German Notes 01

 I make sporadic notes into a dead tree, and intermittently write them up here.

Script and Alphabet

British 26 plus ß ("eszett" or "Schafer's S" ; deprecated since ~1980s review of orthography). 

Vowels are pronounced long if followed by a single consonant, or "h" but long if followed by two consonants or doubled. THAT MAKES NO SENSE, go back and check!

O, U, and A can take umlauts (e-umlaut and i-umlaut are for spoofs and rock bands).

Prounciation

Pile of tables and English equivalents.

Word order

The "verb on the 3rd page problem" :

[Pronoun clause] [Verb+conjugation] [object noun clause] ge-/ geg- [verb root]

Genders

Three genders - masculine, feminine, neuter.

Articles

Setting             ENGLISH   DE(m)  DE(f)    DE(n)
Indefinite article  a         ein    eine     einen
Definite article    the       der    die      das
Dative Indef        ???                          ?
Dative Def                   ?
...

Verb Conjugation

Several types of regular verb - I need to fill the table, then do the regulars
ab
Setting             ENGLISH   DE(m)  DE(f)    DE(n)
1st person singular I         Ich    Ich      Ich
2nd person singular You       ?      ?        ?
3rd person singular He/She/It Er     Sie      ?
1st person plural   We        Wir
2nd person plural   You       Du
3rd person plural   They/ One


?

cd
ef

Noun List

See "genders above to get gender from article.

Der Strom  = river  =  electricity

Swahili Notes 01

Swahili Notes

I've done a number of jobs in East Africa, Tanzania in particular, so I figure that learning at least a little Swahili is appropriate. I'm only doing about 20 minutes a day, but here are what I've picked up so far. Fortunately, Swahili uses the Latin character set.

Table of Contents

Swahili Notes -1

Language type -1

Verbs -1

Present.Simple (I do _____ etc) -2

Present.Negator (I do not ____ etc) -2

Present.Possession (I have [noun phrase] etc) -2

Present.Possession.Negator (I do not have [noun phrase] etc) -2

Future.Simple (I will do ____ etc) -2

Nouns -3

Singular versus Plural -3

Questioning -3

Repetition -3

Word Order – Possessive pronouns -3

Adverbs -4

Language type

Swahili is a language constructed as a “trade language” or Lingua Franca for the region, from some previous languages and the language of coastal (slave-taking) traders from Arabia.

There is a clarity and simplicity to the grammar as I’m uncovering it, which may be related to this origin.

Loan words are being imported currently, and may have been for a long time.

Verbs

Seem (so far – I’m very much a beginner at this) to be very consistent. Most conjugations seem to be a pronoun/prefix and a verb-root (generally the verb’s infinitive, less a leading “ku-”, but there are exceptions). There are a lot of loan-words from Western languages, and probably other loan words I don’t recognise.

Present.Simple (I do _____ etc)

Person	Singular	Plural
1st	Nina______	Tuna________
2nd	Una_______	Mna________
3rd	Ana_______	Wana_______

Present.Negator (I do not ____ etc)

Person	Singular	Plural
1st	Si______	Hatu________
2nd	Hu_______	Ham________
3rd	Ha_______	Hawa_______

Present.Possession (I have [noun phrase] etc)

Person	Singular	Plural
1st	Nina [NP]	Tuna [NP]
2nd	Una [NP]	(?Mna) [NP]
3rd	Ana [NP]	Wana [NP]

Present.Possession.Negator (I do not have [noun phrase] etc)

Person	Singular	Plural
1st	Sina	Hatuna
2nd	Huna	???
3rd	Hana	Hawana

Future.Simple (I will do ____ etc)

Person	Singular	Plural
1st	Nita ____	____
2nd	____	____
3rd	____	____

Nouns

Several “families” - the M/Wa (which describes the singular/ plural prefixes), the K/Ki …

Articles

Like Russian and the other (?) Slavonic languages, Swahili doesn't use articles ("the", "a" etc.) ; if you're trying to translate from Swahili you need to work out where to put them from context.

Singular versus Plural

Mna / Una
- Mna is a singular “you” ; una” is a “plural you”. In southern EN_US, this is the “you-all” or “y’all” construction. Is that unusual or inherited somehow? FR has a “tu/ vous” distinction which mixes plurality and seniority. DE has “du/ Sie”.
Other pluralising constructions?
Lots of loan words.

Pronouns

I may have inherited the m/f/n split from German

Plurality	Singular		Multiple
1st person	I	Mimi	We	Sisi
2nd person	You		You	Wewe
3m person	He		They
3f person	She		They
3n person	It		They

Questioning

[Pronoun][infinitive], so unakunywa is [una][kunywa] "are you (sing.) drinking"

Repetition

_________ tena = [do] _________ again

Word Order – Possessive pronouns

Noun [possessive pronoun] e.g. wanafunzi [wangu] = the students [of mine]
Noun [of] possessor e.g. mlango wa mwalimu = the door of the teacher.
I’m trying to figure out which endings dictate which prefixes.
Suffices (from plurality/ gender) seem related to the prefix of the possessive pronoun

Known prefixes	Possessive pronoun root	English equivalent	Comment (count of prefixes, other)
l-, -m-, y-, w-	-angu	my	4,
	yako	his	1, sometimes -u
w,	-ake	her	0, lost
w-, y-	-ake	it’s	2, sometimes -o
	yao	their	0, other uses too?
w-,,y-	-etu	Our	2,
	wa ya	of the	varies for M/WA nouns, - maybe for K/KW too

Trying to work out which ending to use is giving me a headache.

Suffix on previous word	possessive prefix
-cho, -ea, -wi,	wa- w-
-a, -ji, -ti,	y-
-ma	na- ya-

Word Order

I'm still trying to work this out.
Jina lako   ni     nani      baba
Name your / is   / what    / Grandad
Object    / verb / subject / modifier






Cleaning – hard versus soft?

Adverbs

Little used so far.

Dictionary

Updated as SwahiliDict.2019-09-21.pdf

Aidan’s Swahili Notes Page 6 of 6 total.

GeoMapApp - freeware GIS system linked to geological datasets pasted from main blog

GeoMapApp (www.geomapapp.net) is a Java tool (read : runs on any powerful-enough system) for interrogating various publicly available geological and geophysical data sets as well as your own data sets, then displaying the data together.
My current task - I wish to plot seabed terrain between West Africa and North Brazil, to show the potential for a "chain-of-beads" linkage for not-fully marine whales to cross the proto-Atlantic.
But now I'm tired.

The Brazilian archipelago has a lighthouse and research station at 0°55'00.4"N / 29°20'45.1"W ( 0.916764 / -29.345849 ) surrounded by 5 islets comprising nearly 12000 sq.m of exposed land. That is equivalent to about 120 m in diameter, and unsurprisingly, the 250m typical resolution of the bathymetry and coastlines global datasets don't show it.

That explains why I can't manually position a profile line across the islands. Which is unfortunate. Since multiple-leg profiles are not supported, I'll have to resort to a little subterfuge. Two approaches suggest themselves - manually calculating two end-points that pass over my desired point and looking at that, or constructing a profile from one point to my location then a second profile from my location to another point. The second method would allow construction of "dog-leg" profiles.


OK, now I've forgotten how to do images on the blog, and I've just trashed the last edit.

More JS permissions needed.

Now, having set up the profiles with identical horizontal and vertical scales, I could bodge those profiles together, end to end, to make a single profile, and edit the maps to show it properly on one. Do-able, but a lot of fankle. Alternatively, I can try to work out how to make a GIS "shapefile" (which is opening up a whole can of GIS worms itself) to produce the map plot, and export the two profiles as data files, merge them in a spreadsheet, and do the plot from the spreadsheet (I can also manually correct the StPeter-StPaul rocks elevation to match the 18m of record. It's below the resolution of the dataset.) That's a lot of work for a whim.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Peter_and_Saint_Paul_Archipelago
00°55′1″N 29°20′45″W