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Iversen’s Multiconfused Log (see p.1!) | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6695 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes  Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 3897 of 3959 15 June 2015 at 10:33am | IP Logged |
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Saturday I did my backups of material from this thread back to the end of March - right now HTLAL seems to be stable, but better safe than sorry. And yesterday I spent 4 hours walking round a lake. A serious language student would of cause be wearing a headphone in order to do some shadowing, but I just trotted happily away without any shred of remorse. But I also found time to do some studying.
BA I: Saya belajar halaman dari Wikipedia Indonesia tentang orang-orang Tana Toraja dan pemandangan wisata di daerah mereka. Banyak dari mereka yang saya tahu dari perjalanan saya ke Sulawesi beberapa tahun yang lalu - seperti patung nenek moyanga di atas batu dengan menghadap ke hamparan hijau dengan kerbau, salah satu gua dengan makam dan tulang, rumah-rumah Tongkonan - tapi saya tidak ingat megalit di Batu Tumonga. Di sisi lain, saya telah pasar kerbau Rantepao (kerbau merah muda yang paling mahal) dan pemakaman pembantaian kerbau. Kerbau hidup yang baik - tetapi bisa menyelesaikan dengan sangat cepat. Babi tidak begitu baik - ketika mereka diangkut, mereka terikat ketat bersama-sama dan menempatkan kaki di udara pada rak bagasi di sepeda tanpa suspensi. In this article there was a faulty sentence in the original text, and Google translate is led horribly astray: "Pada waktu-waktu tertentu pakaian dari mayat-mayat akan diganti dengan [....] melalui upacara Ma'Nene" (at certain times clothes of corpses will be-changed with [missing word or one 'dengan' too much] during the ceremony Ma'Nene) Google T: "At certain times of the clothes the bodies will be replaced with a ceremony Ma'Nene" Or in other words: at a certain point of the life cycle of the clothes you kick out the corpses of your deceased relatives and do a ceremony called Mother'HawaiiGoose instead. I actually thought the Torajas valued their ancestors too much for that kind of disrespectful treatment. Otherwise they wouldn't stage those elaborate funeral ceremonies or put statues of the dead ones up on shelves with a view to green fields full a buffaloes stoically awaiting the next funeral. The real deal is that during the Ma'Nene ceremony the dead are exhumed and given new clothes by their loving descendants. Edited by Iversen on 15 June 2015 at 10:45am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6695 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 3898 of 3959 16 June 2015 at 4:07pm | IP Logged |
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Yesterday I spent a couple of hours making two column repetitions of some old Greek wordlists - about 250 words or so. Most of the words were wellknown, although not necessarily among those I could remember without helhat thhep if awakened in the middle of the night and asked to speak Greek. But certain passages in the lists were harder to recall - and I suspect that I have been lax about my original repetitions with those senctions of the lists.
And then I also read some stuff about the Cretan city Iraklion. I got slightly microconfused when I read that its airport lies close to ancient Alicarnassos. But luckily this wasn't the 'real' Halikarnassos - the location of the Mausoleum of king Mausolos (near modern Bodrum in Turkey). But apparently there was/is a place called "(Nea) Alikarnassos" on Crete too. My my, all the irrelevant information you can gather by studying Wikipedia articles... But at least my preconceptions concerning the location of the better known place governed by king Mausolos didn't need fixing. Edited by Iversen on 16 June 2015 at 4:09pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6695 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 3899 of 3959 17 June 2015 at 2:09pm | IP Logged |
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Yesterday evening I...
GR: ... διάβασα για το Αρχαιολογικό του Μουσείο Ηρακλείου στην ελληνικα. Αναρωτιέμαι πώς η τρέχουσα οικονομική κρίση στην Ελλάδα πλήττει τα μουσεία και άλλα τουριστικά αξιοθέατα. Μπορεί θα ήτανε εύκολοτερα να μειωθούν οι δαπάνες για τα μουσεία από τις συντάξεις, αλλά στη συνέχεια οι τουρίστες μπορούν να προσθέσουν λιγότερα χρήματα στην οικονομία. BA I: ... mempelajari organisasi administratif daerah Tana Toraja di Sulawesi (itu tampaknya dibagi menjadi desa yang mengatur sendiri) IC: ... ég las texta frá landbúnaði skóla, þar sem fjöldi umsókna hefur lækkað á síðasta ári. SE: ... Читао сам о преласку на дигиталну телевизију и елиминацију аналогних сигнала у Суботица, Сомбору и Кикинди у Србији. FR: Et pendant la nuit je me suis reveillé, et pour rendormir j'ai lu le chapitre avec les formes de la négation fléchie du finlandais de mon minuscule Assimil de Poche. Cette ruse a fonctionné à merveille - je me suis rendormi après très peu de pages. These texts do have a bias towards social topics, but I have not overnight become politically correct (and if I ever drifted in that direction, a couple of hours with the kind of empty political twaddel we are experiencing these days due to the upcoming election would definitely cure me). So to point out that I still have some normal healthy interests left I would just like to add that I saw the reference to the Spinolophosaurus in Fasulye's log and immediately thought "shouldn't it be Spinosaurus"? But no, both names exist, and they refer to different critters. So I have spent quite some time reading about dinosaurs with different kinds of spines on their backs. The one named Spinosaurus was actually longer and heavier than both T Rex and Giganotosaurus, but contrary to them it lived in wetlands and ate fish for dinner, and to facilitate this activity it had a long crocodile-like head. However it wasn't a crocodile, and as some kind of compensation for this intrusion into croc territory by of croc-headed dinosaurs, the crocs invented longlegged galopping crocodiles (like the Pakasuchus and Kaprosuchus) and to boot one that walked on its hindlegs (Carnuflex carolinensis) - as far as i remember I have mentioned this last beast one earlier in this thread. Edited by Iversen on 17 June 2015 at 3:39pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6695 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 3900 of 3959 19 June 2015 at 2:42pm | IP Logged |
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Yesterday it was election day here in Denmark, but I didn't watch Danish TV in the evening – I watched documentaries in English most of the time, including an intriguing program on the History Channel about the early history of China. According to the Chinese historian Sima Qian (who lived about 100 AD)everything started out with 'the five emperors', including a 'Yellow Emperor". His 8th great-grandson ('the great Yu') allegedly saved the area around the Yellow River from the effects of devastating deluges through as system of dikes and became emperor and founder of a dynasty called Xia, which is supposed to have been reigning from 2070 BC to 1600 BC. After the Xia came the Shang and later the Zhou dynasties, and writing (at first on tortoise shells) was invented. Consequently there are no written sources from the time of the Xia dynasty and their period has been seen as a halfway mythical.
However now a series of early civilisations in the area of central China have been documented through archeological excavations, and one of them fits the legends surrounding the Xia so well that it is likely to have been the 'real' Xia. Some of these early cultures had long ago produced small bronze objects, but the culture found near Erlitou was the first to make big ritual vessels (and maybe also bells) in bronze. Besides it existed during a period with much climatic trouble (documented by thick layers of sediment), but contrary to its predecessors and competitors this culture was based on five different crops which made it more resistant to changing climatic conditions, and even a palace with a basic layout reminiscent of those of all later imperial palaces has been found. The other cultures in the area have apparently not produced similar architecture. And do any of these things prove that the dynasty of state ruled from Erlitou was the legendary Xia dynasty from the annals? Of course not, since no one could write while it lasted. And there will of course always be sceptical archaeologists who refuse to consider anything that hasn't been documented by one of their own Western collegues in a peer-reviewed scientific magazine from either North America or Europe, but to me it seems that the burden of proof has been moved – now the question is whether any other culture than the one from Erlitou could have given rise to the descriptions of the Xia in the old annals. To my mind it fits the bill rather well.. And was this more interesting than watching the election programs on TV? Well, I think so. I might have switched to one of the Danish channels later, but I took a nap around 9 O'clock in the evening and didn't wake up until 2 O'clock in the night. Then I just checked who had won and spent the next couple of hours studying Polish – i.e. doing wordlists and studying my trusty old "Mowimo po Polsku" from 1979. Edited by Iversen on 20 June 2015 at 8:54am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6695 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 3901 of 3959 20 June 2015 at 10:11am | IP Logged |
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I had thought about going to New York and speak about the behaviours of the mighty Google Translate at the polyglot conference there, but that plan had to be abandoned. Instead I'll publish some of my notes in a thread here in HTLAL, called "The etology of Google Translate". Not all 'chapters' are ready yet, but they will follow as soon as possible. Feel free to comment or add your own examples. Edited by Iversen on 20 June 2015 at 10:12am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6695 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 3902 of 3959 23 June 2015 at 8:12am | IP Logged |
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You can may guess from the thread about Google Translate how I spent my weekend: googling, translating, looking through my bilingual printouts and writing a text with about 30000 characters (plus 3300 spaces), including the answer about English and its role as the intermediary stage. Maybe Google translate also uses direct connections between other languages - like searching for unknown word or word combinations in a language up in a related language. But so far I haven't seen any unequivocal proof that it does so. But thinking about this I realize that I only have given one example with an unknown word that simply passed untranslated through the system, namely Romanian "chip" ('face'). But I did give examples of the inverse phenomenon. namely proper names which GT shouldn't have tried to translate.
I got a number of responses, but the subject doesn't seem to have aroused too much interest. But I got a chance to formulate the things I otherwise would have said in New York, and now they are out of my system and I can start using those bilingual texts again without constantly thinking about ways the errors in them form patterns. Yesterday evening I however looked through some more of the humanmade bilingual texts in my good old "Mowim po Polsku" (Polish -> English). It is supposed to be a text book meant for beginners, but it uses words and word forms which aren't even in my midsize Polish<->French dictionary (Oxford), and one of these caught my interest, namely the two instances of a verb weż / wezmę, which are translated as 'take'. Luckily my big fat Polish <--> German Pons quotes irregular forms, so that I could get back to the infinive form wziąć. This made me realize a lacune in my green sheets: I have made a sheet with the different verb classes, based on 1. & 2. person singular which should suffice to form the present of almost all Polish verbs. But I hadn't ever made a sheet with all the forms, including the past tense, conditional and analytic futures, and now I got it done - although probably not in its final form. The problem (please forgive me for nor formulating this in Polish) is that Polish used an old active past particle with an -l as its simple preterit, just as the other Slavic languages do. Some of these, like Sorbian and the South Slavic languages have retained the finite form of the verb for 'to be' (in Polish "być"), but like Russian and several others Polish has dropped the auxiliary. But in contrast to these Polish has reintroduced the personal endings and attached them to the old participle and to the conditional, and to this last also the equivalent of Russian "бы" ('by'), but contrary to Russian in the form of a morpheme that comes before the personal endings. Well, mostly it is like that, but sometimes both the personal endings and the 'by' leave the preterite and lodge themselves unto other words - and the "by" can even become independent and grab the personal ending. For these studies I used Pons "Grammatik kurz und bündig" to give me an overview (with pedagogical and often inventive table layouts) and the thick "A grammar of contemporary Polish" by Oscar E. Swan to elaborate and supplement the short and concise explanations in Pons. Like some more details about those freeroaming endings (Swan pp 255), which obligatorily attaches themselves to some conjunctions and may do so to other words at the whim of the speaker: kiedyś wróciła? = when+2p.sing return+past+feminine+sing ('when did you(female) return=?') kiedy? = when (ty)* wróciłaś wczoraj = (you) return+past+feminine+2p.sing yesterday * optional I don't know of any other Slavic language that has combined all these element in its past forms - and then still retain features that reminds us that these elements once belonged elsewhere. It is not unheard of to have such rebellious morphemes - think of the unaccented pronouns in Portuguese and the definite articles of the Scandinavian languages - but it greatly adds to the complexity of the tables to have them. Edited by Iversen on 23 June 2015 at 8:07pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4699 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 3903 of 3959 23 June 2015 at 12:26pm | IP Logged |
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Actually in Czech when you use the past tense in 1st or 2nd person you still say jsem
mluvil 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6695 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 3904 of 3959 23 June 2015 at 8:19pm | IP Logged |
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Thanks to Tarvos for the hint about Czech - I haven't studied that language yet.
DK: Og så til en nyhed fra min hjemby Århus, hvor det splinternye kulturhus Dokk1 blev indviet sidste lørdag. "Dokk1" skal angiveligt udtales /dok ét/, men da jeg så det læste jeg det som "dokken", fordi det ligger ved havnen og lyder som den bestemt form af ordet dok. Jeg nævner det nye hus her fordi det rummer byens nye hovedbibliotek, men bygningen rummer også Europas angiveligt største automatiske parkeringsanlæg, verdens største rørklokke (7 meter høj - og den skal bimle hver gang der fødes en ny århusianer) og så skulle biblioteket for øvrigt også være Skandinaviens største offentlige bibliotek. Med alle udenværker har det kostet mere end 2 milliarder danske kroner (ca. 300.000 €), men det er naturligvis ikke alle pengene der er gået til biblioteket. Faktisk står der færre gammeldags papirbøger på hylderne end i det gamle bibliotek (resten er sendt ned i arkivet i kælderen). Til gengæld er der nu blevet plads til borgerservice, café, foredragssale, computere til fri anvendelse og masser af legepladser til børnene, og der bliver fra nu af åbent også på søndage. Jeg er mildt sagt ikke begejstret for at man har nedprioriteret bøgerne, men nu har jeg altså set vidunderet, og det er imponerende. Et ægte uforfalsket udtryk for århusiansk storhedsvanvid. Edited by Iversen on 23 June 2015 at 8:31pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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