Andrew’s World

I actually forgot one thing!
The day before yesterday I received a mail by some guy asking if he could use my photo of Marc Okrand (the inventor of Klingon), that I had uploaded to Wikipedia a while ago. He was writing an article on him for The Wall Street Journal and he asked if I had more pics. So I sent him mine and allowed him to use the photo, and now the article is online and even mentions my name under the picture... see:

"Helping the Hearing Impaired And Voicing the Klingons"

Cool, innit? :)

Today in irc://freenode/##english...

Vesped:	Hey people
SkunkyFone:	who you callin a people?
Vesped:	everyone
Arrekesu:	I am not a people
SkunkyFone:	everyone isn't online right now.
Vesped:	SkunkyFone, just saying hey to the people here
SkunkyFone:	Vesped: but, you see, Arrekesu and I aren't people!
Vesped:	why not?
SkunkyFone:	I'm a Skunk.
Vesped:	ok then
SkunkyFone:	I dunno what Arrekesu is, but he says he's not a people either.
Vesped:	"Hello entities" then?

Hooray! It's my LiveJournal's 7^th birthday! Yes, I'm keeping this blog for 7 years now, already... I hardly know of any consecutive blogs that old (except for saria's maybe). Today is Wednesday and I am spending the day writing my term paper on Tsez. I just took a shower and I am hungry, I gotta eat something soon. Later the day, I will meet Melanie, Jürgen, Johanna, and maybe others as well in the city, we're planning to go eat and drink something somwhere. Afterwards, I'll visit Tina to take her home so we can watch Torchwood together. :-B

But now on to the annual statistics, date: April 1, 2009
• Date Created: 2002-03-31 15:22:37 (note that that's a different time zone, so it was already April 1 for me)
• Account Type: Basic Account
• Journal Entries: 2,044
• Post Ratio: 0.80 entries per day
• Comments: 9,023 posted / 10,906 received
• Memories: 223 (I stopped memorizing stuff when the tag feature was invented)
• Tags: 79
• Interests: 146 (highest possible amount)
• Friends: 131 (10 of them deleted)
• Friend of: 125
• Member of: 21 communities and 9 syndicated journals (2 of them deleted)

Hm, my posting ratio is declining. :S

P.S.: LOL, I just accidently posted this entry to linguaphiles! :D

This is about the International Workshop on Pharyngeals & Pharyngealisation in Newcastle upon Tyne, which Sven G. and I attended to present a poster on pharyngeal consonants and pharyngealized vowels in Tsez.

So, on Wednesday, 25 March, I took the ICE from Leipzig to Berlin to meet Sven and board the plain to Amsterdam with him. On the airport in Berlin, while waiting for our plane, we saw Jürgen Vogel and Hugo Egon Balder. Sven also told me that Boris Becker was right in front of me, but I didn't see him. In Amsterdam, I bought myself a new Dutch book: De voorlezer (The Reader / Der Vorleser), which I find a bit more difficult to understand than the other two Dutch books I read. Funny how all three are originally German. ;) Anyways, we took the next plane straight to Newcastle, to the north of England. There, we arrived at our hotel (streetview!) after rummaging through the town by metro and foot for quite a while. In the hotel lobby already waited someone from China, English name "Charlotte", with whom I planned to meet — she is doing a research in Edinburgh on synesthetes who speak or learn Chinese. Thus, I took part in some tests for her on her laptop and received £ 30 for that. I had to assign colors to various Chinese characters and some Latin letters. There was also a group of test characters which were planned not to mean anything to me... but as Charlotte chose them from Unicode, I recognized all of them (there was ¦, §, ˨, ₪, Ѧ and some more) but luckily didn't have colors for most of them.
Later in the evening, Sven and I walked through the town and had dinner at the "Heihei", a Chinese restaurant.

The next day, we set out early as Sven wanted to have breakfast. So we went to town, walked around, ate, and also visited a bookstore. I almost bought a Malay dictionary... aw well. At about 12 o'clock the conference started at the University's "knowledge beehive" and we were about the first to arrive there. Many linguists from all over the world were there, but mostly Arabs. Also some Hebrews, Canadians, Americans, Brits and a French guy was there. Except for Sven and me, there was only one other German person, Markus Hiller, who presented a poster on pharyngeals in Swabian. Perhaps the famoust phoneticist there was Ian Maddieson, though.
Between the talks were breaks and the buffet was richly served... juice, milk, coffee, tea, cookies, and also a lot of really tasty food for lunch. Everyone agreed that the food was great! Later, at about 6 pm we – not being invited speakers – presented our posters. Most of the posters were on Arabic dialects, only few on other languages such as Hebrew, Swabian, the Kansai dialect of Japanese, one about Northeast Caucasian in general and ours about Tsez. All languages with pharyngeals. Everything went well, both Sven and I explained a lot, answered questions, but unfortunately didn't have enough time to see all the posters. We missed the Northeast Caucasian one by Alex Bellem, what a pity! Maybe I'll publish a link to our poster here when it's uploaded somewhere...
In the evening we went to a restaurant and had an all-you-can-eat dinner (for £ 30), which was really rich and great. I talked a lot to a Canadian linguist named Kimary Shahin, living in Qatar. As she's sometimes working with speakers of a Salish language named St'at'imcets (pronounced [ʃtɬʼatɬʼemxəʧ], weird, huh?), I asked her if she could provide me with a Swadesh list in it, for our ASJP project, she agreed and is now waiting for my e-mail with the 40-words list. I hope I won't forget to write her... I also talked to Janet Watson (who spoke German really well!), who is doing research on Mehri, so I also asked her for a list...

The next day was already the last day of the conference. It started at 9 am and involved more talks... among them one by John Esling about children's process of learning language — in fact, pharyngeals and pharyngealized vowels belong to the first sounds uttered by babies. Who would've thought! He had some really cute recordings in his presentation... another interesting thing was that James Scobbie from Scotland brought a little ultrasound device with him and let us try it out in the break. I also tested it and could see my tongue moving in my mouth. James found it looked like a little hamster. Hm. ;)
After the last talks and the general discussion, the best poster was selected, but of course it wasn't ours. Thus ended the workshop.
Afterwards, Sven and I walked through Newcastle a bit, had dinner at a Japanese restaurant and then went back to the hotel.

The next day, at around 4:45 am, we took a taxi to the airport and flew back to Amsterdam and then to Berlin, where each went on his way home by train to Halle and Leipzig. A britpop/indie band (or at least some lookalikes) seemed to be with us on the plane, but I have no idea who they were... unfortunately I forgot to load my camera's accu, otherwise I would've taken some photos and asked Sabine if she knew them.
It was really a nice time up there in Newcastle, the weather was okay and similar to Germany. I enjoyed the workshop very much and learned quite some new things. That's all, folks. :)

Tomorrow (damn, it's today already) I'm going to attend a workshop on Pharyngeals and Pharyngealization, which will take place in Newcastle upon Tyne, in the north of England. I'll go there with Sven G. from the MPI and we're going to present a poster on pharyngeal consonants and pharyngealized vowels in Tsez. Whoo... England. I'm looking forward to the trip!

Back on Saturday this week!

Happy π Day!

I just thought of a nice Tsez minimal pair in which one could compare the vowel lengths of a final stressed vowel — something that I consider quite difficult to hear. These examples are бесурā [be̞sʊˈɾaː] vs. бесура [be̞sʊˈɾa]:

(1) besurā "fish" (erg.)

besuro	-a
fish[III]	-ERG

(2) besura "to find"

b-	esu	-r	-a
III-	turn_up	-CAUS	-INF

One could construct a sentence like:

Ацурйо бесурā бесура йолъ.
Acuryo besurā besura yoł.
The fish is going to find a worm.

Neat! :)

Someone on linguaphiles asked for the translation of "family" in all languages of the world, plus pronunciation... several people already contributed, but I thought I might compile a larger and more user-friendly list... along with IPA where possible.

( Read more... )

Corrections and additional translations are always welcome.

I found the recharger + cable of my digicam and my mp3 player again, whee! I'm actually thinking about taking some photos in the great outdoors. One idea was to continue the old habit of taking photos of 47s (and post them to 47s) and the second idea was taking photos of any public words that happen to be Esperanto words by accident. Maybe I'll shoot both?

Tina and I decided not to go ice-skating today (as we usually do every Monday). So there was more time for her and for me to work on our term papers. I'm working on a paper on Demonstrative Pronouns in Tsez, while Tina is trying to analyze some weird umlaut effect in Icelandic via OT. I wish I understood OT better, but somehow I dislike this theory, so my brain refuses to memorize anything about that. Aw well... I seem to be quite good in seeing what Icelandic actually does, rather than coming up with fancy tables with ☞s and *s all over the place.
Oh yeah, I have actually started working on my paper! One page, so far but I only introduced Tsez a little bit, mentioned the dialects and then begun talking about pronouns. I have some difficulties finding out what is important to mention about pronouns in general before giving the paradigms in Tsez and explaining their functions.
But then again, I have thought about the other paper that was due 2 semesters ago but which André Meinunger (yeah, the one who wrote Sick of Sick?!) allowed me to hand in whenever I finished it... I actually resolved to write it next semester. That is, after I finished the paper about Tsez. The topic for this second paper will be The transcription of names in Georgian or something similar and I'm looking forward to it as I have quite a concrete scheme in mind.

iGoogle
I recently started to use iGoogle, which is really useful, as it's a very elegant way to not only read my LJ's friends page again (some might've noticed!) but also to read external blogs and feeds (some might've noticed!). There's even a little tool that shows what's on TV right now. Neat! :]

Liesa is in Leipzig again, I read! Seems we're all meeting again tomorrow at the Sprachenabend!

Kennt ihr Cats, das Musical? Ich hab grad im Internet eine Esperanto-Version von dem Lied "Mister Mistoffeles" gefunden, das ist total toll! Sogar mit Text. Hier kann man's sehen:

Ĉu vi konas Cats, la muzikalon? Mi ĵus trovis en la interreto esperantan version de la kanto "Mister Mistoffeles", kiu bonegas! Eĉ kun teksto. Ĉi tie videblas ĝi:

Do you know Cats, the musical? I just found an Esperanto version on the internet of the song "Mister Mistoffeles", which is really good! Even with lyrics. Watch it here:

Paŭlo Moĵajev — Sinjoro Misterfelo

I came across two amusing wordings today that I'd like to share...

First, I sent a message to a mailing list, which got bounced with the following message:
Sorry, but this mailing list does not accept submissions by email.

I know, I know, this might not be that uncommon, but it struck me as quite a contradiction, when I read it. ;)

The second one is from a elicited wordlist, where someone collected about 100 words from several indigenous peoples of West Papua. In the foreword to these lists, he included this note on one of the lexical items:
"Vulva," defined for ease of monolingual elicitation as a female pig's external genitalia.

I see the logic behind this, but still I find this a bit amusing.

My Review on the Year 2008

January
After returning from the 51ª Internacia Seminario in Würzburg (the annual Esperanto meeting I attend), I registered on Facebook and Goodreads, two typical Web 2.0 sites. I found out about "Anglish", a conlang, or rather modified natural language, and had to write an entry in Anglish.

February
In February I found out (through timwi) that "Rollygeddon" got finished – and animated short movie of someone, who once asked me on ICQ if I could pronounce him a sentence in Chinese — so I have a small role in a short movie now! Furthermore I learned that they would produce a new Star Trek movie, so I had a look at the new characters. I had my 23^rd birthday on February 10^th, as every year and got addicted to Doctor Who (same entry).

March
I had my second birthday party (maybe this was still in February?), and I also went to a little party at Lisa's place — that was the day where her chocolate fountain went berserk. I also wrote an entry in French IPA, and I went to a small reading of André Meinunger's new book "Sick of Sick?", which turned out to be really great. This entry here speaks about my visit to the 2008 Leipzig Book Fair with Helen. Then we refounded the EJUS – the Saxon Esperanto Youth – where I am the "vice president", whoo! In our ASJP project the newest ASJP world tree came out and I just had to analyze it a little... I also had some guests over for a few days around Easter: Johanna and her friend Kristina.

April
As every year, I "celebrated" my LiveJournals birthday (the 6^th already) with a statistical entry, you can be sure I'll write something similar on April 1, 2009! And I attended another Esperanto meeting: the sub_18 in Göttingen, which was really cool and fun. Because of that, I missed the first part of the LSSLD (Leipzig Spring School on Linguistic Diversity), then university started again. See also my schedule for the 8^th semester. Thanks to Tina, I started to visit the Leipziger Sprachenabend again. We also had a little barbecue in the park with Kathi and some others.

May
In preparation for the next StuTS, I borrowed a Dutch grammar from the MPI library and read it, in that entry you can also read that I joined the Wikipedia-Stammtisch but found it to be quite boring. Later on, I wrote about the 43^th StuTS in Amsterdam which was really really cool, partly because I spent so much time with Tina and partly because Amsterdam is really a wonderful city. Christine D. visited me as well for some days, just to see Leipzig, but I'm not sure if she really liked the city as much as I do.

June
The highlight of June was probably Marc Okrand's visit and lecture on Klingon — he's the inventor of the Klingon language and gave a lecture and later on went to have dinner with us, it was so great! More funny languages: I found an old Melpa dictionary and wrote down some sentences for you to laugh about. I also went to Sarah's garden party and went to the MPI by bike(!), you can also read about my talk on Limbu, a little meet-up with Leipzig's Esperantists, listened to Helen's talk on drum languages at her school.

July
Many things happened in July, but due to laziness I crammed them all into one entry about tuberculosis, sinusitis, Alex' great party, my new glasses, the last university day and my visit to a wellness check.

August
Same as in July, I crammed much into one entry, which is now about Tina, Danaé & نورهان and most importantly: my finally passed Chinese intermediate exam! In August I also went to a reunion of our former elementary school's class and at the end of the month I went to my second sub_18 in Naumburg, which was great yet again (see the entry's German translation here).

September
September wasn't very eventful... to be honest, I didn't find any interesting entry there, but feel free to read about the ASJP project, the Dené-Yeniseian theory and an Arabists' party I attented or about a movie evening, the Wenker-Atlas or the Sprachenabend...

October
In October I watched "K-PAX", was at the farewell party for Danaé, at Conny's birthday, Alex and I gave a presentation on Esperanto in the city, where I also met Erich-Dieter Krause, showed the city to an Esperantist from Israel together with Alex and Tina, attended the Egyptian-Coptic conference at our MPI (read this, this and this entry, plus the previous one in this sentence). Then we introduced the BA Linguistics to the new students (the annual "Erstsemestereinführung" with the legendary "Kneipentour"). Later the month we got to see "The Linguists" at the MPI, Tina and I had my first Esperanto lesson at the university — that is, I taught. That means, my 9^th semester started, so you can check my schedule here. With the first-semester students we visited Wernigerode for the "Ersti-Fahrt" and Tina and I went to see "WALL·E" (another 10 point movie).

November
Not long ago Tina and I also went to a lecture on Tibetan calligraphy and we all went to the 44^th StuTS in Münster... really, StuTSen, Ersti-Fahrten and Esperanto meetings are the highlights of my year, it seems. ;)
There are some other news about November/December, but I won't go into that now... most of you can guess it anyway.

December
Quite a little catastrophe happened to me at the beginning of December: I dislocated my jaw (on both sides!). Luckily, Tina went to the dentist with me, who was able to fix my face again. And I had my first "real" fieldwork trip to Braunau am Inn, Austria, where Sven, Diana, Арсен and I recorded a Hinukh speaker. Then comes already the entry about my uncle Horst's 71^th birthday and my entry about this year's Christmas. That's about all for this year.
I'm not sure if I will write anything more in 2008 (probably not), so let me just add that the day after tomorrow Tina and I will go to Biedenkopf for the Internacia Seminario. I'm really really looking forward to that now, I gotta say!

~ The End ~

Read past years' reviews from 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006 and 2007, if you like.

And now to something completely different: I'd like to advertise a website with an interesting concept — you can listen to and pronounce words in many (200 currently) languages from all over the world. Some languages have really many files uploadet, some have less, but for all you can upload your pronunciation of words, if you're a native speaker, very quickly (just a few clicks). I spent some time recording some (many, in fact) words in German, Esperanto and – recently added by me – Klingon! So you might like this website too:

forvo.com

I hope I'll see hear some familiar faces voices when I get back tonight. ;)

Surprise, surprise! Tomorrow I'll be gone for almost two days (Friday and Saturday) to Austria! To Braunau am Inn, to be exactly, the city were Adolf Hitler was born over a century ago. Reason is, I "discovered" (indirectly) a native speaker of Hinuq who also claimed to speak Tsez, there. Now we – that is Sven G., Diana F., Arsen A. (the Tsez) and I – will visit him and his family to maybe record some texts and ask questions. As for me, I might practise my Tsez and Russian on the trip, I hope...

By the way, I'm currently reading Dan Everett's book "Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes", which I enjoy... but I wonder about the many illogical inconsistencies in his transcription of Pirahã words... I'm not talking about alternative pronunciations of consonants and words here, but about quite obvious errors, which are not too rare in the book. An example is a proper name in Pirahã, which occurs as Xaíkaíbaí, Xaikaíbaí, Xaikaíbí [sic!] and Xaikáibaí (of which the latter is the most frequent and thus perhaps correct). A different name can be found as Xaogíoso and Xaogióso here and there. Another curiosity is the spelling of some words that seem to start with vowels, where he leaves out the glottal stop (written in his orthography as <x>) in words like abikwí, which also contain a <w>, which puzzles me, as it is not part of the Pirahã phoneme inventory; sowá is another such word. Then, I remember having found the word kaoáíbogi ("evil spirit") somewhere in some glossed examples by Everett – not in the book, but in one of his articles – now I find him writing that word as kaoáíbógí in his book. Why?
There are more of such inconsistencies... but maybe I am wrong and words may start with vowels in Pirahã. Plus, there's really alot allophony and allomorphy going on. Vowels may be dropped, diphthongs may be monophthongized, tones can change and even jump to other syllables — at least that's my impression from reading his examples. I really really want to read something about Pirahã phonology someday. Maybe I'll ask Sven or Eugenie or even Dan Everett himself if they could recommend some articles or books. I will probably have to buy that Portuguese book from that Brasilian vendor after all... I'd do that if I could find a trustworthy Brasilian with a Paypal account. :/

By the way, some useful Pirahã phrases include:
• Tii kasaagá Xoogiái. = "My name is Xoogiái."
• Kaoáíbogi hi sabí xáagahá. = "Evil spirits are mean."
• Hiaitíihí hi tigisáaikoí. = "Pirahãs are hard."

Quote of the Day
André: I'm reading a book on the Pirahãs.
Timwi: Does the book have page numbers? :))))))

I didn't do anything special today, besides going to work, missing the bus, and saying my parents good-bye, who will spent 2 weeks in Egypt starting this Tuesday. But anyways, I took the Itelmen grammar (by Georg and Volodin) home for the homework. Itelmen is such a cool languages! I already posted a few funny words and phrases. The craziness here lies in the phonetics, which are partly even crazier than in Georgian; I'd dare compare it with Salishan languages. Here are a few unglossed example sentences in English and Itelmen, with pronunciation given in IPA:


English: "Friend, come here!"
Itelmen: Ipļhe, xkʼoļxç!
IPA: [ˈʔɪpɬχɛ | ˈɦkʼʷɔɬxʧ]

English: "Seals are to be struck dead with alder clubs."
Itelmen: Fitwiteˀn ənļemqzosçeˀn kskəsˀan'ļ meļeneļ.
IPA: [ˈɸˠɪtβˠɪtɛʔn ˈʔənɬemqzɔɕʧeʔn ˈkɕkəɕʔɑɲɬ ˈmeɬeneɬ]

English: "I set out with the dogs, my friend set out with the reindeers."
Itelmen: Tsxezikiçen °keqsxeļ, kəmman ipļh xqzeļ.
IPA: [ˈtɕxɛʑɪkiʧen ˈkʷœqʷɕʷxʷœɬʷ | ˈkɯmːan ʔɪpɬχ ɦqʑeɬ]

English: "Bring it here!"
Itelmen: Tke °qtʼļxçik!
IPA: [tkɛ qʷtʼʷɬʷxʷʧʷʏkʷ]

English: "The women were talking about tolkusha."
Itelmen: Mimsxeˀn krwiļxetqzuweˀn silqkit.
IPA: [ˈmɪmɕxɛʔn ˈkrβˠiɬxɛtqʑʷuβˠɛʔn ˈɕɪlqkɪt]

English: "This man I will take to be my husband."
Itelmen: Qamzaneˀsx tļaļçen tiˀn ihļh.
IPA: [ˈqɑmʑanɛʔɕx ˈtɬaɬʧen tɪʔn ʔɪχɬχ]

English: "The dog accepted the ermine as a child."
Itelmen: °Ŋiqsh iˀnaq kənkknen pʼeˀsx.
IPA: [ŋʷʏqʷɕʷχʷ ˈʔɪʔnɑq ˈkənkːnɛn pʼɛʔɕx]

English: "The fire has already turned into ash."
Itelmen: Ximɬx qaˀt çʼinzusxkʼi kʼleknen.
IPA: [ɦɪmɬx qɑʔt ˈʧʼinʑʷuɕxkʼɪ ˈkʼleknɛn]

English: "Ememqut pondered and turned into an old woman."
Itelmen: Ememqut °kkʼeneziknen, uwik txloçhkʼa ktəlˀin.
IPA: [ˈʔɛmɛmqʷut ˈkʷkʼʷœnʷœʑʷʏkʷnʷœnʷ | ˈʔuβˠɪk ˈtxlɔʧχkʼɑ ˈktɪlʔɪn]

English: "arriving guest"
Itelmen: °tʼuɬh kʼoɬkiɬh
IPA: [tʼʷuɬʷχʷ ˈkʼɔɬkiɬχ]


Okay, that's enough Itelmen for now. Please don't blame me for any oral injuries you might experience while trying to actually produce those phrases. It's perhaps no coincidence that Itelmen is an endangered language nowadays!

Oh, I almost forgot! I took a meke/quiz/test today, called "The Language Geek Test" — it's really cool, I got quite a high score, and I didn't even cheat! Why don't you take the test yourself and tell me what you got? =)

You scored 63.75% on the Language Geek Test!
You've earned the title of Master Language Geek.

Here's the test:
www.learnlangs.com/lang_geek/

Letzten Freitag wollte ich eigentlich zu den "Romanen der Ming- und Qing-Zeit" gehen, habe aber verschlafen, wieder einmal. Blöd. Zum Seminar "Caucasian Languages" kam ich aber rechtzeitig. Im Seminarraum waren außer mir noch Sophia G., die kleine Stephi, Roman T., Sven G., Thomas G., Зарина М., Lennart B. und noch ein paar mehr und natürlich die Dozenten: Bernard Comrie, Diana F. und Заира Х. — die meiste Zeit hat Bernard gesprochen, hat den Kaukasus und seine Sprachenvielfalt vorgestellt und auch etwas zum Armenischen gesagt. Dann hielt Diana einen kurzen Vortrag über die Verwandtschaftstheorien in der Region und am Ende war noch Zaira dran, die echt tolle Fotos vom Kaukasus zeigte, hauptsächlich von Bezhta und Inkhoqwari, glaube ich. Dann hat sie uns noch ein awarisches Lied ("ТIугьдул" von Гаджилав Гаджилаев) vorgespielt und uns die glossierte Transkription des Lieds, quasi als lingustische Lyrics, ausgeteilt. Schade, dass sie nicht "Салам аварцам" genomen hatte. ;)

The next day, the Caucasian seminar continued, and Bernard mainly spoke about the Kartvelian languages and the Northwest Caucasian ones, with Kabardian as an example. I was so looking forward to this, as I really don't know much about this family but I do know that it's extremely interesting. One of the examples was, converted into IPA by me:

/qʼəwajasʁaːtaʁhaɕ/

∅-

qʼə-

w-

a-

y-

a-

s-

ʁa-

a-

t

-aʁ

-ha

-ɕ

3-

HOR-

2SG-

DAT-

3-

DAT-

1SG-

CAUS-

CONN-

give

-PST

-PL

-AFF

= "I made him give them to you."

Phew! Isn't that great? Especially since the verb root consists of only one consonant, t. Most verbs consist of morphemes made of one or two phonemes, each. I find it rather striking, that those languages are still intelligible. Anyways... in the longer lunch break, most of us, including the lecturers, went to the Kowalski to have lunch. It turned out they took their delicious spinach puff pastry wraps off their menu. Too bad, I always loved that about the Kowalski.
After the Caucasian seminar was over, I went to visit Julia (yes, that Julia!) and we talked for quite some time. Not about us or ancient times, though... luckily. And after that, I went to Ulrike's, Judith's and Sabine's flat share party. Stephi and Monique were there as well, but few others that I knew, so most of the time, Ulrike, Stephi, Monique and I spent time talking, mostly about China.

现在我不太清楚我星期天做什么。可能我感到无聊，所以我决定了看一个丹麦电影。这部电影是：《绿色的肉店》（六点！）。对啊。丹麦电影总是那么病态。丹麦语也很好笑的，但是它有英文字幕。谢天谢地！

Maandags heb ik ook niet veel gedaan, want ik hed geen college die daag. Brigitte was namelijk ziek en voordat heb ik gebruik gemakt van de tijd en ben werken gegaan. Sven en ik hebben de hele tijd in 't fonetiske labor doorgebracht om de tsezische daten te gaan uitwerken. Wij hadden lol over het woord, dat het miauwen van een kat betekent: наIвлIа; gewoonlijk mag men daar een м an 't begin verwachten, maar niet in 't tsezische, nee nee. ;) Ik heb Sven ook verteld, dat ik bij StudiVZ een avaarse meisje gevonden heb, die over haar zei, dat hij ginoechisch, tsezisch, bezjta en ook avaars praat. Wow! Sven heeft het Arsen verteld, wie toen zei, dat hij de man kende! Wat leuk! Misschien maken wij een kleine tochtje naar Oostenrijk om deze familie daar te bezoeken.
En Sven had het ook over een conferentie of workshop en Newcastle upon Tyne, in maart '09, met het thema "Pharyngeaalen en Pharyngealisatie", waar hij ernaar wilde gaan. Ik zei, dat ik dat ook interessant vind, dus zei Sven, ik kan vragen, of de Max-Planck-Gezelschap dat voor mij betalen mag. Misschien, misschien... ik denk maar, dat ik daar graag wil participeren. Sven zal twee posters klaar maken over de tsezische en over de saksische pharyngealisatie. Hehe... krachtig, twee dagen naar Engeland alleen voor [ħ] en [ʕ]... ;)

Marde mi multe faris, ĉar mi devis prepari mian Esperanto-kurson. Do, mia patro helpis al mi pri la papera kaj folia materialo, poste mi iris por preni la ŝlosilon (aŭ pli bone: transpondilon?) kaj kreton, parolis iomete kun Stephan, kiu volis atendi tiu konferenco pri sintakso, al kiu ankaŭ venis multe da famaj sintaksistoj kiel eksemple tiu ulo Sternefeld. Nu, mi poste iris kun Tina al ŝia hejmo; ŝi ja nun translokiĝas (proksimen de la MPI), kaj mi helpis al ŝi transporti la lastajn ujojn. Do mi preskaŭ tro malfruis por mia Esperanto-kurso, sed nur preskaŭ. Denove mi malbone planis la tempon, ĉar ni nur povis fari eble la duonon de tio, kion mi intencis fari. Nu, sekvontfoje mi devas multe malpli prepari. Mi rimarkis cetere, ke multe da studentoj en mia kurso jam bone enkapigis la regulojn, dum ke aliaj tute ne estas bonaj kaj faras multe da eraroj. Tie ankaŭ estas unu knabino, kiu parolas la tamilan. Interese. La tempo rapide forkuris, kaj je la fino mi demandis, ĉu iu volus kunveni al la LingvoVespero, sed neniu volis.
Do mi sole renkontiĝis kun Tina, Helen, Hanne — kaj tiufoje unue ankaŭ kun Uta kaj Stephan, la (krom Hanne) verŝajne plej junaj esperantistoj en Leipzig. Estis amuza LingvoVespero denove.

Argh, español... no sé si todavía sé escribirlo o no. Hoy fui al "Poesía de la dinastía Tang", entonces al MPI para trabajar las horas restantes de esto mes. Después de eso, fui a la presentación de Bernard Comrie en el studium universale sobre los sistemas numerales del mundo. Tina y Helen también estaban allí. Con Tina fui al McDonald's después por comer un poco... si. No sé qué escribir ahora. Pienso que es el fin de esta entrada. ¡Gracias para leer!

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So my first class today was "Tang-Leben und Empfinden im Spiegel der Lyrik", a class mostly about Tang poems. Hey, I think they're pretty interesting, at least those 律詩 are — they have a pretty rigid structure and all that. Nice course. Afterwards I went eating Dürüm with Ulrike, then went to the MPI, where I attended a talk on language contact between some Sepik languages of Papua New-Guinea by Alexandra Aikhenvald, a very interesting person, who speaks quite fast but with quite a Russian accent. She also made a lot of small jokes and funny side notes while she was talking. The topic itself wasn't that interesting for me, I must admit... I was only there to see the great Sasha Aikhenvald. And I did. Yay! :)

Although I hurried, I came a bit late for my next class: "Sprachwandel — die Theorie von der unsichtbaren Hand". The room was full to bursting, so I and a few others had to stand outside the classroom and listen to what Mr. Meinunger had to say. Even worse, some woman from the institute had to use the friggin' copy machine the whole time, which was really loud. Fortunately, many people left during the break, so I could slip inside and get hold of a chair.
Interestingly, I had bought a small used book a few days ago downstairs in the GWZ, namely "Sprachwandel: Von der unsichtbaren Hand in der Sprache", by Rudi Keller. Only afterwards did I notice that this was required reading for the course! Luckily, it's quite a nice read.

Brigitte borrowed me her Itelmen grammar until tomorrow, yay! I have to read the section about phonology. That language is really cool! If you like the phonology of Caucasian, Berber and Salish languages, this is the language for you! They can have up to 7 consonants in the row for the onset and up to 5 in the coda. Let me just write down a few example words in IPA:

"with someone else" = [kʼipɬχʧom]
"cowberry" = [ʧʷœɬʷxʷʧʷœɬʷxʷ]
"bone" = [kʷtʷχəm]
"raven" = [qʷlʷɒqʷɬʷχʷ]
"bend down!" = [qʼʷnʷɒɬʷχʷʧʷ]
"friend" = [ɪpɬχ]
"mother" = [lɑχɕχ]
"I wanted to eat" = [tkɕxqʑʷukiʧen]
"he jumped down" = [kɕtkʼɬknan]
"go away and come back!" = [qənxɬxʧ]
"go outside!" = [qχumɕtxʧ]
"forty-seven" = [ʧʼɑqɑʔn tʷoβaɕːaʔn ɛq ɛtʷuktʷunʷuk]


Yeah, that's it so far. In the meantime, there were 10 e-mail requests of people who would still like to come plus 4 more who told me in person. Oh my... 15 + 14, I really have to remove the ads from the institute or the amount of new proto-esperantists will become unbearable... at least for the course, not for the world. ;)
I'll try to prepare an LJ entry with my schedule for this semester now, then I'll go to sleep, finally.

Today was not as eventful: I went to work and later on went to meet Melanie, Ulrike, Johanna and Claudi at the gastSpielhaus (the game café formerly known as Triangel), where we played NoNo (a wordgame which is much harder than one might think), Quiz Taxi (silly and boring, the TV show's much better!) and last of all Knowing You, Knowing Me (excellent game design and good idea, but utterly boring questions). None of the games were great, but it was nice nonetheless.
And then, when I saw they had VEX too, I asked if they have a spare version of the game for sale. And yes, they did! So I bought it for about 10 €, this game which is not available in stores anymore... yay! Can't wait to play it again.

Ah, I still haven't seen the latest Heroes episode... I hope Tina has time tomorrow. :S

And if you wonder, why it's so late early again: I was playing Monkey Island 2 up to now and then even installed and started playing Monkey Island 3 (in English, this time, after playing it three times in German and a half time in Spanish!). Fun!

"Har har! Taste cold steel, feeble cannon restrain rope!"
—
"Haha! Schmecke den kalten Stahl, schwächliches Kanonenhalteseil!"

Well, what'ya think? I watched "The Linguists" yesterday! Great movie actually! I recommend you to watch the trailer here. It's a kind of documentary about two American linguists – David Harrison & Greg Anderson – who travel to various places around the globe, like Siberia, India and Bolivia to interview the last few speakers of languages on the verge of extinction, in this case: Chulym, Sora and Kallawaya. The film shows their adventurous journeys of their fieldtrips to these places.
We had the luck to have both the film and one of the two linguists, Greg Anderson, at our institute yesterday. So the MPI's lecture hall turned into a movie theater, so not only the MPI people could watch the movie, but also several university students, Mr. Bickel's daughters, soon-to-be linguistics student Helen, and perhaps some more. We watched the movie, and afterwards there was a discussion about it, some people asked questions, and Greg answered them and also explained some interesting things about the movie... like it's being sometimes a bit overly dramatic or rather cinematesque... but what do you expect, the movie wasn't produced by linguists themselves.
Anyways, a really nice movie and Greg and David hope it will soon be shown on American television. By that time, they should probably release the DVD as well. Currently, only 23 have rated this movie on IMDb, the average rating is 7.6 now. I rated it 8 points, if you want to know.

After the movie, we had our FSR meeting relocated into the MPI's couch corner, and later on, some of us plus some of the first semester students ("firsties"? "freshmen"?), namely 성우 (Song-U), Larissa and Antonia came to the Nikolaikirche with us to celebrate this candle protest anniversary thingy, whatever... no idea how you call it, I'm a history nut. We were standing there, listening to the choirs and brass orchestras and several people commenting on what happened 19 years ago.
After the show was over, everyone left, besides Song-U, Tina and I — so we decided to have dinner and went to the Spizz. Song-U recommended the Milchreis ("rice pudding") they're serving there, and indeed it was great.