Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

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Iversen
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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby Iversen » Thu Jul 11, 2019 12:13 am

I read far more books in Danish before I restarted my language studies, but during my last library visit I did gobble down some 200 pages about talent, written by a man named Buhl. His main claim was that talent is more about tenacity and the urge to improve than about a monolitic inborn ability. On the other hand he also acknowledged that there is such a thing as lack of talent (though he didn't use that word), insofar that he accepted the sad fact that he never would be a world class runner or tennis player. And that view would of course also be a valid standpoint in the discussion of language learning.

DA: En af hans historier handlede om nogle polske håndværkere der gravede et hul nær forfatterens hus, vistnok for at lægge et rør af en eller anden slags. Deres holdleder konstaterede at grunden lå lavt og var fuld af grundvand, og så lagde de et lag småsten for at dræne vandet bort. Resultat: fliserne ovenpå lå smukt og lige Så kom der et par kommunalarbejdere for at grave noget andet ned, og de rodede det hele sammen i én pærevælling. Resultat: fliserne bevægede sig op og ned og kom til at ligge hulter til bulter. De to kommunalarbejdere var givetvis erfarne, men de havde en fast metode og var for dumme til at se hvor den skulle revideres. Eller også - og denne pointe stammer fra et tidligere kapitel i borgen - eller også havde deres overordnede udstyret dem med en fast køreplan som de skulle følge, og i så fald blev de givetvis bedømt på hvor tæt de fulgte opskriften. Og resultatet af den metode er middelmådighed og tåbelige bommerter. Når man skal fokusere på en opskrift i stedet for på selve opgaven bliver man DUMMERE - og man bliver dummere og dummere jo længere man er ansat i et firma eller en forvaltning der opererer med denne planøkonomiske form for planlægning.

SLK: Dnes večer som študoval dva texty. Prvá (v slovenskom jazyku) bola o západoslovenskom múzeu v Trnave, druhým bol článok zo srbskej Wikipédie o cyrilike. Obaja ležia v mojej zóne pohodlia a v textoch poznám väčšinu slov, takže to nebol väčší problém ignorovať preklady - ale stále robím dvojjazyčné výtlačky pre bezpečnosť.

SER: А понекад преводе забавно. На пример, у следећем чланку сам видео да су аустријски цареви покушали да укину ћирилично писање - иу преводу је навело да су покушали да елиминисати кларинете.

And speaking about music: I have now reached the Mozarts - father and son and ... wait, there is actually a third Mozart (and I'm not referring to the Brazilian composer Mozart Camargo Guàrneri). Wolfgangus and Constanze had six children, out of which two survived, and the youngest one was educated as a musician and composer. Bad idea: it is never easy to be the son of a genius, and it becomes even harder if you run around calling yourself Wolfgang Mozart junior (or 'Sohn'). So Franz Xaver Mozart may have been a solid standard composer, but nobody EVER plays his music - except on Youtube, where you can find just about anything ever recorded by anybody (copyrighted or not).

GER: Dieser Mozart wurde von einem polnischen Grafen in Lviv (Lemberg) als Hausmusiker und Komponist angeheuert, und ich wurde von seiner Existenz nur aufmerksam, wenn ich dort das folgende Denkmal über ihn sah. Er war vielleicht nicht allzu erfolgreich in seinem Beruf, aber in Lviv weiß man offenbar immer noch, daß dort ein wahrer Mozart gewohnt hat.

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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby lichtrausch » Thu Jul 11, 2019 5:14 am

You seem to have extensive knowledge of biological taxonomy, so I was wondering what you make of the critique of Linnaean taxonomy put forth in this article:

What’s in a Name? Taxonomy Problems Vex Biologists
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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby Iversen » Thu Jul 11, 2019 2:24 pm

I'm not an expert on the subject, but I have read a lot about it so I do know about some of the problems with the traditional taxonomy. And I have also read a lot about paleontology so I also know something about the historical dimension.

One problem is the definition of a species, a family or an order. One standard definition has been that members of different species can't interbreed and produce fertile offspring. But if you put gibbons or lemurs or toucans from different species together in one cage then you'll see them interbreed with no respect for the zoological definitions whatsoever - pure mayhem. Another example: In my mother's garden there are three bushes of something we call "solstik" (= sunstroke, but not an official name - not even in Danish). It is a crossbreed between "solbær" (blackcurrant) and "stikkelsbær (gooseberry), and their berries are like bigger and somewhat milder blackcurrants. DIfferent species? Yes indeed. But they did produce a fertile crossbreed.

However thanks to different mating rituals and territories most species are relatively stable, and it would be idiotic to discard the general notion just because of some dubious cases. The linguistic counterpart to this would be the discussion about languages versus dialects. We can discuss whether Sicilian deserves to be called a language in its own right, but it still makes sense to talk about Italian as an umbrella that also covers Sicilian. Or we could discuss the language situation in the former republic of Jugoslavia ... or maybe better not...

The other main problem is whether the nomenclature also reflects the actual genealogical history of each branch or twig. The article mentions cases where superficially similar animals actually aren't closely related, like the 'normal' hedgehog and the tenreks from Madagascar (see picture below), and there are cases where superficially distinct animals are seen as closely related - like elefants, hyraxes and sea cows. Traditionally such claims have been based on those anatomical details that weren't relevant for the similarities or lack thereof. The idea is that changes that occurred in order to make an animal or plant better suited to its environment could occur in several different groups as long as they were exposed to similar environments. Like when different animals convert some of their hairs into needles in order to ward off predators. But when some inconspicuous bone has the same shape in vastly different animals it is hard to see the advantage for survival, and then it becomes much more tempting to interpret it as a common heritage from some distant ancestor.

With the advent of genetic analysis some of the old groups have turned out not to reflect the real genealogical trees. As a child I learned about a family called the edentata (the 'toothless') which comprised sloths, ant eaters, armadillos, pangolins and aardvarks. But then their genes were analysed, and the sloths, ant eaters, armadillos were put into a new family called the Xenarthra (which means "strange joints", because they have some 'extra' bones in their joints), while the aardwarks were diagnosed as distant relatives of elephants and the pangolins as their own little family hidden somewhere in the woods. Another case: vultures in the new world aren't actually birds of prey, but more like distant cousins to storks. And speaking about birds: it has now been generally accepted that birds actually are dinosaurs. And your dinner is more closely related to T Rex than T rex was to for instance Psittacosaurus. Or to human beings or a lizard for that matter.

In linguistic terms this corresponds to the discussion surrounding similarity versus historical relationships. For instance Norwegian is more like Swedish and Danish today, but historically it is seen as a relative of Icelandic and Faroese because it followed them in some sound changes that happened almost 1000 years ago. But only linguists know the sounds that reflect this ancestry, and for the rest of us Norwegian belongs in the same basket as Danish and Swedish. Or take Italian, which historically is placed with Romanian and the extinct Dalmatian, but nowaday Romanian has become the odd guy, far from the other Southern European Romance languages.

One thing that really would spoil the idea about genealogical trees would be if branches could fuse after having been separated. And if you look at vocabulary this can definitely happen - with languages like Albanian and the seven or so Romani languages who have more loan words from their neighbours than originally inherited ones. Or Scots, which is rapidly becoming English with a weird accent. But the historical linguists were adamant that systematic sound changes were final, and grosso modo this has turned out to be so close to the reality that it would be silly to stop talking about Stammbaums.

When we speak about bacteria and (even more) vira it seems that they are so adept at exchanging DNA sequences that it seriously undermines the idea of genealogical trees. After all, if your DNA contents can be freely exchanged with other bacteria and vira then the whole idea of tree structures that loyally reflect your ancestry must be dropped. And for languages this has already happened at the vocabulary level and in some cases at the syntactical level too - and then we speak about a 'Sprachbund' (like the one on the Balkan peninsula, where a number of languages have conspired to kick out or limit the use of infinitives). We have also the idea of dialect continua based on phonological changes that don't spread from a single center. But centralizing factors (like wars and national TV stations) have weeded out much of the variation, and then we are back to the tree containing the main languages which was constructed by the language historians. It may not reflect the whole reality, but in the main it functions rather well, and we don't have a simple alternative.

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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby lichtrausch » Fri Jul 12, 2019 8:48 pm

Very interesting. I wonder how far the analogy between biological and language evolution/classification can be taken. For instance, whether languages are also more susceptible to horizontal "gene" transfer in earlier forms as is the case with organisms (vira and bacteria). I get the impression that sprachbunds were more dynamic in our ancient past.
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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby Iversen » Fri Jul 12, 2019 9:28 pm

Well, the inherently unstable creole languages (or those belonging to wandering tribes like the Roma) definitely absorb words indescriminately from all accesible sources, so in this sense they behave like primitive lifeforms. On the other hand our 'standard languages' remain stable in spite of multiple loans because they are supported by schools and national media.

Yesterday I wrote a couple of words about paleontology, and today I have followed this up by reading (and studying) two articles in Spanish about the socalled Cambrian explosion, both from a site called neofronteras.com. I can see that it is several weeks since I last wrote anything in Spanish here so I am going to write my comments in this language. My apologies to those who now have to use Google translate or one of its competitors.

SP: Hasta hace unos años, la llamada explosión cámbrica se percibía como un solo evento muy repentino, donde repentinamente aparecían animales multicelulares con conchas duras, y antes de eso (en elperido llamada el precámbrico) los paleontologos contaban solo con organismos unicelulares y quizás algunos gusanos y similares inmediatamente antes la explosión - pero no se esperaba jamás que se encontrasen sobras de estos.

Hoy en dia los investigadores se han vuelto mucho más sabios. Primero, pueden demostrar que la vida ya existía hace unos 4 mil millones de años, poco después del final del gran bombardeo (donde la tierra se calentó por la multitud de meteoros cayentes) que fueron enviados a la tierra a causa de eventos en el sistema solar que no tenemos que discutar aqui. Se estima que la mayor parte del agua actual de la Tierra fue llevado aqui por los asteroides cayentes, y sin esta agua no habría habido vida en la Tierra (y yo no hubiera podido escribir estas líneas).

Los rastros más antiguos de la vida se conocen solo a través de impresiones químicas, pero eran organismos primitivos anaeróbicos. Pero entonces sucedió algo: cerca de 3.5 mil millones de años surgieron cianobacterias que se asentaron individualmente o como almohadillas gruesas llamadas estromatolitos, y empezaron inmediatamente producir un veneno desagradable llamado oxígeno. Al menos esto fue la percepción de las arquea existentes para quienes el oxígeno era un veneno mortal. Pero no había nadie a quien quejarse, y por lo tanto, la cantidad de oxígeno producida por los cianobactérias aumentó constantemente. Los Archaea tuvieron que buscar refugio en lugares extremos, como dentro de rocas y fuentes de ebullición.

Y después pasaron unos miles de millones de años donde los continentes navegaron lentamente alrededor de la planeta sul manto y se rompieron y se reunieron de nuevo, pero por lo demás no ocurrió nada especial ... por cierto, la más inventiva entre las bacterias (eucaritas) que se encuentran para formar núcleos celulares su genoma en los núcleos celulares, y luego también obtuvieron algunos alojamientos que evolucionaron en la mitocondria de nuestras células. Pero considerando que pasaron unos 3 mil millones de años, de hecho no sucedió mucho. Es decir, unos tres o cuatro veces la Tierra de calientó tanto que se formaba gelo en grandes partes de sua superficie. El período dicho Criogénico comenzó hace unos 720 millones de años y finalizó hace unos 635 millones de años, y es posible que todo el globo fue cubierto por hielo durante almeno uno de los dos or tres episodios congelados (según la hipótesis llamada 'bola de nieve', sobre el cual yá he escrito extensamente a partir de un artículo escrito en ruso).

He escrito por encima que los paleontólogos no esperaban encontrar rastros de fauna compleja antes del Cámbrico, pero hoy se ha aprendido algunas cosas importantes que no se sabian aún durante mi juventúd: se ha encontrado rastros de animales multicelulares antes del Cambrio, y el período relevante se llama hoy Ediacaria para algunas montañas en Australia (los rusos prefieron el nombre de vendian, sugerido por un investigador ruso). Los mas avanzadas animales de este período eran alfombras planas de células que se arrastraban lentamente alrededor del fondo marino y absorbían bacterias y fitoplancton con su parte inferior. El periodo ediacariano por definición comenzó después de una congelación llamada Marinoa, que terminó hace unos 635 millones de años, peró los rastros de animales del biota llamado 'ediacaria' yá no existían en la primera parte del período (y, por lo tanto, es sorprendente que se haya elegido esta definición). Sin embargo, una tercera congelación llamada Gaskiers ocurrió hace aproximadamente 580 millones de años y duró aproximadamente 340,000 años, y el surgimiento de la fauna ediacara se puede establecer a hace unos 575 millones de años,justo después de esta edad de hielo, lo que probablemente no sea por acaso.

La llamada explosión cámbrica ocurrió un poco mas tarde, cerca de hace 542 miliones de años atras. Los aburridos y lentos animales del periodo Ediacaria desaparecieron, y en su lugar surgieron biotopos con presas y depredadores moviles, que incluso fueron cazados por depredadores aún más grandes. El 'top depredador', Anomalocaris, medía hasta un metro de largo y comía todo lo que era más pequeño que él. Peró los animales menores luego mejoraron su defensa, y por exemplo aparecieron trilobites con ojos - por cierto, algunos ojos de piedra peculiares que no se parecen a nuestros ojos de burbujas suaves o los ojos facetarios y duros de los insectos, pero funcionaron, y los trilobites sobrevivieron. Anomalocaris no.

Estas comunidades de animales estan bien representadas en algunos depósitos canadienses llamados "esquisto de Burgess" ('Burgess shale'), pero el período duró solo unos 10 millones de años, y solo entonces vino la explosión cámbrica clásico (y final), donde los trilobites se convirtieron en el grupo animal dominante. La mayoría de los grupos de Burgess Shale desaparecieron, y en su lugar aparecieron las formas ancestrales de todos los grupos de animales que tenemos hoy en día, aunque, por supuesto, duró aún algunos centenas de miliones de años antes de que comenzaron a escalar la tierra.

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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby Iversen » Mon Jul 15, 2019 8:55 pm

I have spent the weekend on tourism in my neigbourhood - Saturday four zoos and a railway museum, Sunday one viking fortress, one open air museum and two zoos. So I didn't really do any studies.

Today (Monday) I read some pages in the Japanese dictionary I mentioned in an earlier message, and then I took the bus to the library and returned it - I'm NOT going to learn Japanese, and the reason is of course those little glyphs they have borrowed from the Chinese. But Monday is also the day, where the library put up some signs about 'sprog café' - and then people can sit down to speak in foreign languages. Today there were actually a fair number of people. One German man came with his language teacher hoping to get some Danish language training, and we tried our best, but his level was far too low for even the most basic conversation. He could say his name and ask "hvad hedder du?", and that was it. We had been told that he spoke Italian so I asked him in Italian what job he had down there (an industrial engineer of sorts), and then I told him what that would be in Danish and expected him to say in Danish that he was an "ingeniør", but even that was an uphill struggle. I know it is difficult to learn a foreign language, but sometimes it seems to be more than difficult, and the two left after maybe ten minutes

Apart from that an elderly Danish lady and a Czech lady and her Danish friend participated, and shortly after also a young man with Iranian roots, and it turned out that our most common language (apart from English) was German. The Czech lady apologized for her bad German, but she studied Norwegian so the solution was to let her answer in Norwegian (which all Danes with the slightest flair for languages can understand) - and soon she also spoke German to us. Problem solved..

The problem with these sessions is that you never know who turns up, and sometimes it may be very few people. It may even happen that there is someone present who ONLY understands English (or English and Danish), and with low participation everybody then has to speak English - what a bummer if you wanted to speak Italian or French! But the last couple of times I have luckily escaped that situation.

ESP: Unu el la temoj, kiujn ni diskutis estis Esperanto, kaj feliĉe la plej ĵusveninta junulo ne sciis ion ajn pri ĉi tiu lingvo, do ni havis la ŝancon klarigi al li la projekton de Zamenhof - en la germana. Fakte la pli aĝa sinjorino opiniis, ke Esperanto en kelkaj miloj da jaroj povus iĝi la komuna internacia lingvo de la mondo - mi pensas, ke ĝi estas tro optimisma.

RUS: За час до языкового кафе я начал читать в русской книге несколько страниц о каком-то журналисте для американских газет в москве, у которого была какая-то болезнь, а потом было что-то о хозяйке и съемной комнате и мебель в нем. Название содержало слово «блог», но это все, что я могу вспомнить об этой книге. Я бы лучше прочитал статьи в Википедии.

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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby Iversen » Tue Jul 16, 2019 9:23 pm

Today I have visited two cities on a day trip, and I have planned one more trip in the near future. You might think this was an excellent opportunity to listen to podcasts or read some foreign stuff, but I missed the chance - probably because I know that my excursions are so labour intensive that I don't really want to add to the strain. I did bring along my antiquated MP3 player, but only used it to play rain and waterfalls to drown out external sounds.

With so little to report, let me return to one thing I forgot to mention about my weekend trip. In two days I visited six zoos, one fortress, one railway museum and one open air museum (Hjerl Hede), and in July this last one has populated most of it houses with volunteers in folk costumes who do the tasks relevant for each house. I have been there out of season, and I remember that after my last visit I lamented that they apparently didn't care a bit about the dialects spoken in Jutland in former times. But this time I heard a lot of Jutish, and ..

JUT: .. a tøws te at de æ a guer ting at man ikk bare såen smier æ kulturarv u a æ windu bår fordi te at de dær Køwnhavner ett forstår en diss a wosses jyysk dialekte. De ka' sku lær'ed! Fandeme!

(translation into normal boring Danish: "jeg synes (til) at det er en god ting at man ikke bare sådan smider kulturarven ud af vinduet, bare fordi de der københavnere ikke forstår en disse af vores jyske dialekter. De kan sgu lære det! Fandeme!

For instance I saw three volunteers who discussed with four visitors, who sounded like they came from Copenhagen or somewhere over there. One visitor lady said afterwards that she hadn't understood anything of what the three volunteers had said. For me it was very easy, maybe because I have heard so much of it it former times where there were more strong dialect speakers around ... but the times are a-changing, and young people nowadays just listen to English pop songs all day long from their 'smart' phones. I remember from my economic study days that there were situations with curves that at some point crossed .. and what happened then? In this case we see the phones getting smarter and the youngsters are getting ever dumber, so sometime in the near future you may live to see those dastard phones becoming smarter than their human carriers ... and what will that lead to?

By the way, please notice that the Jutish dialects (i.e. the dialects spoken in Jutland by 'jyder' ) don't use postclitic articles as standard Danish does, i.e. "æ kulturarv" against "kulturarvEN". This is one thing in the Jutish dialects that harks back to a time before the viking age, where the demonstrative pronoun in its weak form as prepositioned article suddenly found itself attached to the end of substantives. In Icelandic the process has still not been carried totally through through since both the original substantive and the postpositioned article are inflected. In standard Danish they have fused completely so that only the article is inflected, not the substantival root. But the Jutish dialects avoided this problem totally simply by retaining the article in front of the articles at all times, and they have simplified it (like English) to just one form, which can be "æ" or "a" depending on the location.

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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby Iversen » Wed Jul 17, 2019 5:45 pm

I have been studying Irish the whole afternoon (while listening to composers whose name starts with Mu- , like G and G Muffat, Munktell and Mussorgsky). I have not touched this language for several months now, and I can definitely feel that it has retracted into a dark corner of my brain.

To pull it out from its hiding place again I first grabbed a bilingual collection I once made with texts about Alzheimer and Asperger and lucid dreaming. I found a text which I hadn't finished and then I started out from rock bottom doing a hyperliteral translation. Why? Because I needed to get back into the quirky Irish way of thinking, and then ordinary translations are more like distractions - even when they are correct according to the usual criteria. But sometimes they aren't even correct. In this case I had used Google translate to make an English translation, and then errors are expected. There are some standard error types, and mostly you can see when something smells fishy. Take for instance this sentence with its GT translation:

IR: Deachrachtaí a dhéanann leanbh a oiriúnú i mbaol ionfhabhtuithe, mar sin is minic go mbíonn leanaí le siondróm Asperger tinn. Ina dhiaidh sin, cuireann sé seo tuilleadh le hidirgnhíomhaioch shóisialta leanaí le comhghecaithe, agus tagann comhartaí aois scoile siondróm an-aithint.

GT-EN: Difficulties caused by a child to be infected with infections, so Asperger's syndrome often suffers. Subsequently, this adds further to the children's social interaction with colleagues, and Asperger's syndrome syndrome disagrees.

It is clear that there is something rotten here, but when I looked "ionfhabhtú" up in my green Collins pocket dictionary it actually confirmed that it means 'infection' - and I have never heard that Asperger children have more snotty noses than more social kids. As for the last half sentence my own guess is that it means something like ".., and there-will-be signs at school (of) syndrome Asperger (to be) recognized/noted". No disagreements there, but just symptoms - and 'syndrome' is of course only mentioned once.

As I mentioned I don't expect GT to provide correct translations, but just to give me so many hints that I can avoid some of my dictionary look-ups, so I intend to continue using it - even for languages like Irish where it is less confidence inspiring than with larger languages. Unfortunately I have noticed that many of my problems with precisely this text are caused by strange things in the original text - like in this passage:

IR: ..., nó cuma siad le cuma neamhspleách seasta ...
GT-EN: or look to a steady independent look

If my Collins can be trusted "cuma" actually does mean 'look', but in the sense "shape, form", and it is used in expressions like "is cuma" ('it doesn't matter'). How come then that it is used about the eyes of Asperger kids, and apparently both as a verb and a substantive in the same sentence? How bad style is that? The answer could be that the original text itself is the product of a machine translator, and the suspicion becomes 99,9999% certainty at this sentence:

It: Dá bhrí sin, is cosúil go minic go mbionn leanaí le siondróm Asperger féin-lárnach, callous, emotionally, cold, tactless, unpredictable ina n-iompraíocht.

I don't think it is necessary to quote the translation here - the original is clearly a fake. So now I have dug my Potter no. one in Irish and in English up again and intend to continue my studies with that book. Its Irish version is of course also a translation, but made by a competent human being.

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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 » Sat Jul 20, 2019 9:51 pm

Since my latest message in theis thread I have continued my studies in Irish using Harry Potter, but the level here is higher than in the Wikipedia articles and similar things which I normally use so it is a fairly slow process. I have also done some belated repetitions of Albanian wordlists, but I do remember the texts the words came from and this is a quite relaxing task compared to Potter in Irish. But today I got the silly idea that I write something about marmalade/jam in Latin and it turned out to be even more hardcore than the Potter book-partly because it turned out to be a problem to find anything about the subject in the sources - even the dictionaries lack crucial words.

Point one: the ancient Greeks and Romans did know that you could make fruit mash stiffer by cooking it for a long time with honey and a sprinkle of grape juice. There are some hints in Apicius chap. 3 about this. But it seems that the old folks first tried with quinces and .. well, the book mentions melons, but the next step in marmalade/jam confection came much later with the introduction of citrus fruits, and the Brits seems to have been frozen in time at a stage where the word marmalade was reserved for products based on citrus fruits (Anne Boleyn seems to have been fond of those), whereas similar products based on other things had to be named 'jam'. Not so in the rest of Europe: in Denmark the difference between "syltetøj" and "marmelade" is that 'syltetøj' generally is slightly thinner and contains chunks of fruit, but you can make both of whatever you can imagine - including vegetables like carrots. 'Marmelade' may contain berries, but it is generally more uniform in its consistency.

Point two: quinces and xitrus fruits and kiwis and some other vegetables and fruits contain coagulating agents like pectin acid, but 'red' berries don't so here you you have to add them while you are boiling the berries - otherwise you'll get juice rather than jam. You'll normally also add lots of sugar. In commercial products there will generally only be 30 to 40% fruit, and most of the rest is sugar. But when my mother and I make jam we use 1 part sugar to 2 parts fruit. And the reason that we make it at all is that my mum's freezer was bristling with berries from several years back, and now the harvest of 2019 is looming on the horizon - so we had to do something. Which hints at a third problem: names for additives and machinery and utensils used during the production process. The Romans didn't have freezers so I had to invent a name, and when I tried to remember the Latin name for cauldron I had to make a detour to the druid in Asterix (called "Miraculix" in Danish), and then I found the word "aenum" in "Asterix Gallus". But my dictionaries say "haenum" so that's the form I will be using below.

So all in all the followin wee peece o' Latin is bound to be full of glaring anachronisms and unidiomaticisms, but here it is:

LAT: Ut fructum liquamen producere, multitudo fructorum aut baccarum necesse est, sed in culina matri meae capsa hyperfrigorifica est quae baccis plena est ex aliquot annis, et cum tempore messi baccarum anni MMXIX imminente, mater eqoque decideravimus quam solutioni liquamen facere - bis III kilogrammata, et capsa semper semiplena est baccis. In horto inter alia ribes nigras et ribes rubra atque rubum habet, et processum infra describo.

Haenum magnum necesse est, quia in unaquaque coctione III kilogrammata baccarum coximus - ribes nigras rubraque et rubum. Bene, baccas lente fervefacere usque ad mixturam maxime cum baccis dissolutis habes - id est, fervefacere assidue versante forsitan X minutos post initium ebullitionis, et per hos minutos etium saccharium adiungere, semper versante (agitatio necesse est ut evitari se saccharum ad fondo cacabi adhaerere). Per ultimos minutos etiam agentem coagulantem adiungere. In Dania venundatus est pulvis "Melatin", qui plerumque ex acidi pectinis compostus est (pectinus maxime ex fructis citrinibus extrahenditur) - circa 10-12 grammata per 3 kilogrammata baccarum 'rubram' convenient. Pauliter refrigescere permittes concoctione, et tunc remedium conservationis adicere et in receptula sterila fundere.

F5937a06_bær_til_syltetøjsfremstilling.jpg
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User avatar
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 » Mon Jul 22, 2019 9:20 pm

Yesterday I studied some more Harry Potter in Irish, but I have already commented on that. Suffice to say that I still find the Irish text quite taxing, and it can be sometimes even be difficult with the English original as a guide because the way Irish expresses things is so different from English thinking patterns. Besides I don't feel quite ready to write about the subject in Irish at this point, but give me a few days more then I may be back to my former best form (which was execrable by any standards, but above zero).

I have also done some long delayed repetitions of old Albanian wordlists. I still remember the texts the words originally came from, and I also remember that I have written something about those texts here. For instance there was one about the pretty bay at Vlore and another about Gjirokastra, the birth town of the infamous dictator Enver Hoxha (and therefore fairly well preserved), and when when I had done the wordlist thing I to my surprise discovered a text about lucid dreams in the same text collection which I hadn't worked on yet - so that's what I did next.

AL: Kam studiuar gjithashtu disa tekste irlandeze, por tekstet irlandeze ishin ndoshta mashtrime - ishin përkthimi i makinës. Ndoshta nuk ndodh me tekstet shqipe. Teksti vjen nga një faqe interneti "alien.al", por nuk është aq e pasigurt sa dikush do të mendonte sipas emrit. Së pari, ka diçka rreth gjumit REM dhe për eksperimentet e S.LaBerge, më vonë në ushtrimet atje - ndoshta - mund të nxisin ëndërrim të shndritshëm, por pa pretendime okulte.

And then I finished the evening with a bit of Greek on the internet. I made a text collection with three articles about Kastoria - two of which didn't tell much about the town itself, more about its surroundings, but the third mentions the main sights of the town, including an ecological museum where you apparently can see a digital version of the town in the 6. century (maybe not what you expect in an ecological museum, but nonetheless a good idea).

F3915a03-5_Kastoria.jpg

GR: Στην πραγματικότητα, έγραψα ήδη για αυτήν την πόλη πριν από δύο χρόνια, αλλά με βάση άλλα κείμενα. Η πόλη είναι ιδιαίτερη επειδή βρίσκεται σε ένα νησί σε μια λίμνη, που συνδέεται με το 'ενδοχώρα' με μια στενή σούβλα γης. Έχει διατηρήσει πολλά κτίρια από τη βυζαντινή εποχή, καθιστώντας την ενδιαφέρουσα. Αλλά το πιο σημαντικό πράγμα για εμένα στη στιγμή είναι ότι μπορώ να διαβάσω κάτι στα ελληνικά. Έχω ήδη μελετήσει ένα από τα τρία κείμενα σήμερα, αλλά ....

...then I broke of the studies and went downtown by bus to our local main library. Here I read some 200-300 pages in Danish about psychology and a book about translation techniques, and then I sat down to see whether anybody would turn up for the 'language café. The big problem is always the low number of participants, and today we were just two - but luckily the other one was an elderly gentleman who wanted to train his Spanish - normally he only had a paid (!) teacher to speak to. And I rarely get a chance to use my Spanish so I was of course happy to oblige. And when he lamented that it was hard for him at his age to remember vocabulary I took that as an excuse to demonstrate my three-column word list system for him.

SP: También discutimos la cantidad de palabras comunes en español y inglés contra francés y inglés, el gran numero de formas verbales en español y la señalización bilingüe en las calles de Barcelona y algunos otros temas.

This evening I haven't studied yet. I have had my printed photos from as far back as my trip to Brazil in February lying around in an envelope, and now at long last I managed to glue them into my photo album no. 59. Actually photos on paper are obsolete and I rarely look into those albums so I have started a 'detox' process: from the holidays I have made this year I have had less than half printed, and I may stop totally after the next album, which will be no. 60 (not counting the albums that contain stereo photos - I'm at no. 6 with those). Already now I only have the complete collection of photos on my computer (apart from its back up and my mum's laptop), and that's also where I look at them nowadays.

FO-EDB.jpg

RIght now I have finished listening to three hours of music by the German organ composer Pachelbel (who became famous because of a canon) and I'm in the middle of some six hours of violin wizardry by signor Niccolo Paganini - maybe I can find a text in Italian about this guy.
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