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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Posted: Wed Jul 24, 2019 2:01 am
by Iversen
IT: Non ho avuto il tempo ieri di studiare la vita e le opere di Paganini, ma ho letto alcune cose sui fratelli Sammartini. Uno si chiamava Giuseppe Baldassare Sammartini - no, a proposito,... secondo la Wikipedia inglese si chimava realmente "Giuseppe Francesco Gaspare Melchiorre Baldassare Sammartini (also Gioseffo, S Martini, St Martini, San Martini, San Martino, Martini, Martino)..." Suo fratello ha probabilmente anche avuto una folla di nomi, ma io non li ho trovati. Dunque lo cognosco soltanto sotto il nome di Giovanni Battista Sammartini. Il problema con i due compositori è che i loro lavori sono stati pubblicati su molti nomi diversi, inclusi alcuni che non rivelano se fosse GB o G Sammartini a scrivere un determinato opuscolo. Le versioni pirata sono ancora più disordinate.

Nella mia collezione musicale avevo un paio di file "Sammartini 1a e 1b") con opere de ambedue fratelli più alcune opere sparse sotto le ali di altri compositori. Ho messo tutto questo in ordine per quanto si può fare (due file doppie per due fratelli: Sammartini GB 1a+b ben accanto di Sammartini G 1a+b) - e nessun traccia Sammartinesca fuori di questi fili - ma poi sono ceduto alla tentazione di correggere altri casi in cui alcuni lavori di un compositore erano nascosti lontani dal resto del suo lavoro di creazione - come le quattro marcie di Sousa che si trovavano su un file chiamato Lortzing 1b (i miei file musicali sono distribuiti in coppie perché ho assunto la struttura dalle vecchie cassette). Ora sono assieme con il resto della musica di ottoname - dove, per inciso, si trova anche una marcia chiamata "Sotto la bandiera di Cuba". Potrebbe essere giocata per il compleanno del signor Trump?

EN: By the way, did you know that somebody once made a a transcription of Sousa's Stars and Stripes for organ? You can find it on Youtube, for instance here.

DU: Of misschien liever in deze versie, die met een beetje geluk op de Nederlandse straten te horen is op het Nederlandse nationale instrument - het straatorgel (of draaiorgel).

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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Posted: Thu Jul 25, 2019 7:09 pm
by Iversen
I have used my Greek Grammar from Routledge as goodnight reading (the section about demonstrative pronouns), but without seeing much I didn't at already know - the few unknown things were just words in the examples or the position of accents, not grammar as such. Nevertheless it is a good thing to refresh your grammar knowledge once in a while.

Apart from that - not much studying. I have printed several texts about Dutch street organs (and one article about ordinary organs in Afrikaans), but they they will have to wait to the weekend. Right now I'm busy doing some changes to my music collection, and one of the things this implies is that I include some more Romanian music, including pieces played by the great pan flute player Zamfir - but it is always difficult to see whether he actually has composed or arranged the pieces he plays. Some are known from other sources (like El Condor Pasa), and then I know that he didn't compose them - but there is not any indications as to where the works I can't recognize come from. Nevertheless it is a pleasure to listen to him - especially the oldest recordings, when he didn't yet cooperate with people like James Last and André Rieu and didn't play ABBA tunes on his instrument.

RU: Am avut deja o piesă de Porumbescu în colecția mea, Balada pentru vioară și orchestră - și asta e muzica excelentă. Dar a fost greu să găsesc altceva de loc. Există o Rapsodia Română pe Youtube, dar nimic altceva - afară de cântece de Crăciun și asemenea lucruri. Cum se poate numi o liceo de muzică după un bărbat cu o putere atât de mică?

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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Posted: Sat Jul 27, 2019 11:53 pm
by MorkTheFiddle
Zamfir is a favorite of mine, too, but I don't know where he takes his tunes from.
His music accompanies a movie from a ways back, Picnic at Hanging Rock, one of my favorites, which is about, among other things, valkyries, though I've never seen anyone discuss that. The movie, along with Zanfir's playing, left me in a kind of stupor for 15-30 minutes after the first time I saw the movie.
And your painting is spell-binding. Thanks for posting it.

Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Posted: Tue Jul 30, 2019 1:26 pm
by Iversen
Thanks for mentioning the painting too. This forum is of course mainly dedicated to language learning, but I also see it as a space where I can show travel pictures and paintings and babble about the things I read about in my second languages. It would be much less fun to write here if I only had to report the number of pages I had read in each language since the last message.

I have been on a family stay this past weekend, and as usual with little study activity but lots of gardening and a wee bit of jam confection. But I didn't reach the absolute zero point since I did study the Germanic texts about sundry types of organs which I mentioned in an earlier message. To be precise, the collection contains to following items, all from Wikipedia: two pages about mechanical organs plus one (abbreviated) one about pipe organs in Dutch, two pages about pipe organs in Afrikaans ... well, and when I had printed those I added a short text in Western Flemish, a slightly longer one in Allemannisch (which in Wikipedia terms refers to Schwiizerdüütsch), one half page in Lower Saxonian and a full page in Platt. And no translations - I don't need them with these languages, even though I only have studied Dutch, Afrikaans and Platt properly. For some reason there are no articles about pipe organs in the Frisian languages, but I have found a whole community of Frisian organ players and aficionados on the internet, so they do have organs there. Maybe I can pick something from that site to add to my Germanic organology antology... to be seen. In Denmark we haven't really had much in the way of big street organs, but ..

DK: .. så sent som i min ungdom kørte der stadigvæk gøglere rundt med lirekasser, dvs. små gadeorgler betjent med et håndsving (på tysk: Leierkasten). Billedet nedenfor viser en af standens ypperste, rottekongen Cibrino, der deltog i Århus Festuger i mange år ind til de blev fisefornemme og kedelige. Endnu tidligere blev lirekasserne mestendels betjent af invalider, der tjente en skilling ved at køre rundt i baggårdene og divertere beboerne med deres instruments liflige klange indtil folk betalte for at få dem til at gå deres vej. Derfor har vi også udtrykket "at slå til lirekassemand" om brutal vold, der invaliderer offeret.

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Apart from that, I have been working on my music collection, and now the end of the task is within sight - with one major exception. The exception is that I have a lot of music without themes in the theme catalogue (and even more where I can hear that the themes I have notated long ago are seriously incorrect). Me and my ears and IMSLP will be occupied with that task for at least a year from now on. But I'm almost pleased with the selection and distribution of items in the collection now. Of course I may run into recordings that simply are too rotten to keep, but I'm two thirds through the alphabet and have checked dubious cases ahead so the number won't be overwhelming. And I have done one smart check: I want all composers either to have their own files or have their works placed together in the files of another more lucky composer - and not strewn all over the place. So with a few exceptions I have achieved this during the last week by making a list of composer names and the 'main composer' of any file where they are represented. The exceptions are mainly of the type where a renaissance ensemble has recorded a number of short pieces,and ..

FR: .. en outre il y le cas special des Mariés du Tour d'Eiffel et de l'Eventail de Jeanne, deux oeuvres collaboratives de compositeurs (et -trices) français (/-aises) des années 1920. Il serait bien dommage de séparer les éléments des oeuvres comme ça seulement pour un principe.

EDIT 31/7: DU: Het irriteerde me dat ik niets van orgels op het Fries had. Ik keek naar de website die ik noemde (organumfrisicum) - maar die was in het Nederlands. Toen keek ik naar http://www.omropfrysland.nl, aanvankelijk zonder succes (naast dat ik kun gesprokene Fries horen), maar ik heb toen naar "tsjerke oargel" (kerk orgel) op Google gezocht, en ik vond dan verschillende korte aantekeningen over orgels en organisten. Ik studeer echter geen Fries en heb niet geplant dit te doen - daarom is deze boodschap op het Nederlands geschreven.

Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Posted: Thu Aug 01, 2019 8:21 pm
by Iversen
I have done three noteworthy things today,. This morning I studied the first part of a text about Albanian history (in Albanian, of course), but barely reached the Bronze age because there is something else going on in my town which lured my away from my comfy chair and its immediate surroundings: the 2019 Tall Ships race, which ends here. So for four days our harbour is full of sailships af all sizes, including some enormous ones. You can visit some of them, and besides there are stands for some of our local museums - but also concerts, which I thoroughly deplore since I don't like the music they present. Some of the ships even make noise themselves, like the Mexican Cuauatemoc, which prides itself of its singing crew. OK, let them sing, but do they really need to use megaton loudspeakers to spread the noise all over the harbour? Luckily I have bought a miniature MP3 player, which I have filled with brown and white and pink noise plus waterfalls, rivers and rain showers with and without thunder, and this saves me from a lot of phonic annoyances. But it is hard to cover a blaring mexican crew with loudspeakers.

RU: Один из наиболее интересных кораблей был русский: Штандарт, который является копией корабля из 1703 года. Уже не было никаких строительных чертежей, поэтому копия основана на картинах и архивах, но выглядит оригинально, а экипаж был одет в исторические костюмы. событие что дало стране доступ к Ботническому заливу, И да, я их слышал говорить по русски - но в основном по английски.

Россия только сначала понадобились корабли, когда Пëтр Первый победил шведского Карла 12 в Полтавской битве. Это победа дал доступ к Ботническому заливу. И царь был хорошо подготовлен: он работал на голландских верфях во время своего европейского путешествия. В этой поездке он также посетил Данию, а его резиденция в Нюкёбинге Ф до сих пор называется Дом Зара (ныне музей). Но здесь его особенно помнят за то, что разбил мебель в пьянство.

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When I returned home I could have continued my tour de Albanian history, but instead I did something artsy: I made a stereo version of one of my old paintings from the 80s. To do this you need to do a lot of advanced photo editing. Imagine two poles right in front of your nose, one behind the other. Your left eye will se in between the poles from the left so the back pole will look as if it stood to the left of the front pole. And inversely the back pole will be seen as standing to the right with your right eye. So if you take a 2-dimensional painting and move the things that should be far away to the left, you see them as they would appear to your left eye. Moving them towards the right would produce the impression that the back pole actually was closer to you than the front pole. And inversely for your right eye. However keeping everything in place on the right image and moving things left (far away) or right (near) on the left copy will be enough - and then you don't have to interfere with the original at the right.

So if you make a double copy of a painting and edit the left image then you can get a stereoscopic illusion by looking at the edited version with your left eye and the original version with your right eye. It is actually somewhat more complicated since there are elements in most paintings that aren't just freestanding objects in an empty space but for instance 'carpets' that go from somewhere at the front to somewhere in the back, and then you have to impose a slant to this object. And you have to improvise something to fill the spaces that become visible when you move objects so it is a time consuming task, but quite fun once you can study the result.

To experience the stereoscopic effect your left eye ahs to focus on the left image, the right eye on the right image. Since my eye is the dominant one I only need to block the right eye from seeing the left image - I don't need to block the left eye from seeing both versions. And I can do this with my hand. But when I started out I used a piece of cardboard to make each eye see only the relevant image for that eye. I also own a thingy with some mirrors that can do the trick, and in some museums you can find historical contraptions that do the same same thing with lenses - but only from small double-images.

There are also systems that use reddish versus greenish colours to separate the images (and you need to use plastic glasses to look at such images) - but since this system spoils the colours I don't like it. Another (newer) system uses polarized light, but you can't do that from paper copies or an ordinary screen. So I stick to my own system, and I have now hundreds of stereoscopic pictures based on this system from my travels plus a fair number made by painstaking editing photos of my own paintings as described above - but frankly, it doesn't seem that others share this interest so I mostly make them to please myself.

As is the case with most of my languages.

Kunst092stereo.jpg

IT: A proposito, l'ispirazione per questa immagine proviene dalle raccolte di cadaveri mummificati trovati in varie chiese. Di seguito un esempio da Savoca in Sicilia. Puoi pensare che il mio dipinto sia macabro, ma l'originale è più macabro perché è realizzato con veri e propri cadaveri umani.

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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Posted: Fri Aug 02, 2019 9:21 pm
by Iversen
I visited the mighty tall ships again today (in better weather than yesterday), and after I returned home I bravely continued my battle with the text about the Albanian bronze age.

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Normally I would consider Albanian a fairly easy language once I have found out what the words mean, but it seems that this particular text is full of words that don't exist in any of my two dictionaries (Buske's taschenwörterbuch and the Ftalor Shqip-Anglish-Shqip from Edfa), which is somewhat unusual. However Google Translate somehow manages to come up with translation proposals - and I deliberately use the plural form here since it tends to come up with at least two equally alluring proposals for each passage which however have preciously little in common - and then it is my task somehow to choose or to find a compromise between them. I wonder how much actual learning this leads to since it takes a long time to get through just a few sentences - but I guess that I learn something about the mechanisms of the language in the process.

I would like to give an example. Let me first say that I mostly choose 'funny' languages instead of Danish or English when I make my machine translations, and in the sentence I'll quote below I had chosen Esperanto so here I first give the original translation then the two translations I got a moment ago when I cut the first part of the sentence away. The first one is the 'officially 'proposed one, and then the alternative one follows below.

(...) rrethohen me mure gurësh të palatuar të lidhur në të thatë apo me ledhe e hunj

ĉirkaŭitaj de senpolitaj ŝtonaj muroj, konektitaj al sekaj aŭ kavaj deklivoj.
ili estas ĉirkaŭitaj de sekaj ŝtonaj muroj ligitaj kun fojno kaj ŝtonetoj
ĉirkaŭita de ŝtonmuroj cxirkauxhakitajn ligitaj al la seka fosaĵo aŭ la palisojn

they are surrounded by dry stone walls bound with hay and pebbles
surrounded by stone walls hewn connected to the dry moat or the stakes

Sie sind von Trockenmauern umgeben, die mit Heu und Kieselsteinen verklebt sind
von Steinmauern behauen verbunden mit dem trockenen Graben oder die Einsätze umgeben

de er omgivet af tørre stenmure bundet med hø og småsten
omgivet af stengærder hugget forbundet til den tørre voldgrav eller indsatserne


"Apo" means 'or' and some of these translations have got a construction with alternatives - but some don't have this feature. There is hay in the stony walls in three of the translations, but not in the other three. Where did that come from? My Fjalor (dictionary) translates 'hay' as "bar i thatë", but "thatë" alone menas 'dry' - or 'boil, furuncle', but at least that possibility wasn't exploited here. So.. no hay here but dry something. Methinks the moat mentioned by the other half of the translations? The moat is 'ledh' (and not 'ledhe', which means 'Liebkosung' in German). The problem with this solution is that I then fail to understand the construction of the sentence.

Let's start at the other end: "surrounded by walls stony yang hewn yang connected by..." .. and then something that walls can be connected by or to (I use the Indonesian 'yang' to indicate the presence of a connector - although the Albanian connector is inflected). As for the word "palatuar" I didn't find it in any of my two dictionaries, but "latoj" means 'to cut' or 'to hew' and '-uar' is an ending that turns up both at infinitives, gerunds and passive participles - here it must be the ending of a participle. The word "lidhur" (from "lidh"= 'connect') is another participle. The final word "hunj" isn't found in any of my dictionaries, but it could be an irregular plural of "hu", 'stake', as proposed in English by Google - and rendered sensibly as "palisoj" in Esperanto, but totally misunderstood as "Einsätze" resp. "indsatser" in German and Danish.

In a bout of creative desperation I actually tried to find out whether the ancient village called Korcan which is mentioned in the Albanian text did have a moat or not or whether there was hay and pebbles in its dry walls, but to no avail. As for the stakes it might be very efficient to have a wet moat with sharp spikes embedded in the mud at the bottom, but at this point in history ... well, it would definitely be a very modernistic trait, so I doubt that there were stakes at stake.

So at this point I decided to let the Albanian archeologists do their work without my help.

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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Posted: Mon Aug 05, 2019 7:49 pm
by Iversen
The tall ships left our harbour yesterday, but already Saturday evening at 22:30 there was a grandiose display of fireworks. And then I spent half the day yesterday organizing my photos from the event, but after that I did manage to do some language study, mostly in Greek. I studied an article about a reconciliation park (which really wasn't a park in the usual sense, but some kind of museum), a short snippet of text about traditions in Kastoriá and a lengthy article about water therapy - well, not my cup of tea, but it's like reading about radiotherapy or vegan food or snake oil or psychoanalysis: you read it with a certain of queasiness, but as long as you don't indulge any of these dubious practices I suppose they are harmless.

GR: Το πρώτο των ελληνικών άρθρων μίλησε για το Πάρκο Εθνικής Συμφιλίωσεις, που είναι ο προφανώς μουσείο σε οροσειρά κοντά στην Καστοριά, όπου υπάρχει ιστορικά τμήματα (κυρίως για τον πόλεμο κατά των Ιταλών και τον εμφύλιο πόλεμο) και τμήματα φυσικής ιστορίας. Αλλά πιθανώς δεν είναι αρκετός λόγος για μια μακρά παράκαμψη. Το σύντομο άρθρο για την Καστοριά ανέφερε ότι αυτή η πόλη ήταν μοναδική στην κληρονομιά της από διάφορες ηλικίες. Και είναι μια ωραία πόλη, αλλά όχι η μοναδική με τα ερείπια και τις παραδόσεις της προϊστορικής επιστροφής στους Βυζαντινούς και πέρα από αυτήν. Και το πράγμα με τη θεραπεία με νερό έχει ήδη ταξινομημένεί ως υγιεινή και ευεξία περισσότερο από θεραπεία ιατρική.

Yesterday evening I spent about an hour reading the grammar chapters in my Assimil micro language guide. Actually I hadn't forgotten as much as I thought, but I once prepared some materials for green sheets which go further than the few pages in the guide - maybe it's about time to go back to them and finish the job. And in the meantime the Albanian archeologists may have decided whether fortified Bronze age villages in Albania had a moat or not. The only trouble with that assumption is that they may forget to inform me.

Today I did some extensive reading in Greek, but then I went to the library to see who turned up for the language café. Actually only me and two others, but one was a young lady of 25 years who was very eager to learn some Spanish, and the other had come to speak German, but she was quite well versed in Spanish (and apparently a retired teacher), so we got through the basic levels of the Spanish language.

And when I came home ..

SLk: Začal som študovať slovenský text o Retro múzeu v Trnave. Toto mesto som navštívil až minulý rok, ale nevedel som, že má nové múzeum. Navštívil som Západoslovanské múzeum (ktoré som spomínal predtým v tomto denníku) a niektoré kostoly a veľké nákupné centrum, ale keby som už počul o retro múzeu s historickými vecami každodenného života, určite by som ho navštívil. A nie, nie som si istý, že tento stav je gramaticky správny! Podmienené doložky sú zlomyseľné!

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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Posted: Thu Aug 08, 2019 10:31 am
by Iversen
Yesterday I visited a town called Odense (the birthplace of Hans Christian Andersen ... and a place he left as soon as possible, never to return). In its library I found in the cellar not only the archives, but also a socalled world library. OK, there is also shelves with books in foreign languages at the main library in my own town, but the special thing about the Odense thing was that it has special shelves for children's books - including books in rare languages like Albanian. But not in Greek (or Portuguese or Catalan for that matter).

Apart from that, on TV Tuesday evening there was a reference to a queen Pharao named Sobeknefru or Nefrusobak (something like 'pretty crocodile-god'), who contrary to the later (and more renowned) Hatchepsut apparently insisted upon being depicted as a woman. There is a list of of female pharaos here, but I just checked Sobeknefru in the English Wikipedia - and then just for fun in the Russian one, where I ended up reading a lot of interesting stuff not only about her, but also about ...

RU: ... первых двух династиях. Конечно, до первой из пронумерованных династий были правители, но разделительная линия установлена на Менесе / Нармере, который объединял Верхний и Нижний Египт (соответственно южный и северный часть Египта, потому что Нил течет в северном направлении). Многие имена потеряны, другие найдены только поздним греческим писателем по имени Мането, и вы редко знаете что-либо особенное об этих древних правителях, кроме имени. Но во второй династии должно было быть что-то поразительное, о чем мы можем только догадываться.

Фараоны Старого Царства обычно ассоциировали себя с богом Хорусом, но один из них изменил свое имя от чего-Хорус-нибудь то к чему-Сет-нибудь. На самом деле Сет был злым богом, который убил отца Хоруса, Осририса, так что миссис Исис должна собрать куски со всех частей страны. Это ответило бы, что современный правитель включил "Сатан» в свое имя. Но никто не знает, почему Сет Перибсен сделал это. Мы знаем только его преемник Хасехемуи использовал несколько форм своего имени, в том числе некоторые, содержащие имя Хоруса. Хасехемуи был последним правителем второй династии, но первым фараоном третьего был его (вероятно) сын Джосер - чувак с ступенчатой пирамидой и гениальным разнорабочим Имхотеп. Почему вы отделяете ряд династий здесь? Мы не знаем сегодня, но это было сделано уже в древние времена вышеупомянутыми греками Манетом..

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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Posted: Sat Aug 10, 2019 4:06 pm
by Iversen
I have just been watching a program about quantum physics and parallel universes in the series "Through the Wormhole", and it has as usual distracted me from my studies and from writing here. The problem is that I start thinking. And this my thoughts were roughly the following one:

The essence of quantum physics is that everything is a blur of probabilities. The classical interpretation is that when we observe something governed by a probablilty function the the function collapses and we then have an observed fact. This fact didn't exist before we made the actual observation, and such a late birth of a fact is actually in itself a fact that can be proved mathematically. So if we have a wall with two slits and we let particles pass through the resulting probability function will show an interference pattern - even if there is only one particle 'in the air' at any time. and only by observing a certain particle do we get the information that precisely this particle has passed through a certain slit.

But how can my observation have consequences for the whole universe? It is simpler to assume that the probability function still lives on, and that I just discover on which development line my particle and me happened to find ourself on - out of all the possible ones. And then every other possible outcome should still exist in some way as a parallel universe - but we have no access at all to this universe, and it doesn't seem to run away with any of the content of OUR universe. Which in itself is a remarkable thing.

And now I think: what if you are looking at a slit experiment and so am I. I look at 'my' particle NOW, but you are told to wait a little. So in my world the probability function must reflect that 'your' function hasn't collapsed yet, but mine has. And the question the buggers me now is: can I in any way from the shape of the probability function in my world calculate whether you have sneak peeked before time or not? We are looking at the same experiment so you might expect the probability function as seen by me to be different if you already have discovered which slit MY particle had chosen.

The reason is that you only can have this information if a photon already has hit the particle before I look at it a again with the help of another photon. If you haven't jumped the gun then it may or may not have been hit by the first photon, but if you have seen it then a photon must have hit it. The expected probability functions must be different (some Markov thing, I suppose). But can 'my' probability function depend on whether you have told me or not whether you made that premature observation?

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OK, back to languages. As I announced in the thread about Kaufmann's desillusion about discussions about learning methods I had expected to spend last evening on a couple of Slavic languages and a bit of Albanian grammar, but as you also can see from the one about the origin of English things didn't end up that way. Instead I got involved into reading a bonanza of texts in Old Germanic languages instead, like the Heiland in old Saxon and Caedmon and the Anglosaxon Chronicle in Anglosaxon, with a few peeks into some of the oldest Old Norse sagas added to complete the linguistic mayhem. But to compensate I did use the beginning of Harry Potter 6 in Russian as goodnight reading. And it functioned admirably (ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ....).

Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Posted: Mon Aug 12, 2019 12:21 am
by Iversen
I have done wordlists yesterday and today - lots of them! So far I have covered Scots, English, Afrikaans, Dutch, Low and High German, Icelandic, Norwegian (bokmål) and Swedish, and today I did the repetitions for all those languages. Now I only have to do Irish, Latin, Old and New French, Portuguese, Castilian, Catalan, Italian, Romanian, Greek, Albanian, Bulgarian, Serbian Slovak, Polish, Russian, Esperanto, Finnish and Bahasa Indonesia (and I may add Ukrainean and a couple more this time - just for fun).

I did the first couple of lists in this round with three triple-columns with each around 30 words, but cut it down to two columns from midway Low German and onwards. With three columns each language simply took too much time, and when I do the next round (no. 4) I'll just take one column for the languages where I took three this time and two with the rest.

The whole point of making wordlists in 28 languages (including some I don't even study actively) is to refresh each and every language I have on my agenda (without necessarily visiting each and very language each and every week). And it turns out there are lots and unknown and sometimes funny words even in the languages I know best - like English and Norwegian and Swedish and German. This time I have started all the lists at L, but I don't expect ever to cover the whole alphabet.

The whole exercise may take most of next week, but I also expect to find time for other activities. For instance I got back to my Albanian fortified villages today, and I have settled for the theory that they had surrounded their villages by walls and dry moats with sharp sticks poking out, mostly because I have seen exactly this construction in a TV program about fortified villages in Geat Britain after the viking invasions in the mid 800s. OK, the bronze ages villages are almost 2000 years older, but the basic task was the same in the shqippy epoka e Bronzit: to keep invaders out.

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Update 13/8 00:55 CET: I have now done the wordlists in Irish, Latin, Old French and Modern French. But I have also checked my piles from round 2 and discovered that I already have added Czech and Ukranian to the agenda so ... 4 down, 2 up and 17 left for a total of 30 languages. And now I think: I have also good dictionaries for Hungarian and two Baltic languages (but still not for Estonian)... plus some Asian languages. I have to tell myself that this also has to be an exercise in humble reticence and ability to resist silly temptations.