Month: September 2018

#eng If you’re having trouble falling asleep, that just means that all the dream servers are overloaded, and you need to lay down and wait until someone wakes up and frees up a slot out there somewhere.

I’m wondering why this isn’t covered in the news anywhere.

The Russian anti-doping committee has acknowledged the involvement of officials from the Ministry of Sports in the system of covering up positive doping tests of athletes.

At least, the day before yesterday “…Compliance Review Committee reviewed at length a letter from the Russian Ministry of Sport to WADA and was satisfied that this letter sufficiently acknowledged the issues identified in Russia, therefore fulfilling the first of the two outstanding criteria of RUSADA’s Roadmap to Compliance…”.

Russia also agreed to allow experts access to samples stored at the RUSADA laboratory.

https://www.wada-ama.org/en/media/news/2018-09/wadas-executive-committee-to-discuss-updated-recommendation-from-independent

#learnkorean

Just leaving notes here for myself and the few interested. This is already the third part.

In Korean, the alphabet “lacks” a bunch of sounds, yet there is a plethora of “extra” ones. There are diphthongs, double vowels. The complication is that they have almost the same pronunciation when written differently. For example, 애 and 에 are both read as “e”, and the following three 외, 왜 and 웨 are also read as “we”. There are very similar letters ㄱ (k+g) and ㅋ (k+h), and ㄷ (t+d) and ㅌ (t+h), ㅂ (p+b) and ㅍ (p+h). There are long consonants, such as “ㅃ” (a bright and accented “ㅂ” (p)), “ㅉ” (a bright ㅈ, closer to ts), “ㄸ” – a bright sound from “ㄷ”, “ㄲ” – a bright and accented “ㄱ”, “ㅆ” – a bright from “ㅅ” (s).

Interestingly, Korea in Korean is 한국 (Hangook), which means “One nation”, and its full name is 대한민국 (Daehanminguk) – “Democratic Nation of Great Han”. More precisely, not quite so. Hangook refers to both Koreas, while the South is called Namhan, i.e. “Southern Han” (남한). North Korea is called by Koreans as 조선 (Joseon) or Bukhan, “Northern Han” (“북한”).

Over this weekend, I somehow managed to primarily learn the alphabet, and I can read words like 샌프란시스코 (San Francisco) or 코카콜라 (Coca-Cola), 러시아 (Russia). Basically, everything that does not require knowing any word from the Korean vocabulary. I still need to better memorize the diphthongs and not hesitate while reading, and also get acquainted with grammar on a superficial level, and then we’ll see whether to continue or that’s enough)

It’s interesting how Koreans themselves describe the pronunciation of Russian alphabet letters through Korean and English. http://orus.tistory.com/14.

P.S. Oh, I can also now greet like this:

ㅐㅌㄴㄴㅇ!

#learnkorean (following up on the previous post about the Korean language)

To reinforce the Korean alphabet in my memory, I decided to see how familiar Korean brands are spelled in their native language.

Samsung – well, this one is number one. Two words: 삼성. The English equivalent is a very accurate pronunciation of the original, sam-sung. It originally means “three stars”.

Hyundai – two syllables: 현대. Translates as “modern”.

Kia. In Korean ki-a, 기아. Translates as “Entering the world from Asia”. Here, ki and a are not just letters of the alphabet, but the pronunciation of the Chinese characters 起 and 亞 (from 亞細亞 – Asia).

Daewoo – 대우, denotes “Great Woo”, where Woo is the founder. Modest) Well, the company no longer exists.

Doshirak – 도시락, pronounced toshirak, and means “rice in a box”.

By the way, Taekwondo is also a Korean word, 태권도.

#learnkorean I’m working on a multilingual personal project here, the announcement will be soon. New languages are gradually being added, and I chose Korean as the second one because there are many Koreans in our region. So, I decided to figure out how this language “works”. I won’t be learning it seriously, but I will understand how to translate and at least recognize the brands in writing)

I’ll leave notes here. It will help me remember better, and others might find it interesting too.

There are paired sounds here – k/g, t/d, p/b, ch/j, and the r/l that behaves a bit differently. Overall, this means that in one case a Korean will read p, in another – b, and generally these letters will be slightly mixed up in foreign languages. Or not slightly.

For example, it turned out that there is no letter F in Korean, so my name is written without an f at all: 라오, and generally f in words is usually replaced by something indistinct, and “focus” will be read as “po-kos-sy” = 포커스. Sometimes other sounds are used. For example, the drink Fanta is 환타 (han-tAa).

Their “r” and “l”, like the Japanese, are essentially one sound. I did not understand how it is “one sound”. It turned out to be interesting. For example, the name “Liza” will be written in Korean as “라이자” (literally “raizA”).

They do not have the letter “v”, but there is a very similar sounding letter “b”. For example, by all accounts, “Vanya” will be recorded as “반야” (ban-nYa). True, I still do not quite understand why you can’t write the same name as “오안야” (wan-ya). I will ask a Korean colleague at work the day after tomorrow.

They do not have the sound “z”. There is the letter ㅈ, which sounds like J. It cannot replace “z”, but it is what it is.

Secondly, “r” at the end is never pronounced. Therefore, the name “Peter” will be written as “피터” (pi-tO)

Thirdly, in Korean, there is no such thing as several consonants in a row. Therefore, the name “Chris” will be written as “크리스” (ky-ris-sy).

Fourth, they have long voiceless consonants. kk, gg, pp.

Fifth, they have vowels in the alphabet that sound identical. For example, “ㅖ” and “ㅒ” both sound like “ye”, and ㅐ and ㅔ sound like “e”. Well okay, if you try very hard, a slight difference can be heard, but between “ᅫ” and “ᅬ” it is not heard at all (“we”, see hangul.ru). No one has cared about this for a long time. It used to be different, but now it has faded away.

Then there is a snag with pronunciation in that the pronunciation of a consonant changes depending on the following vowel. For example, 마 is read as a clean Russian “ma”, consisting of two letters, the first of which is sort of “m”, and the second – “a”. But 무, which consists of the same “m” (ㅁ), but paired with “u” (ㅜ), together produce a sound which is nothing like “muo”, but closer to “nu” or “gu”, and if “m” (ㅁ) goes with “i” (ㅣ), it is not read as “mi” (although that is exactly what the English transcription says), but “bi” (or “(b+m)”, “i”). The same story with “누”, which consists of “n” and “u” but is read together as “dy” or something like that. Hard to convey)

Interestingly, almost all Korean surnames consist of one syllable, and names – from two syllables. For example, the performer of Gangham style is not called Psy (싸이), which is a pseudonym, but 박재상 – Park or Bak (박), the surname, and Jae-sang (재상) – a common name in Korea. Names are made up of two signs, in this case Jae and Sang, which are selected from a relatively limited list of possibilities, with separate lists for men and women. Well traditionally, exceptions also exist. https://www.topikguide.com/find-korean-name-gender-male-or-female/ – they are listed here. Therefore, if a Korean writes to you, you can try to guess whether it is he or she exactly that way).

The word “chauffeur” originally (many years ago) referred to the person who stoked coal in the locomotives of steam trains to propel them forward.

This coal-stoker, the one feeding the fire, eventually became known as the driver, and the term persisted even after the advent of gasoline and electric trains.

The analogy was subsequently extended to all types of vehicles.

https://www.pourquois.com/francais/pourquoi-conducteur-est-chauffeur.html

Must rewatch, good movie, very lifelike #cathedral

People really have some imagination. Holders for beach towels, and whatever it’s called that they lie on at the beach, stick into the sand

If I were McDonald’s, I would have long ago installed microphones at the cash registers and trained a speech recognition system while still in the learning mode. This would allow accumulating more data and periodically checking the quality of recognition. In a year, cashiers could be kept just to confirm 80% of the orders, and in five years, cashiers might not be needed at all. If anyone says that five years is a lot, remember how different a McDonald’s from five years ago was from the current one, except for the terminals.

Oh! And it’s lilac! Came home from work, having dinner, and I’m amazed