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

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Iversen
Super Polyglot
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Denmark
berejst.dk
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 Message 2185 of 3959
28 December 2010 at 2:05pm | IP Logged 
The summary for December is now ready - though of course I'll have to extend it to cover the last couple of days in 2010. We once had a dicussion about names for decades. We never really reached an agreement on the name covering 2000-2009 (the zeros? the nulls? the noughts?], and we came through 2010 without finding a name for the periode 2010-2019 (the tenners? or tennies? or teens?). But from 1920 we have a tradition to hark back to: the twenties.

Decorations on Christmas trees in Denmark are variable - not just red and white as our national flag Dannebrog. My mother's living room is decorated with hundreds of pleated "Christmas hearts" in all colours (except black), but the tree itself is mainly decorated with coloured glass balls, 'lametta' (tinsel?), silvery stars and redwhite pixies. My own flat is not decorated with Christmas things at all. However on the wall of my office I have put an anti-Christmas painting which isn't for the faint-hearted.


Edited by Iversen on 28 December 2010 at 2:35pm

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arturs
Triglot
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Latvia
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278 posts - 408 votes 
Speaks: Latvian*, Russian, English

 
 Message 2186 of 3959
28 December 2010 at 2:29pm | IP Logged 
1) его название - "Новый венский Журнал", и я его купил

2) Язык легче действительно - this is correct, but as a practically native Russian speaker, it feels more natural for me to say Язык действительно легче

3)чтобы понимать - again, this is grammatically correct and everyone will understand You, but для понимания sounds more natural in this particular sentence

4) красивые статьи - this quite confused me - again it is not incorrect, but I have never used the word красивая for describing an article as a whole, because красивая means beautiful and has no other meanings,on the contrary to the English word "nice", which can be used to describe a person or a physical object and something that is not a physical object, like an article.

5) Can you please write in English, what you meant with this phrase - эксобширной на парках и на садах Австрии?
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Iversen
Super Polyglot
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Denmark
berejst.dk
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Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan
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 Message 2187 of 3959
28 December 2010 at 2:52pm | IP Logged 
Thank you for your corrections

Ad 5): I can understand that you have problems with this phrase: "эксобширной на парках и на садах Австрии". "эк(с)" shouldn't be there at all, and there is at least one word missing in the remaining text. The general meaning should be something like "with an extensive look upon the parks and gardens of Austria" (there is a long and beautiful :-) article about them), so maybe I could have written something like "с обширной смотреть на парки и на сады Австрии".


Edited by Iversen on 28 December 2010 at 3:08pm

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arturs
Triglot
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Latvia
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Speaks: Latvian*, Russian, English

 
 Message 2188 of 3959
28 December 2010 at 3:14pm | IP Logged 
This is a quite precise translation of "with an extensive look upon the parks and gardens of Austria" - с обширным обзором парков и садов Австрии :)

обзор means review, coverage, overlook, overview

Edited by arturs on 28 December 2010 at 3:16pm

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Iversen
Super Polyglot
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Denmark
berejst.dk
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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
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 Message 2189 of 3959
30 December 2010 at 11:37am | IP Logged 
"обзор" has just the meaning I was searching for in my incomplete sentence.

SCO: Ah dinnae write aught in this threid yestreen, but in the afternuin ah did get done a wee video in Scots fae ma channel on Youtube. Ah did tried reading a prepared text the time, which ah for ordinar diesna do acause ah cannae shut me big mouth an juist read what's on the sheet - this time I mostly stuck tae the manuscript ('twas hard!), but it is mae fun just tae gab freely. In the video ah whiles awmaist forgit tae imitate a Scots accent acause Ah'm too busy readin the text!    

I'm at my job right now, but while working on some spreadsheets I also have listened to some videos on Youtube. One of those caught my interest because of the method: Mike Campbell "Glossika" examined the concept of negation raising across a lot of languages (including some I know, others I don't know). The idea is that in some languages with some verbs you can 'move' a negation from a subordinate phrase to the main phrase, even though the result strictly speaking isn't logical.

I think I don't understand. vs I don't think I understand.
but
I hope it doesn't rain. vs. *I don't hope it rains.   (my asterisk)

In the first sentence you don't stop think, you think a negative though - but the negation can move 'upwards' in the hierarchy. And then he proceeds to investigate this phenomenon in other languages using Google hits as his yardstick for grammaticality. And that's perfectly OK, but the practical problem is that it can be difficult to make really pertinent searches because of intervening words, inflection, incompetent language users and other bothersome things. But the basic idea, that we need a lot more quantitative assessment in grammatical descriptions, is very relevant - it is not enough just to cite the different possibilities with some random examples drawn from high-brow literary works. You need to see what is common, what is rare and what is totally impossible as seen from the viewpoint of native speakers.

When I made my final dissertation for my degree in French many years ago I faced the same problem, and I reacted by simply taking 10.000 pages of French literature and counting ALL subordinate sentences or subordinate-like construction, subdivided and exemplified according to my own homemade analysis system. I didn't continue in the academical system so I never had the chance to carry on this kind of systematic quantification of a language, but it would be a splendid way to single out what you really need to focus on when learning it. And with modern electronic wizardry the task should be way easier than it was in 1981 when I did my counts on paper.

You could make your language use more idiomatic if you had a omniscient source where you could check for instance whether sentence knots are possible at all in a given language, and if yes, which cases are common and which are just used by a few aberrant authors, just as you now can check through Google whether a given word is commonly used.

Edited by Iversen on 30 December 2010 at 2:49pm

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Iversen
Super Polyglot
Moderator
Denmark
berejst.dk
Joined 6453 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
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 Message 2190 of 3959
31 December 2010 at 1:20am | IP Logged 
BA I: Setelah Laoshu disebutkan saluran saya Youtube dalam sebuah video yang saya mendapat jumlah yang mengejutkan langganan. Ketika saya membuka rekeningnya (?) gmail saya halaman pertama dipenuhi dengan pesan layanan dari Youtube. Dan 100 orang telah menyaksikan upaya saya untuk berbicara bahasa Skotlandia.

Since Laoshu mentioned my Youtube Channel in a video I have received a lot of subscriptions - when I opened my gmail account the whole first page was filled with service messages from Youtube. And 100 persons have vatched my attempt to speak Scots which I uploaded yesterday. Wow - I'm glad that I haven't got one million viewers like some videos get, then I would drown in service messages and I would spend all my time reading comments.

GR: κτός από αυτό: Έχω ασχοληθεί με την Ελληνική μου, χρήσοντας του έμπιστου φίλου μου: ο οδηγός για την Αθήνα το οποίο εγώ κάποτε αγόρασε ως αναμνηστικό. Είναι καταπληκτικό πόσες λέξεις θα πρέπει απλώς να περιγράψει τα ερείπια στην Ακρόπολη!

I have also been working on my Greek, using my ol' friend: the bluish guidebook to Athens which I once bought as a mere souvenir. Those Greeks use a bewildering number of terms for the stuff on top of the Acropolis, including words that aren't found in any of my dictionaries. But the main content is pretty clear, and it helps that I have seen the place.

POR: Ouvi também um só vídeo com o senhor Freire (por favor consulte a secção "poliglotas"!), o que deixa 12 para os próximos dias.

I have also listened to one of the 13 videos where the amazing Senhor Freire is interviewed (see the section "Polyglots") - so that leaves 12 for the next couple of days.


Edited by Iversen on 31 December 2010 at 1:24am

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Iversen
Super Polyglot
Moderator
Denmark
berejst.dk
Joined 6453 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
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 Message 2192 of 3959
01 January 2011 at 2:50pm | IP Logged 
Bonne nouvelle année
Godt nytår
Selamat tahun baru
C Новым годом
Sărbători fericite
Feliz ano novo

GER: .. und Prosit Neujahr! So hat der einheimisch östereichischer dirigent Welser-Möst jedenfals gesagt, und damit habe ich auch angedeutet das ich SELBSTVERSTÄNDLICH wie jedes Jahr das traditionelle Neujahrskonzert direkt aus Wien gehört habe - und ich habe es natürlich auf ZDF gehört um die Kommentare auf Deutsch zu haben. Die Ansagerin könnte sehr wohl eine geborene Österreicherin sein, aber ich weiß nicht mit Sicherheit, ob ZDF wirklich das Originalton aus Wien slichthin übernommen hat. Jedenfals sprach die Dame mit sehr schöne rrrrrrolllende r'en und auch die Mitläute waren wie erwartet etwas geschlossener als die von Mittel- und Norddeutsche Sprecher.

I have as usual heard the traditional New Years concert from Wien (Vienna), and of ciourse I heard it over the German TV-station ZDF in order to get the comments in German and not in Danish. I'm not a specialist in German dialects, but the lady who spoke sounded quite Austrian to my untrained ears, and I enjoyed the rolling r's and the slightly more closed vowels.

BA I: Saya juga mempelajari beberapa bagian dari brosur wisata Singapura. Saya melihat bahwa di teks pada "Haw Par Villa" adalah beberapa kata yang hanya berdiri di Melayu kamus saya, tidak dalam "pengadilan" Indonesia (ruang sidang), "tampilan" (muncul) Tapi itu tidak mengejutkan saya - mencetak dari Internet di Gunung Mulu juga dalam bahasa campuran.

Besides I have studied a few passages from my Singaporean tourist booklets, and I noticed that one of these, the one about "Haw Par Villa", had several words which I only could look up in my Malaysian dictionary, not in the Indonesian one, which otherwise has proven to be the right one for this task. "Haw Par Villa" is an amusement park with statues and other illustrations of Chinese folklore in garish colours and with so much tackiness that it seems deliberate to a Westerner like me. But who knows, maybe it was done in total earnest!    

My mother's Christmas tree:



I have tried to look the names of some of the Christmas decorations up.

"julehjerte" is of course "(plaided) Christmas heart"
"kræmmerhus" = cornet - a remnant from the time where the decorations contained edibles
"lametta" = lametta (from Italian), - but I have also seen the word "tinsel" somewhere
"julestjerne" (plaided) = "Froebel star, German paper star, Swedish starhals"(Quote from my dictionary, and us Danes should be deeply offended!)
"musetrappe" (mouse stairs) = "accordion-folded paper snake especially used as Christmas decoration"
"glaspynt", "glaskugle" = "glass globe"
"guirlande" = festoon, paperchain (if made of paper, but it is mostly made of thin metal foil)

other things:
"julenisse" = Christmas pixie
"kravlenisse" ('crawling pixy') = paper pixy with 'feet' that make it possible to place it on paintings and furniture
"julemanden" = Father Christmas

You will probably recognize most of these items from other cultures, but I think the Christmas hearts are more popular here in Denmark than anywhere else on the planet.

And with those remarks I think we have dealt exhaustively with the event known as Christmas (or Xmas)

Edited by Iversen on 02 January 2011 at 1:04am



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