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Iversen’s Multiconfused Log (see p.1!)

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SII
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 Message 1537 of 3959
01 December 2009 at 6:59am | IP Logged 
Iversen wrote:
3) о книге A. Мангеля об "Илиаде" и "Одиссее"
OK, I thought I could get away with it because of the quotes..


In Russian the names of books, cities, ships etc are declined when they use without the "common" word, but with this word these names aren't declined. For example: "в городе Москва" but "в Москве". In your sentence you can speak "о книге А. Мангеля об "Илиаде" и "Одиссее"" or "о книге А. Мангеля о книгах "Илиада" и "Одиссея"" -- in last case the names of books must be in nominative because before them stay "common" word "о книгах".

Quote:
6) "Быть нервным": I was not aware of the psychiatric use of this expression, - I thought it meant "to be nervous" - I should have looked it up in a dictionary!


"Быть нервным" uses not only in psychiatric, but it means that a man/woman _always_ is very nervous without the real reasons. Such peoples aren't "mad", but theirs reactions very often go out of normal limits. But Odysseus wasn't psychopath or very nervous by his nature, he only be excited, worried, uneasy because he was absent very long time. He was nervous, but temporarily, not always, and in Russian it is need to use the verb "нервничать" or "волноваться".
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 Message 1538 of 3959
01 December 2009 at 3:53pm | IP Logged 
SII wrote:
In Russian the names of books, cities, ships etc are declined when they use without the "common" word, but with this word these names aren't declined. For example: "в городе Москва" but "в Москве". In your sentence you can speak "о книге А. Мангеля об "Илиаде" и "Одиссее"" or "о книге А. Мангеля о книгах "Илиада" и "Одиссея"" -- in last case the names of books must be in nominative because before them stay "common" word "о книгах".


This is a very good explanation - I have seen some booktitles etc. inflected, some not, and I have read some rules for inflection of foreign personal names in my grammar books. But I had not noticed that the presence or absence of a generic word (here книгах) is the decisive factor that decides whether the following book titles are inflected or not.

I have also taken the different expressions for different kinds of nervousness ad notam.

Edited by Iversen on 01 December 2009 at 3:57pm

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SII
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 Message 1539 of 3959
01 December 2009 at 5:34pm | IP Logged 
Iversen
Now the rule about generic words sometimes not work: the level of grammatical correctness in Russia very strlongly fall after crush of USSR. For example, I often hear "В городе Москве" instead of "В городе Москва". Probably, hereafter the rule will be changed officially...
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 Message 1540 of 3959
02 December 2009 at 11:47pm | IP Logged 
SP: Entre las ruinas mayas de Copán, en el oeste de Honduras, hay un altar de piedra esculpida que representa a los 16 gobernantes del mundo maya. Su fundador mitológico, Yax Kuk Mo, está esculpido pasándole el cetro del poder al último gobernante, Yax Pasah, quien hizo construir el altar en el siglo VI, unos 200 años después de que el fundador de la dinastía, de acuerdo con la leyenda, llegara a Copán desde otra ciudad de Mesoamérica. Hasta ahora los arqueólogos no tenían razones para creer que la historia de Yax Kuk Mo no fuera sólo una leyenda. Pero un proyecto de excavación de 14 años recientemente completado condujo a descubrimientos que confirman la historia ancestral. www.iadb.org

Yo hice en 2005 la Ruta Maya, un viaje por cuatro paises durante el cual he visitado un gran numero de ruinas mayas mas o menos conocidas, y evidentemente he tambien visitado la ciudad de Copán ruinas que está ubicada en Hondueras unos kilometros al sur de la frontera con Guatemala. En efecto las ruinas están 2-3 chilometras fuera de la ciudad - pero se puede caminar. En comparación con por ejemplo Tikal (en Guatamala), las ruinas de Copán parecen más refinadas y menos abrumadores, y el visitante toma nota en particular de los estelas muy finamente talladas. He visto también la celebre escalera con jeroglíficos con la historia de la ciudad maya y de sus reyes. Cerca del final de la dinastía fue la ciudad conquistada por otra ciudad más pequeña, y su rey fue sacrificado a los dioses. Después de este acontecimiento traumático el heredero naturamente cercó de restablecer el respeto de la dinastía, y se cree que la escalera con el material histórico fue construido para este propósito. Pero no pasó mucho tiempo antes que fue abandonada este ciudad como la mayoría de las ciudades maya.

Como una de las mas lungas inscripciones maya esta fue importante para la descodificación de la escritura maya. Existe tambien unos pocos libros en glifos maya y algunas indicaciones sobre sus principios. Antes de que se podía leer las escritura, hubo algunas teorías ingenuas sobre los mayas como una raza particolarmente pacífica, que sólo estaba interesado en la astronomía y en sus calendarios. Pero al leer los textos originales, los sabios han reconocido que la historia maya fue una cadena de guerras sangrientas y luchas dinásticas.

---------

For some reason I ended up reading about the Mayas tonight. It started out as Spanish language training, but I also found an interesting source in Russian, and of course the literature in English is too extensive to be ignored so I have also used some English sources. If you want to learn about the Mayan writing system you should definitely download the complete guide from the site www.famsi.org, which also has tables of rulers and a lot of other information. But the Mayas are in general so well known that you can find articles in most major languages about them.

One text (at www.iadb.org) mentioned the famous stair at Copán where there are descriptions of all 16 kings of the local rulers. The crux of the matter is that it apparently has been possible to verify that the founder of the dynasty Yax Kuk Mo actually did exist, and this makes it likely that the whole thing actually depicts the reality - which actually was debatable. One of the most impressive feats in linguistics is the deciphering of the Maya writing, which took a long time both because of the complexity of the writing itself and the scarcity of long inscriptions. Most Maya books were burnt by the Spanish, but ironically the man who was responsible for this also collected information about the writing that was crucial for the deciphering. Actually he completely misunderstood the answers of his informants, but the scientists who worked on the decipherment found out how to use the information. And now the glyphs can generally be read. And the outcome? Well, the naive fairytales about a gentle people of stargazers and calendar makers has exploded into a chaotic picture of bloody wars and dynastic feuds!

RU: Я читал о расвалe культуры майя на русский сайт www.matri-x.ru. Авторы говорят уже о возможности стихийных бедствий (таких, как тайфуны), но два наиболее вероятные объяснени - войны и разрушения окружающей среды. Войны я уже упоминал. Их сельское хозяйство был действительно весьма эффективно, c террасах c целью предотвращения эрозии, но она не может прокормить растущее население в крупных городах. И лес был расчищен частично для топлива в домах и частично для производство топлива для известкового раствора тереть на храмях. Майя строили свои храмы в слоях, и каждый слой должен быть смазана известковым раствором. Как пишут авторы русский: мы можем даже узнать что-то.

I have read something about the collapse of the Maya culture on a private Russian site, www.matri-x.ru. The authors discuss the possibility of natural disasters, but the main explanations for the debâcle are wars and misuse of natural resources. The Maya actually had a fairly efficient agriculture, using terraces for water saving and to limit erosion. But in the long run it was not enough to feed the increasing populations in the towns. Besides the forests were cut down to get fuel for domestic consumption AND for burning lime for their temples. This may sound innocuous, but the Mayans built their temples in layers (like Russian dolls), and each and every level was covered with a thick layer of plaster.

As the Russian authors write there is a lesson to be learnt from this ignominous end to a great civilisation ....


Edited by Iversen on 03 December 2009 at 10:14pm

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Iversen
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 Message 1541 of 3959
03 December 2009 at 11:11pm | IP Logged 
I have spent the time I had earmarked for my log thread on reading other threads, so here you get the short version:

As I have written some days ago I bought a Serbian magazine at the main railwaystation in Copenhagen. I spent some days studying at the end of August, and since then I have made a few wordlists and looked at some bilingual texts which I produced using Google as described in my Language Learning Guide. But all in all it doesn't amount to much in time - it is definitely an on-and-off affair. However the number of words and grammatical elements that are shared with Russian has given me some ability to understand texts in Serbian ... and Croatian. Actually I have one Cyrillic dictionary and two with Latin letters, and it is not a big problem looking words up in a dictionary with another alphabet because there is a strict 1-to-1 correspondence.

In this magazine (Нин) there are several articles in a row about old clerics, including patriarch Pavlje who died this year. However I have skipped those and concentrated on some articles with more secular content. One of them is called Сибирска идила (Sibirian idyll) and tells about people living in a small Sibirian oil town. I have used the beginning of this article for 'intensive reading/copying', i.e. I copy the text to a folded sheet, look up words and make notes at the right margen of the paper, and then I write a translation. This is the most slow and ennervationg way of dealing with a text, but I did the same thing with Greek and it gave good results.

Even after a page or so I have seen the main features of both morphology and syntax, and then I understand the tables and rules in my Routledge grammar much better. And the words I collect while working my way through this article will naturally be incorporated in wordlists when I have finished it.

An excerpt in both alphabets (in fact most Serbian homepages are written with Latin letters):

Y обом регионy се производи 60 одсто рyске нафте,
Y obom regiony se proizvodi 60 odsto ryska nafte,
In this region [reflex.] produced 60 per-cent Russian oil,

цене y градy сy за десетак одсто више него y Москви,
cene y grady sy za desetak odsto više nego y Moskvi,
prices in town [??] at some-ten per-cent higher (than) those in Moscow

али сy плате изyзетно високе тако да је стандард знатно изнад просека
ali sy plaтe izyzetno visoke tako da je standard znatno iznad proseka
but [.?] salaries exceptionally higher (than) that? which is standard above average

па за једно радно место конкурише седам кандидата
pa za jedno radno mesto konkuriše sedam kandidata
and to each job place apply seven candidates

....

With the time I can spend on this project it will take some time before I can write regularly in Serbian or Croate in this thread, but even a cursory glimpse like this now and then helps me to understand the language(s), and so far that is my only goal.


Edited by Iversen on 03 December 2009 at 11:17pm

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Iversen
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 Message 1542 of 3959
04 December 2009 at 1:40pm | IP Logged 
GER: Ich konnte heute meine Arbeit früh beenden, und ich sitze deshalb gerade an einem PC in einer Bibliothek in Kolding. Hier lese ich über die Astronomie im Internet, und in diesem Zusammenhang bin ich auf einen Artikel über die Entdeckung eines Braunen Zwergs auf der Website www.alphagalileo.org gestoßen. Braune Zwerge sind nicht wie weiße oder gelbe Zwerge alte zum teil ausgebrannte Sterne, aber Sternähnliche Objekte, die nicht groß genug waren um die gewöhnliche Kernprozesse zu haben. Und weil sie extrem schwach und dunkel sind sollte es eigentlich fast unmöglich sein sie zu finden. Jetzt hat aber eine internationale Forschergruppe unter der Leitung vom spanischen Astronom David Barrado y Navascués "den besten bis heute bekannten Kandidaten für einen Braunen Protozwerg" identifiziert. Und dies ist nur möglich mit Daten von Teleskopen im Weltall, hier das Infrarotweltraumteleskop Spitzer.

Nachdem ich diesen Artikel gelesen hatte, wollte ich natürlich auch sehen was es an dieser Seite noch gab - aber das meiste is im Englichen verfasst. Ich lese sehr gerne und sehr viel auf Englisch, ganz einfach weil is dort eine Fülle von Daten gibt, die es in keiner anderen Sprache gibt ... aber mitunter möchte ich auch möglichst eine Bißchen Aufwechslung haben, bitte. Ausser English sind nur Französisch und Spanish als Alternativsprachen angegeben, aber die Artikel - die eigentlich Pressemitteilungen sind - gibt es auch in andere Sprachen, wie Polnish und Deutsch.

------

I had finished my scheduled tasks at my Job quite early tody, so right now I'm taking a brak at a library computer. I have been reading something at a site called www.alphagalileo.org about brown dwarfs - not humans, but small starlike objects in space that never really had the weight (quite literally) to develop the kind of nuclear reactions that fuel ordinary stars, including white and yellow dwarfs. Apparently a Spanish team now have found a likely candicate, using data from an infrared space telescope called Spitzer.

After reading this article I evidently wanted to see what else I could find, and I then discovered that most of the site is in English. I read a lot in English because this language has a wealth and breadth of material that is unmatched by any other language ... but something I just crave reading in some other languages. At this site German isn't an official alternative language, only French and Spanish, but thee are articles in several other languages - I just found one in Polish. By the way almost everything on the main page is about the upcoming Climate Conference. As I have written earlier I am sceptical about anything that can decided at such a monster conference, and I read in one of the three free newspapers I read every day that only 5 % of the Danish population seriously believe that the conference will result in an important final document.

Another aspect of this is that a Dutch group of social scientists have tried to predict on scientific basis whether the conference will result in anything spectacular. I quote: "The methodology developed by Decide at the University of Groningen has specified countries’ positions and interests regarding seven important negotiating points. The methodology can provide insight at an early stage into the expected complex negotiation process dynamics in, for example, mergers, takeovers and political decision-making." Then they calculate probablities and set up scenarios, and all this leads to a qualified estimation of the likelihood of succes. So far the Netherlanders are as sceptical about the outcome as the Danish population.

FR: Un autre communiqué d'intérêt astronomique raconter qu'un équipe française sous Huhues Sana ont étudié une 'famille stellaire' nommée Trumpler 14 dans la nébuleuse de la Carène a (qui aussi héberger l'étoile massive et instable de Eta Carinae). Ces étoiles - qui se trouvent à quelques 8 000 années-lumière de nous - sont jugé d'être très jeunes, peut-être agées de moins d'un million d'années, et l'étonnant c'est que nous sommes là pour les étudier dans un espace de temps si étroitement limité. L'instrument utilisé pour ce projet est l'alternatif le plus sérieux aux télécopes célestes. En voici la description: "l’instrument MAD (Multi-conjugate Adaptive optics Demonstrator) installé sur le très grand télescope (le VLT) de l’ESO. Grâce à MAD, les astronomes ont été capables de corriger la plupart des effets « brouillants » de l’atmosphère et ils ont ainsi obtenu une image très précise." J'ai lus qu'il existe des téléscopes avec beaucoup de petit disques qui se bougent en unison, mais aussi qu'on peut changer la forme du miroir avec une foule de petits moteurs électriques. Je ne sais pas quelle métode a été utilisé pour le MAD.

-----

In another article at the site there is the announcement of some splendid photos from a group of extremely young stars (allegedly less than 1 mio. years old) situated at or in the direction of the constellation Carina (the 'Keel'), which also is home for the massive and instable giant star Eta Carinae (which may in fact consists of two stars, according to this report). One of the more interesting thing about this announcement is that the pictures were taken not with a space telescope, but with something called MAD (Multi-conjugate Adaptive optics Demonstrator). A description of this instrument can be found here.

... OK, that should be enough right now. I am glad to have found one more multilingual site with short and easily digestable texts about science.


Edited by Iversen on 04 December 2009 at 2:11pm

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SII
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 Message 1543 of 3959
04 December 2009 at 8:14pm | IP Logged 
Iversen wrote:
RU: Я читал о расвалe культуры майя на русский сайт www.matri-x.ru.


1) Not "расвале" but "развале" :) But the word is incorrect for this context. "Развал" is disintegration. For example, it is correct to say "развал" about the crush of USSR or Austria-Hungary: these countries have disintegrated, but their splinters are being at now. But the Maya's culture was vanished at all (or almost all). IMHO, the best word for translate of "collapse" in this case is "гибель".

2) "на русский сайт" -- you use the invalid case, right is "на русском сайте".

Quote:
Авторы говорят уже о возможности стихийных бедствий (таких, как тайфуны), но два наиболее вероятные объяснени - войны и разрушения окружающей среды.


1) "Уже" in this sentence is incorrect by sense. If used "уже", this sentence say that the authors earlier say about something as cause of Maya's collapse, but _now_ they _start_ to say about natural disasters etc.

2) It is right "два наиболее вероятных объяснения".

3) "войны и разрушения окружающей среды" is formally absolutely correct, but it is sounds poor. In English you wrote "misuse of natural resources". IMHO, it is better to say "войны и хищническое использование природных ресурсов". The word "хищнический" comes from "хищник", i.e. "predator". "Хищнический" means the barbarous, rapacious relation to something, for example, depredation of forests, extermination of animals etc.

Quote:
Их сельское хозяйство был действительно весьма эффективно, c террасах c целью предотвращения эрозии, но она не может прокормить растущее население в крупных городах.


"был", "с террасах", "она", "может" are incorrect, the right are "было", "с террасами"/"на террасах", "оно". "могло" (the first and third are illegal gender -- you use masc. and fem. but the right is neuter; the second is illegal case; the last is illegal tense). In addition, it is better to change the word order: "Их сельское хозяйство, использовавшее для предотвращения эрозии террасы, было действительно весьма эффективным, но оно не могло прокормить растущее население в крупных городах".

Quote:
И лес был расчищен частично для топлива в домах и частично для производство топлива для известкового раствора тереть на храмях.


The first half of the sentence is formally correct although we don't speak "для топлива в домах", the right is "для отопления домов". In addition, it is better to say "Лес был вырублен", not "Лес был расчищен" ("расчищен" implies receipt of free field for building or sowing; "вырублен" implies that the logs will be used as fuel or building materials, i.e. these verbs have the different nuances of "goal").

The second half is incorrect, the right is: ", частично для обжига извести, исппользуемой при строительстве храмов".

So, the full sentence is "Лес был вырублен частично для отопления домов, частично для обжига извести, используемой при строительстве храмов".

Quote:
Майя строили свои храмы в слоях, и каждый слой должен быть смазана известковым раствором.


There is only one formal mistake: "и каждый слой должен быть смазан известковым раствором". "Слой" has masc., not fem. gender.

But "в слоях", although it is formally correct, is sounds poor (not Russian :) ). The best sentence is: "Майя строили свои храмы послойно, и каждый слой должен быть смазан известковым раствором".

Quote:
Как пишут авторы русский: мы можем даже узнать что-то.


1) "Как пишут русские авторы".

2) "мы можем даже узнать что-то" -- formally correct, but it hasn't the real sense. If to translate your English sentence, I can say:

Как пишут русские авторы, это является уроком, который мы должны извлечь из... (hmmm... formally ignominous is "позорный" or "бечестный", but in this case these words aren't well)... бездарной/нелепой гибели великой цивизилации.
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Iversen
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 Message 1544 of 3959
06 December 2009 at 4:00pm | IP Logged 
Arrgg ... maybe I should stop writing in Russian


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