Which book was the toughest for you to get through?

[dividedbyblue]

Three weeks for Dreamwidth: Which book was the toughest for you to get through?

This would be "The Well at the World's End” by William Morris published in 1896. The story itself isn’t complicated, but it’s written in an archaic style. Since I read it in English, which isn’t my native language, this was quite hard to get through. Thankfully, I read it on an e-reader (Project Gutenberg has the ebook for free, since it’s in the public domain), and so my e-reader could instantly translate a lot of words. A notable observation was that many older English words I encountered seemed to be linked to older Dutch words, which was interesting.

I knew of the book because we discussed it in a design course in school. Not the story itself, but the beautiful design of the pages with the Illustrations by Edward Burne-Jones. I sometimes wonder if they made reprints of the book as it was with the original illustrations, or if the only way to see this is at a museum. This is what a page looks like:



I decided to read it when, at a certain moment, I heard that this book might have influenced Tolkien for his Lord of the Rings series, and that intrigued me and made me decide to give it a go. I wasn’t aware of the archaic style. When I started reading it, I was puzzled. I assumed I must have been mistaken about the publication date, thinking that the book was way older than I believed it to be. I looked it up and discovered it was just written in an older style. Nevertheless, I decided to continue reading it and I finished the book. Apart from being hard for me to read, I enjoyed it, it’s a nice fantasy story.

Comments

[soricel]

WOW. Not sure I'd like to read this book, but it sure seems like it would be nice to look at.

[dividedbyblue]

It’s so beautiful. I would also love to have this book in front of me, flipping through the pages in awe of the layout and illustrations.

[mekare]

I love Edward Burne-Jones! Thank you for sharing the book page.

[dividedbyblue]

You’re welcome ^^ His art really is amazing

[igenlode]

Yes, English is a dialect of Old Dutch (or I believe that technically they are both dialects of Old Low German) ;-)
So it is slightly closer to Dutch than German, or so I'm told.

[dividedbyblue]

I didn't know Dutch was closer to English than German. Cool! I do remember reading somewhere that for English people, Dutch is supposedly one of the easier languages to learn. I don't know if that's correct though :)

[igenlode]

I do remember reading somewhere that for English people, Dutch is supposedly one of the easier languages to learn. I don't know if that's correct though :)

Not in my experience, but then my acquaintance with Dutch is limited to deciphering a couple of vintage knitting patterns a Dutch friend once sent me... 'Cast on': opzetten, 'to set up' -- 'slip a stitch': afhalen, 'to hale/haul off' -- 'increase': meerderen, 'to do more' -- 'undo': uithalen, 'to haul out'... there's probably something to the theory, because I can memorise most of the translations by identifying (possibly false) parallels in antiquated English expressions.

If I know the subject of a piece of reasonably brief Dutch text, then I can often spot relevant terms either via English or via German: "Dit is een sterke en smakelijke Russische tomaat, die genoemd is naar de bekende Russische acteur en zanger Mikhail Sergeevich Boyarsky" -- "this is a strong and tasty Russian tomato, which is named after the well-known Russian actor and singer" (but most of that is from the German, really)
https://www.vreeken.nl/295225-vleestomaat-boyarsky-boyarski
"Tomatenplanten gebruiken veel water" -- tomato plants need a lot of water...

I'd have said that it looks a lot closer to German than to English, from our perspective :-)

[dividedbyblue]

That's cool that you can identify the meaning that way! I agree that Dutch and German are very close. I only had some basic German classes in high school and know very little vocabulary, but I can still mostly grasp the meaning of simple German sentences. Some words are just so similar. Even very long words. Dutch and German share that ability to paste words together and make longer words, for good or for worse :)

[igenlode]

Basically the more different languages you know scraps of, the greater the chances of being able to identify a similar word/usage in one of them (which I assume is why people who know a *lot* of languages are apparently able to acquire new ones relatively easily!)
English is quite a good native language to have from that point of view, because it has both Romance and Teutonic roots and a very large vocabulary due to having acquired duplicate terms via different routes; if you know a lot of obscure or obsolete English words then you have a good chance of spotting related words in other European languages.

(I once described English as "still basically Anglo-Saxon with all the grammar stripped out and a whole load of Norman-French vocabulary words (plus a later layer of scholarly Latinate ones) overlaid on top")


As I understand it, the relationship between Dutch and German (Deutsch) is similar to the relationship between Spanish and Portuguese, which is a lone survivor from among a whole lot of Spanish related dialects that later got ironed out into political uniformity, while Portuguese survived in its curent form simply by accident of remaining on the other side of what became an international frontier. All the German dialects that used to occupy the continuum between Dutch and German are now pretty much extinct within 'Germany' (which didn't of course exist in those days), leaving Dutch as effectively the only one still spoken (plus English, which has of course seen a lot of other influences since the days when it was Anglo-Saxon...)

I have been (re)learning Russian, which is rather less closely related -- save for modern borrowings from English, and older borrowings from French/German -- and that also has a tendency to accumulate vastly complex long words, but in their case it seems to be more a case of lots of prefixes/suffixes added on to modify the meaning and function of the word, rather the German habit of combining multiple nouns/verbs to create a new concept ;-)

(The one I always liked was Schnecke, 'snail', versus Nacktschnecke, 'naked snail', i.e. slug :-p)

The example I was looking at recently in Russian was rol', a theatrical role (presumably borrowing from French), which becomes, via international misunderstanding, gastrol', a theatrical tour (from the German Gastrolle, a guest-role), and hence gastrolirovat', a five-syllable word meaning 'to go on tour,' from its original one-syllable root...

[dividedbyblue]

Yes, I've heard about Spanish and Portuguese being very similar. I'm learning Spanish, but I haven't looked at much Portuguese, so I can't really say. I didn't know there were other Spanish dialects and German dialects that have vanished with time. That's a sad evolution.

I can understand that knowing many languages will help with comprehension. In my Spanish journey, my knowledge of French has helped a lot.

The Nacktschnecke is interesting. It's the same word in Dutch. slak = Schnecke/snail and naakt = nackt/naked; so 'naaktslak' is also our word for 'Nacktschnecke' or 'slug'. We also have the word 'gastrol', which means the same as 'Gastrolle' in German. It's interesting how many things are connected.

[igenlode]

slak = Schnecke/snail and naakt = nackt/naked; so 'naaktslak' is also our word for 'Nacktschnecke' or 'slug'.

That's interesting, because this is evidently a case where the Dutch word is indeed closer to English (descended from Plattdeutsch) than the 'High' German word: 'slak' and 'slug' are clearly closely related. (I wonder where we get 'snail' from? It's not from the French...)

*checks Volume IX of the Oxford English Dictionary, kept on the desk for this precise purpose*

Apparently that *is* from a Low German word 'sniel' (and/or a German word Schnägel, "now dialect"). So at some point German had the separate verbal concepts of snails and slugs, but economised by realising that they were obviously the same animal with and without a shell :-D

[dividedbyblue]

Oh, interesting! Cool that slak/slug are closely related. Fun that indeed they economised the language that way, having the same-ish word for an animal with different forms.

Do you know a lot of languages?

[igenlode]

I have studied French, German and Russian at various times, plus some primary-school Latin and a year of Ancient Greek at high school. I know a little Italian from studying classical music (it helps to look up what the lyrics actually mean when singing them), and likewise some Latin from religious music. I have a Romanian friend who has shown me a few tiny scraps of detail about her language (the suffix -ul means 'the', so 'lupul': the wolf, 'copilul': the child) and a Dutch friend with whom I've swapped some words, and I know some Portuguese people who try to teach me scraps of their language (reading "Speaker for the Dead" also helped me acquire a little Portuguese vocabulary!) But most of those are just a few words here and there. I just find it interesting to make comparisons between languages :-)


The only language I can read fluently for pleasure is French (I can't speak it, of course, save in cases of extreme necessity). I can read and translate German and Russian into idiomatic English, but only with the aid of heavy dictionary usage; my German was probably better than my Russian for a long time, but in the last year I got involved in a 1970s Russian-language fandom for which there is basically no English material. The entry drug was a film that was popular enough to get a DVD release with English subtitles (though I don't know how much penetration into the English-speaking market it ever got -- I certainly had never heard of its existence until this year), but all the behind-the-scenes interviews, fanvids, documentaries etc. were in Russian only, as were all the sequels, and of course all the other projects all the actors have been involved in before or subsequently. And while I was originally able to get YouTube to auto-translate comments on Russian videos, I managed to watch so many of them that it has not only stopped offering to translate them, but has started offering to translate other comments into Russian for me :-D

So I have been going through a period of very intense exposure (including reading -- terribly slowly -- a book of behind-the-scenes memoirs from one of the actors) and my Russian may now be better than my German. I have certainly had a lot more *listening* practice, and have a much-increased tolerance for the experience of having a rush of words flowing over me and only being able to understand about one in five or ten...

My latest project has been writing English singing translations for some of the songs from the film so that I can actually sing them (and have people understand what they mean). I was originally just looking desperately for *any* sort of translation that would tell me what the lyrics meant, but while there are no English translations out there, bar a few very mangled renditions that read like computerised output (which really doesn't work well on lyric poetry), I happened to run across a French translation of one of the songs that I was looking for that was not only pretty accurate, so far as I could tell (later confirmed when I checked the unknown words in a dictionary!), but was also rhymed and scanned to the original melody.

And being insanely competitive I immediately decided that I, too, could do that :-P

In fact it turns out that I can, to a decent standard (albeit at an average rate of about four lines of verse every two days at best -- this sort of thing is extremely slow going). The great thing about 'literary translation', and particularly of poetry, is that the principle is to translate what the original text actually *meant*, as opposed to what it literally said... so you have more leeway, to a certain degree, especially in the case of poetry, where the constraints of scansion have to be borne in mind as well.

So, for example, where the Russian literally says "[I] stood as if [I were a] bollard" -- Russian tends to use a lot fewer words than English -- I would feel entirely justified in rendering that as "I stood like a statue" or "I stood frozen to the spot" or "I stood stock-still" or "I couldn't move a muscle", according to the requirements of the rhyme-scheme, because that is clearly what the expression actually means in context. In any case a literal translation would make no sense as English poetry -- it needs to sound poetic rather than mechanical. So I'm basically composing an entirely new lyric, but one that matches the meaning of the original as closely as possible line for line, preferably including all the original elements but sometimes introducing a little variation or elaboration in order to manage a rhyme: for example, I translated a phrase that originally said "I found in his sea-chest" (referring to the discovery of a letter) as "In his sea-chest I found folded flat" in order to rhyme with 'that', which seems to me an acceptable addition with which to describe the existence of a letter ;-)

(Incidentally, the Russian for 'bollard' is apparently 'knecht', containing non-Slavonic phonemes and clearly derived from the German word -- though I would have thought they looked more like castles than knights, at least in terms of chess-pieces!)

[dividedbyblue]

Cool that you know so many bits and pieces from different languages. It is true that watching media in a language really improves your skills. I have that with Spanish. I never took formal courses, just a bit of Duolingo and watching a daily Spanish Telenovella, as well as interacting with Spanish fandom. I'm now in a situation where I can mostly understand it, but not speak it. Therefore, my grammar knowledge is insufficient. It's also a joy learning a language like that. I'm happy that you found that for Russian!

So fun that you translated a Russian song. I agree that those texts being poetic makes this task more difficult. The only song translation I ever did was "Glede Ma Glede," a song used in Xena, but it is actually a traditional Bulgarian song. I found an English translation and used it to make a Dutch translation, not a literal one, but also more poetic. It's something really short. I was pleased with what I ended up with eventually :)

It's funny, the word 'knecht' also exists in Dutch. The word is often used to describe someone who works for another person, a servant of sorts, such as for a person of noble birth or a farmer.

[igenlode]

It is true that watching media in a language really improves your skills. I have that with Spanish. I never took formal courses, just a bit of Duolingo and watching a daily Spanish Telenovella, as well as interacting with Spanish fandom. I'm now in a situation where I can mostly understand it, but not speak it. Therefore, my grammar knowledge is insufficient.

Yes, that's pretty much my position (minus the interaction :-p)
But I did originally have the grammar; I studied Russian formally for three years, and am supposed to know this stuff. I just haven't gone back to look it all up, although I keep feeling that I ought to.

(Ironically I actually watched a dubbed South American telenovela when I was in Russia in the 1990s. It's one of my most vivid memories of that stay -- tuning in every day on the television with my host family! I think it must have been a re-run and they must have switched from one season to another halfway through, because the characters confusingly all got ten years or so older and had a different set of relationships... the interesting part for me was when there were snippets of dialogue in French or English, because those were then subtitled on the screen *in Spanish* where everything else was dubbed. I'm not sure I'd even realised that it wasn't a native Russian programme before that; after all, if you're watching Russian TV you tend to assume that it's being made by Russians, however exotic the setting ;-)

It's funny, the word 'knecht' also exists in Dutch. The word is often used to describe someone who works for another person, a servant of sorts, such as for a person of noble birth or a farmer.

I would guess that is probably related to our 'knave' (Knabe in German is of course just a young male), which currently means a rascal or rogue, but originally just meant a servant.
The Oxford English Dictionary tells me that "knave" used to commonly be cited as the opposite of "knight", like male and female or cat and dog ;-)

[dividedbyblue]

Cool that you already have a basis of the Russian grammar. I now, after one and a half years of Duolingo/Telenovela Spanish, I bought myself a book to learn the grammar :) Hopefully, I will be able to actually write or speak a bit after finishing it. Russian is intriguing too. I tried doing the Duolingo course some time ago, but got stuck learning the alphabet. I should give it another try.

Interesting about the South American telenovela. I agree, I would also assume it is a native series when watching it while being in the country. In the Dutch region of Belgium, where I'm from, we don't tend to dub TV series; we watch them with subtitles. I think we're a bit in the minority here :) I see French and German TV dubbing everything, too, for instance

[igenlode]

It was the Russian alphabet that first interested me -- I always liked codes and ciphers :-D
(I also studied Ancient Greek, which has the advantage that the Russian alphabet was originally based on the Greek alphabet, with a few extra letters added for the Slavonic sounds that don't exist in the Greek language.)

After a good deal of hunting around on the Internet I am now pretty sure that the telenovela I was watching in its Russian dub the early 1990s must have been "Yeltsin's favourite soap opera", Los Ricos También Lloran ("aired in 1991–1992... was watched virtually by the whole population and became for a long time a reference point").

All I could remember was that the main character's name was Maria (according to Wikipedia it was actually Mariana, but it's possible this was changed in dubbing!)
But I definitely do recognise bits of this plot summary of the 'Yeltsin show', especially the bits about the secret son and the time-skips of several years -- I think I must have come in somewhere close to the beginning of "the second part", with a few flashbacks to Maria/Mariana's early life as a poor peasant...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_ricos_tambi%C3%A9n_lloran

I have vaguely wondered what it could have been for many years -- and now I finally know the end of the story :-D
(Though by the sound of the plot summary, in fact I must have seen virtually all the way to the end of the show before I left!)

[dividedbyblue]

Yes, I also remember recognizing Greek letters in the Russian alphabet; not from knowing the Greek language, but from studying mathematics that uses Greek letters sometimes :)

I'm happy that you found the series again! Was this show something you watched in your youth/ childhood? Those shows always seem to leave a special sensation on oneself :)

[igenlode]

I'm happy that you found the series again! Was this show something you watched in your youth/ childhood? Those shows always seem to leave a special sensation on oneself :)

I was a teenager at the time and half a continent away from home... and it was the one and only soap opera I'd ever seen, given that my family didn't watch TV :-)
Also probably the most enjoyable part of my time in Russia, and certainly one of the most memorable, with the exception of learning the Lord's Prayer in Old Church Slavonic, which was my party trick for a while after getting back to England: https://www.johnkilpatrick.co.uk/music/misc/otchewords.htm