And, on a more humorous tone (from xkcd):

But do not forget the history of… counting languages. It is not as simple as you would think. Both because it is a daunting task, and because the mere idea of counting those is deeply rooted in history: Tackling the Impossibility—and Necessity—of Counting the World’s Languages.

The general aim is to ask an AI chat to assist me with translating vocabulary to enhance my store of German words. But this language has some peculiarities, and I want to follow them and integrate their understanding. For example, German has somewhat complex verb tenses and words follow genres (masculine, feminine, or neutral), often different from what we know in other languages (English, French, etc.). So, I aimed specifically at supporting this.

How? I chose an AI chat (Google Gemini – using Gemini 2.0 Flash and/or Gemini 2.5 Flash (experimental)) because its answers are aligning near perfectly with the complex prompt I built (see below). Others may be able to do similarly, but DeepSeek R1 is far too slow (and I don’t use the “chain of thought” which may be a strength in other contexts), Llama 3.x – surprisingly – fails to stick to the rules I describe in my prompt. Another Large Language Model (LLM) AI model may be good. But I would recommend you test it before using it extensively.

So, here is the prompt I decided to use (it took a little bit of refining to get to his efficiency), and I invite you to re-use it or share it.

Hello Hilfe,
I need your help to learn German and - mostly - to improve my vocabulary while I build flashcards. Your role is to translate to German some English words I give you. But I have some specific restictions on the way you must answer with the appropriate sequences.
For a verb, on a single line, give the infinitive, then the third person of the present indicative, then the third person of the preterite, then the past participle (no need to include articles).
For a noun, on a single line, give the singular and then the plural, including the article (which identifies the gender of the noun).
For an adjective, on a single line, give the adjective, then the comparative form, then the superlative form.
There's no need to dwell on proper nouns (they're probably the result of a typing error); Simply translate where possible.
The order will suffice to describe (no need to specify or remind each time what the elements of the answer are). But the sequence of forms requested must appear with each form separated by commas, without adding a period at the end of the line. 
In the case of multiple translations, it's okay to separate the meanings, clarifying the context, but respecting the translation rules (each meaning with its own separate line).
In the case where I indicate a German word, there's no need to translate, but to construct the answer as for a translation (with the corresponding sequence). For example, a verb will be conjugated according to the above rule.

So, when I type:

push

It will answer:

drücken, er drückt, er drückte, gedrückt (to push, to press)
schieben, er schiebt, er schob, geschoben (to shove, to push)
der Stoß, die Stöße (the push, the shove)

If I type:

Morning

Here comes the answer:

der Morgen, die Morgen

I hope that it will help you to improve your vocabulary. It does not help for other aspects (grammar, pronunciation, accent) but it supports my progress.

Have fun with Deutsch!

So, here is a condensed list:

Wild Focus

This is the web site of my portfolios. There, you will see the subjects I really fell in love with and some more personal projects (often still a work in progress, like my half-portraits).

One of them appears to be well understood even today: The Greek alphabet evolved with technology around the Mediterranean sea.

However, It was clearly preceded by older scripts and some of them have not even been translated as of today. From the Bronze Age in Southern Europe and the “interior sea”, you would find:

• Linear A script: Used by the Minoan civilization in Crete around 1500 BCE to 1200 BCE.

• Linear B script: Used by the Mycenaean civilization in Crete around 1850 BCE to 1450 BCE.

I invite you to follow the links to the World Histroy Encyclopedia, which contain very useful information about all these (and other historical data).

He found two ways to compare some alphabets. One is about grouping them (a bit like in a Venn diagram):

The second is a more hierarchical walk between alphabets.

Both appear quite interesting to my eyes.

• You certainly knew that the alphabet we use (A to Z) has not always existed. You may have suspected that it was evoving in time from older scripts. Matt Baker, from UsefulCharts.com, has a very visual presentation of how our modern latin script may have evolved from proto-sinaitic (over nearly 4 thousand years). I find this properly fascinating. I can’t stop looking at that chart:

• I probably did not know much about the hyphen. This little under-used (or improperly used) sign is the subject of a deep little book (“Hyphen,” by Pardis Mahdavi, which came out in 2021, which I read with passion). But the original article is from the New Yorker: How to Use (or Not Use) a Hyphen.

First, a collection of 1000+ wood-block engravings from Japanese master Utagawa Hiroshige also more simply known as Hiroshige at ArtsMia.

Hiroshige is an artist who understood how to marvellously renew the traditional art of Japanese wood-block engraving, while opening himself to inspiration from the European impressionnist painters.

And a stunning recreation of the ancient Japanese battle of Sekigahara (a major event in medieval 17th century Japanese history, which has been inspiration for many great works of art on all mediums). But instead of using the traditional engraving, videographer Yusuke Shigeta has created a multipanel moving exhibition using video display reproducing scenes that you would think coming from a large size engraving.

You may observe this at the Chubu Centrair International Airport, and you will be able to follow the intense battle of more than 500 samourais and soldiers.

Sources: OpenCulture and Dornob.com.

So, I decided to create a kind of online portfolio in order to show only a severely reduced number of images – but specially curated to keep only those I really love. Thus they will become alittle more accessible.

But it became also the opportunity to share some of my intentions behind the pictures (in French). I don’t always randomly shoot pictures . I have some projects, some ideas, some intent. Sometimes, I can assemble them in a lighter package grouped around a common tune I chose. These portfolios now become available on :

Wild focus (photo.roumazeilles.net)

Updates are much less common, but it’s more of my own photo raw personality.

But you would be surprised finding a rather unusual bar/pub inside this building: Guinness-record bar for the number of different whiskies displayed and on-sale here (nearly two thousands on the day the auditors came and counted them; At least one from each and every distillery in Scotland to the day).

But this is not all, we loved the hôtel where we spent a delicious night (and we did not even empty the bar).

Kremlin and its tall walls:

Saint Basil cathedral and its multi-colored domes:

The rest of the Moscow city center is somewhat surprising for a European capital city: A mix of centuries-old architecture, communist-era industrialism, modern-times tourism.

Avec finalement, quelques images (obligatoires) volées dans le luxueux métro de Moscou :

Moscou, août 2018.

Consequence? A wave of insults against the poor Steven Spielberg (who did not ask for such hate) with messages like “Bastard! Heartless killer!”.

Should it be a photograph in front of a dead lion or a killed elephant; It would be slander and cause for trial.

But, thousands of people would not even recognize the sheer paleontological impossibility of this perfect fake news. And they start shouting!

During a public recording of “des papous dans la tête“, France Culture radio station  show, on the 6th of June 2004, Françoise Treussard rhetorically asked herself if the author of the classical question-story about the chicken who would have crossed the road was present in the studio. I took the issue in my own hands as if I could find the actual author. Alas! Did I know that I was embarking on a long journey through time (actually only a few days of research, but years of Internet history).

How?

As a matter of fact, the first step was to start my dear Google (and Altavista) to try and find more easily the roots of the meme. The story is so commonly known here that looking in the Internet seemed the natural way. And I nearly immediately understood how much bigger it was than I thought. What I imagined a nice humoristic idea (but a recent one) quickly appeared as much older.

I started naturally (I’m French) digging into French versions. Up to July 2000, French language seem to simply ignore the mere existence of the
chicken (poule or poulet, in French). But it can be found on web sites like http://www.chez.com/freetimes/philo.htm or alprerkillersite.ifrance.com/surlespoules.htm updated in the second half of 2000. At this time, the chicken has seriously philosophical reasons to cross the road. The answer is given by Plato, Karl Marx, Douglas Hofstadter or Machiavel. The diversity from these two examples immediately shows that they are absolutely not primary sources but variations from a possibly common origin, but both deeply modified.

Consequently, I made the hypothesys (an easy one on the Internet) that the origin was to be looked for in the English language and that French occurrences were only late translations and extensions (several answers rely deeply on common French cultural background, though). Actually, you may find thousands of web pages web titled “Why did the chicken cross the road?” and updated in the second half of 2000.

So the search went on deeper in the past.

In the second half of 1996, hypertext versions (in HTML) are uncommon, but text-only versions appear quite often. But in 1992, there is no longer any reference to our brave chicken. In December 1993, according to Altavista we see the first apparition on the personal web site of Lori and Michael Blake: www.frogtown.com/~mblake/text-files/humor/Music.Humor.

Note: At the same time, I could find a blonde joke (Yes! as early as that) with interesting common traits even though it is set deep in the middle of other jokes:

268. Q: Why did the blonde cross the road?
     A: Never mind that! What was she doing out of the bedroom?!?
     R: I don't know.
     A: Neither did she.

[http://www.scc.net/~ytrah/txt/ALLBLOND.TXT]

Now, seeing so many of these text-only cases (no web page formatting), I hypothesized that the rarefaction could come from the youth of this media (web is often considered as born in 1989) and from the scarcity of web archives dating back to this time. But, there is a place where we can go much further back in time: Usenet newsgroups. Google has the great advantage of being a good archive easily searchable using the public search engine. I thus jumped into this next phase.

Again, the History counter jumped back several years with 19 references found between 1981 and 1989 in various newsgroups including the most probable rec.humor (fully dedicated to jokes and humor from its inception). And from all these references we can draw interesting remarks.

• Not any “why did the chicken cross the road?” actual list
• 11 lists of elephant jokes (between 2 February 1992 and 31 December 1993) where we find:

Why did the elephant cross the road? 
Chicken's day off.

• 1 isolated case with a version involving our courageous bird but it is rather different from the one we know (amateur mathematicians know a Moebius strip has no other side because it is a geometric figure folded onto itself):

Q: Why did the chicken cross the Moebius strip? 
A: To get to the other ... er, um ...

First hypothesis

We can imagine an elephant joke gone loose with a humorist following on the new trail of a chicken but adding the series of interesting answers. But the theme of crossing the road is already well alive in 1992. It leads to neat variants since we identify an elephant and a blond. In both cases, the reason for crossing is unclear to the audience. For the elephant, the answer is the traditional incoherent humor; For Moebius, there is the addition of a star figure of geeks and other hackers.

The jump to more literary answers is not an obvious one and seem to point to an individual who sort of created a bridge between two universes (even if true hackers always insisted on drawing from a much larger cultural base than what folklore would lead us to think).

This jump is all the more remarkable knowing that in 1994, there is no real “why did the chicken cross the road?” list and only elephants are joke subjects on Usenet (at least in a context similar to what we are looking for). It’s only in 1995 that we really see chickens crossing roads or streets, and always around fans of the Star Trek series.

Do the philosophical explanations appears at the end of 1993? It’s difficult to be affirmative. But, taking into account the scarcity of available data, it is tempting to imagine a philosophy lover extending the already existing idea from a common anglo-saxon humor meme to a more sophisticated level.

Jumping forward into the past again

I finally could find an old indirect reference to a BASIC language computer game written in 1982 thus described:

Chicken -- A Great Game:
 Why did the chicken cross the road?
 To lay an egg.
Actually, our chicken is trying to score points by getting safely
across this busy highway. Each time he makes it adds to his score, but
the cars go faster and faster. If he gets hit, the SPCA sends an ambulance
and the cops slow the traffic for a while.

There, we immediately see all the original elements of the joke except the list of explanations and the literary references. It seems to confirm the very old age of the original meme of a chicken crossing the road for a confusing reason.

References

The reference web site: WhyDidTheChickenCrossTheRoad.com (at least, this is the one with most answers to the question we explored).

When using the term hacker I simply refer to the old meaning of exceptional programmer rather than the more recent definition of a dangerous computer-loving teenager or shadowy Russian mafioso. See the Hacker’s dictionary.

On BoredPanda.

I recommend specially both the novel and the movie.

The exotic animals reminded me of wildlife safari photo trips…

Here are some of those I collected during my recent visit to Melk Abbey.

Stift Melk wbe site.

I grabbed a few photos while I was there.

But these Scottish people are really great. So utterly impossible to understand that their verbal exchange seems poetic and stripped of any useful meaning. Some kind of automatic writing translated by a Google machine into a marvelous video:

Today, I was stopped by the sheer simplicity of this documentary film about a man who is the last piano repair parts reseller in Paris. A moment out of time.

La Mer de Pianos from Films & Things on Vimeo.