Vladas

Business Trip Across Europe

Sunday, 17. August 2008, 21:37:32

Recently I had an unusual business trip to my customers in Europe. This time I decided to go by trains and ferries. Just to see everything around, to touch and even to smell. There were two points I had to visit - Plymouth and Lisbon. On the way back I stopped in Paris for one day. Never been before, so I decided to stop for I could just say "I've been to Paris, sirs!".

I've made a lot of friends as well as photos during the trip. Now I started to put some of them into my photo album and started from - well - of course Paris! You can find detailed trip route here as well.

We are AI. Continued.OS -> Google Web -> Nothingness = Parallel Net

Comments

jehurst # 22. August 2008, 12:01

Beautiful photos, well composed. I never quite got to Paris, but I did visit Givet on the Meuse when I was hiking around Dinant in Belgium.

Your header photo of the cranes reminds me of Rotterdam. Indeed, a place which is "memel."

vladas # 25. August 2008, 12:36

Thank you for valuating my photos as good! I'm not professional, I just like making photos throughout all of my life (starting with B/W). And I really like this my cover photo. I realize that this racurs must have been expolited thousands of times, but anyway - it's mine one. A little bit of Photoshop here too. Only a little.

To tell about Memel. This is an old German town of East Preussa, established in 1252 by Swedes or Germans (?), and now it is called Klaipeda (presumably an original Lithuanian name) and belongs to Lithuania. The name Memel probably is taken by Germans from local inhabitans/tribes (Samogitians) which were calling 'low and swampy places' as 'memelia'. You can find an exact location of Memel/Klaipeda at the east cost of Baltic Sea on my trip map.

jehurst # 26. August 2008, 02:37

Well, from my limited linguistics training, I always understood "memel" as "surrounded by water." Of course, Rotterdam fits that term, indeed. There are several places in the Netherlands which include words I believe are related to "memel."

vladas # 26. August 2008, 05:41

It seems that these two meanings of 'memel' are very close: 'low swampy places' are indeed 'surrounded by water'. What was original meaning is a question of Indo-European language origination, which by recent researches could be somewhere around the old Prussan tribes (mordern north-west of Poland). And this is a place where old-German and old-Baltic languages are came from.

If you compare proto-IE numeric system with modern Lithuanian (based on Wikipedia), and then compare old-Latin declention system with Lithuanian (also from Wikipedia), you can see astonishing similarities. (taking into account that modern Lithuanian 'ų' is former 'um' and 'ą' - 'om' and so on). Firthermore, old-Baltic and old-German initially had to be very close to each other, and then went a little different.

I have some idea, that IE languages had been injected to humankind in some of three different locations probably at the same time. It's quite unbelievable that humans could invent or converge to such sophisticated initial language as IE. All they did troughout the history - they had only been simplifying its language (took out declensions, proverbal forms, etc.). In all other areas, normally, it went opposite, - all the processes created by people had a trend to become more and more sophisticated in time.