Morbid = Kinky in ads from Spanish speakers

[+ José Soplanucas]

1 hour ago, DrownedBoy said:

English is different from a lot of other languages. It's a Germanic language, not a Latin-rooted Romantic language like Spanish, Italian, or the other major Romance languages.

 

All languages have particularities, English is not special. Not even in the point you are making. Although it is true that English is not a Romantic language, as French was the official language in the court in London for about three centuries, it has received a strong influence and a rich vocabulary rooted in Latin.

[mike carey]

8 hours ago, José Soplanucas said:

All languages have particularities, English is not special. Not even in the point you are making. Although it is true that English is not a Romantic language, as French was the official language in the court in London for about three centuries, it has received a strong influence and a rich vocabulary rooted in Latin.

👆

All true BUT (and not to veer too far away from our 'morbid' conversation) English borrowed the vocabulary but not the grammar and in that we tend to hew to the Norse rather than the more complex Germanic version. Our vocabulary tends to use Latin- and Greek-based words for complex things (and the 'arty' and for a fancy way of saying things) but use Germanic words for simpler and more visceral (and Germanic for the animal and French for the meat - those at court didn't want to know what a deer was (except when they went on a hunt), they only cared for the venison on their plate), and for our pronouns, articles (the, a) and basic verbs (to be, to have), and numbers, although some really simple things are similar across the board as they are derived from the Indo-European root words.

False friends can result from a coincidence, and also from the meaning in one or both language diverging from a shared source word in different ways. That happens often enough in formal use of the word, the potential for idiom to diverge even further is immense.

[DFdub]

On 9/1/2024 at 8:19 AM, José Soplanucas said:

I disagree there, my friend. There are many occasions where there are no equivalencies, although of course we have the tools to explain the meaning.

No disagreement there. I did not say that there are no instances where direct equivalencies do not exist.

My point, though perhaps poorly phrased, is that a common mistake is to begin from a position that equivalencies do not exist simply because there is nuance in the source language. Most often, the target language has equivalent nuance and meaning; this is not absolute though. My native ethnic language, a French dialect, has certain expressions that are not simple translations to English so I get it.

That said, I do not accept this as the default opening position. More often than not, equivalent translation of concept/meaning exists.