Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

[Iversen]

I have been on a mini holiday mixed with a family visit here in Jutland for a few days, which as usual has meant that my study activity has been diverted into geographical and cultural spheres unrelated to my current linguistic endeavours. But yesterday, after my return to my homely abode, I did find time to study a topic with a definite connection to the theme of my upcoming speech in Bratislava (European language history and geography), and just to add an element of language training I chose the articles from the Bulgarian Wikipedia about the Kurgan civilisation(s) and about Marija Gimbutas, who presented the Kurgan hypothesis. And as several times before I found it surprisingly easy to understand, but I wouldn't pretend to be able to speak it - and to write in it I need my dictionaries (Lingua, Langenscheidt) and Jean Feuillet's Petite grammaire within reach. Which by the way reminds me of a glaring hole in my collection of green grammar sheets: I have yet to do the pages about Bulgarian grammar.

Some time ago I studied another text in Bulgarian which might be worth reviewing, an article about the Bulgarian copper age, which preceeded the bronze age. Copper age?? Is there such a thing? Not in Denmark, where we only have had a stone age, a bronze and iron age (named after the cupboards where museum director Thomsen put collectibles from presumed different ages, thereby inventing the current internationally used prehistoric chronologic system). But it seems that Bulgaria had a copper age, where the alloy bronze hadn't been invented yet ... and this age apparently didn't evolve into the ubiquitous bronze age, but disappeared leaving a cultural void. Did an invasion from the East cut its life short? Methinks the invaders spoke a pre-Indoeuropean language and the copper people didn't, and then it would be relevant for my speech.

By the way: it's funny (or sad) how a commitment to speak about a certain theme tends to narrow your choice of reading materials into something that might be useful exclusively for that commitment. Which is an effect I always tried to counteract during my school and study years by not taking notice of the pensum chosen by the teachers.

GR: Θυμάμαι την αποφοίτησή μου στην εκπαίδευση της κλασικής αρχαιότητας στο γυμνάσιο (το γυμνάσιο ήταν - και εξακολουθεί να είναι - ένα ίδρυμα που δεν χρειάζεται να τρέχει γυμνό, σε αντίθεση με τις συνθήκες του αρχαίου ελληνικού προκάτοχού του). Σχεδίασα την ερώτηση "ύβρη" και ήρθα να αναφέρω τον βασιλιά Κρέων. Τότε είδαν λίγο για αυτό, και μίλησα για μια τραγωδία γι 'αυτόν. Δεν είναι στη διδακτέα ύλη, είπαν. Τότε είπα ότι υπήρχε κάποιο άλλο έργο και μίλησε λίγο για αυτό. Ευτυχώς, αυτή η τραγωδία ήταν μέρος του προγράμματος σπουδών, αλλά είχα δείξει ότι δεν ήξερα τι περιελάμβανε το πρόγραμμα σπουδών .. ευτυχώς είχαν την αίσθηση του χιούμορ: πήρα ένα κορυφαίο βαθμό.

BU: Статията за Гимбутас е сравнително кратка, и следователно също прочетох датската и английската статия за нея - но не статията в литовски език. И да, това ме дразни, че не мога да го прочета! Централната й аргумент е, че индоевропейските езици идват в Европа с патриархални ездачи от Изтока, които унищожават съществуваща матриархална култура. Нейните опоненти смятат, че тя е описала съществуващата селска култура с твърде идилични думи и те обикновено не вярват в поредица от нашествия, а вместо предложи бавно културно въздействие - но това е още по-наивно. Сега знаем, заради генетичната информация, че курганнити гени се появяват в Северна Европа, докато ситуацията в останалата част на Европа е по-неясна. Но европейците започнаха да говорят индоевропейски (прото-итало-келтски и други езици). Защо? Мисля, че само появата на нов управляващ елит може да принуди населението на инати селяни да променят езика си. Това не се случва при културни инфекции.

Gimbutas.jpg

[Iversen]

Since the message above I have found and read an article written by the great Gimbutas herself. but since it was in English I shan't comment upon the content here.

My other activities have to a large extent been of a technical nature: I have reviewed the nominal morphology of Bulgarian, and that is luckily not very complicated. The Bulgarians have scrapped most cases, leaving only the vocative and the main case for everything else (the accusative died a century ago). However they do use postclitic definite articles like us Danes. Unlike us, they add the article to prepositioned adjectives rather than the substantives that follow them, and they use articles even more assiduously than we do, which sets them apart among the speakers of Slavonic languages. But still something I can relate to. The verbal system is more complicated, and I have to look it over a couple of times to find a suitable layout for my upcoming green sheet.

I have also spent some time doing Polish wordlists using words from my fat green Pons dictionary (German <--> Polish). I also have a more handy French<-->Polish dictionary, but it was compiled for Poles with an interest in French, and therefore it rarely indicates verbs in pairs of perfective and imperfective companions, which is a must for learners. We have another thread where learning words from lists has been declared a mistake. But I know that it works. One criticism is that words should be learned 'in context', and there are indeed words that have such elusive and vague meanings and uses that you need to see tham in action to get a feeling for them. This reminds me of Axon's list of Indonesian expressions, where I noticed things like the "deh" in "Kayaknya aku liat dia deh" (I think I see him) and the "si" of "Fotoin gua/aku si" (take a photo of me) or the "ni" of "ini ni enak banget" (this is really tasty), but similar small words with 'fluid' meanings are found in all languages, and you don't stand a chance of ever learning to use them just by reading the explanations in dictionaries. But you don't need a context to grasp the core meaning of the overwhelming majority of the words in any dictionary - at most a bit of morphological information, plus maybe some idiomatic expressions where they occur in unexpected roles.

Even the meager information in a dictionary can give context enough to help you remember a word. For instance my Polish Pons contains the word "pieczara", which means 'cave'. And this gives an amusing background for the word "pieczarka" which means 'champignon' or 'mushroom', but it also makes you wonder why "pieczara" means 'cave' when 'piecza' means 'care'. I don't have a Polish etymological dictionary, but luckily we have got the internet, and the Słownik etymologiczny języka polskiego has this to say about "piecza": piecza, 'staranie, opieka'; w dawnym języku (cerkiewnym, staroczeskim i innych) mówiono: »piec się o czem« 'starać się, gryźć się', stąd bezpieczny, niebezpieczeństwo, a dawniej, jeszcze i w 16. wieku, przezpieczny, przezpieczność. Dalej pieczliwy, pieczliwośč[1], 'troskliwy', 'troska, staranie', przestarzałe. Od piek-; przyrostek -ja, dlatego u wszystkich Słowian to samo cz: słowień. pecza, 'troska', czes. pécze, rus. piecza..

If you don't immediately understand this then we have one thing in common. I stuffed the whole thing into Google translate and got: cares, 'care, care'; in old language (church, Old Bohemian and other), it was said: "bake about something", try to "bite", hence safe, dangerous, and formerly, still in the 16th century, safe, safe. Farther, roast [1], 'caring', 'caring, trying', obsolete. From hell; the suffix -ja, therefore, for all Slavs, the same part: words. pecza, 'care', Czech pécze, rus. care. .

OK, safe and dangerous and from hell. To me it seems that GT has mixed words from another etymological root into the dough, namely the one that has something to do with baking things: "Piekarnia" is a bakery, and "pieklo" is one of the names for hell. Maybe the words for bakeries and grottoes have some kind of common ground in the way ovens were constructed in the old days, or maybe it is just a coincidence. And then somehow supervising the baking process for a cake (placek) was equated with care in general.. who knows?

Polsk-ordliste-med-repetition.jpg

[mick33]

Even the meager information in a dictionary can give context enough to help you remember a word. For instance my Polish Pons contains the word "pieczara", which means 'cave'. And this gives an amusing background for the word "pieczarka" which means 'champignon' or 'mushroom', but it also makes you wonder why "pieczara" means 'cave' when 'piecza' means 'care'. I don't have a Polish etymological dictionary, but luckily we have got the internet, and the Słownik etymologiczny języka polskiego has this to say about "piecza": piecza, 'staranie, opieka'; w dawnym języku (cerkiewnym, staroczeskim i innych) mówiono: »piec się o czem« 'starać się, gryźć się', stąd bezpieczny, niebezpieczeństwo, a dawniej, jeszcze i w 16. wieku, przezpieczny, przezpieczność. Dalej pieczliwy, pieczliwośč[1], 'troskliwy', 'troska, staranie', przestarzałe. Od piek-; przyrostek -ja, dlatego u wszystkich Słowian to samo cz: słowień. pecza, 'troska', czes. pécze, rus. piecza..

This is quite interesting information. I think I already knew 'piecza' meant care, but if I had ever seen 'pieczara' or 'pieczarka' before I would have just assumed they were inflections or conjugations of 'piecza'.

If you don't immediately understand this then we have one thing in common. I stuffed the whole thing into Google translate and got: cares, 'care, care'; in old language (church, Old Bohemian and other), it was said: "bake about something", try to "bite", hence safe, dangerous, and formerly, still in the 16th century, safe, safe. Farther, roast [1], 'caring', 'caring, trying', obsolete. From hell; the suffix -ja, therefore, for all Slavs, the same part: words. pecza, 'care', Czech pécze, rus. care. .

OK, safe and dangerous and from hell. To me it seems that GT has mixed words from another etymological root into the dough, namely the one that has something to do with baking things: "Piekarnia" is a bakery, and "pieklo" is one of the names for hell. Maybe the words for bakeries and grottoes have some kind of common ground in the way ovens were constructed in the old days, or maybe it is just a coincidence. And then somehow supervising the baking process for a cake (placek) was equated with care in general.. who knows?

This seems rather frustrating, especially for me because this means I have learned and/or dabbled with three languages that GT doesn't translate well (the other two are Finnish and Hungarian). I recall that when GT was new, the developers said that they expected it to improve as people used it more and made corrections and offered suggestions for better quality translations.

[Iversen]

For me it is especially frustrating to see GT bungle its translations since I have made a speech at the last gathering in Berlin about ways to improve it, and I have even written a whole thread here at LLORG about the topic ... but do the Google guys listen? Nope.

For those that might be interested the thread is named "A couple of suggestions to Google Translate from a heavy user"), and my main proposal is that Google lets their software import at least one good dictionary per language - preferably after using a morphology machine to produce all valid forms and a grammar to weed out the illegal regular forms of irregular words. OK, this last step may involve some human intervention, but not in the old form where a linguist had to write the complete system by hand. Once you have got all the forms with translations (and maybe some kind of morphological marker) the whole heap of data could be fed to the system using the same mechanisms that it uses for gulping down any other bilingual sources. And you would see a significant drop in missing words and absurd guesses in the translations.

As Mick33 correctly observes the Google guys had believed that their systems would become really good just by letting them gnash their teeth on whatever bilngual texts they got into contact with, but this has clearly not happened - not even with language pairs that are amply served with bilingual texts like Dutch and English. The Latin translations are of course rock bottom lousy, both because the available bilingual texts are centuries old and because because the thinking patterns built into Latin differ quite a lot from the thinking patterns built into most modern Western languages, including Romance and Germanic as well as Slavic languages. It wouldn't surprise me if the results for Finnish and Hungarian also were somewhat dubious, but here at least you have lots of contemporary texts to feed into the Moloch.

BUT I also have to say that that I'm grateful to google for providing me with an automated tool to produce bilingual texts for study purposes... and the thing not only adds new languages faster than I do, but it also learns them to a level where it can use them for something practical. And then we have to live with the funny translations, using ordinary common sense to spot the more obvious howlers in them.

Kunst202.JPG

Yesterday I continued doing Polish wordlists, but apart from that I have had a peek at the early history of the Celtic and Italic languages, and one of the sources I found while doing this was none other than good old Verbix, which I so far only have used to tell me about verbal forms in some of my target languages (I still haven't got it to work with those that use Cyrillic alphabets). However it apparently also contains a bird's eye view history of the Indoeuropean languages, complete with estimated dates. It can't be used on it's own since it doesn't refer to sources for those dates, but there are some tidbits of information which I didn't know. For instance I knew that Hittite is one of the first Indoeuropean languages which is attested in writing, but according to to the anonymous author of the Verbix texts the Anatolian branch appeared already around 3500 BC:

Really, the Anatolian branch preserved a great number of phonetic, morphological and syntactic traits which do not exist in any other Indo-European group. When Anatolians separated, Proto-Indo-European continued to develop new grammar features, and they exist everywhere but in Anatolian. For example, three genders known in all Indo-European tongues did not exist in Hittite and Luwian, there are no signs of feminine stems a, i, u of nouns there. The instrumental case plural masculine form in -oys can be traced everywhere except Anatolian languages. The same can be said about the demonstrative pronoun so, sa, to, unknown only in Anatolian.

According to the same source Achaeans came to Greece 2250 BC (but they wrote nothing until the Minoans had taught them Linear-something much later), i.e. before the Hittites and Luwians came to Asia Minor, probably from the East or via Caucasus, around 2100 BC. And then they waited until the 16th centurys BC before they started to do their accounting in written form. And now I speculate about who the Anatolians were who arrived around 3500 BC - and where they lived, if not in Asia Minor. Were the Hittites and Luwians part of a second wawe into Asia minor, and if so, is there then any proof that the first wawe spoke some kind of protoIndoeuropean languages?

By the way, professor Renfrew has proposed that the Indoeuropean languages penetrated into Europe from Turkey rather than from the Kurgan steppes, and several thousand years earlier than claimed by Gimbutas & co. (and also much more slowly). My personal take on this is that at least the Germanic languages are late descendants of the language spoken by the steppe horsemen, and this is supported by recent genetic research. As for the rest of Europe... well, it doesn't seem that the Kurgans ever came there in large numbers, so the introduction of people in Western and Southern Europe to Indoeuropean languages probably happened through intermediary mix cultures in Eastern Europe and in Balkan - and not as early as implied by the adherents of the Anatolian hypothesis.

Did some groups actually come through Turkey? That's very likely. It's however noteworthy that Albanian and Armenian both show signs of 'satemization', unlike the Italic, Celtic and Germanic families which all consist of 'centum' languages. The Slavic and Baltic languages are also 'Satem' languages, which is comprehensible if you look at the geography. If the break into 'centum' and 'satem' languages happened after some speakers of ProtoIndoeurope already had left the steppes, then the ProtoBaltoSlavians had time to undergo the 'satemization' before moving Westwards into Eastern Europe. But that doesn't mean that the ancestors of the Illyrians (who probably were the ancestors of the Albanians of today) took the same route - only that it in all likelihood have happened after the satemization process unfolded in some undefined central homeland.

BaltoSlavic_BronzeAgedistribution_(Wikipedia).jpg

[Iversen]

Yesterday evening I started out listening to some Youtube videos about genes, but then I somehow ended up watching one video about weird stars and a couple of videos from the latest Polyglot gathering, and to boot all these were in English - shame on me! The one and only exception was a multilingual speech about Esperanto from the equally one and only Cesco Reale, which reminded me of a language called Europanto, known from a thread in HTLAL: Porquè niet eine Europantisch thread?. The OP Vilas gave this introduction:

Dearisimmos amis Ik want startare aquì eine discussio in Idioma Europantiko , that est un melange of todos lenguas europeane . Ist mucho easy , il faut only hacer eine mixtura de alles spraches europeane more hablate, und make your gramatika como te gusta .....
Aqui' in this lieu virtuel meet eine grosse numero de polyglotten. Ich thinko ist facil falar in europanto...

And I was careless enough to write the following (in September 2006):

Ego con great vergnügen volle haver spass por tant que non me expecte zu learn una llenguatge care nu să finnas en nixunparte no mundo.
Wat for übrich sollem noi machen amb acest proiecte hvis alla dom qui lernent slaviques sprachen eða ελληνικά arrivent cu tutte sue merkwuerdige bogstaver? Si könnetque escriure Europaиto with d'autres litterae?

And what happened? I have spent time learning Esperanto which isn't spoken in nixunparte no mundo, and I have for several years been buried up to my neck in both ελληνικά and Slavic languages written cu merkwuerdige bogstaver - and now those weird letters have become second nature to me (to the extent that I prefer my neat Cyrillic and Greek handwriting styles to my Latinitsa scrawls). I can even see that I used an 'и' in "Europaиto" instead of the expected 'н' (and treated Catalan "llenguatge" as a femininum - how did that happen?).

The thread went on and on to message 142 on page 18 in 2011, where it sadly ended as follows:

Kounotori wrote (on page 17):

Europantoは정말アジアパント的下に있어요。我 アジアパント를学んでいる和이言語很好말해 요。
アジアパント万歳！

My reaction to this :

Je mußte mon amigo Google rogare.

Koreanisch ---> basselandico:
は정말 ---> "Ik ben echt"
있어요 ---> "daar"
말해 요 ---> "de twee woorden John"

Kinesisk ---> Danese:
我 ---> "Jeg"
的 ---> "næste"
를学 ---> "videnskab"
言語很好 ---> "gode ​​ord"

Japonica ---> CommonLingva
んでいる和이 ---> Japanese language
アジアパント万歳 ---> Pant Viva Asia!

This - demasiado δύσκολο!

End of quote.

And Joanthemaid concluded the thread with this short answer:

Klar. Even toi kapisch -- bastante compliqué. Because govorisch plein de sprachen. Still, la mayoridad, verstehtible.

Kunst164.JPG

[Iversen]

I have just spent an hour or so on making my own ultra-mini Slovak morphology, mostly by clipping things from Wikipedia and Angelfire. The irony is that I do own a fullsize grammar book, but it's in Slovak (the one from Lingea), and even though I can get the gist from some passages it isn't suitable for learning Slovak at my current level. I have also a Slovak <--> English dictionary from Lingea, and it is in many ways a good one - but since it is written for Slovakian learners of English all annotations and clarifications are written for them and not for people who try to get a grip on the local lingo a couple of weeks before they go there. So you won't find a clear division into perfective and imperfective verbs, just to take an example -but luckily I can recognize a lot of the relevant affixes from other Slavic languages.

I have already written a dictionary based wordlist with around 200 words and done the first repetition, and I can recognize many of the words. The one thing that I find irksome is that infinitives end with the palatalizing sign ' (equivalent to the Russian 'soft' znak ь) ... and I'm constantly tempted to add an -i as in Serbian. I find it also weird that most adjectives end with something that looks like an accented vowel (ý or á). However according to Wikipedia the Slovakian alphabet has got 46 letters, and the á and ý are just letters in their own right (long versions of a and y, respectively).

I have even found a text to study at the homepage of the zoo in Košice - a neat little story about the tricks the staff used to get their blackbreasted thrushes to breed. Apparently one of their two females had started to build a nest, but the keepers could see that the little lady had chosen a site that was totally unsuited. So they hurried out into the town and bought a dish with a 10 cm diameter, which the bird after some deliberation accepted, and then she laid her eggs there .. but not without adding her own personal style to the thing: "Samica misku prijala a upravila sí ju podl'a vlastnych predstáv róznym materiálom - k senu doplnila mach a ihličie" (or in other words: she added moss and 'needles' (presumably from some kind of conifer in the neighbourhood). And it all ended up with a brood of three chicks (or whatever you call the offspring of turdus dissimilis), followed by a fivefold brood the following year. So the money for a wee bowl from a shop somewhere in downtown Košice was well spent...

TurdusDissimilis.jpg

SLK: A nie, nie prichádza dlhý text v slovenskom jazyku. Tiež mám učiť naučiť európske haplogroups!

[Iversen]

I have now also made a rough sketch of the things I need to know about Bulgarian verbs. In principle I should know them already since I have read the grammar from a to z (or rather а to я) twice since I bought the book several years ago during a travel where I had not yet decided whether I would ever learn other Slavic languages than Russian - and maybe not even Russian. But it was written in French and fairly small and compact so I just read the whole thing for fun shortly after I had bought it, and then I read it again a couple of years ago when I discovered that written Bulgarian wasn't the end of the world. The big difference this time is that I now note things down and try to imagine what my green sheets should look like. With a little luck I'll remember things better this time because of the more systematic approach.

And it turns out that the Bulgarian endings are quite easy to learn. Apart from some remnants of a vocative and a few fixed expressions the nouns and adjectives have lost their cases, and the main trouble is to remember the few cases where the plural ending is anything but -и (or -ове for monosyllabic masculine nouns) ... and to know where the accent should be. As for the verbs I still see a potential problem in learning where the different past tenses should be used. Contrary to other Slavic languages Bulgarian has an aorist AND an imperfect plus a host of compound tempora, and so far I just assume that the aorist should be used where I use the simple perfect in the Romance languages and the imperfect where I use the corresponding form in those languages. But as I said the endings seem to be fairly easy. The grammar subdivides the verbs into lots of subgroups, but as far as I can see the only systematic problems are 1) which vowel should be used before the ending, 2) where should the accent be and 3) does the 1. person singular in the present tense have а/я or some vowel plus -м? There are of course some sound changes, but there are patterns in this, and things that don't follow simple and logical patterns should be treated as irregularites and learnt with each verb instead of cluttering my tables.

RU: Я, конечно, также читал некоторые тексты, и среди этих текстов есть некоторые с русского сайта astronet.ru. Один из текстов касается проекта по перенаправлению угрожающих астероидов. Согласно этому проекту, 20-тонный космический корабль должен быть размещен рядом с астероидом, и гравитация затем должна оттянуть его незаметно из пути, который бы приведет его к земле. Это звучит неловко! Почему не поставить ракету на поверхность с попком вверх и использовать остальное топливо, чтобы оттолкнуть астероид? Гравитация - очень слабая сила, а выхлоп из ракеты должен быть более мощным.

JulesVerne.jpg

[Iversen]

My main language right now seems to be Slovakian. Yesterday I read one more text from Kosiče Zoo, whose season opening was executed by Nixon. Eh, Nixon - isn't he dead? Well, this Nixon is a sea eagle.. Today I have made a wordlist with 60 words and done the first (and maybe only) repetition and studied a text about Betelgeuze (see below). Isn't it idiotic to start studying a language two weeks before you arrive in the country where it is spoken? Well, maybe it is - but only if you expect to be fluent at your arrival. I don't even expect to speak it, but hopefully I will be more or less able read it (and write simple sentences with the help of a dictionary and my new grammar sheets).

One more advantage of starting too late: if I had started last year and still not learnt the language, I would have been severely disappointed with myself. Now I'll be proud if I just can read the street signs (and/or pronounce the name of the gathering venue correctly).

SLK: Článok z zive.sk o Betelgeuse nám hovorí, že hviezda sa rotuje príliš rýchlo. Prečo? Výskumníci teraz veria, že červený obor jedol sprevádzajúcá hviezdu, a potom prevezmet jeho impulzný moment. Astronómia je veľmi zábavnejšia ako románi - a niekedy viac krvavá!

Chronos-de-Goya.jpg

PS it took me almost an hour ... or, well, maybe just twenty minutes.. to concoct the lines in Slovak above... but it was worth the effort. You learn more from battling with a concrete task than from just looking through a text.

[Iversen]

EN: Yesterday I escaped from the Slavic dominance syndrome by grasping my printout of the long list of informal sentences in Bahasa Indonesia which member Axon published in April, and I went through some of it, but found it distracting that a fair number of the words don't appear in my Tuttle's dictionary - and I like to know what exactly people say and not only what they mean. Next time I visit Indonesia I'll definitely have a look at it again, but right now I decided to switch to another text I have worked with earlier, but not finished: the one about 18 waterfalls. I got stuck somewhere around number 12 - not because the text was hard, but because 18 waterfalls is a lot of waterfalls to read about in one go, especially when the author repeats the words "air terjun" or "air terjun ini " about twice in each sentence. However with this text I only had to look maybe one word up per line, and I could even spot a few misprints (like "erbeda" for "berbeda"). And surprise: one waterfall was even from a known area, namely the one called "Sendang Gile" from Lombok, which turned out to be near Gunung Rinjani. As you may remember I wrote about the volcano Gunung Masalas in april - the one that exploded in 1256 with such efficiency that it disappeared from the map, just leaving a lake and a wounded neighbour volcano which had lost the side that turned towards it. The neighbour was of course Gunung Rinjani.

BA IN: Setelah air terjun terakhir ada hadiah tambahan: sebuah artikel tentang Taman Burung di Bali. Terletak sedikit di utara Sanur di "Jalan Serma Cok Ngurah Gambir, Singapadu, Batubulan, Gianyar, Bali, Indonesia" (, Bumi, Tata surya, Bimasakti, Jagad..), dan ketika saya melihat peta hari ini menemukan bahwa sekarang ada juga kebun binatang (safari + laut) di daerah yang sama - tetapi itu tidak ada pada tahun 2002 selama liburan saya. Menurut kenangan saya, taman burung itu adalah kecil dan memiliki biaya masuk yang tinggi sesuai dengan kondisi setempat, tapi itu dijaga dengan baik dan "penuh penuh" diisi dengan burung-burung yang bagus. Liburan saya terdiri dari satu minggu perjalanan pulang pergi di Sulawesi, di mana kami melihat rumah-rumah tongkonan dan kerbau-kerbau dengan tenggorokan yang dipotong, dan dua minggu di Bali, di mana kami hanya harus bersantai dan pergi ke air dan membeli patung-patung kayu yang dibuat oleh seniman lokal. Saya tidak melakukan satupun dari ketiga hal itu: sudah bergegas berkeliling dan melihat hal-hal pemandangan wisata (tanpa membeli satu pun patung kayu), dan kemudian saya pergi ke Jawa selama seminggu (Surabaya dan Yogyakarta), meskipun saya memiliki kamar yang bagus di sebuah resor mewah di Sanur berdiri kosong minggu ini. PS: pada tahun 2002 saya tidak tertarik dengan bahasa - semuanya dilakukan dalam bahasa Inggris.

EN: Today I have been walking around in three parks in my town, thinking through the things I should say about Indoeuropan migrations - and of course in French so this peripatetic activity may to an outsider have looked like mild physical exercise for lazy people, but it was in fact part of my language studies.

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[Iversen]

I have been on a family visit again, but his time I remembered to grab a bunch of printouts to read in the train and - outside gossip (and gardening) hours - at my mum's place. I'll just give you the list below:

CAT: Un article sobre el limit de un àtom. El límit superior teòric seria quan els electrons més externs havien de volar més que la velocitat de la llum per percorrer la circumferència al voltant del nucli. I això passaria amb un nombre atòmic (Z) = 173. Però en el món de les realitats, ningú àtom tan complex pogués sobreviure molt temp, i un altre límit podria ser la hipotètica unitat de menor temps. Un altre article trata de Lynn Margulis i les seves idees sobre la vida prehistòrica de les nostres cèl·lules. Probablement va ser ella qui va suggerir que les mitocòndries es traslladessin a l'interior de cèl·lules amb nuclis milers de milions d'anys enrere, i des d'aleshores vivien en ells com les tropes de casa en els cellers de Hogwarth. Són interessants perquè el seu ADN es transfereix exclusivament de la mare als nens sense la interferència del pare i, per tant, és possible establir arbres genealògics 100% matrilinears.

AF: Onder my artikels op afrikaans is daar een oor kwarke - nie so tegnies as die Engelse artikels nie, maar daar is baie nuttige terminologie (as jy van wetenskaplike onderwerpe wil skryf, natuurlik). Byvoorbeeld, dit word genoem dat quarks graag in driehoeke saamsmelt. Dit herinner my aan 'n SF-roman deur Arthur C. Clarke: "Childhood's End", waar dit blyk dat die mens se ware liefdadigheid swart en geil is en soortgelyk aan satan homself. Die atoomfisiese driehoekies word hadron genoem, en ons is almal opgebou deur hulle (protone en neutrone). As 'n kwart en sy antikwark saam bind, is die resultaat 'n meson. Mesone gom dinge saam. Mesone is met ander woorde soos priesters.

RU: Несколько статей о примитивных акулах (я уже упоминал их ранее в этом журнале).

BA I: Saya juga memiliki beberapa artikel tentang hiu dalam bahasa Indonesia - tetapi di sini hiu-hiu tersebut lebih 'modern' karena ada lebih sedikit artikel panjang tentang fosil hidup.

IC: Safn af stuttum greinum um sálfræði og taugafræði frá Visindi.is. Einn þeirra er kallaður: "Er hægt að vera talblindur?". Og svarið er: já. Ég vil ekki nefna nöfn hérna, en nokkrir stjórnmálamenn, þ.mt stjórnendur ríkisins, virðast hafa áhrif á þetta heilkenni. Aðrir telja ekki að það sé heimur utan fyrir utan töflureiknarni þeirra.

FR: Et finalement il y avait un article sur les vitraux des cathédrales en France. Pour moi c'est les vitraux qui distinguent surtout les églises - pas de vitraux, et la probabilité que je visite se diminue de manière significative. Il faut que je passe du temps à lire des textes en français, puisque j'ai promis de tenir ma conférence à Bratislava dans cette langue - quoique sur l'histoire des languages plutôt que sur les vitres.

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