Also from my trip to the British Library I had a good look at that left hand cast. His index finger is longer than his ring finger. What do we deduce?

They appear that way but I measured them on my cast with a tape measure fom the knuckle in the hand to the tip of the finger the last time we discussed this. (Of course we gotta check these things out. ) They're exactly the same length which may be even more interesting.

It was during a search for a cast of Chopin's hand that I first stumbled across PW, so I am very grateful that it was being discussed here at that time. I still haven't been able to get one (I want the kind pictured on the last page), though I have seen them close up. Perhaps in Poland later this year.

I've envied his long fifth fingers. (My pathetically short ones are compensated for somewhat by my long fourth fingers.) As some of the posts imply, the "2D/4D ratio" has some significance. It relates to the amount of testosterone exposure a person gets during prenatal development. Males usually have longer fourth fingers than second fingers.

The hair: What I saw at the Biblioteka Polska in Paris was light brown with just a hint of red, and a few white strands. I would almost call it strawberry blond, but I think it's a little too dark for that. I wouldn't use the term dirty blond because that suggests more of an ash blond to me, and it's too reddish for that.

I remember my husband touching his own head and saying "oh!" when he saw it, because it was so close to his own color. The color was precisely like our daughter's, actually, but I can't simply send you a picture of her in order to show you, because she's been dyeing hers for years. (At this point it is very dark brown with intense lipstick-red overtones.) If I can find the page where I posted a picture of her at his tomb, I'll let you know, because she had her real color back then.

But I seem to remember that MR had seen a different lock of hair supposedly belonging to Chopin, and that it was a different shade. As usual, Our Guy seems to exist in a fuzzy universe of probabilities rather than certainties.

Elene

Hello all chopin lovers
i just wanted to share with you something i found, i hope it's not here and that i am putting it again or something.
Anyway, i think i found the most comprehensive site with chopin portraits and dags (i mean one dag and one photo ofcourse), anyway here is the link:
http://www.psm.vin.pl/Chopin.htm

have a nice day,
Shaul.

Thank you Shaul. Very nice.

I think that "moyen" is best translated as "average" in this context.
The "intriguing" part is the beard ("barbe"). Did he ever sport one or did he just not shave well that day (that would be incompatible with most descriptions, no?) .. or do they simply approximate these descriptions.. Not sure if they necessarily see the person when they write out the passport. I bet you could have it done by proxy for the right amount of pourboire..

He didn't ever have a beard that we know of but around this time he did have some rather understated sidewhiskers which I suppose would count.

Thank you, Shaul! It is a lovely site!

I've always taken that particular mention of 'barbe' to mean facial hair (including stubble/five o'clock shadow) - the colour of which would of course be another important point in identification of an inividual, even if they didn't actually have a beard as such.

Wonder what'd they'd put down in that spot for George? Meow.

(Hey, I'm a brunette, I can say that.)

Re: Chopin's hair - I remember reading a description someone who saw both Chopin and Liszt perform at the same venue gave in a letter - the gist was Liszt was taller, and lanky, Chopin was very slight. And while they had the same fair coloring, Chopin's hair was fine and wavy, while Liszt's was coarse and straight.

Probably abondants

Happy birthday, -Frycek!

Happy birthday -Frycek!!!

Yet another birthday wish for Frycek.

Shaul, great to hear from you, it's been ages! Thanks for the portrait site. A few I know of are missing, but there are some I'd never seen.

I wonder why the George Sand drawing is listed as 1844- I thought she did that in Majorca. (We do know that he liked that portrait.) One of the copies given here is far better than the other, and I don't know whether she actually did two versions, or if it's just that the reproductions are so different.

Regarding the "barbe," I was interested to note that the 1837 medallion portrait has long fluffy sideburns, and that may have been done in the same general area of time as the passport (or not?). I thought that he only wore those when he was younger. (Not that I have any idea what his fashion presentation was from day to day, of course.) But some of those doctors who are trying to do historical diagnosis say that Chopin's inability to grow a beard was medically significant, and in actuality, despite what he wrote about it, he does seem to have had reasonable facial hair growth, according to portraits, which may or may not show the truth. Another thing we can't be sure of.

(I fight with dark facial hair myself, kitties, and don't find it terribly funny! But then, I have long 4th fingers. I wouldn't be surprised if a black-haired woman like Mme Sand would have trouble with it, especially as she got older.)

Elene

Don't worry Elene, I doubt you'll be breaking any records soon
http://www.media-post.net/longest_beards.php

On a vaguely related note, how useful would it be to be this boy, with 12 fingers in total (and 13 toes), especially if he has full use of all fingers.
http://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/reco...ing_person.aspx

I'd come under "abondant" myself and I also have the extra long fourth finger (and the extra short fifth for that matter.)

Gosh Chopin4life, that little boy seems to have some strangely shortened fingers and toes. I hope he gets on OK in life.

On another topic, I came across this quirky 'encyclopaedia' entry for Chopin today:
Alternative universe

The passport, which was for his first trip to England, is dated 7 Juillet 1837, so it is from roughly the same time as the Bovy medallion.

[On medallions, the Chopin portrait site unaccountably omits my favorite medallion, the one showing a double portrait of Chopin and Hiller, both in profile, and probably dating from 1834.]

Jeff Kallberg

I love alternative history, but don't get around to reading much of it. I have no idea how they manage the time and energy to write it. And good grief, constructing languages-- most of us can barely manage to learn the real ones.

Here is the Wiki page about their Bach: http://ib.frath.net/w/Johann_Sebastian_Bach
Strangely, their Wikipedia is written in English, a language doesn't even exist in their world.

The Chopin entry is hilarious, I think! Apparently no one could imagine a world without some form of Chopin! What if our own Chopin had lived to be 94 and continued to innovate? Well, he probably wouldn't have been quite like this....

"Thus, during his entire life Chopin was Veneda's most famous and most successful pianist and composer. Altogether, his works for piano solo number 355 mazurzyks and mazurzycas, 199 nocturnes, 181 etudes, 70 waltzes, 58 vénédaises (including the famous Andante Spianato and Grande Vénédaise Brillante in E flat major), 31 ballades, 27 scherzos, 13 impromptus, 12 sonatas, 8 rondos, 5 books of preludes, and several sets of variations and smaller works. Furthermore, he wrote seventeen concertos for piano and orchestra, nine operas, four symphonies, two violin concertos, a cello concerto, a clarinet concerto, a concerto for taragot and bandura orchestra, and numerous chamber works, including over 300 songs.
After 1880, Chopin's musical language changed radically. Different opinions have been ventilated about the question why. Some argue that Chopin simply had enough of the forms he had been using his entire life, others believe he had discovered a deeper truth (or even, that he was in a direct contact with God), while others explain it from his deteriorating mental capacities. Whatever the cause, Chopin denounced most of his previously written works, burnt many of his older manuscripts, and started to write a kind of music that was completely unheard of before, and that even in the early 21th century sounds like pure avantgarde. Clearly, he was exploring extremes: some works of this period are unusually long (for example, his fifteenth piano concerto, written in 1897, requires and orchestra of over 600 musicians and lasts no less than two hours and fifteen minutes), others are extremely short (like his sonata for double-bass and piano: one minute and fourty seconds). He also showed a radically new and free approach to tonality, culminating in almost complete atonality; he even experimented with series of twelve tones, more than twenty years before dodecaphony was officially invented in Vienna by Arnold Schönberg. Chopin also developed a special preference for unusual instrument combinations: after having written almost exclusively piano music, he started to write sonatas for heckelphone and organ, for bass tuba and piano, for tenor saxophone and piano, for Dumnonian bagpipe and lyra, for bandura orchestra, etc. And while after 1897 he could not even remember his own name, he remained a prolific composer of interesting albeit strange works. When he finally died of old age on 29 February 1904, one day before his 94th birthday, he left no less than twenty-seven unfinished manuscripts he had apparently been working on simultaneously. He was buried in the Skleża Sąciej Krucze at the Parwija Kordynieża."

Here is their Wiki home page in their Chopin's native language. http://ib.frath.net/w/Pażna_Przęczypała
Good Lord, real Polish wasn't hard enough for them, they had to invent an alternative Polish?

Elene

But Polish isn't hard, at least you always know how to pronounce (the pronunciation rules are very regular and easy). The linked text has not a single word in Polish, but I can read it quite fluently (without understanding).

Compare with all those "conscious", or "cough" vs. "dough" things in English. Or "The violinist lowered the bow and made a bow". Or those poor children trying to spell out "see, ahr, eee, double you... crew!".

Or this:
http://www.spellingsociety.org/journals/j17/caos.php

And you dare say Polish is hard?

Is this course good?

Well, I have little experience with Polish language courses because a strange thing happened in my life as I was able to fluently speak Polish at a very early age (I must be sort of genius in linguistics, comparable to Mozart and Chopin in music ).

But from I see in the first lesson, is looks reasonable.

Życzę Ci przyjemnej nauki!
("I wish you enjoyable learning"; the verb życzyć (wish) requires the object to whom the wishing is addressed (Ty = you) in the dative case and the object being wished (przyjemna nauka) in the genitive case.)

There was an article in the Wall Street Journal (of all places!) this morning about our friend:

Chopin

Chopin's is so mysterious yet so amazing, i can not fathom the things i feel when i play and hear his music
it's just unbeleivable!!!!
Elene, good to hear from you again how is your project going???
i have a hypothetical question for you, is there any chance there is another photo or dag of chopin which is in private hands and goes in the family for generations and we just dont have a clue about it? i heard there are at least two unpublished waltz of his in private hands, so can it not be logical there are even more unpublished works at people's hands which take care of them? like the sketches of waltzes that chopin's sister left us that were burned by the russians?
i am almost positive that there are more stuff of chopin in this world which we didn't have a pleasure to check out yet!!!

J.A.S.: English spelling is a horror that has now spread over the entire planet, and though various people have attempted to fix it over the centuries, nothing has helped! Polish spelling is indeed consistent and easy to learn (although I keep wondering what you guys have against vowels).

However, yes, Polish is very hard for those of us who only know languages without cases! Here's an example that may amuse you:
http://www.transparent.com/polish/?fc_c=920495x3674254x296318318
Read the entry "Two Ears and Two Eyes."

But your English seems to be better than a lot of native speakers', so if you do want to lay claim to some sort of linguistic talent, I won't argue with you!

The thing that struck me about the artificial languages in that alternative universe is that they are "real" languages, not gibberish. (What a lot of work for something that's only a game!) At least I am under the impression that they are real languages. I'll have to take a better look at their quasi-French.

(I heard my grandmother speaking Slovak every day when I was a child, but she never tried to teach me anything-- she preferred being able to talk to her friends without our understanding much-- and I never knew that I ought to try to learn. I sure wish I could have taken advantage of that opportunity.)

Shaul, there are so many bizarre questions about Chopin, and there is so much that we don't know, that I don't think anything would surprise me anymore. I'd like to listen to some of your own work, but where do we find that, as opposed to your recordings of Chopin and Mendelssohn?

Elene

plus, i forgot to say, that i myself am a composer, and in my 10 years of composing i have composed so many peices and so many skitzes , some became cool peices, some are still undeveloped and some vanished, so i am sure there is more to chopin's repertoire out there~~!!!!!

Dang! Double dang!! How could I not know that today is Samuel Barber's birthday?? PT will be featuring his work in the next few weeks too.

Barber's own singing voice can be heard in the first hour of today's PT, on a Scottish folk song that is a great favorite of mine.
http://performancetoday.publicradio.org/

Certainly someone who was highly influenced by Chopin.

Elene

I don't understand. We have eight vowels in Polish, don't we?


You have cases (in the same sense, i.e. with declension) also in English. You don't say "I see he and he see I", you say "I see him and he sees me". And of course there is the Saxon genitive.

The two languages evolved from their common roots in two different directions: to say the same either with more words which are shorter or with fewer words which are longer, because they contain prefixes and affixes to convey more meaning. Compare:

Leśniczanka zdjęła kapelusz (3 words, average word length = 8.37).
The daughter of the forester has took her hat off (10 words not using the Saxon genitive, av. word length = 4.0).


Because there used to be the double number in addition to the singular and plural. This has survived only in some expressions regarding objects which are always double. Two eyes in the human head. Any number of needle eyes etc.


If they only change the word spelling and superficial features, not touching the deep structure, it's easy to write a computer program which will automatically and 100% accurately translate between the real and the artificial language, in both directions.

Ah, that's very interesting about the programming of an artificial language. I probably should have realized that.

Cases in English are relatively vestigial. We have the Vikings to thank for getting rid of them for the most part.

A person singing in Polish, as opposed to vowel-intensive Italian, would see why I am complaining about lack of vowels! Yes, Polish has them, but it likes to use strings of consonants and is pretty stingy with inserting those vowels.

(English isn't fantastic for singing either.)

I do appreciate the conciseness of Polish.

(French often requires even more words than English; I wonder if Chopin felt frustrated by that.)

I'll shut up now, because I'm only a wannabe linguist, not a real one.)

Elene

I was thinking the same... Where did you learn English, J.A.S.?

I regret not having chosen Polish at the Uni. I studied 5 languages and didn't choose Polish... , although of course I have always been in love with our friend Chopin! But it's never too late, right?