Yesterday I spent a lot of time on piecing materials about Irish grammar together in the spreadsheet I mentioned a couple of days ago. At the time I thought I was halfway through, but of course I wasn't, and now I am at a loss to see how all the information I have collected can be squeezed down to a couple of pages, which is my normal goal. But at least I have my spreadsheet now for further study, and it has been a good repetition course to gather all that information. In addition I did work my way through a few more lines in Harry Potter, but not as much as expected - instead I spent several hours fixing/replacing broken zippers in my preferred winter coat and my best fleece sweater, and after that I patched up some pillows. That took several hours.
One of the most conspicuous features of Irish (and other Celtic languages) is that they inflect words at both ends. If you take for instance Latin or Modern Greek the adjectives have grosso modo the same endings so here the logical layout for a green sheet is to put the table of adjective below the corresponding table for the substantives, and then you can place the articles and other paraphernalia at the level of the substantives. Not so in the Germanic and Slavic languages: here the adjectives have different endings from the substantives, and in the Germanic languages these endings even depend on whether you have a definite article, an indefinite article (or none) or certain other elements at the start of the substantive clause, so here logic tells you to put everything, i.e. articles, the different set of adjective endings and the substantive endings, on the same line. And then we have the Irish system... gosh.
I'm still thinking of ways to deal with that monster, but it seems that the most economical way to describe the initial mutations of for instance substantives would be as effects of something in front of them - or in other words, describe the substantival and adjectival
endings (or palatizations/depalatizations) without even mentioning what happens at the beginning of the words, and then describe the mutations as effects of preceding articles (or prepositions and articles) - if there are such articles. The grammars are all curiously secretive about the situation where there isn't any article - so does a 'naked' feminine substantive in the nominative/accusative have lenition or not? Maybe the answer can be gleaned by looking at the names of female characters in Harry Potter... time will tell.
Today I have watched several hours of German TV from Arte - there were three excellent nature documentaries there in a row (from Königsee, the Bodensee area and the hot Kaiserstuhl). After that I first studied the final part of the passage about the Devonian (the section about plants - 'tanaman') from my dubious Earth history in Indonesian, and after that comes the Permian - so where is Carbon? I don't remember anymore where I got the text from (somewhere on Facebook, I think) and I don't remember whether I skipped every other period or the author/translator did.
And after that I finished my article about the labyintodonts in Russian and followed it up with an article about the famous
Ichthyostega (still in Russian), which was found on Greenland in 1931 by Eigil Nielsen, a member of the Danish Lauge Koch expedition. A much beloved Danish cartoonist and humorist named Storm P(etersen) even made drawings based on the first informal reconstructions, but then our local authorities made the fatal error of leaving the task of describing it scientifically to Swedish scientists ..
SW: Och hva hände då? INGENTING ALLS !! Den första som fick fossilet het Gunnar Säve-Söderbergh, men han ble allvarleg sjuk og skrev förståeligt nog ingenting medan han låg och kämpade med döden - vilket varade förvånande länge. Etter kriget dog han, ock fossilet kom då til en man kallat Erik Jarvik, och fortfarande hände inget INGET ALLS. Jarvik var enligt uppgift en lärd man, men inte precis en prydnad för forskarstanden med hänsyn till tempo. År 1955 utfärdade han dock en skiss, men den liknade Storm Ps teckningar i förvånande grad, så kanske han hade glömt var han lade originalresterna och ville bara inte erkänna det. Eller kanske ville han båra inte svara på frågor. När tröga Jarvik äntligen dog i 1998 kom fossilerna till Cambridge i England, men HURRA HURRA, nu har de äntligen kommit hem till Danmark, där vi lika gärna kunde ha behållit dem från början. Historien berättas i "Videnskabens
Verden", men jag känner den också från en utställning på Zoological Museum i Köpenhamn, och der fanns en annan ritning som faktiskt var bättre än den nedan - men jag har inte kunnat hitta den, och museerna är för närvarande stängda så jag kan inte kunnat fråga varken där eller på Storm P-museet.
Ichtyostega (Wikipedia).jpg
StormPdk-fisk.jpg
EDIT: (DK) Og så fandt jeg sørme alligevel den tegning som jeg ledte efter - blandt mine egne fotografier fra den omtalte udstilling:
F5921b12_Ichtyostega.jpg