Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

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Iversen
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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby Iversen » Sun Oct 18, 2020 11:26 pm

I have reached page 44 in my log, and I have quite a lot of things to write about ... but no, today I'll write about something else.

SP: Acabo de ver un programa en TVE (mi único canal de television en español) sobre el extraño comportamiento de las plantas, sobre todo cómo se mueven sin musculatura. Ok, se pasa lentamente, pero "eppur se mueven" (como hubiera dicho Galileo). Fue una mezcla extraña de un estudio amigable para los niños y hechos duros científicos para los adultos, pero puedo acceptar un cierto número de divagaciones infantiles siempre que haya algunos hechos reales también.

EN: Actually I had been listening to baroque music by Italian composer for some hours (while looking them up in the Italian Wikipedia to learn more about them), but then there was a classical music quiz on Danish TV which I wanted not only to watch, but also to hear, so for once I had to switch on the sound on my TV set - and then I ended up watching TV with sound for the rest of the evening. Concerning the quiz: the participants have to guess music played backwards or played as short snippets or played by the participants by banging themselves on the heads with plastic tubes that emit specific notes - one more expression of infantile behaviour on TV for grown-ups, but quite entertaining nevertheless.. I was shocked that one of the teamleaders couldn't recognize the raindrop prelude of Chopin, but on the other hand the other teamleader succeded in guessing a prelude by Rachmaninov just from the first chord, and the first teamleader - the one who didn't know the raindrop prelude - recognized another piece after some 3 or 4 notes, I don't remember which one.

Personally I'm more in trouble this year where the emphasis is on chamber music than I was the first couple of years where the whole Danish Radiosymphony Orchestra had been summoned to play - as much to save money as for covid prevention, I guess. I am just not quite as savvy about chamber music as I am about orchestral music. And my instant knowledge about the standard repertoire is not quite what it was some years ago - simply because these days I listen more to unknown and forgotten music than to the standard fare.

IT: Come parte dei miei studi musicali, ho ovviamente letto una serie di testi in altre lingue, compreso l'italiano. E uno dei motivi è il modo in cui i lavori venivano pubblicati ai vecchi tempi. Al giorno d'oggi, un numero di 'opus' può riferirsi a un gemito di gatto ottuso in pochi minuti, ma nell'era barocca e anche nell'epoca classica, le persone scrivevano quantità folle di musica - tanto che spesso non fu pubblicata. Ma se fu rilasciato, normalente accadeva in raccolte di 12 pezzi di qualche tipo. Ma talvolta il sistema è andato nel fango di polvere da sparo.

Per esempio, il compositore Giovanni Legrenzi ha presentato una raccolta chiamata "Acclamationi Divote a voce sola" per la pubblicazione a Bologna, dove la collezione ha ricevuto il numero opus 10 - ma subito dopo ha inviato una dozzina di concerti a Venezia, dove anche questi hanno ricevuto il numero 10 ("La Cetra") perché l'editore veneziano non sapeva nulla sopra qualsiasi pubblicazione simultanea a Bologna. Perciò si è conventi da saltare il numero 11 e continuare direttamente con l'opus 12, ma il risultato è che i concerti in la Cetra oggi a volte si attestano come opus 10 qualche-numero, a volte come opus 11 lo-stesso-numero. Ci sono tuttavia anche altri dove una raccolta è stata pubblicata da due case diferente, con le opere della collezzione in ordine diversa.

E così oggi ci sono studiosi che stanno cercando perplessi di capirlo tutto - nello stesso tempo in cui devono cercare opere inedite nelle vecchie biblioteche e sugli scaffali polverosi delle chiese. O scoprire quale de due fratelli ha scritto una certa opera quando il manuscritto soltanto da il cognome (come per esempio nel caso degli fratelli Alessandro e Benedetto Marcello). Un altro esempio, che ho menzionato nel mio log: un fisarmonicista francese di nome de Chedeville scrisse una serie di sei sonate nello stile di Vivaldi e fece pubblicare il risultato come l'opus 13 di Vivaldi, "Il Pastor Fido". Ho comprato l'opera su un LP Turnabout negli anni '70 dove Vivaldi era ancora accetttato come autore. Ma haha, recentemente si è trovata la comunicazione segreta tra un editore francese (un signore Marchand) e de Chedeville che afferma senza dubbio che si tratta di una truffa. Ma la musica è eccellente. Lo stesso coi concerti chiamati Concerti Armonici 'di Pergolesi'. Oggi si sa senza dubbio che il vero compositore è l'olandese Unico Wilhelm van Wassenaer - tuttavia la musica è eccelente, e mi piace di averla nella mia collezione.

Il Pastor Fido.jpg
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Iversen
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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby Iversen » Mon Oct 19, 2020 10:51 pm

I skipped the report about my progress through my own log yesterday, but today I'll mention a few points. To my surprise I can understand almost everything I wrote back then without even looking in a dictionary or putting passages through the Google translator, so even though I may feel that I haven't made enough progress this experience proves that I must have learned something along the way. And that's of course a strong motivating factor to continue writing here. I don't know how many read the things I write (apart from the fact that the number below the pictures grow), but as long as I learn from doing those writing exercises the time hasn't been wasted.

And in retrospect I'm now reminded about not only topics I studied in past times, but also of formulations which I still remember with some fondness - like when I wondered when the increasingly effeminate and banalized Edinburgh tattoos would drop the final lone piper above the gate and replace him with a singer who was famous back in 2015, and "then at the end it winnae be a lonely piper tae hinderly sooth yer rattling nerves wi a wee bit o delitesome pibroch, but Rihanna screamin her lungs oot." In 2016 I then made a new attempt to watch the show without getting sick, but my experience was the same - quote (in Scots):

SCO: The stairt wisnae bad, with pipes an drums an stout men in tartan skirts.. OK, mebbe it wisnae reelly necessar tae play 100 pibrooch tunes in 3-4 minutes, but it wis nae dout pure Scots. Then a menyie o sodgers showed hou fast thay coud play with thare guns while thare stonefaced commander daundered up an doun atween them - boring, boring, but ah cannae claim that it wis irrelevant. After that some cantie fiddle pleyers frae the Hebrides comed along, an ah wis quite blye o that eetem of the program. The rest wis an affront tae the great traditions o this event - t'was like a failed mynt tae marry dauncin militarie muisickers wi Bollywood an Moulin Rouge. Houaniver ah didnae see motorbikes this yeer, and the lony piper wis still wailing some sad tuin frae his hame country on a guid auld bagpipe. Mebbe thay coudnae afford the salary o Rihanna...

F0117a01_Edinburra castle (withoot ony piper, but also withoot Rihanna).jpg

One the same page I told about my rip to Haiti and I show a bilingual text in French and Haitian Creole - actually I haven't seen anything in that Creole since 2016. It was a one time off...

GER: Auf Seite 31 fasse ich die Vorträge zusammen, die ich beim 'gathering' von 2016 gehört habe. Dies ist ein bißchen historisch, weil ich keine weiteren Vorträge machen werde und nicht beabsichtige, in den bevorstehenden Versammlungen teilzunehmen, aber es war ganz schön dort zu sein, solange es dauerte. Darüber hinaus gibt es aber auch eine Tabelle mit den Formen der deutschen Artikel und den regelmässige Endungen den Adjektive und Substantive. Ich habe dies ich auf Anfrage gemacht, aber vergessen, wer mich darum gebeten hatte, und jetzt kann ich es in einem neueren Faden wiederverwenden. Ansonsten mache ich meistens grüne Blätter (hier ausnahmsweise weiß) für meine neuen und schwachen Sprachen wie Albanisch auf Seite 33, nicht für alten Bekannten wie Deutsch.

EN: So far I have reached page 45, where the most unexpected find was the pedigree of all the Titans in the Greek mythology - big lumping trolls which the Olympian gods had a lot of trouble defeating. Below the 'titanomachia' is shown in a partial copy which can be studied at the Antique Museum in my home town. The sad guy in the foreground isn't part of the story - he's a dying gaul, butchered by the troops of evil mr. Cesar. At the bottom level of Hell in Dante's comedy there are three unfortunate persons: one being Judas who betrayed Jesus, the other two being the murderers of Cesar. I have always wondered why they didn't get a medal and a place in the divine harp consort in Heaven.

Apart from that: I went to the language café. First I spoke in English with a Turkish man who needed some practice, but when he left the pair at the neighbouring table asked me what this café was all about, and then it turned out to be a Danish man and his Venezuelan wife. She also wanted to train her English, but half the time we spoke Spanish - and of course we spoke at full speed with no concessions. It is OK to speak in Spanish to Danish learners, but more fun to be confronted with speech at a completely native level.

Titanomachia_Antique_museum.jpg

EDIT: I checked the history of the poor dying Gaul. It seems that it is a plaster copy of a Roman copy of a statue commissioned between 230 and 220 BC by Attalos of Pergamon to celebrate his victory over some marauding Celts, quite possibly those that were called Galatians by the Greeks - and yes, there were Celts as far away as Asia Minor in those days. So for once I can't blame Julius Cesar for the murder...
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Iversen
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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby Iversen » Sat Oct 24, 2020 6:49 pm

I have been on a family visit, and as usual that has meant some days away from my computer and a large dip in my study activity. I did bring along Langenscheidt's micro German-Greek dictionary and did also make a wordlist with around 100 words - but then the neontube in my mother's best lamp broke down, and the font used for the dictionary is minuscule so ....

Since I returned yesterday I have continued reading my own old log, where I now have finished the year 2016. This was actually the year where I had managed to copy my old cassettes to Waw and MP3, and where I got caught up in moving the items around to collect the works of each composer on as few files as possible (using the archaic model from the tapes with an a and a b side, but more lax rules about the length of each file) ... and I'm basically through with that, but now I'm in the middle of a longterm project where I replace old bad recordings with new ones with less noise. And where did that noise come from? Simple answer: vinyl - and to some extent cassettes, but the old scratchy vinyl records are my worst enemy right now. I hate vinyl... but when I threw my record collection away it was nevertheless a sad day. The picture below only shows a tiny fraction of the collection, which was started in the 60s.

F6017a01-2-Pladesamling-goodbye.jpg

In between I do watch a bit of television. For instance there were a couple of semi-touristical programs called linea blu and linea verde on RaiUno, and watching such programs can to some extent alleviate the lack of travelling, but not completely. We are not quite as hard hit by corona here in Denmark as for instance the French or Brits or Czechs, but the number of new positives is pointing upwards, and the authorities fear that this soon will spread to the hospitalization curves. We have had a lot in infections of mink farms (both owners and minks) and also some cases with foreign workers living close together in cramped accommodations ... but the most nervewracking is the occurrence of severe outburst due to utter complete stupidity of people who should know better, like when more or less a whole boarding school went together to a sauna - that trip alone has so far resulted at least 71 infections. We are still allowed to visit our museums and libraries, but now only muzzled, and tourism abroad has been almost completely abolished - all because some idiots can't understand that they should keep a safe distance to other human beings and carnivores.

OK, back to my log. Around Christmas 2016 I explained how to make braided christmas hearts, and on page 52 I show the incipits of some of my own musical compositions from a distant past. The reason is that I somehow got involved into a revision process where I even had to rewrite some works - and that added to the endless row of my feeble excuses for not studying languages all day long. That task has been finished, but not the revision of my music collection.

Between page 45 and 50 I wrote quite a lot about different study methods, including the scriptorium and hyperliteral translations in their different variants, and I also found time to practice them myself, but all in all it is clear why I haven't advanced more in my Slavic languages etc. - too much time spent on music. I even had a period where the relationships between Anglosaxon and Frisian were on top of the agenda, and there are other topics that took spread over several messages - with comments from other members, and I sincerely welcome those.

The period I have been studying since yesterday started with the aftermath of the polyglot congress in Thessaloniki, so there I of course had to comment on some of the lectures - and on the paradoxical tendency to do them in English. I have not checked the program for this year's virtual conference since the main thing for me now wouldn't be the lectures, but the polyglot conversations between them.

Stjerneformede julehjerter.jpg
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Iversen
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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby Iversen » Sun Oct 25, 2020 11:35 am

SP: ¡Hola! He hoy visto en TVE una transmisión muy interesante sobre Tartessos, una cultura que Wikipedia en inglés sigue calificando con condescendencia de 'semimítica'. Si uno espería encontrar una gran ciudad esto podría ser justificado, dado que aún no se ha rastreada un tal ciudad, pero el círculo cultural tartésico en sí es un hecho arqueológico, nada menos.

El nombre Tartessos es griego, y los griegos se refirieron al lugar como una ciudad fuera de los 'pilares de Hércules' (es decir, el Estrecho de Gibraltar), pero a pesar del descubrimiento de almenos 90 inscripciones breves, nadie sabe cómo los habitantes llamaban a su ciudad y la tierra asociada y su idioma está desconocido. Todo lo que se sabe es que la cultura comenzó a finales de la Edad del Bronce y sobrevivió hasta el inicio de la Edad del Hierro, cuando cesó repentinamente.

La transmisión mencionó varios sitios que solo han hecho excavados en este milenio. En el más grande de ellos, Turuñuela, hay restos de una 'hecatomba', es decir, una gran ceremonia de sacrificio donde los sacerdotes habían sacrificado no solo bueys, sino también preciosos caballos. Esto indica un miedo total en la población, tal vez porque se acercaba un enemigo externo (también se han mencionado inundaciones, pero inundaciones no se podían predecir y no pueden explicar los sacrificios) - se mencionó de paso que los celtíberos en este época estaban en avance, por lo que tal vez fueron ellos que asustaban a los tartésicos. Pero también hubo otras culturas en la península, como los íberos al este y noreste y los lusitanos entre Portugal y Madrid (la qual, por supuesto, aún no existía).

En Turuñuela se ha hallado un solo raro esqueleto completo - lo cual es bastante excepcional porque los tartésicos practicaban la cremación - pero aún no se había examinado su ADN, por lo que no se sabe si hay por ejemplo algún rastro del Mediterráneo oriental o se la población de Tartessos era completamente autòctono. Sin embargo, se mencionó que en un sitio más pequeño (Rancho algo) había dos niveles, y en el más antiguo se encontró un símbolo para el dios egipcio Seth, mientras que en la parte superior se encontraron símbolos del dio fenicio Baal. Y, por cierto, el templo fue construido como una cabeza de toro, el que se puede ver como un lejano señal de avance de las bárbaras corridas contemporáneas de toros en España.

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

Postby Iversen » Tue Oct 27, 2020 10:58 am

I went as usual to the Language café at the library yesterday, but that will be the last time in the foreseeable future. We have had rising covid numbers for some time, and apparently some scared jerk in the administration has decided that only two persons are allowed at each table in the area - which is is idiotic since we have had enough problems to collect four or five persons per session, and therefore it has been easy to keep a social distance at at least one meter. But the timorous chicken person has driven his/her point home by getting all offending chairs removed and putting up messages that chairs and tables are to be at their sacrosanct hallowed positions. The problem is that a language café without a formel organization can't work in that scenario. Typically people get involved by hearing some talk in a foreign language, and then they come to ask how things function. But then you suddenly have three persons (maybe more) involved, and that is apparently a cardinal sin these days. Actually the current official limit for unofficial gatherings (including those in private homes) is ten persons so when some hyperzealous jerk decides that the rule should have been two persons then it will push us nearer a situation where even more people simply loose confidence in the sanity of the rulers and stop observing even those recommandations that make sense.

Yesterday I stood at the empty area (empty apart from one person working on his computer), and then a young woman came to ask what the heck was going on. She wanted to train her Spanish, and soon after an Italian lady came along whom I from earlier meetings knew to be fluent in Spanish (and Portuguese too) .. and then we had to sit down in another area in the library where the limitation to two persons hadn't been enforced strictly (yet). However the area that was set aside to the language café has been crippled to the point where I can't see the point in trying to keep the thing running. So I'm definitely not going there next Monday.

The problem is that it was well neigh the only location where I still had a chance to speak in at least some of my languages. But then you might say: with rising covid numbers, shouldn't we all be happy to suffer? My answer is that social distancing, strict hygiene and avoidance of crowding with hundreds of participants quelled the first wawe in the spring, and if it doesn't do the same thing now (in spite of ever more strict rules about just about anything) then the explanation must be that there are people who have given up following those precautionary measures - and then it doesn't help to give irrelevant and symbolic (and sometimes even contraproductive) orders.

F6006a02_Dokk1.jpg

Apart from that: I have now reached page 68 in this log - at the precise point in time (July 19 2017) where it passed 40.000 views. Right now it is at 123.739 (and rising) so there is still at least one thing that still functions in this mad world. Given that most readers probably skip certain Foreignese passages (or use a translation program) this is not a bad result at all.

Another milestone (albeit outside the purely linguistical scope): at page 57 I discovered that it was possible to upload for a living composer to upload your own compositions for free, provided that they were made more or less completely public domain. In most countries they only enter public domain 70 years after the last surviving author's death (but 50 years in Canada where the site is located).

The first of the polyglot gatherings in Bratislava also took place in 2017, and since I can't see the point in going straight to such an event and directly home again I went first to Tuzla in Bosnia, from there to Bratislava and back home by train through Austria and Germany. Btw. I made a mistake that year: the crew asked me to send in my illustrations for that year's lecture several months in advance and I complied, so when we finally got to the actual day for the lecture I had changed my mind about what I wanted to say, and the illustrations didn't fit my speech. The result was my least satisfying lecture to date. I discussed certain weird sentence constructions like this one in Danish:

"Jeg tror det er ham den voksne, som at der klarer den" (I believe it is him the grown-up who that there manages-to-do it)

The funny thing is that they are used far more frequently than some of the 'authorized' constructions, but not in formal writing - and purists hate them because they can't analyze them within their limited framework. We are not nearly as much in awe of our grammarians as people in certain other countries, but there are limits. Another example is the "fordi at" ('because that') which spurns the vitriolic hatred of our few remaining purists (who only accept "fordi" without "at") - but in fact the construction has been used by almost everybody since Old Norse, and there is still a similar construction in Modern Icelandic ('af því að'). The point is that the "-di" ('því') is a demonstrative pronoun, and it is perfectly OK to attach a subordinate clause to a demonstrative with the relative "at" - purists or not.

This may be a slightly technical and highbrow discussion, but luckily the thread has also sometimes moved into less formal, but equally important realms - often with the help of other members. Like when much of page 65-66 is spent on a long discussion about how to make good French fries and what to put on them. We use "remoulade" in Denmark (a French word referring to a concoction of mayonnaise with chopped pickles and other weird ingredients), but I have rarely seen that outside this country - and definitely not in Franch or Belgium where they tend to use pure mayonnaise (also used along with ketchup in Germany, but there they have shortened the name to 'mayo'). I condemn fries in Britain as soggy, where they should be crisp at the outside and soft inside - but when I last visited England it seemed that the fry quality has improved - most fries were edible.

Kunst058.JPG
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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby Nogon » Tue Oct 27, 2020 4:26 pm

What a pity about the Language café! I love to read about it, and wish we had something similar too. There are Language cafés at the Stockholm library, but most of them are dedicated to new speakers of Swedish, and a few are English or French cafés, but there are no "allrounders".
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Iversen
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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby Iversen » Thu Oct 29, 2020 4:26 pm

From today we also have to wear those facemasks in shops and cultural institutions like libraries and museums, but luckily still not outdoors. My stance on those contraptions is that they defintely serve a purpose in crowded places, especially indoors where there isn't enough ventilation, but strictly speaking there isn't any medical reason at all for carrying them when there isn't another living soul within sight. The problem the government had to face was however that not enough people were using them in those situations where they are relevant - like in stock packed busses . And with infection rates going up our government had to do something so it chose to make them obligatory first in public transport and a few other places - and now in all shops and libraries and sundry other places.

So I have celebrated my last 'naked' day by visiting as many museums as possible in my own town, and yesterday I went to a nearby town and visited a few more. In one of them I spoke to the lady behind the desk (and the acrylic screen which now has come in general use everywhere). We discussed the loss of travel opportunities, and she mentioned that this would the first year for a very long time where she couldn't take her annual trip to Athens - Crete would still in principle be possible, but she had a place plus family and friends in Athens there so it had to be that town, and being big and crowded, the capital is of course the worst hit place in Greece. So no visit down there in 2020 for her. But then ...

GR: ... αποδείχθηκε ότι αυτή η κυρία μιλούσε άπταιστα ελληνικά και μπορούσε επίσης να το διαβάσει άπταιστα, αλλά σπάνια έγραψε και δεν είχε σπουδάσει γραμματική. Είναι το αντίθετο του προφίλ μου - γράφω αντί να μιλάω. Είπε μερικά πράματα στα ελληνικά και εγώ τους απάντησα, αλλά δεν ήμουνα προετοιμασμένος για μια συζήτηση στα καθαρά ελληνική χωρίς προειδοποίηση, και συνεπώς συνεχίσαμε στα Δανικά - αλλά ήταν ακόμα ένα χρήσιμο 'ξύπνημα'. Ποτέ δεν ξέρετε πότε θα έχετε την ευκαιρία να χρησιμοποιήσετε μια δική μου περιφερειακή γλώσσα. Αυτήν τη στιγμή, η Ελλάδα βρίσκεται στη λίστα των πιθανών προορισμών, αλλά υποθέτω ότι οι περιορισμοί είναι αυστηροί εκεί, και στη συνέχεια δεν είναι ευχαρίστηση.

F3442a05 - propylaia.jpg

EN: I returned to my own town between 3 and 5 o'clock in the afternoon where my budget bus card can't be used, but then I just visited our local art museum once again and lo and behold, the 'artist in residence' for October turned out to be a French lady - and of course I couldn't resist using the opportunity. After all, my French is always ready but needs a bit of exercise every now and then - my Greek has to be awakened before I can use it.

FR: Elle rentrerait en France à la fin du mois, et il était donc naturel de discuter les differences entre la situation en France (ou pire encore: en Belgique ou la République Tchèque, où les taux d'infection en ce moment sont dix fois plus élevé qu'au Danemark - cinq fois plus hauts en France). Il est en effet difficile d'expliquer pourquoi la France a été touchée tellement plus durement par le virus que le Danemark - surtout après que la population avait été emprisonnée pendant des mois pour maîtriser la première vague. À Paris, le problème c'est, entre autres, qu'il faut être ultrariche pour vivre dans le centre de la ville, et donc les gens ordinaires vivent en banlieue et prennent le métro dans le centre tous les jours. métro boulot dodo comme on dit ... J'ai proposé une loi qui augmenterait les impôts sur les entreprises et agences urbaines de 10% s'ils n'avaient pas d'horaires de travail flexibles pour leurs employées - cela pourrait peut-être alléger un peu la pression sur le métro. Mais travailler au foyer (si possible) pour tout le monde seraient encore mieux. Elle était quelque peu nerveuse concernant le discours du président hier soir - et pour cause: monsieur Macron a ordonné un mois de confinement comme au printemps où les Français grosso modo sont condamnés à rester chez soi. Je suis vraiment désolé pour eux!

EN: right now I'm listening to youtube videos while I write this, and I have just finished one instalment in a series (signed by Ecolinguist) where people are speaking different languages, and then the challenge is to find out how much they understand of each other's languages which they haven't formally studied. Actually there were two quizzes with the combination Latin versus Romanian, and it seemed that these languages weren't totally mutually incomprehensible - but on the other hand Romanian has moved quite far away from mum. It appears that there are subtitles in English, but I didn't need them - and besides I can't see them because I have been writing here.

RO: În imaginea de mai jos, este doamna din dreapta care luptă cu cei trei vorbitori de latină din stânga - și având în vedere cât de puține latine și române am auzit în ultimii ani, am fost foarte încântat să pot înțelege ambele limbi. De asemenea, este surprinzător faptul că a fost posibilă reunirea a trei vorbitori fluenti de limba latină. La urma urmei, sunt mai mulți vorbitori de română...

By the way, concerning Latin:

LA: in pagina LXIX rursus invenit conexumvocabularium Davidis Morganis, quod optime est quia translationes nominibus rerum ex vita cotidiana potius quam vel plura vocabula ex mundo militare praebet. Structura sua quanquam non optima est, et ego ex rete igitur totum librum prehensi ut egomet versionem utilam machinari, sed longe ne consultavi (facte oblitus sum) et nunc nescio ubicationem suam in computralem meam accuratem sit - sed qum rursus invenirem, hanc versionam indicem vocabulorum utilium certe uturus sum.

Exempli:
"cartoon (movies)" ---> "imagines ridiculae pictae animataeque"
"one-way street" ---> "via cursus unici"
"slum, shanty-town, Hooverville" ---> "tuguripolis, casopolis"
"give lectures" ---> "lectiones habere"
"McDonald’s" ---> "taberna Macdonaldiana"
"Schutzimpfung" ---> "vaccination* prohibitiva+ (v. praeventiva*) "

Latin versus Romanian.jpg
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Cèid Donn
Blue Belt
Posts: 513
Joined: Thu Nov 15, 2018 10:48 pm
Languages: en-us (n); français, gàidhlig, gaeilge, cymraeg, brezhoneg, español
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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby Cèid Donn » Thu Oct 29, 2020 5:10 pm

From today we also have to wear those facemasks in shops and cultural institutions like libraries and museums, but luckily still not outdoors. My stance on those contraptions is that they are really useful in crowded places, especially indoors where there isn't enough ventilation, but there isn't any medical reason at all for carrying them when there isn't another living soul within sight. The problem is howver that the government had to it obligatory to wear them just about everywhere because weren't weren't using them in those situations where they were extremely relevant - like in stock packed busses . And with infection rates going up governments had to do something.


Mandatory mask regulations have worked, and one reason is yes, they are very effective in places were transmission is likely, virtually cutting the transmission rate to zero with 100% compliance, provided the air in a particular space isn't heavily loaded with the virus already.

But also when the population is required to wear them everywhere, you're not leaving it up to hundreds of thousands of individuals to subjectively make multiple micro-decisions throughout the day about when they need to put a mask on, and thus limiting the chances of when people forget, misjudge, get lazy, rationalize or just assume it's okay for them not to wear a mask when in fact they are in a place or situation that puts them at risk of exposure or spreading the virus themselves. It's not a matter of the government changing the curtains. It's about probability and the fact that whenever and wherever you go out in public, there are a multitude of variables you cannot control and have no knowledge about, so your judgements and choices based on what you think you know about your risks are always handicapped. You are not omnipotent. And neither is anyone else you will encounter on any given day. Probability rules that it's simply best to make everyone wear mask at all times in public. Whether you subjectively perceive it as a pointless act, especially based on your own personal comfort, is not valid in the face of all the variables you cannot control about society and this virus.

It's also about human nature, about how people get lazy and fall into whatever feels comfortable to them, despite them rationally knowing they shouldn't get lax. Again, just make people wear masks.
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Note from an educator and former ESL/test skills tutor: Any learner, including self-learners, can use the CEFR for self-assessment. The CEFR is for helping learners progress and not for gatekeeping and bullying.

Dagane
Orange Belt
Posts: 172
Joined: Wed Apr 13, 2016 6:08 pm
Location: London, UK
Languages: I regularly use:
Spanish (N)
English (C2)
German (C1+)
Hungarian (A2?)

I formerly studied:
Galician (B2?)
Dutch (A1)
Czech (A0)
Portuguese (A2?)
French (A1?)
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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby Dagane » Thu Oct 29, 2020 9:52 pm

Tartesos 8-)

De adolescente me interesé por esta cultura de forma pasajera. Es cierto que se sabe muy poco, pero también que el territorio central se presupone en lo que hoy es el inmenso parque natural de Doñana, de gran importancia natural y frágil conservación. O lo que es lo mismo, no creemos conocer el yacimiento principal, porque estaría en Doñana. Vete tú a conseguir licencia para excavar allí...
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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 » Thu Oct 29, 2020 10:04 pm

SP: No creo que los arqueólogos profesionales se atrevan a dejarme excavar Tartessos. Pero si uno encuentra una ciudad más grande en la zona, seguro que me gustaría verla con mis propios ojos el sitio cuando el mundo vuelva a ser normal. Acabo de ver un programa de televisión donde se decía que llegan de nuevo un montón de turistas a las Islas Canarias (OK, menos que antes de la corona), pero en mi país tienes que restar en cuarentena durante dos semanas si visitas CUALQUIER parte de España.
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