Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

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Iversen
Black Belt - 4th Dan
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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...
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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby Iversen » Tue Dec 10, 2019 10:18 pm

I have more or less established the music collection that will serve me to the end of my life, but I still have one major task: to update my thematic system, wherein the main themes of all the 10.000 or so compositions are handwritten with pen and ink. Luckily I have kept it à jour through the years so that it only is my additions from the last couple of years that need to be written down and included on the relevant pages - but I have a list with 400-500 files that have lacunes so this process won't be finished tomorrow (maybe in 2020, but it may last even longer). So how can this be done without loosing touch with my languages? Well, I can't do anything while I listen to the music and write themes down, but I can listen to speech while I make a fair copy from my scrawled notes, and that's exactly what I have done today as you can see below. And then later I'll scan the fair copy and integrate the themes into my system - a long and tedious process, but it has to be done. And I can listen to even more babble in other languages while I do that part of the job.

AF: Ek het 'n geruime tyd gelede podcasts op Afrikaans afgelaai van 'n webwerf met die naam 'Burger'. Nou het ek deur Google gesoek en 'n webwerf ontdek wat nie minder nie as 135 shows van 2013 tot 2019 in die reeks bevat. Die programme was jare lank 'Die tale wat ons praat' genoem, maar het nou die naam verander na 'Taaldinge'. Die inhoud is egter dieselfde: onderhoude oor spraken - nie net met taalkundiges nie, maar ook met professionele persone uit ander gebiede. Ek het byvoorbeeld na 'n onderhoud geluister oor die uitspraak van minerale en metale (hoe sal jy 'platinum' sê?) met 'n geoloog en 'n ander onderhoud oor die terminologie van sterrekunde met 'n sterrekundige uut de Universiteit van Jo'burg. Ek sou wou hê dat ook ander tale so 'n skatkis het.

Platt: Plattdüütsch hett apenboor nich zo'n schattkist, aver ik höff enige videos funnen op Youtube, so wie een Talk op Platt vun Eckernföör un fief Dele uut 'n video vun Pla(u)tt in Sibirien, wo enige wenige Düütsche Mennonnitten noch leven (die die Stalin nich ermordet hett) - dortoe Musiek uut De Herr der Ringe, die Thema vun die Mitteleerde. In diese Moment höör ik die tweete vun twee Fähr-programme mit Hans Meinen und Annie Heger. 't is unverwacht dat ik överhööft jichtenswat vun 't Platt noch versteh üm dat ik in 2019 keen woord op Platt höört hett, aver mien Platt is as 't schient noch lebennig. Im Gegendeel segt die Hoogdüütsche Ansagerin vöör die Sendung uut Eckernföor dat vöör ehr 't Platt so frömd is wie die Rhätoromanische Taal. Un vun een Dame uut NDR (Norddüütsche Rundfunk) is dat eenfach schändlich. Wiedennig kunnen die Lüü vun Norddüütschland so totaal ehr lokale Spraak vergeten?

BU: Направих и списъци с думи на български и руски, но това е друга тема.

Sibirien op platt.jpg
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Iversen
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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...
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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby Iversen » Wed Dec 11, 2019 9:31 pm

SCO: Ah didnae hae ony tribble tae unnerstaund Afrikaans or Platt yestreen, and then I thocht that my Scots likeweys micht do wi a wee bit o keep-up. At first a thocht that I woud read or listen tae something aboot yule (aka "Christmas"), but than I fand a page frae the Scots beuksellers with the follaein message:

A growin confidence is kythin amang the Scots-speakin community whase confidence Scottish society delibrately tried tae smash. (...) In the bad auld days, a buik wi Scots in it wid inevitably shaw Scots speakers as teuchters or bawheids. But the independence debate chynged this. Scots speakers noo are faur less likely tae buy buiks that treat them like streengers in their ain country.

A also ken this rideeculous seetiation frae Platt, whare some micht dink that aw Plattschnakers be auld peatdiggers and morons who daenae iver read beuks, but an avalanche of guid beuks in Scots and Platt micht change that impression.

Frae the buikseller's page ah conteenaed tae http://www.gov.scot, and fra this semi-offeecial page ah fand a link tae the "Scots Language Centre", whit forby a course of Scots had a series o links tae the mair recent programmes frae the Scots radio (also found at Soundcloud) - sae that the nou ah hae listened tae the least twa oors of Scots gab..

EN: I also had a wee peek at Albanian, but here I had to recognize that my remaining skills didn't even suffice to reread an old study text without peeking into the translation. I have therefore spent some time copying and studying part of the text (which deals with the bronce age in Albania), but it'll take some more work to get this language back on track. I then proceeded to Indonesian, which hadn't degraded to the same lamentable degree as Albanian, but nevertheless might do with some loving care. So I printed the Wikipedia text about Christmas ('Natal') in Bahasa Indonesia out with a translation into Dutch/Esperanto and intend to work my way through it during the coming week. OK, the guys down there may not be christian, but modern christmas here has also preciously little to do with christianity and the article is quite long and detailed- it even mentions the dark companion of Father Christmas, "Black Peter" - so I expect to learn a guid dale from it.

Kunst023.jpg

By the way, the oldest preserved poem in Scots is called the "The Brus". It was written around 1375 (almost at the same time as the Canterbury Tales by Chaucer) and deals with the heroic exploits of Robert the Bruce and others during the Scottish Independence Wars. It is preserved in two manuscripts from 1487 and 1489, and you can find it on the homepage of the Gutenberg project. I have only read the beginning of it, but it is striking how easy it is to read this poem in spite of its age. The following section tells about the situation where the Scottish king is dead without an heir, and now the nobility ask the English king Edward Longshanks to arbitrate - which he of course uses as an excuse to declare himself king of Scotland. And then the Scots have to fight a long and bloody war to regain their independence.

How the Lords of Scotland took the King of England to be Arbiter at the last.
Quhen Alexander the King was deid,
That Scotland haid to steyr and leid,
The land sex yher, and mayr perfay,
Lay desolat eftyr hys day;
(...)
For sum wald haiff the Balleoll king;
For he wes cummyn off the offspryng
Off hyr that eldest systir was.
And othir sum nyt all that cas;
(...)
Be this resoun that part thocht hale,
hat the lord off Anandyrdale,
Robert the Bruys Erle off Carryk,
Aucht to succeid to the kynryk.
The barownys thus war at discord,
(...)


TheBruce.jpg
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Iversen
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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 » Thu Dec 12, 2019 11:34 pm

I am in a sense doing a run through all my weak languages, and to get some quality time for language studies today I deliberately avoided to switch on my PC - so no temptation to listen to music or podcasts! I first worked with a text in Albanian about the iron age Illyrians, and I could feel that the mist slowly lift - but not to the extent that I'll write anything in this language here today. After that I worked with an article in Slovak about some small languages, and I'll comment extensively on that below. And finally I went through a fairly long article from the one and only airline magazine which I managed to grab during my last visit to Greece - the one from Aegean Airways. The article told about Greek wine, and ...

GR: Υπάρχουν στην Ελλάδα και άλλα είδη κρασιού από την ιδιότυπη Ρετσίνα, η οποία περιέχει ρητίνη. Αλλά το άρθρο μιλά περισσότερο για το 'κανονικό' κρασί, συμπεριλαμβανομένου του ελληνικού λευκού κρασιού που φαίνεται να είναι ελάχιστα γνωστό εκτός Ελλάδας. Το άρθρο αναφέρει ορισμένες οινοποιείες από την περιοχή της Αθήνας, και τουλάχιστον μία εταιρία είναι στην ιδιοκτησία της οικογένειας για τέσσερις γενιές. Αλλά δυστυχώς για τις εταιρείες πίνω εγώ σχεδόν ποτέ το κρασί.

I already had some unknown/dubious words lying around from a text about hiking in Greece, after copying and studying the wine about wine I had collected enough words to make a wordlist with around 100 words - but at the same time I felt confident enough with texts at this level to completely ignore the English translation in the magazine. So how can I then notate so many supposedly unknown words? Well, the answer lies in the notion of 'unknown', which also covers a lot of guessable words. A more reliable yardstick is to notice how many of those words I look up - including those I look up in vain, and that's quite a lot. Actually my Greek-Danish dictionary is quite good and comprehensive, but even here I ran into a number of words which it didn't contain - at least not in their original form, but maybe as derivations. And this is a dictionary with some 28.000 headwords according to its own claims!

When I worked with Albanian and with Slovak texts I used two dictionaries, a small one and a larger one. And in both cases I missed a fairly large number of words in the small dictionaries, which is to be expected - but even in the larger dictionaries I several times looked in vain.

By the way, I added an extra 100 words directly from the dictionary to the Greek wordlist, but that's another story..

I show one page of Slovak text copy below. The situation was that I have been neglecting this language for some months and it was never really strong, so when I copied the first section of text, the column with 'unknown' words grew twice as fast. I took this as a signal that it was worth copying the text once more, and the second time I then had the feeling that I actually understood Slovak - which is a nice feeling. And it was not totally without foundation because already when I had copied the next section I could see that I notated far fewer words, and I also had a better feeling about it - so I just went on to the next clause. In other words, it only took some serious copy-cum-study of eight lines of handwritten texts to 'get back into the groove' with this language. Which I take as a sign that I actually get results from doing this seemingly idiotic and pointless kind of activity. Albanian turned out to be slightly more recalcitrant, but even there I could feel progress after just one page. The one thing this exercise can't bring me is fluency in thinking, writing and speaking ... for that I need to get my head buzzing, and the copying thing is too slow and deliberate and meticulous to make my head spin.

Slovak_text_copy.jpg
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Iversen
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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby Iversen » Sat Dec 14, 2019 11:45 am

Yesterday I had to get through a medical examination, and while waiting I had time enough to read the booklet "Civiltà Nuragica" (95 pages) by Paolo Melis which I bought during my so far only trip to Sardinia. Now when you as linguistically minded people hear about Sardinia your first reaction might be to think of the Sardinian language, which is claimed to be the most conservative descendant of Latin - but my trip was done entirely in Italian, and you don't see many signs in the streets of Olbia that the island has its own language with no less than five main dialects (supplemented by areas allegedly speaking a Catalan dialect marked by an avalanche of /u/ sounds).

During my short stay I basically stayed in Olbia so I missed seeing the famous nuraghe, i.e. megalitic stone buildings dating back to the bronze age. The people who built them never wrote anything, and the culture basically vanished with the arrival first of Karthagians, later the Romans. The language spoken there now is of course a descendant of Latin, but the genetic constitution of the population harks back to ages even before the Yamnaya invasion in Europe (from 2800 BC onwards). Actually the Sardinians represent the closest remaining relatives of long dead mr. Ötzi from the Alps, whom you now can see in a deepfreezer in Bolzano, Italy.

IT: Durante il mio soggiorno, ho visitato la biblioteca pubblica dove ho letto una grammatica luguduriana, seguita da alcune pagine di una storia in lingua sarda. Sono andato in una libreria per comprare quest'ultima, e il libro era ancora sul mercato, ma non ce l'avevano nella libreria. Da allora ho letto e ascoltato un poco di sardo a causa di una domanda su HTLAL, ma per il resto ho ignorato la lingua. E non ho mai avuto il tempo per leggere il libro di Melis, ma ora tuttavia l'ho fatto. E una volta che ho finito scrivere questo messaggio, intento di studiare il contenuto del sito Web sardu.net, ma il poco che ho già letto sul suo frontespizio non mi pare troppo spaventoso.

Il mio viaggio ad Olbia nell'anno 2011 è stato un punto di riferimento anche per un altro evento memorabile: questa fue l'ultima volta che ho visto un film in un cinema (escluse le proiezioni in musei ecc.). Stavo vagando per le strade, e per coincidenza ho passato un cinema che stava per mostrare un film di Harry Potter soltanto cinque minuti più tardi - e poi ho pensato, vabbè, fammelo vedere. E per quanto mi ricordo, è stato doppiato in italiano, quindi non è stato uno spreco totale di tempo.

f4235a05_Harry Potter_Olbia.jpg
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Iversen
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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 Dec 16, 2019 5:48 pm

Today I went to the library again to participate in the weekly language café, but it was almost a fiasco. When it started at 4 o'clock PM there were a few people who just sat around and read or looked at their notebooks, but no one else apart from me seemed to be antecipating the café. So I was just about to leave, but then I somehow did get something out of it, because ...

GR: Δύο νέοι άνδρες κάθισαν σε άλλο τραπέζι, και λίγο αργότερα ένα κορίτσι ήρθε να ρωτήσει αν αυτό ήταν το γλωσσικό καφέ. Βέβαια ήταν, αλλά δεν υπήρχαν άλλοι, και έτσι ξανά πήγε. Όμως ένας από τους νεαρούς είπε ότι πίστευαν επίσης ότι ήρθαν και αυτούς για το γλωσσικό καφενείο, αλλά είχαν εγκαταλείψει. Αποδείχθηκε ότι ο ένας ήταν μισός Έλληνας, οπότε έλαβα απροσδόκητα την ευκαιρία να μιλήσω μια σύντομη συζήτηση στην ελληνική γλώσσα - δεν θα μπορούσε να γίνει κάτι περισσότερο γιατί δεν ήμουν έτοιμος να θυμηθώ την ελληνική μου γλώσσα. Εκτός αυτού, διάβαζα βουλγαρικά λίγο πριν, έτσι το κεφάλι μου ήταν γεμάτο από βουλγαρικά λόγια. Η συζήτηση δεν κράτησε πολύ καιρό, καθώς και ο άλλος νεαρός άνδρας δεν μας περίμενε πραγματικά, αλλά ήταν μια χαμένη ευκαιρία για μένα - την πρώτη φορά από τη Θεσσαλονίκη στο έτος 2016 που μίλησα λίγο ελληνικά και τότε δεν κατάφερα να το βγάλω σωστά η βαθιά κατάψυξη.

Yesterday it was bad weather and I stayed at home all day long. I worked on my music collection in the evening,but before that I spent several hours doing text copies in one language after the other - mostly those that I had neglected for some months because of my music thing. Below I have shown how a page may look if things run smoothly: no duplications and a right column that is shorter than the text - which in this case consists of two passages from the homepage of the Museum of Natural History in Beograd, Serbia. Actually my Serbian isn't better in better shape than my Slovak, and I have probably neglected it for longer than both Bulgarian and Slovak, but apparently working on one Slavic language also spills over to the others because they are so closely related. And it may be relevant that I have spent more time making wordlists in Serbian than in Bulgarian or Slovak.

I did also work on one language that is totally unrelated to any other language in my collection: Indonesian. As I have mentioned earlier I found a fairly long article about Christmas on -of all places - the Indonesian Wikipedia, but it's only now that I have had time to work with it. And the surprising thing is that it didn't cause me nearly as much trouble as for instance the Albanian text I mentioned a few days ago. I may write some more about this text and its language later, but right now I'm more keen on getting back to my studies.

Serbian_text_copy.jpg

PS: I almost forgot to mention that I also have worked on the rest of the Bulgarian text about fauna during the Silurian period plus an Icelandic text about the famous bust of Nefertiti - maybe I'll write some more about the latter later, but you have probably heard enough about my Bulgarian-based paleozoic studies.
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Iversen
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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 » Tue Dec 17, 2019 12:47 pm

This is a follow-up to the preceding message from yesterday. I did study some - I worked on one more section of the Albanian text about the Illyrians, and it went easier than last time, but I still feel that this language is far far away. Once I could even construct short messages in it, but for the time being I'll refrain from trying to replicate this. The language stays on my agenda, though - and then I think about Irish, which must be even further away. I'll revert to that also, but not today.

In contrast my Indonesian text about Xmas went down rather smoothly. It even explains that the X is fully justified since it goes back to the Greek name for Christ: Χριστός. It then goes on to briefly quote Matthew and Luke, but since that's religious stuff I won't comment on it. Instead there is one more detail about text copies that might be relevant, namely that my right column (for new or otherwise interesting words) in Indonesian became fairly long because I also include the roots of the new words with this language (I also tend to quote perfective/imperfective verbs as pairs in the Slavic languages). The construction system of Indonesian is based on roots whose meaning can be modified with prefixes, mostly leaving the root recognisable (although there are things like initial 's' becoming 'y'). There is a good example of a second order root derivation in the text.

As you may know there are people who consider Christmas as a religious festival (rather than a tribute to god Mammon), and such things are called "hari raya" in Indonesian ('big day'). In my text I ran into the passage "Natal dirayakan dalam kebaktian malam pada tanggal 24 Desember (...)" (Christmas is-celebrated in protestant-mass (on) day 24 December). It's my dictionary (Tuttle) that states that "kebaktian" only can be a protestant mass, not catholic, even though the word comes from 'bakti', meaning "service, devotion'. But the funny thing is the passive form "dirayakan" which is based on the secondary term of the compund "hari raya" - so the passage could actually be cut into pieces as "Christmas is-bigged in thing-devotion for date 24 December". According to the dictionary "raya" is also used in other compounds, like "kaya hari": very rich ("kaya" alone means rich) and "jalan hari" (highway). Just for fun I let Google translate the single word "raya" and guess what: the main translation was "highway", with 'great', 'large' and 'big' only given as alternatives.

On a related note: my dictionary didn't contain the word "peringat", but it does have the root "ingat", meaning 'remember', and in my bilingual printout 'peringat' is translated as 'celebrate', which fits quite well into the context. But the dictionary gives another term for "to celebrate": "merayakan".

As for the Icelandic text it is taken from the homepage of the Icelandic TV company, and to boot there is a 9 minutes long clip in glorious spoken Icelandic about Nefertiti to accompany it - or maybe it's the other way round. Nevermind, ...

IC: Nefertiti var kvæntur faraos Akhenaten, sem reyndi að framkvæma trúarbyltingu sem myndi aðeins skilja eftir einn guð, sólguðinn Aton, sem aðeins var hægt að hafa samband í gegnum faraó - slægð! Prestarnir voru ekki hrifnir og þegar Akhenaten lést var byltingu hans alveg framhjá snúið aftur af syni hans og eftirmanni Tutankhamun, sem starfaði undir eftirliti vezira hans Aye og hershöfðingja Horemheb. Og hvað með unnusta hans Neferneferuaten Nefertiti? Akhenaten verður örugglega hafa verið ástfanginn, af því að það er prentað í solhymne hans og hann gerði henni einnig að með-stjórnar Faraós - með rétt að skoðast í fullri stærð. En nafn hennar hverfur skyndilega úr annálunum, og ekki er vitað hvort hún dó - sumir telja að hún hafi breytt nafni (til Neferneferuaten). Eftir andlát Akhenaten var nýja höfuðborg Amarna rifin, og enginn veit hvar lík faraóinns týndist - það er ekki óhugsandi að prestarnir hafi eyðilagt það. Múmía eftir Nefertiti má finnast - þar hafa verið framsettið nokkrir frambjóðendur - en sláandi minningin um konuna er falleg brjóstmynd, sem stendur í Nýja safninu í Berlín. Þú getur ekki ljósmyndað í herberginu með glergrindunum hennar, en með sumara (zoom) frá aðliggjandi herbergi fer það auðvelt. Hins vegar valdi ég að sýna eintak, sem sýnt var á sýningunni Duckomania í Frankfurt í árið 1991. Er hún ekki falleg -jafnvel í afriti ?

P3403a02_Duckomenta.jpg
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Iversen
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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby Iversen » Thu Dec 19, 2019 3:04 pm

FR: Hier j'ai regardé et - à titre exceptionnel - aussi écouté la télé: il y avait deux programmes sur TV5 où l'on parlait de Notre Dame de Paris qui brûla le 15. avril 2019. D'aucuns ont silenciueusement murmuré que certains des ouvriers sur le toit ont fumés des cigarettes en travaillant - ce qui n'était pas trop astucieux de leur part, vu que les authoritées ecclesiastiques avaient décidé de ne pas installer un système d'extinction d'incendies parce que les objets irremplaçables dans l'église ne supporteraient pas d'être mouillés en cas d'incendie. Ce problème a été partiellement resolu maintenant, car l'église a brulé et beaucoup de ces objets ont été détruits. Et j'espère que l'ouvrier qui (peut-être - ou peut-être pas) a perdu un mégot de cigarette dans le hangar ait vraiment honte!

Bon ben, ce fut hier la première foi que j'ai vraiment pu voir dans quelle état l'église se trouve à ce point. Le président Macron a dit qu'il faut la reconstruire au cours des prochain cinq années, et beaucop d'associations et personnnes riches ont promis de payer du moins une partie des frais. Tant bien (pourvu que les grèves actuelles cessent avant l'expiration de ce periode), mais je ne savais pas dans quelle mesure Notre Dame de Paris ait été conservée. Et je me sentais un tout petit peu responsable puisque j'ai écrit une tragédie française (d'apres monsieur Racine) nommée Phèdre Atomique, dans laquelle l'église de Notre Dame avait été transformée en centrale nucléaire et s'avait explosée à la fin de la conte de peur qu'on la démonte pour rendre la France plus verte.

Il parait que la cupole centrale a été tout à fait detruite, avec le rang de fenêtres superieures et parties du toit. Or la fameuse façade et les murs extérieurs et les colonnes intérieures ont survécu, plus du moins une des splendides rosaces et nombre d'autres vitraux - ce qui me plait énormement puisque j'ai j'ai toujours aimé regarder ces splendides examples médiévaux de l'art verrier à son apogée le plus élevée. Et encore une surprise: le grand orgue, chef-d'oeuvre de Cliquot et de Cavaillé-Colle et d'autres, a été sauvé, quoiqu'il faut faire de menues réparations par ci et par là et laver les tuyeaux avant qu'on puisse retourner à l'utiliser pleinement comme avant l'incendie désastreuse. Or, l'organiste a pu jouer une petite pièce pour montrer que la méchanique alambique derriére les pipes visibles n'a pas été gatée.

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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 Dec 21, 2019 9:20 am

Apart from eating and sleeping I spent my time yesterday on three things: going downtown to take pictures of places with lots of Christmas bling bling (also with a visit to the library, whose decorations were more sober), writing down themes from some of my music files and studying Slovak. For this last task I used a text about the Smolenicky castle, which I haven't visited. It lies some 20 km North of Trnava and should be within reach by public transport, but since I already have spent so much time in Slovakia recently it is not likely that I'll get back there the next couple of years. The text is included in a bilingual set I printed out for study purposes, and they are probably all at the same level. I had some trouble with the first two (about small museums in Slovakia), but already now it seems that doing some text copy-with-study on these two has brought me to the point where I found the third one fairly easy - I have tried to concoct a small rant below to regain a bit of my former active prowess (which never was worth writing home about), but just being able to understand written Slovak again isn't too bad - with so little repetition. Now I'm also going to have a peek at Czech and Ukranian which I never have studied formally to see whether they also have become accessible at least at the getting-the-gist level. As I wrote in an earlier message the Slavic languages are so closely related that I expect work on one of them to spill over to the rest of the bunch.

SLK: Slovak je jazyk, v ktorom "ch" je umiestnené ďaleko od písmena "c" v abecede, kde takmer neviditeľné znamienko " ' " značí palatizáciu (napríklad u infinitívov) a kde prízvuk ma zdôrazňuje*, pretože je na iných miestach ako na tých, kde som to očakával. Mám však dobré slovníky a zo dňa na deň sa stáva zrozumiteľnejším. Smolenický palác je stredoveký, zrekonštruoval ho však Jozef Pálfi, ktorý musel byť veľmi bohatý (aspoň pred projektom - možno nie po ňom). Nenavštívil som to, ale architektom bol Jozef Hubert, ktorý pracoval aj na Bojnickom paláci - a navštívil som tento palác a považoval som ho za veľmi zaujímavý. V Bojniciach sa nachádza aj zoologická záhrada, ktorá zvyšuje atraktivitu mesta.

EO: Mi venis al la kastelo Bojnice dum la monda kongreso de Esperanto en Nitro, kaj hazarde mi renkontis ekskursan grupon de la kongreso, tial ke mi rajtis sekvi la grupon ĉirkaŭe en la palaco. Sed mi vizitis la zoo sen helpu. Tre agrabla loko, sed streĉa ĉar ĝi kuŝas sur monteta flanko.

* the Slovak stress stresses me because it ain't where I expected it to be (I couldn't translate this wordplay directly into Slovak). Or in the plural: the Slovak stresses stress me - ain't that neat? And now we are in the comment section: my Slovak writing skills weren't ever anything to write home about - and that would also be a bad idea because nobody in my family would be able to understand a message in any Slavic language...

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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 Dec 21, 2019 11:31 pm

Second message today: I have continued my Slovak studies by making wordlists based on the things I have studied recently, and then I also found some old wordlists which hadn't been been reviewed, so I also did that. With 'first' and 'second round' wordlists I have probably been through some 4-500 Slovak words today.

Maybe I should have listened to music, but I somehow ended up listening to lectures and science programmes in English on Youtube instead while writing those wordlists. This isn't ideal since trying to memorize words while listening to lectures isn't an ideal combination - especially when I concurrently also watched television without sound, but with subtitles in Danish. I do however feel that my memory did its best with those wordlists, and I also remember a lot from the videos - like the description of the finds of a 35 feet long crocodile with long legs and sea scorpions and the humanoid Kenyanthropus with the flat face from the paleontological sphere and something about the van Oort belt and poor little Pluto at the margen of the solar system on the astronomical front.

When I had finished the wordlists I got the splendid idea to search for more science videos, but in another language. And since then I have been listening to four long videos plus a few fragments about astronomy in Brazilian Portuguese - all in all at least 4 hours. In this moment I'm listening to a 43 minutes long video about the assumed collision between Terra and another planet named Theia, and before that I listened to a video about the Bola de Neve (snowball) theory, which states that the whole planet was frozen over some 700.000.000 years ago and only thawed when volcanoes filled the atmosphere with carbon dioxide.

POR: Antes disso, ouvi uma palestra sobre energia escura na série "Uma Visão Geral". Ela tenia uma vantagem: o palestrante falava muito devagar - mas, na verdade, eu também entendi quase todo dum outro vídeo sobre o mesmo tópico na série Simplifísica, embora o palestrante lá falava como uma metralhadora com diarréia. Não houve muito nisso que me surpreendeu - afinal, eu tenho já lido artigos e visto vídeos e filmes sobre todos os tópicos mencionados, mas precisamente isso me ajuda a entender as postagens brasileiras. E também pude treinar meu brasileiro em fevereiro, quando visitei Recife e Natal. Estou contento com o meu nivel.

So why do three things at the same time: well, I feel that I have to do as much study as possible before the Christmas days - I have a dire feeling that my study activity will be severely limited during that time.

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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
x 14962

Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby Iversen » Sun Dec 22, 2019 8:01 pm

.. and today I have done more or less the same thing as yesterday: I have done the repetitions for my latest Slovak wordlists, and I have listened to documentary videos on Youtube, but this time in another Romance language which I haven't cultivated nearly as assiduously as Portuguese here in 2019: Romanian. The first problem was to locate suitable videos in Romanian - there are so many in English that they tend to drown out everything else, so I did a search using the terms "dinozauri -dinosaurus" - and then I somehow ended up with a video about ginormous dino-munching snakes (about the same size as Voldemort's favorite horcrust in the Harry Potter series).

RO: Impresia mea a fost impresia că românul meu a supraviețuit destul de bine - nu avea probleme să înțeleg videoclipurile menționate.
Videoclipul pe care l-am văzut mai întâi a început cu reclama unui site irelevant de muzică, după care m-avia așteptat ca următorul să fie pur și simplu rahat pur - dar nu era fost deloc rău. Am primit o mențiune sensibilă a șarpelui titanoboa care poate crește până la 13 metri lungime. Dar a mâncat cu adevărat dinozaurii? Probabil că nu (cu excepția păsărilor), pentru că a trăit în Paleocen - adică după dispariția dinozaurilor în urmă cu 65 de milioane de ani, și a de fapt umplut un decalaj în ecologie după moartea lor. Există și alte videoclipuri construite pe același principiu pe alte subiecte paleontologice. În acest moment ascult un videoclip despre fauna pe Pâmint înainte de aparerea dinozaurilor - și printre altele, este vorba despre de proto-mamiferele din Perm și Trias. Dar nu șerpi, deci cei mai vechi șerpi incontestabili apar în perioada Cretaceului, ultima parte a Mezosoicum. Și acum am trecut la un alt videoclip, aceasta data vorbînd despre scorpioni de mar, insecte uriașe și alte animale de vârste ainda mai vechi.

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And now I have to stop writing ... XMAS (shudder shudder shudder..) is drawing nigh, and I have to pack a few things!

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