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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 6709 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 2417 of 3959 27 May 2011 at 9:35pm | IP Logged | |||||
Let me clear up the discussion about "good day". Splog (who is called FluentCzech on Youtube) made a video where he used "dobrý den" from Czech as example of the need for literal translations as opposed to 'free' translations. This expression obviously means "good day", but this is not used in modern English (contrary to "Guten Tag" in German), so you risk finding the 'translation' "hello" instead in a language guide. My point in the video (and I think I speak for Splog too) is that you haven't grasped the idea behind "dobry den" if you stick to "hello". To think idiomatically in Czech you have to take the Czech way of thinking seriously, and the best way of rendering the Czech greeting is to translate literally it as "good day" - thinking in terms of "hello" will just lead you astray. One point I make in the video is that ideomatic expressions aren't as imprehensible as sometimes claimed. If you know that a certain string of words has some special meaning and you then look at the components them you can often how this came to be - the thing you couldn't have done was to predict that this actually happened. Any language chooses some word combinations for active use, while others are ignored. To speak idiomatically you need to now which combinations actually got used with derived meanings, and which ones were left behind. Of course there will also be cases where the factors that gave a certain expression it special meaning and its active use are unknown to you, but that doesn't mean that there weren't a reason once. Even in a case where the elements appear to be meaningless it helps you to remember the expression if you accept that the elements in principle have a meaning. Take the French "hareng saur": Hareng saur est l'appellation communément donnée par l'industrie alimentaire au hareng salé et fumé, à l'odeur puissante (Wikipedia). The word "saur" is apparently not used in other combinations so you could say that it hasn't got any independent meaning in French outside this expression. But it seems to be of the same root as German "sauer", so if you think of it as "pungent fish" you have understood the expression better than if you just had settled for the translation "buckling" (or "stokfisk" in Danish). To think idiomatically you have to take the differences in thinking patterns between different languages seriously. Edited by Iversen on 14 September 2011 at 12:29am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6709 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 2419 of 3959 28 May 2011 at 3:04pm | IP Logged | |||||
Well, you say "hallo" and "buckling" and "I don't feel very well" in English, and you have to know that Anglophones say "I don't feel very well" in a situation where a Dutchspeaking person might say "Ik voel me niet zo lekker". But to think in Dutch you need to internalize the thought behind this quite amusing use of "lekker" - it is not enough to learn this idiomatic expression by heart. I don't say that you should think any expression in English first and then translate it into Dutch. My point is that you should notice that the Dutch actually say the equivalent of "I don't feel so delicious". SP: Hasta este momento he estado sentado en mi silla mirando la televisión mientras yo hacia listas de palabras, primeramente en polonés, después en ruso. Entonces copió un párrafo sobre la profesión de traducción en Rusia y algunos de mis textos impresos sobre el Karoo en Sudáfrica (en afrikaans). En la televisión he visto una serie de emisiones sobre las grandes extinciones en la historia de la Tierra, y la más interesante de estas fue sin duda la emision sobre la extinción que terminó el tepido y húmido Ordovícico y inició el mas frío Silúrico. Los científicos piensan que una ráfaga de rayos gamma vagaban por el universo y por coincidencia alcanzaron a la tierra, onde sudaron nuestra capa de ozono y quemaron el suelo. Un estallido de rayos gamma es un paquete increíblemente energético de partículas emitidas en una sola dirección determinada, proveniente por ejemplo de supernovas extremas que crean agujeros negros masivos. Es una muy mala idea interponerse en el camino de esto! Después vi una media hora de "Desde Galicia para el mundo" en TVE Internacional en español estandardizado (a excepción de una breve discusión entre dos Galicios, que explícitamente estuve incluído para ilustrar qué totalmente imposible sería para todo extrañero a la región comprender la lingua o dialeto galego). El sitio web de TVE Internacional está aqui. I have spent my time today making wordlists in Polish and Russian, and after that I copied/studied some texts in Russian and Afrikaans. My concurrent television watching was mostly dedicated to a series on Discovery World of programs in English about the great extinction events of this planet, but I did also watch one half hour of "from Galicia to the World" on TVE International (in Spanish, not Galician). And right now I'm watching something about food on Raiuno. It has proven conclusively that you can't make Italian women shut up by bribing them with ice lollies (they didn't even try this with the two men in the program). PS: and right now I see that Akhenaton's mummy (from "grave no. 55") has been conclusively identified through DNA-analysis and comparison with Amenophis III, and that this hitherto unidentified mummy has a certain aberrant cranial bone shape in common with the mummy of king Tut. Sorry for not writing this in Hieroglyphs or at least in Coptic, but I'm somewhat linguistically impaired. Edited by Iversen on 14 September 2011 at 12:30am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6709 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 2421 of 3959 30 May 2011 at 11:13am | IP Logged | |||||
SP: Sí, desde un punto de vista estrictamente lingüístico el gallego está suficientemente cerca de portugués para que se pueda decir que es el mismo idioma. Pero los Gallegos viven en otro país y sus ortografías son diferentes (muchos 'x' en la ortografía más comun), y probablemente le gustaría ver a Gallego como lengua independiente. La Wikipedia Gallega tiene unas indicaciones optimistas sobre el uso real del gallego en 1991 y 2001: Data: - - Entenden - Falan - Leen - Escriben Censo 1991: 96’96% 91’39% 49’30% 34’85% Censo 2001: 99’16% 91’04% 68’65% 57’64% Pero la Wikipedia en Anglés está mas cauteloso en decir que.. "Currently about 82% of Galicia's population can speak Galician and about 61% has it as a mother tongue". From a purely linguistical point of view Galician is so close to Portuguese that you could see them as one language (there is even a socalled dialect continuum). However the Galicians ('Gallegos') live outside Portugal, and their orthographies are different - many x's - and if you can trust the internet sources they also prefer to see Galician as a language rather than a dialect. The big question is how many of the inhabitants in Galicia speak Spanish rather than Galician. I have visited Santiago de Compostela long ago (in 1991), but back then I didn't care about the local language situation. Edited by Iversen on 14 September 2011 at 12:32am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6709 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 2424 of 3959 30 May 2011 at 3:21pm | IP Logged | |||||
Fine picture, and very instructive. I guess few people even knew how much space Leonese and Aragonese once took up on the peninsula. The only thing that may be problematic with the picture is its size.
Edited by Iversen on 14 September 2011 at 12:26am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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