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

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jeff_lindqvist
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 Message 3457 of 3959
02 December 2013 at 3:58pm | IP Logged 
I overheard a conversation some days ago, when it was said that Julius was more common in my area than anywhere else in Sweden (in fact, the person had never met ANYONE named Julius before moving here).

Interesting blog post:
http://survivinglifeinsweden.blogspot.se/2012/12/swedish-bab y-names-redux.html

The other side of the spectrum is those who name their kids Anné, Pierré, Helené...
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Iversen
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 Message 3458 of 3959
04 December 2013 at 1:37pm | IP Logged 
DU: Ik zat in mijn werk-leunstoel gisteren en hadde niets te lezen op Nederlands (mijn computer met internet enz. is buiten bereik van mijn fauteuil). Zo ik studeerde de inhoud van de achterkant van mijn boekenplank (waartoe de fictie is vewijst), en ik vond daar een klein, maar dicht gedrukte boekje dat ik helemaal ben vergeten: "Het ontwaken der Mensheid" van Herbert Kühn,Prisma 1958, duitse originaal van 1954. Toen waren de Neanderthalers, Homo erectus en sommige Australopithecus-species bekend, maar sinds 1954 heeft de paleontologen veel nieuwe hominiden en prehominiden gevonden, en sommige van deze ontdekkingen hebben de interpretatie van de oudere vondsten diepgaand veranderd - dus het boek is nu zeker verouderd. Maar het onderwerp interesseert me, en de stijl en de dichte druk zal het zeer bruikbaar als goedenacht-lezen maken. Het ontwaken van de mensheid wordt zo mijn nieuwe slaapwel pil - welk ironie!

I can't reach my computer with the internet connection from my comfy chair, and yesterday evening I needed something to read in Dutch so I consulted the backside of my bookshelves where I keep all the fictional books. Among these I found a little second-hand book from 1958 called 'The awakening of mankind'. And no, it isn't science fiction - on the contrary, it is a non-fictional account of the early history of man. The problem is that in 1954 the only Neanderthals, Homo erectus and bones of a few Australopithecus species were known, but the paleontologists have found lots of new bones and other remains since then, and some of these fundamentally change the view we have on the extinct hominids and prehominids. But the theme is interesting, and because of the somewhat heavy writing style and the small print this account will certainly function well as goodnight reading. The awakening of mankind thus becomes a sleeping pill for me - somewhat ironically.

I had also time to study a page of Harry Potter in Irish and some Indonesian, but then I fell asleep.

Edited by Iversen on 04 December 2013 at 1:57pm

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Iversen
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 Message 3459 of 3959
05 December 2013 at 1:17pm | IP Logged 
IC: Ég hef núna óg gert orðreikningum á íslensku, og niðurstöðurnar voru almennt eins og búist. Tiltölulega mörg orð voru metinn sem 'giskaleg', og þetta er sem auðvitað vegna bakgrunni mínum í dönsku. Sumir orðarætur sem eg vissi ekki, átti mörg afleiður, og þetta kostaði mig alveg fullt á vog. Til dæmi þekkti ég ekki "kafa" (Dönsk: 'at dykke', ensk 'to dive'), en það finnast marg afleiðsla, eins óg "köfun föt", "köfun námskeið", "köfunartæki", "kafari", "köfun" og svo framvegis Og gamla orðabók Sigurðssons hafði nóg af tilvísanir til símskeytum og símbréf sem ég hef ekki gert neitt til að læra.

My Icelandic wordcounts gave the following results:
Iðunnar: 9000 known (43%) and 3000 guessable (13%) out of roughly 20.000
Sigurdsson: 8000 known (42%) and 2000 guessable (12%) out of roughly 18.000

The percentages for guessable words are fairly high, but given that it is a Nordic language where I have read comparatively few texts and listened even less this isn't really surprising. In 2009 I got 48% resp. 53% 'known' words (which back then included guessable words), and you may ask why I haven't made any progress. Well maybe I have, and then I have just been more fuzzy about knowing the corrrect meanings this time. However I also 'lost' a number of pages with many words based on a few roots, which I didn't know (like "kafa" for 'to dive').

In Sigurdsson I counted every 50th page, and one of these happened to be the one with at least ten words for telegrams and telegraphs – which I haven't spent much effort on – and telephones, which I do know. Their common root is síma, which means thread. An oldfashioned telephone with a cable is a "sími"– but a mobile phone is farsíma (far-thread) even though the cable has disappeared long ago. That's how the linguistically conservative Icelanders deal with modern contraptions. They ask themselves: what would Egil Skallagrimsson have called this thing (before he planted his axe in your skull)? OK, then that's also how we should call it. But this attitude may be under attack from youngsters who care less about the glorious past than about the current affairs of their American pop idols. Otherwise the word "hotel" wouldn't have seeped into the Icelandic language.


Edited by Iversen on 05 December 2013 at 1:33pm

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montmorency
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 Message 3460 of 3959
05 December 2013 at 4:07pm | IP Logged 
Would "hotel" have otherwise been the equivalent of "rock-dwelling for many unrelated
people with built-in hot-springs"? :-)
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Iversen
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 Message 3461 of 3959
06 December 2013 at 12:41am | IP Logged 
I think the normal procedure in the ol' days would be to be the guest of some rich and mighty person (or a relative of yours). As you probably remember even Odin spent time as a coachsurfer, and Hávamál is full of references to this practice. I haven't read about hotels in Medieval Iceland, but we got them in Denmark under the name "kro" - though this system wasn't institutionalized until the late 14. century. The first real 'kro' in Denmark was established in 1198 with Bromølle Kro on Sjælland (Zealand) - and at that time people already spoke Old Danish in this country. Nevertheless "krá" would be my best bet at an alternative to the ugly foreign word "hotel", which through French ultimately comes from the word "hospital".

Apart from that I have had an acute fit of Wordcountenitis. I have added wordcounts for Italian, Spanish and Esperanto to the list at page 248.

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Iversen
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 Message 3462 of 3959
07 December 2013 at 9:52pm | IP Logged 
I have studied the 'regulamin' of Zoo Wroclaw in Polish, I have watched "Passaggio al oveste" in Italian (plus fragments of Linea verde, but the nauseating background music of that program is a definite showstopper), read Herodot's remarks about Babylon in Russian (and done some Russian wordlists) etc. etc, and the last couple of hours I have been listening to Dutch Science programs.

DU: Toen ik schreef een boodschap in de thread over het luisteren, luisterde ik nog steeds naar een programma over Grandin Temple, die ondanks haar handicap (autisme) is uitgegroeid tot een zeer welbespraakte schrijfster en 'vee-fluisteraar'. Die programma was op nederlands en engelsk, maar nu luistere ik naar en programma met een voordracht over kleine zaken, en gisteren heb ik geluisterd naar een dicussie med een universiteits-professor over de mysterieuse zwaarte kracht in het universum - het was en deel van de serie "De Wereld Leert Deur". Maar dit programma met de appels en water en 'silly putty' het me niet geleert wat zwaarte energie of donkele materie is - de geleerden hebben op dit moment nog geen goed antwoord..   

Op dit moment zie ik een programma in de serie Beagle over menselijke migraties, en ze beginnen vanzelfsprekend in Afrika. Een grappig detail is dat er passages in het Nederlands en Engels zijn, (AF) maar tydens die besoek aan die San-mense in Suid-Afrika (en de blanke boer by het Voortrekkermonument in Pretoria) word Afrikaans gepraat - met Nederlands ondertiteling.
   

Edited by Iversen on 08 December 2013 at 11:14pm

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Fasulye
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 Message 3463 of 3959
08 December 2013 at 9:54pm | IP Logged 
Iversen wrote:
DU: Toen ik schreef een boodschap in de thread over het luisteren, luisterde ik nog steeds naar een programma over Grandin Temple, die ondanks zijn handicap (autisme) is uitgegroeid tot een zeer welbespraakte schrijver en 'vee-fluisterer'


NL: Correctie: ... luisterde ik nog steeds naar een programma naar Temple Grandin, die ondanks haar handicap (autisme) is uitgegroeid tot een zeer welbespraakte schrijfster / auteur en "vee - fluisteraar"

Ik heb deze TV uitzending over Temple Grandin live op Nederland 2 bekeken en vond het ook heel boeiend. Ze is een vrouw en geen man. In andere documentaires op de Duitse TV heb ik al over haar werk en de rol die het autisme voor haar werk speelt gehoord. In haar geval werkt het autisme in bepaalde opzichten niet als handicap maar als voordeel voor haar werk als hoogleraar dierenwelzijn en veefokkerij.

Fasulye

Edited by Fasulye on 08 December 2013 at 9:59pm

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Iversen
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 Message 3464 of 3959
08 December 2013 at 10:35pm | IP Logged 
PO: Spędziłem cały dzień studiujący polskich czasowników, ale wynik jest dość skomplikowane, więc wolałbym to wyjaśnić w języku angielskim.

... and this is what happened.

I own two Polish grammars and three dictionaries plus one language guide (in Italian). The only one of my dictionaries which is reasonably consistent in marking perfective vs. imperfective verbs is my fat two-way German-Polish Pons, which also marks some verbs as having 1.ps. singular present/future tense on -am, were most verbs have this form ending on ę. However it isn't consistent in marking all verbs as belonging to one or another category, and actually it doesn't have a section about Polsish verbs - only one about the German verbs. So in essence I suspect that both my Pons and my French-Polish Oxford have been written for Polish speakers rather than Germans and Frenchmen and me. The third dictionary declares itself as a "Słownik minimum", but for morphological annotations it is below my minimum. In contrast I have a Russian-Danish dictionary which has divided all verbs into 63 categories - but not sorted in the orer I would like them, so I have had to write a green sheet with the order I like. With this in mind I thought I might get a better overview over the Polish verbs by making a similar green sheet for them.

OK, I have two grammars. My German Pons "kurz und bündig" is indeed kurz and bündig, but even at my present state I can se that it barely scratches the surface of the present tense forms. On the other hand my Slavica "grammar of contemporary Polish" is very detailed, but it is also the kind of book that makes language students crawl out of a window in the middle of the night to find a tree where they can hang themselves. The best weapon against that kind of grammar is to extract the things you want to remember and then afterwards try to see whether you can reorder/reformulate those things in a more accessible fashion, leaving the rest aside. And if that works you have material for a green sheet.

First I noticed that the endings (minus the preceding vowel) always are ę or -m, sz, [zero], my, cie and ą or ją (ę is of course a nasalised e, so it contains both a 'preceding vowel' and the shadow of a long gone n or m). The first and the last form tend to 'swing together', and so do the middle four forms. The authors promises that everything relevant normally can be deduced from the infinitive and the two first forms of the present (except in the case "być", 'to be'), and they seem to believe that the dictionaries can tell you those forms. Well, my dictionaries can't, so having a personalized system ready when I see the relevant forms in real life is an absolute necessity. But thanks for the simplification.

Infinitives end in ć (apart from a few that end in c). The things that happen between the root and the ending is the problem, and it took me the rest of the day to clean up and reorder the categories of the grammar book to my own satisfaction. As far as I can see the main problem is that the authors cling to a canonical analysis based on stems that don't necessarily look like the things you can see with your own eyes (or hear). And the result is confusion - like when the author quotes forms like "lubić lubie lubisz" and then add that the "primary root consonant b is visible in the adjective luby pleasant". Well, I can see a 'b' in each an every form in present. The solution to the riddle is here that "bi" is defined as a consonant in its own right and not the same thing as the first letter in "b" + "i". I understand that, but it still sounds weird.

OK, I found out that the most regular patterns are found for the verbs with 1.p.sing. on -n, so in my system they form the first group. And then I go backwards till I end up with the first group in the first conjugation. Along the way I check whether there a consonant and/or vowel changes between the infinitive and the two present forms, or between these two, and then the contours become somewhat more clear. For instance the verb "nosić" (carry) has "noszę" in the 1.p.sing. and "nosisz" - here the 1.p.sing. has a different consonant than the two other forms. And does my fat Pons tell me that? Nope. But that's life if you try to learn Polish using dictionaries written for Poles.

I have now in front of me a sheet of paper with all the example verbs from the section about the present in my fat grammar, and the intention is that I will try to use these verbs as 'memory hooks' when I study Polish texts. So if I see see a 1. person form with sz between the root and the ending I'll know from my table that this can happen in several situations, which doesn't help me much - except that sz sometimes alternates with s. But maybe I see the form "nosisz" tomorrow (with 's' in the same position), and then there is one and only one place for it in the system. This is not how I want to work - I would prefer receiving instantaneous and complete information about the morphology - but as I suggested: it is easier to categorize the things you meet if you have your categories ready before you dip your toes in the real world. Also when you hit a rock and have to revise them...

Fasulye wrote:
...haar ... schrijfster / auteur ... fluisteraar


"Zijn" in plaats van "haar" is echt een domme fout en het is niet de eerste keer dat ik heb deze fout gemaakt - maar natuurlijk is Temple Grandin een vrouw. De verkeerde woordkeuze voor de 'schrijfster' was een gevolg van luiheid, terwijl de spelling van de luisteraar was puur giswerk (baseerd op het engelse "horse whisperer", overgeheveld naar vee).


Edited by Iversen on 10 December 2013 at 11:10am



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