Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

[Iversen]

I finished the music collection revision project yesterday afternoon, and then I suddenly had time to relaxstudy languages again. So in rapid succession I went through copy-and-understand exercises based on printouts in Slovak, Indonesian, Russian and Albanian plus one more page from Harry Potter in Irish. And my current goodnight reading is inspired by the thread about chicken sexing, where the name of Oliver Sachs was brought up. I didn't have his book about "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat" around, but I do own a good alternative, his book about Musicophilia, which I bought in a Romanian translation during my visit to Cluj last year.

RO: De fapt, am citit deja întreaga carte, însă limba mea română necesită o doză solidă de antrenament de lectură, și bineînțeles muzica mă interesează (poate fi mai mult decât ceea absolut necesară). Am citit poate o jumătate de oră ieri și câteva ore această dimineață, așa că deocamdată am ajuns la pagina 83 - și pe fiecare pagina erau de fapt câteva cuvinte pe care aș fi uit dacă aș fi stat în fotoliul meu. Dar stau în patul și este prea dificil să folosesc un dicționar. Primul capitol povestește despre un om care a fost lovit de un fulger și apoi a început să juca pe pian. Cel de-al doilea capitol este foarte trist: îi povestește de oamenilor ale căror creier a început brusc să red muzică din proprie inițiativă - și cei care rareori au plăcut muzica (mai ales nu l-au plăcut după 1000 de repetări). În unele cazuri a existat o corelație cu scăderea auzului, ca și cum creierul își găsea propriile sunete pentru că nu avea suficient de input. Dar acest lucru nu s-a aplicat tuturor cazurilor. Același capitol spune și despre cineva care a pus o plăcuță pe gramofon său, s-a așezat și a auzit toata muzicei - dar el uitase să pună pickup-ul în canelurile, așa că totul evident s-a întâmplat în al lui cap. Oamenii sunt ciudați ...

GER: Der albanische Artikel erzählt von einem deutschen Supervulkan, heute als der Laacher See (bei Bonn) bekannt. Laut dem Artikel hatte er seinen letzten Ausbruch vor 12.900 Jahren und es sollte alle 10-12.000 Jahre noch einen Ausbruch geben ... und dann fängt der Autor an, das Vorhersagen der Mayas vom Weltuntergang im Jahre 2012 in die Diskussion einzumischen, was absolut blöd ist. Aber der Artikel kam von einer Website namens alien.al, und dann kann man ja alles erwarten (einschließlich das Vorkommen eines nüchternen Artikels wie der über schwarze Energie, den ich kürzlich erwähnt habe).

AL: Për aq sa di unë, bota është ende atje, pavarësisht nga Mayanet, dhe artikulli nuk thotë ndonjë arsye për të besuar në shpeshtësinë e shpërthimit të vullkanit. Unë jam më i shqetësuar për shkak të Yellowstonet dhe Campi Flegrei pranë Napolit, të cilat në parim mund të shpërthej në ajër nesër.

IR: Agus thástáil Harry ar an hata (nó tá an hata ag thástáilt ar Harry)

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[Iversen]

SInce I felt that I was reusing old printouts too much I have made a new collection. The main method is the usual: I put a word into Google and do a search restricted to one language ... and then I avoid the items at the top of the hit list since they are dominated by dictionaries and Wikipedia (which I would be culling all the time even without help from Google). The second to main method is of course to look at the old sources again, but I haven't always remembered to include them in my printouts. Often the translation isn't strictly necessary, but then I have fun using a variety of translation language just to spice things up. If I'm sure I can understand almost evertyhing then I will of course just make a monolingual printout - but in that case I might also just be reading at the screen.

This time the result goes as follows:
A Russian collection with texts from a site called evolution.powernet.ru, section 'history' . My Google 'nucleus' this time was "триасовый" and this gave acces to a rich collection of texts that stretch from the big bang to modern times. My Russian is at a level where I could drop the translation(s), but I kept them for the odd unknown (or forgotten) word, and thee are translations into Danish, English, French, Dutch, Afrikaans, Spanish and Portuguese. It wouldn't be practical to use other Slavic languages since the words I don't know in Russian might be found in those languages too (or be explained with even more unknown words).

In Polish I found a fairly long article on sputniknew.com about the genetic side of the spread of the Indoeuropean language family - a theme which readers of this log will know has been on my agenda for quite some time. The language choice here is utterly boring (English and Danish), but this is logical since I have been neglecting Polish for some time and need more help to get through the text.

In Bulgarian I need less help so here the choice of translation languages has already become more varied. I first looked for things about the same theme as in Polish. I did find an article that claimed that Bulgarians had been there for at least 10.000 years - I'll have to look at the precise haplogroups mentioned in the article to check this. Their Slavic language and culture came with a comparativelyy recent invasion, but an invasion doesn't necessarily imply that the old population is totally replaced. Apart from this I included an article about an ongoing excavation and an article about Alzheimer in the collection.

For the Serbian collection I copied the transcript of a video about national parks from prezi.com (maybe I'll listen to the video itself later), and I added a number of texts about pretty places from Danube-cooperation.com, including one about the Kotor Bay area, where people are supposed to speak Montenegrin and use the Latin alphabet - but in Serbian I try to stick to Cyrillic texts, and this one in Cyrillic looks to me as a genuine article in Serbian.

In Slovak I first checked out the homepage of my hotel in Žilina and then went on to places I visited, like the castle in Trenčín and the Open air museum in Martin (whose homepage is called skanzenmartin.sk - Swedes may recognize this name).

And finally I found some more material on dark holes and the cosmological constant in Greek.

I have reached page 235 in my Musicophilia book in Romanian by mr. Sacks. About a third left ...

Yesterday I participated in a meeting in my travel club, and one of the other participants mentioned that she had become an avid listener to e-books (in Danish), and it seemed that this also was common among the others. I was the odd one out since I never listen to literary readings in any language, I don't ever visit theatres and I rarely read literature - I can't say I never do because I did read "2061" in Portuguese and "3001" in English recently - but it wouldn't occur to me to listen to any literary e-book, not even sci fi or something spoken in one of my target languages. On the other hand I do listen to documentaries - unless they are dubbed according to the abominable 'double' German principle or the music becomes too irritating or the speaker is a selfpromoting jerk, which is more and more often the case.

While I have been reading the last 100 pages or so of Sacks the thought did cross my mind that I might have a blind spot in the interval between language and music. One of the others at the meeting asked me whether I really didn't love hearing Ghita Nørby (a Danish actress) reading literature aloud, and when I said "no" she was thoroughly flummoxed. But for me language - and in particular the spoken language - is a means to communication (and a study subject), not a vehicle for histrionics. I do prefer nice voices to raucous screaming, but not when the owners try to be artistic - then I would prefer hearing them scream in agony. The happiest time in Danish TV ever was the period during the 60s where the Actor's Union went on strike so that not a single actor was heard on TV for several months ... what a release!

I do appreciate short and wellwrought poems like those of Mallarmé or Baudelaire, but I definitely don't want to hear anybody read them aloud. I might learn something about trades and different cultures from prose literature (like the novels of Balzac), but mostly the relevant stuff is mixed with irrelevant fictional babble about unpleasant or otherwise pitiful persons and their fictional personal affaires. A solid historical account is much more my thing - even though truly unpleasant characters also are common in real history. And I prefer instrumental music, so maybe I do miss some kind of intertwining mesh in the interval between language and music which other people enjoy - but I wouldn't want to change places with them. "Skæg for sig and snot for sig", as we say in Danish (="beard on one side, mucus on the other" - and not "Be shy and snuggle" as proposed by Google Translate).

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[Iversen]

I finished Sacks' book Monday towards midday, and if you count maybe ½ hour each evening and the rest in the mornings, then it took me around 8 hours to get through the 360 pages. My reading speed in Romanian seems to be OK even though I haven't spoken the language much this year. There are of course a lot of things I could mention, but I'll just mention one: according to the book neither the author Henry James nor his psychologist brother EVER mentioned music, and nobody have apparently ever seen them or heard about them in any context that involved music. So maybe they were congenitallt tone deaf. The same could almost be said about Freud, but there are some eyewitness reports that suggest that he may have listened to music after all, but just didn't want to admit it. At the other end of the sacle there is the a socalled William's syndrome, whose victims typically have an IQ below 60 but more often than not are extremely musical and also very socially minded, but typically unable to even bind their own shoe laces.

I spent most of the afternoon at our expensive new library, where I checked the area with Fantasy and Science fiction - and it was a miserable collection with hardly any one of the classial authors in those genres, apart from Tolkien. No Heinlein, no Asimov, no Julian May, no Bradbury , just to mention a few names that ought to ring a bell. Instead I borrowed a book with Italian poetry from 1200 to 2000. I'm not sure I'll read it all, but it would be nice to have an overview so that I didn't have to fiddle around with 100 single author editions. And then there was something called a language café. I was there two weeks ago, and back then there was a guy who wanted to speak Italian. This time there were twice as many people as last time, but half of them wanted to train their Danish, and a couple of Danes chose to stay with that group. I chose to discuss economical and scolary systems here and abroad with those who wanted to speak English.

After I got home I have studied one more page from Harry Potter in Irish. It may not appear as much, but at my level half the words are unknown - though I do recognize more and more English loanwords which just have become almost unrecognizable in Irish. It is obvious that a "hata" is a hat, and 'or' (gold) is of course a loanword from French - but it is first now where my reading speed has increased that I notice things like "síleál" (ceiling) or "stair" (history) or "triail" (test, trial).

My good night reading - which I'll use in just a few moment - will probably be one of my Russian guides, either the one from the Palazzo Ducale in Venice or the one from Schönbrunn in Vienna. Both are leightweight and handy, which is an important factor since I'll be reading the book I choose while lying down. And then I'll test my (passive) Italian tomorrow.

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[Suairc]

After I got home I have studied one more page from Harry Potter in Irish. It may not appear as much, but at my level half the words af unknown - though I do recognize more and more English loanwords which just have become almost unrecognizable in Irish. It is obvious that a "hata" is a hat, and 'or' (gold) is of course a loanword from French - but it is first now where my reading speed has increased that I notice things like "síleál" (ceiling) or "stair" (history) or "triail" (test, trial).

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That's an interesting observation about the word stair, I wonder is it in fact a loan word?

I don't believe ór is a loanword though. I think I remember seeing it in Old Irish texts written before the Norman invasion. I've heard it said that the Celtic and Italic branches of IE were close which might explain it. Other examples off the top of my head:

each = horse c.f. Latin equus
corn = horn c.f. Latin cornu
fear and vir?

[Iversen]

Well, "or" may be a heritage word - after all this metal was known while the Celts in Europe still had contact with the Romans. Whether it is even older is anybody's guess. Another word that comes to mind is "airgead" (silver, money) that resembles Latin "argentum". But is it an old loanword or not? Ah dunno...

I have never studied a book about Irish language history - actually I haven't even seen one, but I can see on the internet that the one written by Aidan Doyle only goes back to the Norman invasion, which is somewhat unsatisfactory. According to WIkipedia the written history begins with "Archaic Irish, which is found in Ogham inscriptions dating from the 3rd or 4th century AD. After the conversion to Christianity in the 5th century, Old Irish begins to appear as glosses and other marginalia in Latin manuscripts, beginning in the 6th century. It evolved in the 10th century to Middle Irish." Well, that isn't much.. but the trouble is that the pre-christian Celtic societies in general didn't like writing at all, which is why we know so little about most of the extinct languages from the group. And when the Irish were converted to christianity they wrote their books in Latin (like the famous Book of Kells, cfr the image below). The first manuscripts in Irish (like those containing the socalled 'Ulster Cycle') date from the 10. to 15. century, though they reflect traditions going far back.

To find something substantial about the roots of the Celtic languages you may have to resort to books about Proto-Indoeuropean in general, but I did find a reasonably detailed forum message on Eupedia. A quote from this source: "Naturally, Celtic, Italic and Germanic languages all stem from a common ancestor, the "Centum" dialect of Indo-European, most probably spoken by the R1b people who arrived in Europe from Anatolia along the Danube around 4300 ybp. The question is, does it make sense to divide them in three branches, or are Brythonic, Goidelic, Celtiberian, Gaulish, Lepontic, Latin and Oscan all part of a bigger Italo-Celtic family ? There was probably more difference between ancient Irish and Gaulish than between Gaulish, Lepontic and Latin. Even nowadays Welsh, Cornish and Breton cluster together, but are a world apart from Irish or Scottish Gaelic. ". This suggestion is interesting, but hard to investigate (the formulation"from Anatolia" is however at least debatable). If we had known the Celtic languages, say, 3000 years back in time better than we do, then it might be possible to say whether there once was an Italo-Celtic mother tongue or whether the correspondences just were developed through later contact between Celts and Romans - but, as far as I know we don't have that information.

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RU: Гид для Шенбрунна не был написан на русском, а на румынском языке. Поэтому я прочитал путеводитель в Дворец Дожей в Венеции. И, кроме того, у меня есть несколько путеводителей для мест в Греции в нескольких версиях, в том числе по-русски. Затем я могу прочитать их потом.

[jeff_lindqvist]

These posts made me dig out some of my notes from the spring of 2014 when I studied Old Irish. After just a quick glance, I find quite a few words which indeed look like early loans (or even shared vocabulary), e.g.:
fín – wine
íasc - fish
rige - kingship
rí, rig - king
lebor - books
titul - title
salm - psalm
ubla - apples
ór – gold
argat – silver
(umae - copper doesn't look at all familiar)
rignae - queen
tarbu - bulls (Taurus/Tarvos?)

(Examples from exercises from Old-Irish Workbook (Quin))

[Iversen]

IT: Ho seguito (e eccezionalmente ascoltato) un programma televisivo italiano su un lungo viaggio attraverso l'India - dal sud all'ovest e poi a Delhi e poi al nord et ritorno a Delhi e verso l'este fino a Calcutta ("Overland 19"). Non sono stato dappertutto, ma il programma ha percorso alcuni luoghi che ho visitato - pura nostalgia! L'India è l'unico paese dove ho considerato - ma solo per la durata dello soggiorno - a diventare vegetariano. L'immagine qui sotto è da una gita in barca sul fiume Gange tra la città di Varanasi, la quale è piena di indù chi vengono per morire. La città è anche piena di saddhù e di colonne di fumo che si alzano dalle cremazioni rituali lungo le sponde. Sono contento di aver visto questa città unica, ma anche di non abitarci. Ma l'India ha anche esperienze serene come il Taj Mahal ad Agra o il giardino zoologico di Delhi.

CA: Vaig estudiar l'última pàgina del meu text en indonesi sobre un astronauta alemany en formació amb els xinesos, però ja he mencionat això. A més, una pàgina més de Harry Potter en irlandès i un article breu en català sobre les dimensions de l'àtom i un altre sobre Lynn Margulis i les seves teories sobre l'aparició de la vida en aquest planeta. Ella va suggerir fa mig segle que no només les mitocòndries, sinó també altres coses en nostres cèl·lules van arribar com a hostes a un apartament amb tan sols ràbia ineficaç, i llavors simplement es van convertir en residents. I és en benefici de tots perquè fan un treball útil.

SW: Och då såg jag av en tillfällighet Jeff Lindquists lista i den här tråden över irländska ord som måhända kan vara tidiga låneord eller till och med överlevande ord från stadierna före de keltiska språken även separerades från de andra indoeuropeiska språken. Jag är imponerad av Jeffs kunskap om irlands språkhistoria. Vi vet ju inte hur långt hans studier nått, men undertecknade har jämfört än inte övervägt att studera irsk språkhistorie. Men när jag ser hur annorlunda stavningen är i hans exempel tycker jag också att det måste vara som att läsa ett helt annat språk än dagens standardiserade irländska språk. Nu ska jag först ha standard-irskan bragt under kontroll, ock så ser vi hur långt vingerne kan bära

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[galaxyrocker]

These posts made me dig out some of my notes from the spring of 2014 when I studied Old Irish. After just a quick glance, I find quite a few words which indeed look like early loans (or even shared vocabulary), e.g.:
fín – wine
íasc - fish
rige - kingship
rí, rig - king
lebor - books
titul - title
salm - psalm
ubla - apples
ór – gold
argat – silver
(umae - copper doesn't look at all familiar)
rignae - queen
tarbu - bulls (Taurus/Tarvos?)

(Examples from exercises from Old-Irish Workbook (Quin))

Some of those are loanwords, some aren't. fín, for instance, seems to be, as do lebor, ór, titul, salm. The others, however, seem to be words descended from Proto-Celtic (rignae being a confusing one and not on Wikitionary). 'argat' is a fun one in this regard, as I always assumed it was from Latin but instead came from PC. Another one like that was 'capall', which is actually borrowed into Latin, from Gaulish, not Irish.

It's also worth remembering that a lot of the early loans into Irish were from Latin, from when the Church was established. There are some nice academic papers out there (don't remember titles off-hand) that discuss how we can tell a borrowing from an original word from PC, as well as roughly when a word was borrowed. I'll see if I can't dig them up; I believe they were in Eiriú. Also an interesting thing worth mentioning is the word adharc for 'horn', which has no certain etymology but a tempting cognate in...Basque.

[Iversen]

I don't know any of the old stages of any Celtic languages, but a few scattered associations nevertheless presented themselves like on a silverplatter when I read Jeff's list:

The Italian town Treviso has its name from Latin "Tarvisium", which is supposed to be derived from a Celtic placename (quote from Wikisource:
"Man findet es in der Schreibung TARVOS TRI-GARANVS («der Stier mit den drei Kraniche. in den Ortsnamen Tarvisium (heute Treviso) und Tarvessedum (-» Wagen)". Kraniche ??? or Cranes in English?? Some kind of mistranslation has happened here...

ri or rig for a king resembles Latin "rex", but if "rignae" means queen then there should be other examples of a feminine sufix "-nae". "Rige" may have followed the word for king - actually in Danish vi say "rige" about a country even though we use the word "konge" for kings and "dronning" (from old "drot" = king) for our queens.Could the -nae be the same as our -ning? I wouldn't be surprised if all these words were introduced into Irish with Latin during the christianization - and "salm" would definitely a Christian term. And since books probably didn't exist during the pre-Crhistian period you would also expect "lebor" ("leabhar" today) to be a derivation of "liber".

As for "fin" (wine) it should be possible to find out whether there is a general correspondence between Celtic "f" and Italic "v". I haven't checked this question yet, but for a Celtic language historian this would be known territory.

"íasc " ... Hmmm, it reminds me more of Greek "ichtyos" than of Latin "piscis", but it would take some rather drastic sound changes to connect "iasc" with any of these two possible sources. PS: Greece is far from Ireland, but before the Roman took over, Greece was actually invaded by Celts (Galatians). Did the landlocked Celts discover fish back then?

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Apart from that: I started out today with a text about nudism in Paris (from the BBC page I have mentioned earlier), followed by one about the number of stars in the Univers.

BA I: Otoritas kota di Paris rupanya memutuskan untuk membuka sebuah area di Bois de Vincennes untuk orang-orang telanjang. Tetapi apa yang Anda lakukan jika ratusan orang yang ingin tahu duduk dengan teropong di sepanjang pinggiran daerah itu? Ya, masalahnya bisa diselesaikan saat membuat plang tentang "Perilaku yang pantas". Omong-omong, artikel ini berisi kesalahan aneh: area tersebut apakah dekat taman burung - yang sebenarnya adalah kebun binatang resmi kota Paris - kebun binatang lain di Seine dalam taman "Jardin des Plantes" selalu disebut "ménagerie". Dan keduanya memiliki spesies hewan yang berbeda dari burung.

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[jeff_lindqvist]

Thanks for the input, both of you! I just copy-pasted some words which probably means that some are most likely inflected forms. This rignae example shows that:

rígan , rígain

Forms: rígain, rígan, rignai, rígnae, rígnai, rígna, rígain, rignae, ríghan

( http://www.dil.ie/search?search_in=head ... r%C3%ADgan - it's genitive plural, by the way)

The f/v change is there in fear/vir too, and whether iasc is closer to Greek or Latin, I don't know, but it's not the first time a Latin p- disappears (pater->athair).