, but I fed it the words "the pretty flower", and it came out with "Kireinahana" (and きれいな花, which is sheer useless noise for me) . OK, "kirei" = pretty first and "hana" = flower last, and in the middle the "na" that accompanies 'weird' adjectives - but no article. And maybe to cover its shameful defeat GT puts the translation in the plural. Maybe one of our resident Japanese buffs could solve the mystery?

OK OK, maybe that's enough Japanese grammar, but I think it illustrates how one should read a grammar: as an inquisitive mind who tries to see the system behind the tidbits of informations distributed to us by the author. In this case I would have liked to see a systematic marking of 'weird' adjectives, and the author should have foreseen that there might be a clash between the "na" and a definitive article - and maybe also mentioned briefly how to survive putting a 'weird' adjective plus a noun plus an article into one of the other three cases. And, behold ye venerable writer - pardon me for asking, but is there such a thing as a name for Chinese-born quasi-adjectives from China?

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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby vonPeterhof » Sun May 23, 2021 7:39 am

Iversen wrote:The plural can be marked with "-tachi" for things and "-gata" or you can do a reduplication - or just assume that the listener/reader is clever enough to guess the number. And likewise there is no inherent gender markings, but you can precede the word for a person with "onna" for woman and "otoko" for man. So gender may appear to be a secundary feature, but given what I have heard about the Japanese society I'm sure that the language users will take care to indicate which gender they are referrring to. But what do they do with mixted groups? They have the possibility of ignoring the problem, or they can use the male markers as done in most languages - which solution is the preferred one in Japanese?

The "gender marking" is either semantic or stylistic and never grammatical, so there is absolutely no need to use any markers by default, and the mixed groups problem of many a gendered European language is simply not an issue. Adding onna and otoko to things like job titles is only really done when that information is particularly relevant, and things like separate words for "actor" and "actress" appear to be late 19th century calques from Western languages (as is the case with gendered third-person pronouns). While colloquial Japanese can be full of gendered markers, the lack of true grammatical gender and the general tendency to avoid using personal pronouns altogether makes it a surprisingly easy language to be gender-neutral in.

Also, I'm pretty sure that -tachi is also a lot more common for people than for things. I get the feeling that its use for inanimate objects is a rather recent phenomenon, and most of this sort of usage I encounter tends to come across as fanciful or almost childish. I feel like I've seen it used most for abstract and incorporeal inanimate objects, like "emotions" or "memories", rather than physical objects.

Iversen wrote:The adjectives can be attributive and then stand before the substantives, but they can also be predicative and then stand somewhere later in the sentence (but before the verb, which stands last in Japanase sentences - if there is one). No problems in that, except that some adjectives are different, allegedly mostly loanwords from Chinese. In a 'normal' predicative construction it seems that you can omit the copula: "hana wa chilisai" (flower the .. small), but not with one of the weird ones - here you need to put a verb: "hana wa kirei desu" (flower the pretty is) [my examples]. And attributively: "eiji-shimbun" (englische-Schrift Zeitung), but "kirei-na hana" ((eine) schöne Blume) (examples from the book). And then I miss an example with the definite form and a 'weird' adjective. The definiteness in the nominative would be marked with "wa" or "ga", but where do you put it? I would generally not trust Google Translate in cases like this, but I fed it the words "the pretty flower", and it came out with "Kireinahana" (and きれいな花, which is sheer useless noise for me) . OK, "kirei" = pretty first and "hana" = flower last, and in the middle the "na" that accompanies 'weird' adjectives - but no article. And maybe to cover its shameful defeat GT puts the translation in the plural. Maybe one of our resident Japanese buffs could solve the mystery?

[...]In this case I would have liked to see a systematic marking of 'weird' adjectives, and the author should have foreseen that there might be a clash between the "na" and a definitive article - and maybe also mentioned briefly how to survive putting a 'weird' adjective plus a noun plus an article into one of the other three cases. And, behold ye venerable writer - pardon me for asking, but is there such a thing as a name for Chinese-born quasi-adjectives from China?

Okay, there's a lot to unpack here. First of all, the colloquial names for the two types of adjectives are simply i-adjectives and na-adjectives, based on their attributive suffixes (the i in kirei is part of the stem rather than a suffix). The technical terms in the Japanese grammatical tradition are "adjectives" and "adjectival verbs", respectively, which describes how they worked in Classical (circa 12th century) Japanese and is somewhat misleading in the context of modern Japanese grammar, where i-adjectives are a lot more similar to verbs than na-adjectives, which are in many ways indistinguishable from nouns.

Now the example phrases given are somewhat unfortunate in that they don't really demonstrate the differences between the two classes of adjectives. For one, both hana wa chilisai desu and hana wa kirei are perfectly valid predicative forms, with the presence or absence of desu having less to do with how the adjectives work and more with the politeness level. The situation changes if you replace desu with da, its casual equivalent (except not really): da cannot be apended to the end of hana wa chiisai without a nominalizing suffix, but it can follow a na-adjective like "kirei" due to their noun-like nature in modern Japanese (although hana wa kirei without da would still be the unmarked form, as the use of da makes it more emphatic). As for the attributive forms, eiji-shimbun doesn't really work as an example either since eiji isn't an adjective at all, but a noun, making the whole thing a compound noun. Chilisai hana is a legitimate attributive form though.

As for "articles", I wonder how the book gave you the idea that Japanese has any. Maybe it demonstrated the difference between the topic particle wa and the subject particle ga in simple indicative sentences by marking the subject as indefinite for the former and definite for the latter? The Duolingo Korean course does this for their Korean equivalents in its exercise sentences, except not very consistently and without insisting on the learner being faithful to this distinction in their responses either. While there can be some overlap between the wa /ga distinction and definiteness in certain instances, in terms of distinguishing between newly introduced and previously established information, they're definitely not the same thing. For one they're not really used outside of predicative constructions, so it's no wonder that they don't appear in GT's translation of "the pretty flower".
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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby Iversen » Sun May 23, 2021 2:59 pm

Thank you to vonPeterhof for this explanation - definitely lots to unpack here. Some of the things he writes are actually also mentioned in the booklet, but then there are explanations or diagrams or something else that contradict the first statement. For instance the booklet says that "Es gibt für Hauptwörter (Substantive) weder Geschlecht, Artikel, Mehrzah noch Beugung (Deklination). Zur Kennzeichnung der 'Fälle' werden entsprechende Partikel hinter das Hauptwort gestellt" (p.26). However right beneath this statement you are shown the following table, that contradicts everything that we were just told a minut before:

Hito-waga-andsomethingmore.jpg

The book doesn't give any reason for calling the items in the wa/ga columns particles rather than articles, and then I have to go for the thing I can see with my own eyes, namely words that are equated with German definite articles in different cases, just with the difference that these words are put after 'their' substantives and not in front of them (and that the presumed substantives aren't inflected).

The book also expressly recommends using "-tachi" for things and "-gata" with persons. Not my invention...

On the other hand I have to admit that the book does call the -i stemmed adjectives "i-Eigenschaftswörter" and those with the -na suffix (or whatever it is) "na-Eigenschaftswörter" - I had just hoped for slightly more informative names. It mentions the Chinese origin of the na-ones. but not that they in the 12. century functioned like copula + adjective. With this in mind, it is slightly unexpected that Japanese now according to vonPeterhof has developed in the direction of a situation where "i-adjectives are a lot more similar to verbs than na-adjectives, which are in many ways indistinguishable from nouns.". Being slightly more verb-like is exactly the thing you would expect from those 'adjectives' that can dispense with a copula, but the effect of exchanging "desu" with "da" is not covered in the chapter about adjectives, albeit maybe elsewhere in the booklet.

The conclusion must be that you need a better grammar and tons of examples to understand how Japanese functions - the grammar section of a thin Kauderwelsch simply isn't enough.
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Iversen
Black Belt - 4th Dan
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Ahem, not yet: Norwegian, Afrikaans, Platt, Scots, Russian, Serbian, Bulgarian, Albanian, Greek, Latin, Irish, Indonesian and a few more...
Language Log: viewtopic.php?f=15&t=1027
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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby Iversen » Tue May 25, 2021 10:09 pm

GR: Σήμερα σταμάτησε το σημάδι της ελληνικής. Έκανα μια μικρή λίστα λέξεων με περίπου 70 λέξεις, αλλά έκανα ένα ακόμη πράγμα: ενώ καθόμουν στο κέντρο του λεωφορείου με εντυπωσίασε ότι θα μπορούσα να περάσω το χρόνο μου πιο αποτελεσματικά αν απλά προσπαθούσα να σκεφτώ στα ελληνικά. Και μετά το έκανα για μια ώρα περίπου. Ακριβώς στην αρχή έσβησα ακόμη και απλά πράγματα, όπως τι να καλέσω ακοή και όραση. Βρήκα τη λέξη για το ακοή ("ακοή") μέσω την λέξη-κλειδί "akustik" (acoustics) -> "ακουστική" , αλλά όσο κι αν σκέφτηκα, δεν μπορούσα να θυμηθώ τη λέξη για την αίσθηση της όρασης - αυτή τη λέξη που έψαξα τώρα και δεν νομίζω ότι θα την ξεχάσω σύντομα! Η λύση, φυσικά, θα ήταν να μεταφέρω ένα μικρό λεξικό (όπως το micro-Langenscheidt μου) ... ή βάζοντας τη μετάφραση Google ή έναν σύνδεσμο σε ένα λεξικό στο νέο μου 'smartphone'.

Και τώρα, φυσικά, η σκέψη μου ήρθε: ποιο είναι το όνομα ενός λεγόμενου smartphone στα ελληνικά; Η λύση φαίνεται να είναι αυτή: "έξυπνο τηλέφωνο" - το οποιό σημαίνει κυριολεκτικά ένα τηλέφωνο που δεν κοιμάται. Αλλά οι Έλληνες προφανώς εκτιμούν ότι ποτεδήποτε δεν είστε χορμισμένοι, είστε έξυπνοι.

EN: And now for something completely different. I opened Llorg today with the intention of writing about Greek AND some other things, like the Japanese verbs... but then I ended up writing about ways to deal with grammar instead.

The one thing I have learnt about those Japanese verbs is that there is one set of 'ordinary' forms and another more polite (and maybe even more layers above that), and the twain shall never meet. And I have no intention to learn any of them - especially not from a tiny grammar section in a language guide that already has deluded me once. But even without learning the language it is interesting to know that Japanese use verbal forms with inbuilt negations and things like that.

Apart from that: I will definitely try to get a holiday in Greece this year, but I have just read in one of my study texts (from in.gr) that the Greeks weren't allowed to have visits from others than their own family prior to May 14 - they would have to meet outdoors or maybe in restaurants, that was not quite clear. Besides there are still a lot of restrictions on travels around the country, especially to the islands, and those restrictions are probably only the tip of the iceberg - how are the situation concerning hotels and sights? You can visit the country, yes, and since I soon will get my international Green covid pass (in addition to the Danish one which I already have got) I'll be one of the lucky ones that will be allowed in, but I think it's better to wait a few months. And Greece is actually one of the more welcoming countries in Europa (because the country needs the money). As far as I know it is still impossible to take a night in a hotel or visit a museum in for instance Berlin. Maybe Germany will open up gradually in the coming months, but I want to see it happen before I buy a ticket.

Until then I'll have to travel around in my own country. I feel like a flea buzzing around in a closed bottle...

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Iversen
Black Belt - 4th Dan
Posts: 4759
Joined: Sun Jul 19, 2015 7:36 pm
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Languages: Monolingual travels in Danish, English, German, Dutch, Swedish, French, Portuguese, Spanish, Catalan, Italian, Romanian and (part time) Esperanto
Ahem, not yet: Norwegian, Afrikaans, Platt, Scots, Russian, Serbian, Bulgarian, Albanian, Greek, Latin, Irish, Indonesian and a few more...
Language Log: viewtopic.php?f=15&t=1027
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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby Iversen » Sun May 30, 2021 5:11 pm

Inside the aforementioned bottle I try to get around as much as I can, and I have spent this weekend in the Northern part of Jutland. I had two nights in the town Ålborg, which for the moment is the place that has the highest covid incidens in the country. But haha, I don't care, I have been vaccinated once, I get my second jab tomorrow, and apart from that I'm not prone to drunk partying and football celebrations and similar high risk activities (74 infected so far after one recent match). My main fear was that the town would be closed down during my stay, including all schools and cultural things like libraries and museums where nobody gets infected. You have to show a covid pass and wear a mask to use those institutions there and school children are tested until their noses bleed, but apparently the authorities don't dare offend the drunk party hoppers and football enthusiasts that caused the debâcle. Instead they punish innocent cultural institutions collectively for the excesses of the irresponsable drunkards.

I brought along the latest issue of the UEA magazine "Esperanto" and a bunch of old monolingual prints in Dutch and Afrikaans. I have of course studied them earlier, so it was easy to use them as goodnight reading, but they were quite interesting.

DU: De Nederlandse tekst (drie paginas uit nemokennislink.nl) vroeg: "Helpt Nederlands-Friese bagage bij het leren van Engels?" En nee, dat helpt diet. De gewone stelling is dat Fries en Oudengels nauw met elkaar verbonden zijn, dus er zouden enkele veelgebruikte woorden moeten zijn voor tweetalige kinderen en volwassenen met vaardigheden in het Nederlands en Fries. Maar het artikel onthult met tegenzin een van de verklaringen: alle vragen werden schriftelijk gesteld, en vooral de tweetalige kinderen kenden de Friese schrijftaal niet zo goed. Nederlanders die laat Fries hadden geleerd, deden het beter omdat ze hun Fries grotendeels hadden geleerd door de schrijftaal. De studieleiders hadden dit vanaf het begin moeten berekenen en zowel schriftelijke als mondelinge toetsen moeten gebruiken.

Overigens heb ik nooit een aannemelijk bewijs gezien dat het Fries een bijzondere positie zou moeten hebben. Angelsaksisch is ontstaan naar een invasie waarbij ook Angeln en Saksen en Juten betrokken waren, en hoewel pre-Friese immigranten waarschijnlijk in de aangrenzende delen van Groot-Brittannië (bijv. Kent) al woonden, is er geen bewijs dat Angelsaksisch werd gesproken voor dat Hengest en Horsa en zijn vrienden op bezoek kwam op uitnodiging van koning Vortigern.

AF: Die tekste in Afrikaans (van pisigotydskrif.co.za) handel oor verskillende sielkundige onderwerpe. Ek het al kommentaar gelewer op die teks wat sê dat net die teenwoordigheid van 'n selfoon mense dommer maak, maar daar is ook een wat sê dat mense met 'n lae selfbeeld die toetse beter slaag as hulle beveel word om hulle voor te stel dat hulle Albert Einstein is. 'N Ander stel dat jazzmusikante en klassieke musikante musiek anders dink - en jy het waarskynlik die gevoel al gehad. En laastens is daar iemand wat sê dat introverte mense ander mense nie haat nie - hulle is net moeg vir hulle, en hulle raak al moeger en moeger hoe meer hulle daarmee moet assosieer.

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