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This and that in English

Aloittaja Norma Bates, helmikuu 11, 2019, 11:28:40

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0 Jäsenet ja 2 Vieraat katselee tätä aihetta.

Norma Bates

One of my earliest memories is about that that my Mother is putting a pink jumpsuite on me, and my Father is watching TV. I can hear English because he's wathing Slim John wich was a tv-searies that teached English to people. It is winter and because the jumpsuite is pink, I must have been two or three years old.

I have always loved English almost as much as Finnish. A couple of decades ago I started to read books written in English. I don't have to translate into Finnish what I read in English. Mostly I've been reading "controversial history". Around the year 2002 or so I wrote a lot on a certain forum in the Net. I thought I was writing understantable English, but somebody called me "funny speaking Finnish girl". He might have tried to be funny himself, because of the nature of that certain forum. I don't know if I write good or bad languace, I write as I feel good and proper.

kertsi

#1
My earliest memory is from our yard. I remember sitting in the summer sunshine and sniffing and touching and admiring the tiny pretty plants that grew under the fence. I thought they were lovely. I have no idea how young I was at the time, maybe 3-4, or so?

English is not my best foreign language, Swedish is. I started learning Swedish before English at school, and have gotten a lot more practice in it. English novels I do sometimes read, but not that often. They just are harder for me to read, but it depends on the book, some are easy enough, some just too demanding.

Maybe I just should try more. Ages ago I got a novel by Terry Pratchett as a present from an ex-boyfriend. That book is still unread. It contains linguistic jokes that I just don't get due to lack of thorough knowledge in English. But then I came across a translated novel of Pratchett, that I actually liked. I recon I could someday read the two parallel, the English version and the Finnish. Maybe it won't ever happen.

At the moment I actually happen to have the novel Angels and Demons by Dan Brown on my night desk. I am used to read something in the bed, anything, often some rubbish detective story, to calm down and get some sleep. The sleep time novel just must not be too exciting or scary. This particular novel just does not seem very interesting or entertaining, I think The Da Vinci Code was far better. But then I read it in Finnish. I suspect that the physics part, that is,.the explanations about particle physics in Cern in Angels and Demons are rubbish.

Does someone have any recommendation on an easy to read popular book in particle physics, preferably in Finnish or Swedish?
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Magdaleena

Oho, onhan täällä jo englanninkielinen ketjukin, etsin sopivaa ketjua poliisin kuulustelumetoodeille.


Sorry, cannot recommend any physic books. But the headline of the following news article on BBC was so strange that I had to read it.


Indonesian police use snake to scare Papuan man

Local police officers questioning culprits are routinely using non-poisonous snakes to scare them. A video went viral where an handcuffed alleged mobile phone thief was screaming a snake draped around him  :o
 
Effective for sure, as you never know if it could kill you. In a situation like that there is no time for analyzing local snake species! Or even able to see it's head, small headed ones are not poisonous, to my knowledge :)




"Live from the heart of yourself. Seek to be whole, not perfect." - Oprah Winfrey

MrKAT

I invented this "poem" I used in my signature/footnote:
A marvelous jeweler told me rumors about gray mold in US theater.
A marvellous jeweller told me rumours about grey mould in UK theatre.
How come? Well, it's evolution of language.

And this too:
"Since sin's shins in zines are sins"
(If You pronounce these words, they all sound  quite similar though different meaning).

Missä perussuomalainen törttöilemässä, siellä Jokisipilä puolustelemassa.
                    - Vanha turkulainen sananlasku (by Antti Gronow)

Topi

#4
Lainaus käyttäjältä: kertsi - helmikuu 11, 2019, 12:18:48
English is not my best foreign language, Swedish is. I started learning Swedish before English at school, and have gotten a lot more practice in it. English novels I do sometimes read, but not that often. They just are harder for me to read, but it depends on the book, some are easy enough, some just too demanding.

Maybe I just should try more. Ages ago I got a novel by Terry Pratchett as a present from an ex-boyfriend. That book is still unread. It contains linguistic jokes that I just don't get due to lack of thorough knowledge in English. But then I came across a translated novel of Pratchett, that I actually liked. I recon I could someday read the two parallel, the English version and the Finnish. Maybe it won't ever happen.

At the moment I actually happen to have the novel Angels and Demons by Dan Brown on my night desk. I am used to read something in the bed, anything, often some rubbish detective story, to calm down and get some sleep. The sleep time novel just must not be too exciting or scary. This particular novel just does not seem very interesting or entertaining, I think The Da Vinci Code was far better. But then I read it in Finnish. I suspect that the physics part, that is,.the explanations about particle physics in Cern in Angels and Demons are rubbish.

Sometimes it's just a question of finding the right book, which is partly a matter of luck. Something that catches you at the right time, interests you enough, tickles you just right and so on. I think it's natural to feel like you don't understand enough of the nuance or don't quite get every word. But on the other hand, that doesn't really matter, as long as there's enough that you are getting out of it and enjoying.

I'm not saying Angels and Demons is a wonderful novel, nor that Pratchett's style, tone and allusions, his verbal acrobatics and puns are easy to get used to. I just mean that, in principle, you could always raise that question, even if it's in your native language, of 'do I really get this completely?' or something along those lines. If you stop comparing the experience you're getting to some hypothetical fuller experience that you're not, then quite a lot of the time it doesn't matter if you do miss out on nuance or even find whole words and concepts that elude you. What I've been told – and actually believe to be true – is that once you've had that sort of an encounter with a word several times is in fact when you're ideally mentally primed and have enough context to slot around it that learning it happens fairly naturally.

Anyway, the 'earliest memory' theme was a refreshing idea from Norma and something different to read for a change :)

Lainaus käyttäjältä: MrKAT - helmikuu 12, 2019, 01:20:30
And this too:
"Since sin's shins in zines are sins"
(If You pronounce these words, they all sound  quite similar though different meaning).

It's nice that tinkering with the language pushes you toward these tongue-twister type things, or things that highlight minimal differences. Is 'sin' supposed to have two different meanings here?

Also, I think from a Finnish point of view the 'sh', 's' and 'z' sounds you used might seem similar because they're not typically phonemic in Finnish. That means we don't typically use them to differentiate words with different meanings. So if you hear someone say "kuusi" or "kuuzi" or "kuushi" in Finnish, if the differences are not over-emphasized, it could be just different ways of saying the word kuusi. Perhaps people with slightly different ways of producing an S or slightly slurred speech or whatever. We do have pairs like 'sakki' and 'shakki", but I would still say that natively Finnish doesn't tend to use the two sounds contrastively.

In English though the distinction between, say, 'sue' and 'shoe' is taken to be much more fundamental, to the point that you wouldn't say 'sue' even sounds like 'shoe' in an especially interesting way. It's like any other rhyme or assonance between two words. So, well, wrong to say there's nothing interesting there, but I suspect the contrast between the 'sh' and the 's' might only sound especially playful or interesting to Finnish ears.

I also wonder especially about 'zine'. I think it rhymes with 'whine' and doesn't even have the assonance (shared vowel sound) that 'shin' and 'sin' do.

All of which is not meant to discourage anyone from composing tongue-twisters or poems in English. It's just just some super pedantic twaddle on my part, or alternatively a few comments on what struck me as strange.

Topi

#5
Lainaus käyttäjältä: MrKAT - helmikuu 12, 2019, 01:20:30
"Since sin's shins in zines are sins"

Another thing that is typically counterintuitive to Finnish ears is the "z" sound, which you've loads of in this line. If this were a poem, that would be what was carrying it, and the bum note or odd one out would be "since". Everything else ends in a voiced Z that you can resonate on when you read it out loud. I think it dies out at the end of "sin's" only because of the immediately following "sh".

That's called consonance, the repetition of consonant sounds, as opposed to assonance for vowels. To some extent Finns instinctively refuse to hear the voiced S and the voiceless one as different entitities, which they are in English.

You have "ass", which you could for the British English pronunciation write out as "'äss" and read as it would be in Finnish, more or less. Means 'donkey'. And then you have "as", the conjunction, with both a longer vowel and a voiced S or a Z at the end – the two things are connected of course: The voiceless final consonant shortens the vowel, or the voiced one lengthens it, whichever way you prefer to look at it.

I had a teacher in Finland in high school who horribly overdid the voiced Ss, so that you'd hear things like "Azzzz far azzz money izzz concerned".

Perhaps you have to do that at some point to highlight it to yourself, but it would then ideally even out into something where the two are separate entities but you don't have to lean into it every time.

Still on the Zs, just for an example of where the voiced Ss carry a line, you could have a listen to the opening of Dylan Thomas's "Fern Hill". I'm sure there are loads of other examples, but the first line goes:
Now as I was free and easy under the apple boughs
and then followed by the contrasting voiceless S:
About the liting house and happy as the grass was green.

or, if you will:

Now aZ I w'Z free and eaZy under the apple boughZ
About the liting houSe and happy as the graSS was green.

Happily, since he's borderline camp and wonderfully over the top in how he reads his stuff out loud, he actually highlights this for you here:

https://vimeo.com/267476446

kertsi

Lainaus käyttäjältä: kertsi - helmikuu 11, 2019, 12:18:48
At the moment I actually happen to have the novel Angels and Demons by Dan Brown on my night desk. I am used to read something in the bed, anything, often some rubbish detective story, to calm down and get some sleep. The sleep time novel just must not be too exciting or scary. This particular novel just does not seem very interesting or entertaining, I think The Da Vinci Code was far better. But then I read it in Finnish. I suspect that the physics part, that is,.the explanations about particle physics in Cern in Angels and Demons are rubbish.
As being said, I read books, including this one, at bed time, often slumbering on and off, and thus sometimes the contents of the books are not crystal clear. Anyway, about the physics part, I recall that Brown wrote that 1/4 gram antimatter would be sufficient to destroy the entire Vatican (that lies inside Rome). Now I searched for info about it, and it turns out that that amount would be sufficient to destroy the whole Rome, and having the power of a Hiroshima atomic bomb. Also, that amount 1/4 gram would take 100 million years to make in Fermilab. And besides, it would be a lousy energy source, since making antimatter takes more energy than it can release upon annihilation.
Physicists Scrutinize Antimatter in Angels & Demons

I suspect that the described canister to hold antimatter floating in the air (and making it portable) needs some clarification, too. If I recall it right it was described to have some sort of magnets in both ends. And the antimatter would consist of proton plasma. I cannot imagine how that arrangement would ever work in practice, so I need for google it. The article above just dismisses the issue by saying "antimatter is not portable in real life, although in the movie, scientists transport it in a canister.".
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Topi

What I suspect people dislike about Brown's novels in general is that he often sets the story up so that there is a central mystery that's made to seem interesting, exciting and possibly in some real sense important. So it sets up this expectation that you're going to learn something important and interesting about the real world. What you then find is that, in the end, the excitement end the promise is more the thing about the stories than any knowledge or understanding gained by following it through.

Rather than surprising you at the end and leaving you feeling rewarded or intellectually nourished, it turns out it was all about the build up and the excitement all along.

I don't know if that's a terminal flaw in a novel.  I thoroughly enjoyed Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell. It's wonderfully written and contains lots of memorable images and characters. Ultimately the story didn't quite meet the expectations I'd built up along the way, but really, so what. Still a great read.

The same sort of thing applies to Neil Gaiman's novels. American Gods felt like it promised much more than it delivered, whereas Anansi Boys was more successful in that it seemed like it was exactly the story it aimed to be.

In lots of these cases, I don't really care if novels are factually accurate or even historically accurate. Obviously there isn't magic in quite that way or gods in quite that way. But that's sort of part of the package, and you sort of accept that in these stories that's how these things work.

Maybe the supernatural elements in Dan Brown's work are bit more problematic. He presents them as at least prima facie plausible and realistic.

Magdaleena



From Dan Brown's work I have read only The Da Vinci Code. I even have it or should have, as friends are forgetful. But it is OK, you just get them back, a cultural thing!

Having a priest as teacher for religion and church history till last year in high school I am till today well aware of church history in the Middle Ages. While reading, carefully, I was literally looking for mistakes but I could not find any! It was all accurate.
The book is fiction but could be absolutely true, too.


Good advice is not to watch movies made of your favorite books. I have ruined some and this one of them. It was Disappointing, how could a complex story fit into 1,5 hours or so,  not forgetting the glossy Hollywood coating that sells..

"Live from the heart of yourself. Seek to be whole, not perfect." - Oprah Winfrey

kertsi

Lainaus käyttäjältä: Topi - helmikuu 17, 2019, 20:38:44
Rather than surprising you at the end and leaving you feeling rewarded or intellectually nourished, it turns out it was all about the build up and the excitement all along.
That is a good description of entertainment.

So far, I haven't seen any references to supernatural things in the book. Have read a third of it.

I wonder if this is true? :
A pope usually worked fourteen-hours days, seven days a week, and died of exhaustion in an average of 6,3 years. (The insider joke was that accepting the papcy was a cardinal's 'easiest route to heaven'.)
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Topi

That's interesting that you found it compelling factually.

I think it gives a false impression of what symbology and various other academic fields are actually like. This whole hero figure in the symbologist is over the top and not really that convincing or human or interesting. It does give you this slightly gnostic idea of what if Christianity was just totally misrepresented and misunderstood my the major churches. You get the same basic theme in a way in Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials series, which is maybe more agnostic in its underpinnings.

But there are really interesting ways in which the established readings of scripture in Christianity, Judaism and Islam are obviously open to rethinking and questioning. Like this whole thing of what the garden of Eden story might have really been about. And various similar things where stuff that's taken as established by tradition is in fact totally open to question.

While I have some respect for this emphasis on curiosity, imagination and the inquiring spirit that there is in the DaVinci Code, i can't help feeling that it is in the end really cheaply undersold or done away with by this "yes it's all essentially true except for this one major misunderstanding" tack that the book takes.

Topi

#11
I don't remember much detail from either A&D or The DaVinci Code. So I can only present this dim notion that perhaps the particle physics in A&D serves a role analogous to more overtly supernatural elements in genres such as fantasy. 


So nominally you have fields of science, like stuff that a symbologist or particle physicist would supposedly know and understand. But rather than being an accurate description of real symbology of real particle physics, it's jusf a vehicle in the story, much like magic can be, or gods or anything supernatural.


I'm not totally convinced by that myself 😀 but also don't think I'll start rereading just to pin down a more tenable theory.




kertsi

#12
Now that you mention it, Topi, so yes, in the beginning of the book, there was a not that clearly worded explanation why Vittoria's and Vetra's experiment, which created antimatter, would somehow prove God's existence. The book pretends that the experiment would create (anti)matter out of nothing, just like the genesis in the Bible. My objection to that is, that surely the experimenters had something to begin with: they had enormous amount of energy (in Cern's enormous accelerator).
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Magdaleena


I realize now that I should read The Da Vinci Code again. A vague memory of giving it for my son-in-law  as he was reading some other novel from Brown.

I have no clear memory of the storyline anymore other than it was extremely captivating, wondering how anyone could create a mystery like that. Exceptional background work for sure.

Fact is that not everything from the past is clear and all kind of secret societies were possible, actually it is well known that one could not express own ideas without the Catholic church coming after you,, Nostradamus came to my mind right now, best example of best kind of coding in fear of reprisals! Or the Freemasons, active till today.

I read it in English about 14 years ago and am wondering now why I had it, there are enough books to borrow. Must have been from my son as they usually got a bestseller for mom knowing she would appreciate it <3  Two biographies I gave away without reading, Bill Clinton's and Obama's, not interested enough!

"Live from the heart of yourself. Seek to be whole, not perfect." - Oprah Winfrey

kertsi

#14
^
Now that you mention it, Tiistai, I recall that I liked the part of the Da Vinci Code, which speculated about offspring of Jesus. I liked the what if aspect of it. Similar fascinating speculations appear in the novel According to Mary Magdalene (Swedish: Enligt Maria Magdalena, 1997)
by one of my earlier favorite authors, Marianne Fredriksson.


Joan Osborne - What If God Was One Of Us

If God had a name what would it be?
And would you call it to his face?
If you were faced with Him in all His glory
What would you ask if you had just one question?

And yeah, yeah, God is great
Yeah, yeah, God is good
And yeah, yeah, yeah-yeah-yeah


What if God was one of us?
Just a slob like one of us
Just a stranger on the bus
Tryin' to make his way home?


If God had a face what would it look like?
And would you want to see if, seeing meant
That you would have to believe in things like heaven
And in Jesus and the saints, and all the prophets?


And yeah, yeah, God is great
Yeah, yeah, God is good
And yeah, yeah, yeah-yeah-yeah


What if God was one of us?
Just a slob like one of us
Just a stranger on the bus
Tryin' to make his way home?

Just tryin'...

(formatting is mine)
If God is good (and male), why would he torture his children, humans, in all eternity for sins that are impossible to avoid? (Believing something, e.g. existence of God, is impossible for force by will power)? What father would torture his children, let alone in all eternity for such a petty reason? A father, who would demand unconditional worship and constant praise, is narcisist.
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