Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

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Iversen
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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby Iversen » Sat Aug 14, 2021 3:52 pm

During the past week once again spent some days at my mother's place, and this time it was her Cherry Prunes that had ripened so that I had to pluck 2 kg from tree - leaving as much which already had cracked open. And now you may think: what kind of fruit or berry is that? Well as the English names says it is related to prunes, but they are globular and and brightly red. The English Wikipedia tells that they were used for a Georgian sauce called 'tkemali', but we have not the slightest idea how it ended up in my mother's garden. However the flesh doesn't separate easily from the stone in the middle which means that they aren't practical to eat raw - so in due time they will all be converted into "mirabel jam". Why 'mirabel'??. Well, in Danish they are called "kirsebærblomme" (=cherry plum), but more commonly 'mirabeller' = pretty to watch (and they are pretty!).

GER: Bei meiner ersten Interrail-Fahrt 1972 besuchte ich auch Salzburg und kam dabei an einem Schloß Mirabell mit seinem Garten vorbei. Aber das Schloß wurde nicht nach Kirschpflaumen benannt – denn 'Mirabellen' heißen sie im Deutschen gar nicht. Es heißt, daß Fürst-Erzbischof Wolf Dietrich von Raitenau es für seine Geliebte Salome von Alt bauen ließ, mit der er trotz seines kirchlichen Status 15 Kinder hatte. Doch als der große Wolf entmachtet und auf Hohensalzburg (im Hintergrund des Fotos unten) in Gewahrsam genommen wurde, wurden Salome und ihre Kinder aus der Burg geworfen. Und der neue Erzbischof Markus Sittikus von Hohenems erfand dann den neuen Namen einfach weil er das Schloß schön fand (mira + bell). Leider hat ein unfähiger Kreismeister unter Kaiser Franz 1 später die Faßade umgebaut, und heute wird der Innenraum hauptsächlich für städtische Ämter genutzt - aber mitunter auch für Konzerte. Die Gärten sind aber niedlich.

F0113a04, Mirabell, Salzburg (und Hohensalzburg im Hintergrund).jpg

Übrigens habe ich heute Musik von mehreren Bachs gehört - und parallel damit habe ich Fernsehen mit Untertiteln geschaut und Indonesisch studiert.

SP: Primero hubo una larga serie de programas desde España en TVE, como por ejemplo Jaca en Huesca, Catoira en Galicia y un tercer lugar no se donde con muchas i's en su nombre, el cual he olvidado..

IT ... e poi un programma su Raiuno dove due motociclisti italiani hanno attraversato la Polonia fino a Vilnius in in Lituania. Per fortuna non avevo l'audio, ma in alto a destra c'era un sinistre avviso che la musica di sottofondo sarebbe stata ritrasmessa la sera. Sono MOLTO felice che ci sia ancora il televideo con i sottotitoli su TVE e RaiUno (pagine 888 resp. 777) - altrimenti avrei dovuto rinunciare a guardare la maggior parte dei loro programmi a causa di una musica di sottofondo disgustosa.

EN: And finally a few words about my studies of an Indonesian text about the Devon era in Earth's history. I have made a slight modification to my use of wordlists: now I just copy enough text to fill one half page (with a margin to the right for new words), then I write the corresponding wordlist and after that I proceed to the next bit of text. Earlier I typically collected around 100 words before I made the wordlist, but I now think it is more efficient to do the list while the words are still fresh in the memory from the preceding texty study. And then the repetition a day later as usual.

IN: Periode Devon berakhir tidak hanya dengan satu kepunahan, tetapi dengan setidaknya dua, mungkin tujuh (menurut beberapa peneliti). Ada ikan sebelum Devon, tetapi mereka menjadi predator teratas selama periode ini dengan monster seperti Dinichtys, dan di samping itu, di Devon tanaman dan artropoda menyerbu daratan kering.

F5012b05_Devon seafloor_Dalhousie museum, Canada.jpg
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Iversen
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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby Iversen » Mon Aug 16, 2021 6:24 pm

Yesterday I started out studying an article about Nikolaus Kopernikus in the Greek Wikipedia, and today I have studied an article about Stargard Szczeciński from its Polish counterpart. And true to my most recent recommendations about wordlists I intended to incorporate the new words in it in a wordlist immediately .. and then I found a older collection of Polish bilinguals plus a stack of folded A4 sheets which I had worked on several months ago and whose words I never had transferred to wordlists. So I did that task today, and the result was a combined list with something like 250 Polish words. To explain how this could happen I have to mention that I keep my current 'projects' on a notestand, and there I constantly have papers in at least a dozen languages (not counting those used for translations). And since our museums and zoos reopened in May I have spent at least half the time travelling around and a fair amount of the rest collecting berries (and weeds!) in my mother's garden, so it is not totally surprising that some texts got buried and forgotten beneath newer materials during that period.

But the result was that I have spent several hours studying Polish today, and even though it felt slightly rusty at the beginning I could feel my limited Polish skills creeping ever so slowly back. So I have added to my Polish study time today by writing a small travelogue about my visit to Poland including Stargard in 1990. I have visited its bigger neighbour Szczecin more recently (in 2015), but didn't have time to revisit Stargard then.

POL: W roku 1990 komunizm w Polsce został zniesiony, a ja popłynąłem promem z Kopenhagi do Świnoujścia. To była 10 godzinna wycieczka łodzią, którą spędziłem śpiąc w kabinie, ponieważ wycieczki statkiem mnie nudziły (nie powinienem brać udziału w rejsie!). W Świnoujściu kupiłem bilet na pociąg nocny do Warszawy, ale w Świnoujściu nie było nic do zobaczenia, więc kazałem zmienić bilet na odjazd ze Stargardu. Dostałem się tam lokalnym pociągiem przez Szczecin, co wtedy nie było dla mnie zbyt interesujące - był zamek, ale nie mieściło się w nim muzeum, tylko ośrodek kultury i urzędy, a nigdzie indziej w mieście nie znalazłem muzeów . Od tego czasu spędziłem noc w mieście i zrewidowałem swoje postrzeganie tego miasta.

Dlatego szybko pojechałem do Stargardu. Stargard jest starym miastem hanzeatyckim, z towarzyszącą mu architekturą, które zachowało średniowieczne mury miejskie i związane z nimi mury obronne. Przypomniał mi o Lucca we Włoszech - oprócz tego, że Lucca jest bardzo włoska i Stargard jest bardzo polski. Pojechałem dalej do Warszawy, gdzie zobaczyłem kilka muzeów i ogrodów zoologicznych oraz trzy zamki, a stamtąd pociągiem do Krakowa. Ale ceny w Polsce w tamtym czasie były śmieszne. Miałem już bilet z Warszawy do Krakowa i chciałem tylko kupić rezerwacja miejsca - ale ceny były tak niskie, że przypadkowo kupiłem zarówno bilet, jak i rezerwację miejsca, nie zdając sobie z tego sprawy.

Ostatniego dnia w Krakowie, gdzie kupiłem już wszystkie bilety na podróż do domu, zostało mi 25 koron duńskich - około 3 € w nowoczesnych pieniądzach. I zjadłem angielski stek i inne dobre jedzenie w trzech restauracjach, nie sięgając dna moich pieniędzy. Właściwie czułem się, jakbym oszukiwał Polaków, bo tam wszystko było takie tanie. Polska wciąż jest krajem tanim dla turystów, ale nie na takim poziomie jak w 1990 roku.

Stargard.jpg

A teraz, kiedy piszę po polsku, równie dobrze mogę zdradzić, dlaczego odwiedziłem Szczecin w 2015 roku. Byłem na 'gathering' w Berlinie, kiedy ogłoszono strajk pociągów (znowu znowu !!!!!!), a potem chciałem wyjechać z Niemiec dzień wcześniej. Miałam rezerwacje w hotelu w Poznaniu, ale jedną noc później. W związku z tym anulowałem rezerwację na pociąg do Poznania i pojechałem lokalnym pociągiem przez Angermünde do Szczecina. I wtedy odkryłem, że miasto nie jest tak nudne, jak myślałem w 1990 roku.

Mapa miasta Szczecina.jpg
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Iversen
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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby Iversen » Tue Aug 17, 2021 10:05 pm

Have you noticed that the headline about is black, not blue? I have noticed this phenomenon since I started to mark the "remember me" thingy on the login screen. But since that trick has meant that I can stay logged-in for hours I'm not going to stop it just to have the usual blue headlines back.


In the thread about L-R we briefly touched on the topic of translation, mostly because I had mentioned that I had translated a whole guide to Rhodes from Greek into Danish at an early stage in my language learning. And I wrote that I don't think it was a sensible way to use one's precious time - for one reason: the time it took to look words up in the dictionary. If I make wordlists directly from a dictionary there is no wasted time, and if I study (and copy) a text from a bilingual printout I can avoid most look-ups.

Rhodos.jpg

But there is a more fundamental problem: when you do translations from a weak language into a strong language it seems that the strong language is the reason for the exercise, while it should have been the weaker language. Therefore I'm now inclined to say that the psychologically better direction goes from the strong language to the weak one, even though it results in lousy translations.

There are nevertheless three valid reasons to translate from a target language into for instance your maternal language. The first is that you might help (or just entertain) someone who hasn't bothered to learn your target language yet. The second reason is that you can add to your collection of words and expressions that might come in handy at a later time. And thirdly: you can get accostumed to the way the speakers of your target language actually THINK.

I have a few times written in Old French and Old Occitan (and New Norwegian), which are languages I can read without too much fuzz, but where I don't own the necessary dictionaries. In such cases my first sketches will be some kind of 'skeleton' or 'scaffolding', where the holes have been filled out temporarily by passages in Modern French and Bokmål - and then I have to do research, including checkups on my hunches to find suitable translations for those things. I do the same when I write in some of my weakest languages (Irish, Albanian), but here I at least have suitable dictionaries to rely on.

In the other direction, i.e. from the target language into something stronger you don't need the temporary scaffolding - instead you need to think in terms of hyperliteral translations, which are close to the vilified word-for-word translations. The inhabitants of the pedagogical ivory towers tend to dripple sulphuric acid when these translations are mentioned, but they are wrong. A hyperliteral translation is simply a translation that follows the original as closely as possible, even at the expense of the grammar of the goal. And the point is that is shows how the speakers of the target language THINK - a 'pretty' translation hides it! If you accept circumlocutions in your translations you actually disregard the way the foreign language is constructed, and you act as if its units were phrases rather than words. So if you see a foreign text in a weak language and translate it in your mind it is totally logical to do it in the form of a hyperliteral construct - but of course bearing in mind how the 'same' thing should be expressed in your own language.

Apart from that: I have noticed that when I see a program with Danish subtitles on Danish TV (with the sound turned down, as usual) the voice in my head has a tendency to speak in the language of original - like in this moment where some Anglophones on the History Channel visit Mayan ruins. My inclination is to hear English, not Danish - and I could just as well tell it to translate into Spanish. The language I see is not necessarily the language I hear.

And apart from that too: I have focused on music today and been downtown to buy stuff and visit a museum, but since I wrote the message above I have nevertheless found time to do repetitions of my Greek Kopernicus wordlist and continue my study of the Polish text about Stargard, and I have also read about astronomical topics in Russian (things like a gravity 'tractor', the orbit of Mercury and a photo of the last astronauts on the Moon). But more worrying is, that I have studied an Ukranian text about Onycophora ("fløjlsdyr" in Danish = 'velvet animals'), which are primitive wobbly relatives of the arthropods, even though they look more like worms. The problem is that Ukrainian is so easy to understand that I fear that I can't resist the temptation to add to my language study agenda, and I really don't need more diversions on my plate right now...

Onychophora.jpg

And now I'm going to use the lost and relocated guide to Rhodes as my goodnight read. This time I don't think I need a dictionary to understand it...
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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby Iversen » Thu Aug 19, 2021 10:43 pm

I have spent some time writing about cheating as the most logical way to deal with exercises in textbooks, and therefore this rant will be rather short and only deal with one language: Modern Greek. (EDIT: cheating in this context just means looking in the solutions if you have trouble with an exercise - rather that than guessing or leaving a problem unsolved. It doesn't mean cheating as a way of living)

As I wrote two days ago I am now using the guidebook til Rhodes (published by Athina) as my goodnight reading. The problem is of course that I will be reading it in small pieces and without a translation, so I'm only at page 46 out of 161. Ok, I did spend some time yesterday morning adding about twenty pages to the scoreboard, but that just makes my productivity during the evenings even more pitiful. I guess I'll just have to sit down and finish it off in go go one of these days, else I'll reading about Rhodes until the cows choose to come home.

The level is just right: I feel tempted to look up maybe half a dozen words per page, but since the only dictionary I have with me in bed is a yellow micro dictionary (suitable for reading while lying down) most of the unknown words aren't found in it. There is on the backside a claim that it contains 30.000 headwords, so maybe 15.000 in each half - but that is apparently not nearly enough to understand even a simple guidebook. That being said, I'm now at a level where I basically can read such a book with next to no assistance, and I definitely weren't there yet when I translated it several years ago.

I also own similar guidebooks to other places in Greece, but there I did take the precaution of buying parallel editions in other languages - although I still don't understand why I chose to buy a Russian version of the guide to Delphoi - it's only within the last few years that my Russian has progressed to a point where I could see myself lying down in my bed reading about a locality in Greece with just my tiny Berlitz dictionary to save me in case of unsurmountable comprehension problems. But now I have placed that book in a visible place, and I definitely intend to read it soon - in bed or elsewhere.

F3446b05 - Hellenistic statues in the museum at Delfi.jpg

LAT: Addendum: hodie (dies veneris) ex somnio experrectus sum partim in lingua latina. Documentum latinum scrutatus sum ubi certi loci mihi dubii parebant, et tunc alter persona post meum cum digite indicavi quod "2." certe non romaniis perspicuum fuisset - necesse erat "secundus". Et rursus desomnis, ego contendi somnum latine recordor. Non cum texta latina nuper operatus sum, et igitur mirum est linguam istam in somnia mea experiri.

GR: Πέρα από αυτό, έφτασα τώρα στη σελίδα 63 του ελληνικού βιβλίου. Και επειδή Νεοελληνικό είναι, είναι εντάξει να γράψω "63".
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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby Iversen » Fri Aug 20, 2021 10:12 am

Time for a second (II) addendum. I sat down at my PC to listen to music by Samuel Barber(alphabetical order!), and then I came to think about what people do when I write in languages they haven't studied yet. Maybe they just skip those passages, but the more curious ones might use a machine translator to see what I'm up to. And then I stuffed the Latin passage above into Google and got a shock:

Addendum: hodie (dies veneris) ex somnio experrectus sum partim in lingua latina. Documentum latinum scrutatus sum ubi certi loci mihi dubii parebant, et tunc alter persona post meum cum digite indicavi quod "2." certe non romaniis perspicuum fuisset - necesse erat "secundus". Et rursus desomnis, ego contendi somnum latine recordor. Non cum texta latina nuper operatus sum, et igitur mirum est linguam istam in somnia mea experiri.

Google: Addendum: Today (Friday) woke up from a dream in part the Catholic Church. I am sure of the place where the document is to be searched, and the Latin to me of the doubt is able to be seen, and then the other with our fingers, known to the person of that after my "2." Romania's certainly not been easy - it was "next". And they said again awake all, I call to mind, I will strive for it to sleep in Latin. The paragraph was not working late, and therefore not surprising that language into the dreams of my research.

Oh no, I knew that Google Translate has problems with Latin, but this is ridiculous. It is hard to point to anything which the poor beast hasn't misunderstood. Unless I have forgotten the last bit of whatever I once knew about Latin the passage should be translated as follows:

Me: Addendum: today (Friday) I woke up from a dream partly in the Latin language. I have scrutinized a Latin document where certain passages (places) seemed dubious to me, and then another person behind me indicated with his finger that "2." definitely wouldn't be comprehensible to the Romans - you would need (to use) 'second'. And once awake again, I strived to recall my dream in Latin. I haven't worked on Latin texts recently, and so it is a wonder to experience this language in my dreams.

Kunst079.JPG

RU: Между прочим, я заглянул немного в русскую книгу о Дельфах, и ее на самом деле на удивление легко понять. Вероятно, есть признаки того, что переводы, как правило, легче понять, чем оригинальные тексты, а я не думаю, что смогу прочитать «Войну и мир» как чтение на ночь - но, возможно, книгу о греческих руинах.
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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby Just_a_visitor » Sun Aug 22, 2021 3:11 pm

Iversen wrote:
Kunst079.JPG

RU: Между прочим, я заглянул немного в русскую книгу о Дельфах, и ее на самом деле на удивление легко понять. Вероятно, есть признаки того, что переводы, как правило, легче понять, чем оригинальные тексты, а я не думаю, что смогу прочитать «Войну и мир» как чтение на ночь - но, возможно, книгу о греческих руинах.

From personal observation as a native Russian speaker: unfortunately, guidebooks in Russian, that are published internationally even by well-established publishing houses, are often so badly written! Коряво написаны/написаны корявым языком, I would say. The impression is, they are double-triple translated from language to language with no editor to check and correct the final result.
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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby einzelne » Sun Aug 22, 2021 3:21 pm

Iversen wrote:Между прочим, я заглянул немного в русскую книгу о Дельфах, и ее на самом деле на удивление легко понять. Вероятно, есть признаки того, что переводы, как правило, легче понять, чем оригинальные тексты.


Recte dicis! Usually, I start with translated fiction when I start with unadapted fiction texts.
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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby Iversen » Sun Aug 22, 2021 4:09 pm

RU: Just-a-visitor может быть правым, предостерегая от переводов вроде моего путеводителя по Афинам. Когда вы посещаете Грецию, вы видите параллельные путеводители, может быть на десяти языках, и это похоже на отрасль, более чем серьезную издательскую деятельность. Но в свое оправдание: я думаю, что могу читать эту книгу (почти) без словаря, я могу делать это лежа, и я не собираюсь использовать его для серьезного изучения - только для развлечения (и для засыпания).

F3441b03_euzones.jpg

GR: Παρεμπιπτόντως, έχω φτάσει στη σελίδα 89 του ελληνικού οδηγού μου στους Δελφούς - ήμουν σε ένα ταξίδι σε μια γειτονική πόλη και διάβασα στο βιβλίο στο λεωφορείο εκεί και προς το σπίτι

SER: Осим тога, јуче сам проучавао српски текст о краљу Радославу, који је владао пре Турака, и направио сам одговарајући списак речи - који такође садржи речи из претходних текстова, које никада нисам унео у било који списак речи.

EN: By the way, I vaguely remember that I once compared another Greek guide with its counterpart in Italian, and at least you could see one thing (even at my lousy level in Greek back then): they were very parallel. To a given segment in one there was a segment with the same structure in the other - and the Italian translation made sense. In contrast: I vaguely remember that you can see very big differences with literary translations - although some translation processes are conducted in more strictly regulated way (exempli gratia Harry Potter). But the guidebooks which were on sale on racks in all Greek cities with a bit of selfrespect were clearly done by people without literary ambitions, and that can also be an advantage in some respects. At least the translator of the book I'm going to attack in the near future has a Russian surname - although his Christian name is "John" ... so I should probably not trust everything in the book.
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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby Iversen » Tue Aug 24, 2021 9:28 pm

I have today watched a quite interesting program on Swedish TV about a tough Viking lady named Guðríður Þorbjarnardóttir, who almost certainly was the most widely traveled female during the Viking Age and mentioned in at least two sagas (the Vinland Saga and Eirik the Red's saga). She was born on Iceland, but according to the Vinland Saga she followed her father to Greenland and got married there, while Eirik's saga just mentioned that she was picked with some others from a promontary somewhere after a shipwreck up by Leif Ericson, called "heppni (the fortunate) after that incident because the common belief back then was that it brings luck to rescue people.

But Guðrið was in no way fazed by that experience - she was an active participant in the travels from Greenland to North American, and according to the Vinlandsaga spent three full years there. The only confirmed settlement is the one at l'Anse-aux-Meadows on Newfoundland, and some have identified this with Vinland (land of wine, because the vikings found wild grapes there), others think that the expeditions must have ventured even further South. Even during a period with a quite mild climate it is hard to imagine that Newfoundland was sufficiently warm to produce grapes, and there are also some nuts that must have come from further South - but no other settlements have so far been found. However we know with certainty that there were women on the expeditions because the archeologists found weawing utensils at l'Anse-aux-Meadows - and it is quite likely that it was gutsy Guðrið herself that brought them there in her luggage.

When she got old she moved back to Iceland, and after the last of her three husbands had died she is even said to have travelled to Rome and back for religious reasons - but maybe also because she still was somewhat adventurous - hun havde "ild i røven" as we say in Danish ('fire in her arse').

I have used this as a pretext for printing out some texts on Modern Icelandic from Wikipedia, but also a snippet of Eirik the Red's saga where Guðrið is mentioned, and that excerpt (from the homepage heimskringla.no is of course in Old Norse - but I expect to be able to read it.

IC: Þess má geta að útgefnum sögutextum hefur verið breytt - ég hef séð frumlega handskrifaða texta á netinu (og raunar líka líkamlega á sjötta áratugnum) og stafsetning þeirra er nokkuð fjölbreytt! Fornorræni textinn hefur einnig nokkra setningafræðilega eiginleika sem mér líkar við - svo sem notkun ópersónulegra setningagerða án efnis - eins og var á brúðkaup Guðríðar á risastórri veislu sem Eirik Rauði skipulagði:

"Ok lauk svá, at Þorfinnr festi Guðríði, ok var þá aukin veizlan ok drukkit brullaup þeira, ok váru þau í Brattahlíð um vetrinn."

Athugaðu tilviljan orðið fyrir "wedding" - brúðkaup. Það er samt nafnið þarna uppi á Íslandi !

Vinlandsrejse.jpg

EN: Apart from that I have made a Serbian wordlist with the words from my ancient regal Serbian text collection today, and having done do I got the idea that it might be worth having a check on my vocabulary size because ...

SER: ове године нисам много радио са српским, и то очигледно има последице. Међутим, прочитао сам поменуте текстове уз ограничену употребу превода, али и даље се чини као да сам у прошлости био бољи. Дакле, сада следи нешто о мом тесту речника.

EN: The method is simple: I open a dictionary and start copying the words from a page or column, using green for known words, red for unknown words and blue for dubious items in the middle. And then I jump ahead with fixed distances and repeat the procedure until I have collected enough words - well, I should of course base my calculations on several thousand words, but today I stopped at 161 words. The results can be seen below.

It may seem that I have been twice as good in 2014 as today, but the absolute numbers are misleading (just as they are in the covid stats we get served all the time): when I got 12500 known words in 2014 it was from a dictionary with twice as many words as the one I have used today. However I also made stats from that dictionary in 2014, and it does seem that I have lost several thousand words. And this is confirmed if you look at the percentages (as you should). In other words, I have a task ahead getting those word back. Please note that the stats can't be very trustworthy - as you can see the first column has far more unknown words than the second one, but such differences would even out with a higher number of columns. So why didn't I do more columns? Well, because I'm lazy and I had filled one page, and also because I have vague ideas about making a series of word counts for all my other languages to assess their current situation. For the same reason the calculated total number of words for a given dictionary also varies - but this isn't meant to be hard science (maybe not even science).

Serbian-Wordcount-24-08-2021.jpg

Serbian-Wordcount-development.jpg
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Iversen
Black Belt - 4th Dan
Posts: 4768
Joined: Sun Jul 19, 2015 7:36 pm
Location: Denmark
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 » Wed Aug 25, 2021 7:10 pm

Yesterday I wrote that "I have vague ideas about making a series of word counts for all my other languages to assess their current situation.". OK, today I have spent some time doing exactly that.

First I made one more test of Serbian. but this time using a larger dictionary, the English <-> Serbian rečnik from Štamparija Politica. There is no denying that it is more comprehensive than the other ones I have got, but it is Latinitsa, and I would prefer to stick to Cyrillic for Serbian (one way of keepting it distinct from Croatian). However I do know the conversion formulas, so just for fun I wrote all the words in Cyrillic when I made that count session. And the result? I got 48% known, 30% definitely unknown and 23% which were hard to classify. And 48% may be even lower than the 54% from yesterday, but with a twice as big dictionary (around 23.700 headwords) it still gives me a vocabulary of 11.300 known headwords. Not enough, but ... well, not a catastrophical result either.

As I mentioned yesterday the percentages are the important numbers since you can't demonstrate a large vocabulary using a minuscule dictionary, whereas the percentages are fairly consistent in the sense that you have to use monstrous dictionaries before you see an significant drop in the persentages. And one thing more: if I know half the words in a dictionary, this doesn't mean that I only know half the words in a standard genuine text since most of the words in such a text are common words which get repeated over and over. The true percentage of recognized words must be much higher - but I have not measured how high it is. If I marked ALL words in a text corpus in green, blue and red then I could give a qualified response, but so far I only have my notes in the margins of my study texts to go by, and they suggest that I still haven't reached the fabled 95-98% that should be the criterion for fluent reading. I find far too many unknown words...

From Serbian I continued to Russian, where my last count goes back to 2014. My latest estimate says 44% known words from a Gyldendal dictionary with an estimated 35.500 headwords - I have once been slightly higher, but at a time where I couldn't read as well - which shows that reading is a skill that needs training, not just a decent vocabulary.

And finally I did two word counts for Bulgarian, one using a small dictionary from Lingua (with an estimated 7000 headwords) and the other using the minuscule yellow Langenscheidt, which nevertheless has more headwords than the Lingua (around 11000 - the backside claims 30.000 back and forth, but includes expressions and combos). I got no less than 57% known words with the small one, but only 31% with Langenscheidt - but then I tell myself that I just was unlucky to land on pages with many verbs with prefixes, and then the guessable/dubious ratio rose to 21%. I still feel that it is fairly easy to read Bulgarian, and at the end of the day that is the measurement that really matters. The proof of the pudding is in the eating as the adage goes..

And now I'm going to add some measurements for Polish and Slovak, and after that maybe Czech, Slovene and Ukrainian which I haven't studied yet, but it would be fun to see where the rock-bottom baseline lies. And then Greek and Albanian and Latin and the Romance and the Germanic languages - but not today.

Kunst090.JPG

PS I just noticed that there is SuperQuark Natura on RaiUno right now (two hours about science and nature!), so I'll switch on the sound and listen to some Italian - right now they speak about the saguaro cactus and the legendary superfast hmeep-hmeep bird of the Sonoran desert in Arizona...

PS PS: I have now finished my statistics for Polish with two very different dictionaries: a big fat green Pons (German<>Polish), which is very careful to indicate perfective/imperfective pairs etc., and an Oxford (French<>Polish in spite of the name) which isn't really taking such things seriously - maybe because it was made for Polish-speakers. When I work on my Polish I usually have both within reach - the Oxford because it is easy to lift, the Pons because it can clear up things which the Oxford skips over. And the results? Well, just 34 % with Pons and 45 % with Oxford, but the Oxford has fewer rarities so it is logical that the percentage is higher. However the 34% with Pons becomes no less than 12.300 words because it's a big fat book with an estimated 36.500 Polish headwords (excluding perfective verbs articles that just refer you to the corresponding imperfective verb). Speaking about verbs: I can feel that have have more problems with verbs with prefixes than with substantives or 'naked' verbs, maybe because of the resulting length, maybe because pages full of verbs with a certain prefix have an somnipheric effect on me - but anyway, something that must be remedied.
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