411–420 of 636 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Lots more Galicisms in Spain for sure :) probably easier to share words when you also share a land border.
Do Spanish-speaking and French-speaking areas actually share a border? I thought there was a buffer zone of Catalan and Basque. I'll need to check a map. On checking, it looks like there is a short (but very mountainous) border: https://maps-spain.com/maps-spain-geography/spain-language-m...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Cars are small and for the most part everyone in the car faces the same direction as the car itself. When you have a ship, you have 3 frames of references to contend with (self, ship, cardinal)
Four, actually. You also have the wind frame of reference, which is actually the most important (for sail boats). You don't turn left or right, you turn upwind or downwind.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
One interesting thing about middle ages technologies, like boats, is that the words in the different romance languages for things invented in this era are very different from each other. For example, in Spanish boat words like port and starboard are totally different[1]. Other examples of middle ages words that are very different: windmill = molino, wheelbarrow = carretilla. Words that refer to older things have more…
> windmill = molino I don't know Spanish, but "molino" looks like French "moulin", which is a mill; a windmill is "moulin a vent". So I reckon "very different" is an exaggeration.
We do use different words for the direction of the ship facing towards or away from the wind though.
Not sure if the ancients used other words though. We managed to avoid confusion for a few hundred years though.
It's interesting to compare how different professions handle the ambiguity in left/right. In the maritime world they went with an approach at one extreme, where they just use two completely separate words, "port" and "starboard." (Though that's far from the only case where there's a special word for something on a boat.) At the other extreme you have the medical profession where the first thing you learn in medical s…
> Though that's far from the only case where there's a special word for something on a boat. Understatement of the week... pretty much everything on a boat has a different word for it. Often for practical reasons, sometimes purely traditional reasons. It is nice because it binds one to nautical tradition leading back centuries/millenia.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> the channel and the buoy don't have port or starboard sides In the context of a channel, the buoys (marks) are coded port and starboard, coloured red and green, and shaped like a can or a cone respectively. When navigating a channel into harbour, the port marks are left to the port of the ship, and the starboard marks to starboard.
Red right returning
Except when weird species seize their feisty foreign neighbours.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
One interesting thing about middle ages technologies, like boats, is that the words in the different romance languages for things invented in this era are very different from each other. For example, in Spanish boat words like port and starboard are totally different[1]. Other examples of middle ages words that are very different: windmill = molino, wheelbarrow = carretilla. Words that refer to older things have more…
Cheese is an interesting one - I would expect Spanish to share the word with French and Italian but it’s actually closer to English and Dutch. French fromage Italian formagio Spanish queso English cheese Dutch kaas Languages are so weird :)
My French relatives however, insist that this is not real cheese, as it is not fermented. But the Norwegian language has no such distinction -- the 'brunost' is an instance of 'mysost'; 'cheese produced from whey'. This is no less real cheese than the one you ferment from caseine.
This naturally led me down a rabbit hole of etymological investigation.
The best conclusion I've reached so far, is that the Germanic words stemming from 'kase', referring to caseine, naturally refer to cheeses that would mostly be fermented, as this is what happens with the solid caseine when you leave it around for a bit. Whereas Norwegian 'ost', stemming from 'yste', the verb for separating the caseine from the whey, makes no such distinction.
And ironically, the Latin-stemming words 'fromage', 'formagio', stem from Latin 'formicum'; something that is cast in a form. Having nothing at all to do with fermentation or even milk!
There are two conclusions here, one being that the dictionary translation of words does not capture somewhat-subtle but sometimes important distinctions between words.
The second conclusion is that my French relatives are wrong and brown cheese is in fact fromage. But not cheese, I will concede as much.
It's interesting to compare how different professions handle the ambiguity in left/right. In the maritime world they went with an approach at one extreme, where they just use two completely separate words, "port" and "starboard." (Though that's far from the only case where there's a special word for something on a boat.) At the other extreme you have the medical profession where the first thing you learn in medical s…
On stage, they are "côté cour" and "côté jardin" because the "Comédie-Française" theatre during the 1770 was in the Tuileries palace, and the stage was oriented with the Louvre courtyard on its right, and the Tuileries garden on its left.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
One interesting thing about middle ages technologies, like boats, is that the words in the different romance languages for things invented in this era are very different from each other. For example, in Spanish boat words like port and starboard are totally different[1]. Other examples of middle ages words that are very different: windmill = molino, wheelbarrow = carretilla. Words that refer to older things have more…
Molino is mulino in Italian. Ancient Greek and Latin had similar words starting with mol-. Given the importance of that technology I'm not surprised that the word didn't change much. English' mill is also close to the romance languages. [1] Port and starboard used to be "babordo" and "tribordo" in Italian but they were replaced by "sinistra" (the very word used to say "left") and "dritta". [1] https://en.wiktionary.o…