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

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Iversen
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 Message 3161 of 3959
21 January 2013 at 11:25pm | IP Logged 
I'm glad that my guesses went into the right direction. I'm very content with my Collins Pocket Dictionary, but after all it is a pocket dictionary, and it would be a miracle worthy of Harry Potter if it contained everything.

Apart from that I have worked with a number of languages today, although in small doses. In the bus back home from work I read about chess rules in Low German, later on I did the repetitions for some older Greek wordlists I found among some of my bilingual printouts, this evening I have watched Swedish TV (something about the workings of the memory*) and afterwards a program from Germany on Danish TV about the Middle Ages - with interviews in German. However some of my time still goes with activities related to my travelling, and this evening I have distributed the photos chronologically into my travel diary and made clickable maps. It is hard to be a tourist who has come home. And it is freezing cold here - but I know it is worse in Norway, so I can't complain.


* presumably the interviews were in English, but I have actually forgotten whether the rest was dubbed in Swedish - at least they spoke Swedish during the introduction.
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Brun Ugle
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 Message 3162 of 3959
22 January 2013 at 10:16am | IP Logged 
Iversen wrote:
And it is freezing cold here - but I know it is worse in Norway, so I can't complain.


Not in Steinkjer. It was up around -10 C here yesterday, so I had the windows open for a bit of fresh air.
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Iversen
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 Message 3163 of 3959
23 January 2013 at 10:05pm | IP Logged 
BA I: Hari ini aku harus pergi naik kereta api ke Viborg sebagai bagian dari pekerjaa, dan ada sekitar 75 menit setiap jalan. Saya membaca tiga surat kabar Denmark, tapi ada juga waktu untuk membaca beberapa hasil cetak yang dwibahasal, yang saya selalu membawa dengan saya dalam tas saya. Saya membaca, misalnya, sebuah artikel pada monorail di Kuala Lumpur dari kumpulan pasal tentang kota ini, seperti yang telah saya sebutkan di benang ini.

ESP: Post kiam mi alvenis hejmen, mi kompletigitis mian vojaĝoraporton, kaj tiam mi volis kopii ĝin al USB ŝlosilo mi malkovris kolekton de tekstoj en Esperanto, kiel mi iam elŝutis el la Interreto. Inter ĉi tiuj tekstoj estis la fama prelegoj pri gramatiko de Saussuro , de Zamenhof la Lingoj respondaj kaj ambaŭ "La Aventuro de Alico en Mirlando" kaj "Trans la spegulo" (bazita sur ŝako ludo, kiu memorigas min, ke mi legis pri ŝako en Bahasa Indonezia en la buso hejmen el mi laboro lasta nokto). Mi legis duonon de Alico, sed mi ne bezonas legi la reston, ĉar antaŭnelonge mi legis tutan tiun libron sur skota, do mi scias kio okazos. Tamen, mi ne memoras multe el la scivola okazis al Alice malantaŭ la spegulo - ĉi-tiu Lewis Carroll certe havis strangajn ideojn concerne malgranaj knabinetoj.

I had to go to a neighbour town Viborg as part of my job today, which meant a train trip of roughtly 75 minutes each way - so I had time to read not only three Danish newspapers, but also some of the bilingual texts I always carry around with me. Much of it has been mentioned before in this thread, such as the articles I have got about Kuala Lumour, but I don't I have read (or commented on) the article about the monorail of KL before. Besides I read things in Icelandic, Platt and Latin - my itinerant collection is fairly comprehensive.

After I came home in the late afternoon I first finished my travelogue (at long last), but when I then would copy it to an USB key I saw on this key a catalogue named ESperanto. It turned out to be a collection of text which I once upoin a time have downloaded, but never looked at since. Among these text there is a translation of the famous lectures on grammar by F.Saussure and a text my Zamenhof, but most are literary, including the two books by Lewis Carroll: Alice in Wonderland and Behind the Mirror. I have read half of Alice, and that's enough - I recently read the whole thing in Scots so I know what happens afterwards. On the other hand I don't remember much of the Mirror thing so if I can find time for it I may read it (or some of it).

Now I'm going to listen to some Irish spoken by fair Abair, and afterwards I'll do something else.
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Iversen
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 Message 3164 of 3959
23 January 2013 at 11:38pm | IP Logged 
IR: Abair.ie anois tá trí guthanna, a is féidir iad labhairt níos tapúla nó níos moille. Is fearr liom fós an bhean ó Gwedore, a labhrann is dócha canúint Uladh, cé go tá sí ina cónaí i Éireann. Raibh si cead í a léamh mo téacs Gaeilge ó Luan.

Abair.ie now has three voices, and you can even make them speak more fast or more slowly. I still prefer the sweet voice of the lady from Gweedore, almost at the most Northerly point of the island. I suppose the dialect there is considered as an example of the Ulster dialect, even though Gweedore lies in Eire. She had to read my attempt at writing in Irish from Monday, and I'm not sure she liked it.

It is some time since I last did this, and I noticed one thing: I had more or less forgotten that sh is pronounced almost as a guttural h: "shuigh" --> /hiiii/, "ó shin bhfuair" ---> /ohinwæærr/   (/æ/ here signifies the last vowel in affair - forget about IPA). I noticed that large numbers apparently confuses the software: "go dtí 95 r-phost a léamh" became "go dtí 95 r-phost a léamh" and was pronounced as such. And a dash was written in full as "fleiscin" and pronounced as such. But these are minor problems: I am glad that the little green lady from Gweedore and her two rough companions from Connemara are willing to read things aloud for me for free.   


Edited by Iversen on 23 January 2013 at 11:48pm

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Iversen
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 Message 3165 of 3959
28 January 2013 at 12:52am | IP Logged 
I have been on a family visit this weekend, and I did do some more work on my Greek vocabulary project (the end is near!), I watched Danish, English/American, German, Swedish, French and a little bit of Dutch TV and in the train I got through most of Suetonii tale about the mad emperor Caligula - I'll come back to those things, but not right now. But besides I spent an hour in a library reading Scientific America, where there was an article which might be relevant for language learning theory. I took its point of depart in the idea of a Grandma brain cell, which represented grandma in the brain of some hypothetical person.

The fun starts when this backwards and ridiculed idea got confirmation from some brain researchers who discovered a neuron in the Hippocampus of a real living person, which reacted to the picture OR the name of a certain Jennifer Aniston, who apparently is a famous actress. It didn't react to photos or names of other actresses - although it was mentioned later in the article that another blonde from some series called Friends might elicit a reaction from this neural Aniston fan. So the article ventured that a human being has stored 10.000 fundamental notions which each elicits a reaction from at least one specialized neuron - only one such neuron was found, but thousands of other neurons with a special fondness for mrs. Aniston might be firing at the same time without being montored. And that special cell might also be totally mad about a selection of other things like the Roman emperor Caligula which just weren't presented to it during the test. So there might be a whole fan club for mrs. Aniston spread around the brain in that special brain, all connected through a mesh of ganglia. And I might have fan club in my brain for the Romanian word for ash tray, "scrumiere", or for the star Canopus which is on the brink of exploding.

With all due respect to the neurologists involved in this research, I have some doubts about the claim that a human has around 10.000 fundamental notions stored in his/her brain. Aren't notions built into hierarchies, with Mrs. Aniston as just a special case of the general category actresses? And how can I have a passive vocabulary of more than 20.000 words in a number of languages if I only know 10.000 notions? Even allowing for reuse of cathegories across languages that doesn't match up. My hunch is that certain neurons may have a privileged center position in a network of neurons which all have something to contribute in forming the notion of Jennifer Aniston, but if you follow the traces in all directions they will spread wider and wider, and many of the neurons in that cloud of Anistonites will also have other, more sensible jobs. At least I hope so.

Edited by Iversen on 28 January 2013 at 11:05am

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Iversen
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 Message 3166 of 3959
29 January 2013 at 7:41am | IP Logged 
I woke up early today and used the extra time to study Irish - and once again I perused the Vicipéid text about Hebrew and chose one sentence for closer scrutiny. And just to avoid misunderstandings: my use of a text on this subject has nothing to do with politics - Hebrew is just the most surprising case ever of the reawakening of a semidead language.

Faoin am céanna bhí Ben-Yehúda gnóthach ina iriseoir fosta, nó ba dóigh leis gur trí mheán an nuachtáin ab fhearr a chraobhscaoilfeadh sé na focail nuachumtha ar fud na Palaistíne.

Google translate: Under a busy whilst Ben-Yehúda was a journalist too, or was likely to be the best newspaper medium chraobhscaoilfeadh six new compositions words around Palestine.

"faoin": under
"am": time
"ceann": head, extreme, end
"faoin am ceanna": 'under time at the end'

I have already mentioned the richness of Irish in the domain of idiomatic expressions, and even though there mostly is a logic in them you can't count on it - the connection may have been evident in an earlier stage of the language, but linguistic changes can have obscured it. And you would almost certainly not be able to guess which word combination Modern Irish had ended up with. So I have decided to do some studies of the longest and most complex articles in my Collins dictionary - for instance those based on prepositions like "faoi". This can be done with a wordlist layout with wider columns, and I think it would be the most efficient way to get through as many expressions as possible. You would already have to be a quite proficient reader to collect them from your extensive reading.

One more interesting thing: it is always stressed that the verb is the initial element in a proper Irish sentence unless there are conjunctions or interrogatives etc., but here an adverbial expression seems to have taken that coveted initial position.

OK, back to the sentence:

"bhí": a form of 'to be'

"gnótach": busy

"iriseoir": journalist
With "in" (i + an/na) you could have expected 'in journalism', but jounalism is "iriseoareacht' so the the semantic role of "i" here is slightly aberrant - maybe 'in the capacity of' (= as)

"fosta": too, also

"ba" (or "b'") is a past form of the copula verb ('to be')

"dóigh": way, mode

"nó" is only translated as 'ot' in my dictionary, which is somewhat confusing in the present context

"leis" could be the inflected preposition "le" in the 3p sing, but "with it" has also acquired the idiomatic meaning "'also'

"gur": a conjunction somewhat like 'that'

"trí mheán an ... ": the most mysterious combination of words in this example. "Trí" is 'three', "meán" is 'middle' and "an" is an article. But Google translates this as '(was) likely to be'. Let's pass over it for a moment.

"nuachtáin": newspaper
"fhearr" is the comparative of "maith" ('good')

"ba" (or "b'") was a past form of the copula verb above, and my dictionary sends me from "ab" to the same verb in the 'past or conditional affirmative' - but with an interesting - and relevant - example: "an léim ab fhaide" = 'the longest jump'

"chraobhscaoilfeadh": Google gave up here, but the rule is that you remove the 2. letter if it is "h" before you look things up in your dictionary - it is just the ubiquiteous phenomenon 'lenition' playing around once again, and I wonder why Google can't learn that trick. The word "craobscaoil" means 'broadcast' or (in a wider sense) 'spread'

"focal": word

"nuachumtha" can be split into "nua" 'new' and "cumtha" (in compound words the second part is always lenited, if possible), i.e. newly-invented

'ar fud': all over

'Palaistine': guess what...

So the total meaning would be something like "in the later time be Ben-Yehuda busy 'as' journalist too, or (?!) was way of too via newspapers best spread he the words newly-invented all over Palestine" -

Or in better English:

'Later Ben Y was busy as a journalist too as newspapers would be the best way for him to spread the newly invented words all over Palestine.'



Edited by Iversen on 29 January 2013 at 1:24pm

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tarvos
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 Message 3167 of 3959
29 January 2013 at 11:39am | IP Logged 
Wow, these words don't resemble Breton much at all. Sounds like the transition will be
more difficult than I expect when I get around to Irish.
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Iversen
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 Message 3168 of 3959
29 January 2013 at 1:35pm | IP Logged 
If it can be of any solace to you I also find Brezhoneg somewhat imprenetrable:

"Ur bajenn disheñvelout lec'hanvioù eo homañ, da lavarout eo ur roll lec'hanvioù kar a-bell pe a-dost. Ma'z oc'h degouezhet er bajenn-mañ dre ul liamm diabarzh e c'hallit kemm al liamm er pennad-se evit ma kaso war-eeun d'ar bajenn a glaskit tizhout.



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