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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7154 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes  20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 361 of 541 30 August 2013 at 5:33am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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POLISH
I finished Chapter 24 of "Polish in 4 Weeks - II". The dialogue consisted of John, Waldek and Tomek talking about an upcoming presidential election. The main topic for grammar consisted of prepositional verbs and phrases useful for expressing an opinion or talking about politics. 
(From Amerykanie kolejny raz nas nabrali? – Biznes w INTERIA.pl) 1) “Uncle is not alone. / Uncle is not [named] Sam”* *This is a double-entendre and a comment on relations between Poland and the USA which for some is uncomfortably close but understandable given Poland’s relations with Germany/Prussia and Russia/USSR/Muscovy not to mention the Polish diaspora in the USA which is especially noticeable in Chicago. Convention for vocabulary in the comic strip that's unfamiliar to me (i.e. needed to consult a dictionary) NOUNS & ADJECTIVES: nominative singular (nominative plural, genitive singular) VERBS (where applicable using convention of imperfective > perfective): infinitive (1st person singular present tense [imperfective verb] / future tense [perfective verb], 2nd person singular present tense [imperfective verb] / future tense [perfective verb]) ADVERBS & INTERJECTIONS: no extra information given *** SLOVAK I did the exercises on pgs. 36-38 in the workbook for “Hovorme spolu po slovensky! B – Slovenčina ako cudzí jazyk”. The exercises were some reading comprehension questions about signs in public places, and fill-in-the-blank drills for accusative plural and prepositions that govern the accusative. 
(From S H O O T Y - …som Grogy) 1) “Dad, why don’t you have a tattoo? – I don’t know. – Everyone has one.” 2) “Not everyone has one. – Even Matúš’s dad has one! And a tongue piercing!” 3) “Tattoos don’t hurt. You’re scared, huh? – I’m not scared. Why should I have a tattoo?” 4) “Everyone has one. Even mom. – Mom has a tattoo?!?” 5) “Yeah, she’s not scared. – I AM NOT SCARED!!” 6) “What does she have tattooed? – One coward was enough.” - kérka (kérky) “tattoo” (colloquial) - sráč (sráča) “coward, wanker” (colloquial/vulgar) Convention for vocabulary in the comic strip that's unfamiliar to me (i.e. needed to consult a dictionary) NOUNS & ADJECTIVES: nominative singular (genitive singular) VERBS (where applicable using convention of imperfective > perfective): infinitive (3rd person singular present tense [imperfective verb] / future tense [perfective verb], 3rd person plural present tense [imperfective verb] / future tense [perfective verb]) ADVERBS & INTERJECTIONS: no extra information given *** TURKISH I’ve worked through Unit 3 of “Turkish Self-Study Course” and the material on pgs. 20-24 (Unit 2) in “Elementary Turkish”. I studied more about declarative sentences with demonstrative singular pronouns, the copula suffix -dır / -dir / -dur / -dür and their use with the negating element değil, ne “what” and the interrogative element mı / mi / mu / mü in the former. In the latter I studied personal suffixes expressing present tense of “to be” in other languages, personal pronouns and demonstrative pronouns.. *** UKRAINIAN I’ve done the exercises on pgs. 138-41 in “Modern Ukrainian” thus concluding Chapter 8. The drills focused on locative singular for adjectives and imperative while the final sets of questions pertained to the chapter’s narratives and dialogues. 
(From Одне бажання via Інші | Огірок – переклади коміксів українською) 1) “Oh! A genie! – Yes. You can make a wish!” 2) “Only one? – Yes. – Crap!” - загадувати > загадати (загадую, загадують > загадаю, загадають) “to ask a difficult question; to conceive sg” Convention for vocabulary in the comic strip that's unfamiliar to me (i.e. needed to consult a dictionary) NOUNS & ADJECTIVES: nominative singular (genitive singular) VERBS (where applicable using convention of imperfective > perfective): infinitive (1st person singular present tense [imperfective verb] / future tense [perfective verb], 3rd person plural present tense [imperfective verb] / future tense [perfective verb]) ADVERBS & INTERJECTIONS: no extra information given *** OTHER LANGUAGES I'll probably be easing off a little on my effort with Uralic languages for the next few weeks. ______ 
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| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7154 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 362 of 541 30 August 2013 at 5:35am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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The second part of this entry contains my comments and analysis of the sections describing what Bekavac et al. label as the “syntactic level” of differences in BCMS/SC.
For reference: - Part 1 (analysis of the abstract and what Bekavac et al. label as the “phonological level” of differences in BCMS/SC) - Part 2 (analysis of what Bekavac et al. label as the “morphological level” of differences in BCMS/SC) - Part 3 (analysis of what Bekavac et al. label as the “lexical level” of differences in BCMS/SC) *** BCMS/SC I’ve finished working through Chapter 18 in “Teach Yourself Serbian”. The chapter introduced the passive, and the treatment of family names in declension. It was another very short chapter. 
(From TinyPic via stripovi prevedeni na hrvatski) 1) “Guess what I have? – What?” 2) “3D glasses! – Yeah, I have them too.” 3) “And now excuse me. It’s time to enter the…” 4) “3D dimension!” 5) “Oh, wow!” 6) “What?” - ispričavati > ispričati (ispričavam, ispričavaju > ispričam, ispričaju) “to narrate, tell; excuse*, justify*” (испричавати > испричати (испричавам, испричавају > испричам, испричају)) * Croatian usage only; meaning of “to narrate, tell” is common to all variants of BCMS/SC Convention for vocabulary in the comic strip that's unfamiliar to me (i.e. needed to consult a dictionary) (this will be put in both scripts partially to accommodate those unused to Serbian Cyrillic and also so that I get at least a little bit of practice using the keyboard layout for Serbian Cyrillic). NOUNS & ADJECTIVES: nominative singular (genitive singular) VERBS (where applicable using convention of imperfective > perfective): infinitive (1st person singular present tense [imperfective verb] / future tense [perfective verb], 3rd person plural present tense [imperfective verb] / future tense [perfective verb]) ADVERBS & INTERJECTIONS: no extra information given
This comes off as a case of the researchers suspending their understanding of BCMS/SC grammar and arriving at a tacit conclusion based only on what they read in the newspapers (pun intended). It’s misleading and a sign of intellectual dishonesty. Formally, the use of s or sa depends on the initial consonant/consonant cluster of the following noun or adjective. Sa must be used when the following noun begins with s, š, z, ž or the cluster mn- and this rule applies to all standards of BCMS/SC. E.g. “She is travelling with me / with you / with Sanja / with Božo.” BCMS/SC: Putuje sa mnom / s tobom / sa Sanjom / s Božom However in standard Serbian, sa can also be used where s would occur and is thus equally grammatical. The choice in these instances depends on the user’s preference. In Croatian such variation is deemed ungrammatical. E.g. Bs:, Cr: & Sr: Putuje sa mnom / s tobom / sa Sanjom / s Božom Sr: Putuje sa mnom / sa tobom / sa Sanjom / sa Božom What the authors report as the observed skew toward sa over s in the Serbian corpus reflects translators taking advantage of the flexibility within Serbian on using s or sa which is absent in the other standards. It should not be construed as only sa being prescribed or grammatical over s in Serbian.
These superficial observations ignore that infinitive constructions cast as Croatian and Bosnian are grammatical also in Serbian. As a corollary, the combination of da + [conjugated verb> which is stereotyped as Serbian, is under certain conditions the only grammatical option for all speakers of BCMS/SC. See here for examples of da + [infinitive> among Croats.
This may very well reflect the translators’ stylistic choice, rather than limits imposed by the standards when translating prepositional constructions in other languages.
*The relevant example phrase is “OSCE says no need to monitor…” Bs: OSCE saopćio da nema potrebe. Cr: OESS priopćio kako nema potrebe. Sr: OEBS saopćio da nema potrebe. The authors may instead be ignoring the possibility that the different treatment of OSCE points to stylistic choice and/or the sociolinguistic judgement that constructions with da are perceived as more Serbian or Bosnian. For nationally-conscious Croats, such associations are to be suppressed where possible using alternatives (similar thoughts are tied to the Croatian preference for infinitives following modal verbs rather than conjugated verbs or interrogative sentences beginning with the conjugated verb preceding the particle li at the expense of beginning such a sentence with da li which is more common among Bosnians and Serbs). As far as I understand BCMS/SC grammar and how it relates to the phrase in the example, using da for kako would be grammatical. In other words, this does not seem to be an instance where kako is the sole grammatical option in standard Croatian.
Again the authors may be (mis)construing translators’ stylistic choice as evidence of nationally-identifiable preferences for specific parts of speech in translation. Trying to make much of this kind of variation with an undertone of ethnic association is questionable. Would one draw similar attention to hypothetical translations in English of the following BCMS/SC sentence especially if the English translations were made by native speakers of different ethnicities? E.g. Počeo sam učiti engleski u utorak. “I started to learn English on Tuesday.” “I started learning English on Tuesday.” “I started learning the English language on Tuesday.” Although the first translation in each set is closest to the original sentence, the other translations are acceptable and have the same meaning even though using the infinitive “to learn” or the gerund “learning” constitutes a difference in use of a part of speech. One wonders if these researchers would dare to make similar notes or analyses when comparing the American and British editions of the volumes of Harry Potter which exhibit comparable differences in style and lexical choice.
This attempt at establishing a dichotomy segregating Serbian from Bosnian and Croatian by focusing on one acronym is burdened by the conflation of “analytic” and “synthetic” which are appropriate in a discussion of typology rather than one on inflection. Moreover, my comments in 3.3.1. showing treatment of “NATO”, “G20” and “OPEC”/”OPEK” defy an implicitly neat division between Serbian and the other standards (i.e. OPEK-a etc. in Serbian media shows the “analytic” form of inflection just like OPEC-a does in Bosnian and Croatian media, G20 is left uninflected in all examples). To save themselves from additional academic embarassment as they do this cherry-picking with examples highlighting differences which in fact contradict generalizations that they are trying to establish or confirm, Bekavac et al. should have left the matter of inflecting acronyms with their statement in 3.3.1. of “None of the three languages treats acronyms consistently wihen it comes to morphological properties”.
On the surface this is true but two facts weaken Bekavac et al.’s focus on separating Serbian from the other standards. After accounting for Bosnian and Croatian being (i)jekavian and Serbian usually being ekavian, the words, sav(j)et, sigurnost and v(ij)eće are valid in all standards with the same meanings. Thus they are synonyms but when used to translate “Security Council” [of the UN>, Bosnian and Croatian codify it as Vijeće sigurnosti while Serbian codifies it as Savet bezbednosti / Savjet bezbjednosti. The only term here that is not found in all standards is bezb(j)ednost which is a Serbianism. The second point is that kazao and rekao are equally translatable as “said, told” and valid in all standards. Ascribing the occurrence of synonyms in separate translations to an expression of ethnic identification is strained to say the least.
I find this conflation of an acknowledged phonological distinction (see my comments here on the phonological differences highlighted by Bekavac et al.) with what is presented as a morphological comparison to be unprofessional. I reiterate that the distinction made by Bekavac et al. in their Croatian and Serbian examples immediately above is phonological, not morphological. If the Serbian texts has been expressed in the (i)jekavian sub-variant, the contrast of –ije/je with –e and implied ethnolinguistic division on this point would vanish, and presumably weaken the researchers’ rationale or assumptions as they attempt to establish rigid or supposedly immutable distinctions between Croatian (or Bosnian) and Serbian. The mentioning of Bosnian using different lexemes or derivatives turns on the following examples used in the monograph. E.g. “UN Appeals Court, PACE rapporteur” Bs: Apelacioni sud UN-a, izvještači PACE-a Cr: Žalbeno vijeće UN-a, izvjestitelji PACE-a Sr: Žalbeno veće UN-a, izvestioci PSSE Apart from the aforementioned misconstrued ethnic contrast of –ije/je with –e, these other differences would be suitably examined under differences in lexicon in sections 3.3. and 3.3.1. with the latter pertaining to the treatment of acronyms.
This is well-suited to section 3.3.1. which deals with acronyms and would show that treatment is not so much dependent on ethnic grounds as much as it is lexically-specific with some acronyms in Serbian media sometimes also showing inflected acronyms remniscent of the convention in Bosnian and Croatian media (e.g. OPEK-a, OEBS-u, UNESKO-a). I cannot imagine a credible reason for including these examples under “3.4. Noun phrases” other than their being a means for the authors to belabour the notion of treating Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian as separate languages even though the distinction between the categories is blurred (i.e. differences in handling acronyms are introduced as examples of differences in syntax or noun phrases.) 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7154 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 363 of 541 31 August 2013 at 9:42pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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FINNISH
It seems that I posted too soon in my previous entry for the language. It turns out that there were additional exercises on passive and plural in Unit 6 of the workbook for “FSI Conversational Finnish”. Now I can say that I’ve completed the unit’s exercises. In any case, I was grateful for the extra practice and started to feel more comfortable with the endings of the plural and often provide the correct answers on the first try by the time I got to the last few sets of exercises. Nevertheless, more practice can’t hurt. 
(From Oswald - Sarjakuva) 1) “What does this mean? The moon is in the sky even though it’s daytime!” 2) “This is a dream, isn’t it?” 3) “Of course. – Hahaa, I knew it!” 4) “Everything is a dream!” 5) “Could you please open your schoolbook, Oswald? – Ugh, get lost! There’s no room for you in my dream!” 6) “Ha ha! Why can’t reality be like this?” 7) “Come to think of it, this is a needlessly long dream.” - ottaa esille (otan esille, otti esille, ottanut esille) “to bring forth, take up; open” Convention for unfamiliar vocabulary in the comic strip (i.e. needed to consult a dictionary) NOUNS & ADJECTIVES: nominative singular (genitive singular, partitive singular, partitive plural) VERBS: 1st infinitive (1st person singular present tense, 3rd person singular past simple tense, active past participle) ADVERBS & INTERJECTIONS: no extra information given *** TURKISH I’ve worked through Unit 4 of “Turkish Self-Study Course” and the material on pgs. 25-29 (Unit 2) in “Elementary Turkish”. I studied more about declarative sentences with demonstrative pronouns including those ending with the suffix -rası / -rasi (e.g. bu ~ burası “this ~ this [place]”), and how to answer such declarative statements when converted to questions. In the latter I studied more about greetings, personal suffixes expressing the present tense of “to be” in other languages, personal and demonstrative pronouns, and the negating element değil. Despite the low pace of “Turkish Self-Study Course”, it is indeed excellent for those unfamiliar with Turkish since it introduces relatively little new material in each chapter relative to the preceding one. This means that a chapter’s exercises provide substantial reinforcement of what was taught in the preceding chapter in addition to whatever few new elements are introduced in the current chapter. *** OTHER LANGUAGES I'm trying to put in as much study as possible this weekend since things outside languages will get busier in September. ______
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| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7154 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 364 of 541 31 August 2013 at 9:58pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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The second part of this entry contains my comments and analysis of the sections describing what Bekavac et al. label as the “semantic level” of differences in BCMS/SC.
For reference: - Part 1 (analysis of the abstract and what Bekavac et al. label as the “phonological level” of differences in BCMS/SC) - Part 2 (analysis of what Bekavac et al. label as the “morphological level” of differences in BCMS/SC) - Part 3 (analysis of what Bekavac et al. label as the “lexical level” of differences in BCMS/SC) - Part 4 (analysis of what Bekavac et al. label as the “syntactic level” of differences in BCMS/SC) *** BCMS/SC I’ve finished working through Chapter 19 in “Teach Yourself Serbian”. The chapter mentioned the aorist and pluperfect, and introduced the occasional use of reflexive verbs as impersonal constructions. It was another very short chapter. 
(From Qolombo) 1) “You know, until I saw you, I was having complexes about the size of my nose.” 2) “I understand… And I would have complexes that I have such a small nose.” 3) “A small nose… A small nose… Santa Maria, do I have too small of a nose? – Here we go again.” Convention for vocabulary in the comic strip that's unfamiliar to me (i.e. needed to consult a dictionary) (this will be put in both scripts partially to accommodate those unused to Serbian Cyrillic and also so that I get at least a little bit of practice using the keyboard layout for Serbian Cyrillic). NOUNS & ADJECTIVES: nominative singular (genitive singular) VERBS (where applicable using convention of imperfective > perfective): infinitive (1st person singular present tense [imperfective verb] / future tense [perfective verb], 3rd person plural present tense [imperfective verb] / future tense [perfective verb]) ADVERBS & INTERJECTIONS: no extra information given
At last there is a section which elicits little disagreement from me. Indeed there are many false friends or partial false friends within BCMS/SC, some of which I have explored in my log’s entries this year. However the presence of false friends does not necessarily detract from treating Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian as parts of a pluricentric language nor buttress the idea that they are distinct languages (cf. last sentence in quoted section: “Although there are common lexemes in all three Slavic languages, they can have different meanings.”). Native speakers of a pluricentric language such as Spanish, in addition to those of distinct languages with varying levels of mutual intelligibility such as Czech and Polish or Kazakh and Kyrgyz can readily provide examples of false friends. Edited by Chung on 31 August 2013 at 10:08pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Cavesa Triglot Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 5007 days ago 3277 posts - 6779 votes Speaks: Czech*, FrenchC2, EnglishC1 Studies: Spanish, German, Italian | Message 365 of 541 31 August 2013 at 10:33pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Chung, you are awesome. Even though I know very little about BCS, I loved you comments and learnt a few things. It might be possible that the search for differences might be to biased by authors. Are they all croats? The topic of the languages and the nationalities seems to be still very alive in the whole area. Btw the comic strips are great :-)
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| sans-serif Tetraglot Senior Member Finland Joined 4557 days ago 298 posts - 470 votes Speaks: Finnish*, English, German, Swedish Studies: Danish | Message 366 of 541 31 August 2013 at 11:30pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
I'd probably render this as: Why don't you get your books out, Oswald. The verb 'ottaa esille' implies that his books are still in his bag, so the translation 'open your book' sounds odd in this context. Keep up the good work! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7154 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 367 of 541 31 August 2013 at 11:37pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Díky, Cavesa. This research paper was indeed done by Croatian scholars and their paper aligns with mainstream thinking in Croatian academia where BCMS/SC is not a pluricentric language but only divisible into separate languages on the same classificatory level as Slovenian and Bulgarian. Their angle is to build supporting background material or direction for anyone interested in designing computerized utilities that account for the differences within BCMS/SC. An obvious application would be a piece of software for translation. You can already see the problems in doing this for BCMS/SC in that such software would need to account for factors that are not reducible to something binary or based on Venn diagrams using operators NOT, XOR (exclusive OR), AND etc. In other words there are elements in BCMS/SC that differ in frequency (probabilistically) instead of being a binary matter of existence versus non-existence leading to 1-to-1 correspondence that's easy to include in machine translation. I've already shown that most of the differences latched onto by Bekavac et al. are matters of frequency instead of being mutually exclusive and tacitly easy to program for machine translation or electronic lexicology. What they have done so far is effectively an extended variation of the amateurish prescriptivist guides without usage notes which arrange Croatian and Serbian features or lexemes side-by-side and insinuate that Croats use only A while Serbs use only B even when A is a regionalism, rarely-used or slang among Croats, while B is standard to everyone (i.e. not just Serbs) or vice-versa (e.g. regional Croatian špek "bacon" for standard BCMS/SC slanina "bacon") Related to the example here, just because the Serbian text often shows sa whereas a Bosnian or Croatian one often shows s doesn't mean necessarily that s is ungrammatical and inadmissible in the Serbian text. A "Bosnian" or "Croatian" example sentence of Idemo li s tobom? "Are we going with you?" should not automatically be converted to "Serbian" Idemo li sa tobom? when Idemo li s tobom? is valid along in standard Serbian too (however Idemo li sa tobom? would be ungrammatical in Croatian, and probably for some Bosniaks too). Basically there are some partially two-way relationships that the authors seem to ignore and could mislead or skew subsequent applications in computational linguistics involving BCMS/SC. Of course, a simplistic mind could also rationalize the need for a machine translator within BCMS/SC on assuming that BCMS/SC consists of separate languages rather than variants of a pluricentric language (imagine a comparable proposal in machine translation between two varieties of English such as British versus American, or Australian versus South African). In the next entry I'll provide a more pointed critique of their approach and the questionable arrangement of what they proclaim as differences that could be worked into software meant to help learners or researchers of BCMS/SC. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Cavesa Triglot Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 5007 days ago 3277 posts - 6779 votes Speaks: Czech*, FrenchC2, EnglishC1 Studies: Spanish, German, Italian | Message 368 of 541 01 September 2013 at 12:10am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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I understood the sentence :-) Actually this approach to BCMS and its failure further proves that Czech and Slovak are separate languages with high mutual intelligibility in my opinion. We and slovaks either have the same word (just with different grammar it follows or ortograph or pronunciation but still clearly the same meaning) or we have a different word. And Czech-Slovak are quite popular to be considered one language and compared to BCMS by a part of the enthusiasts.
Trying to make a machine translator when you don't need one, what an efficient use of time and money (I suppose public funds). Are there more attempts to artificially divide the languages? I think it is a mistake because one larger book and tv market is much better than three small ones. (Had it been normal for czechs to buy and read Slovak books here and vice versa, I believe it would be only beneficial for both sides. And we actually have separate languages). 1 person has voted this message useful |
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