Hi, Mark! Awhile ago you wrote in a message to Ardith Hinton:
I can also see that if we're talking about having the
Browns for dinner we may need to make it clear we don't
plan to eat them. :-)
"Respectfully submitted for your perusal - a Kanamit.
Height: a little over nine feet. Weight: in the
neighborhood of three hundred and fifty pounds. Origin:
unknown. Motives? Therein hangs the tale, for in just a
moment, we're going to ask you to shake hands, figuratively,
with a Christopher Columbus from another galaxy and another
time. This is the Twilight Zone." - /To Serve Man/
Thereby hangs a tale indeed. When Columbus landed in North America, or so historians now tell us, many of the natives headed for the hills... while many of the others were either taken to Europe as slaves or expected to produce gold in larger quantities than they could supply. Sooner or later he'd have to admit he hadn't found India or China... but he needed to persuade his financial backers he'd found something equally profitable. I wonder what a Kanamit might want from me, and I think it unlikely I could outrun him or her.... :-))
i used to speak Turkish (1st) and Japanese (2nd) but
haven't since i was maybe 5 years old...
An interesting combination! I studied French & Latin in high school
... and I'm glad I did... but I'm also out of practice now. :-)
As a Canadian, OTOH, I see many things written in both
English & French where the French version occupies more
bandwidth because the words are often longer & there are
more of them.... ;-)
true... german is similar as well in that they put words
together to make a new one... at least, that's the way i
understand some of what i've seen and how it has translated...
Yes, that's my understanding. I have a knife made in Germany, e.g., which has the word "rostfrei" on the blade. I'd interpret this word as meaning literally "rust free" because the knife is clearly made of stainless steel. In English we often put nouns together like freight cars too. However, we tend to keep the spaces between them rather than treating them as one long word.
WRT French... there was a popular song years ago called "La Plume de Ma Tante" which demonstrates what I had in mind. Translation": My Aunt's Pen". Then there's the word "amplificateur", which means "amplifier".... :-)
... and then you get things like...
i'm going to unthaw some chicken for dinner.
hurry and finish washing up the dishes.
and similar... "unthaw" is the wrong word... should
be "thaw" or "unfreeze"...
Uh-huh. I see "the cold-blooded murder of the English tongue" there as well. Whether GBS said it in exactly those words or whether some perceptive Americans added it to a musical version of his PYGMALION, I can relate.... :-)
"up" is not needed in the second one at all... can you
"wash down", too? ;)
Good question. While I've heard folks from England say "washing up" in reference to dishes, they don't specify dishes. I reckon they say this only when they're washing dishes & they'd say "I'm going to wash the car" just as we would... it's not like dressing up or dressing down to suit the occasion.
Oral speech tends to be rather wordy on occasions when we must think on our feet... and most people understand & accept that what they're hearing is the best we can do on the spur of the moment. OTOH, I think UK English is more efficient than North American English at times. The Browns may be invited *to* tea, e.g., but in this context "tea" = a light meal as well as a beverage. :-)
--- timEd/386 1.10.y2k+
* Origin: Wits' End, Vancouver CANADA (1:153/716)