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For some reason I am trying to build the largest compendium of translations of "cheese omelette" in as many languages as possible together with a gloss and description of any unusual features in both natural languages and conlangs. If people could give descrptions of this in their conlangs or any language they speak that'd be nice. I'll start with French as example because I obviously choose the phrase based on the Dexter's Lab episode where he did it wrongly:

Omelette au Fromage
omelette[FEM] LOC_PREP DEF_ART[MSC] cheese[MSC]

In this case the phrase meaning 'the cheese' can be said to be in some kind of locative state. 'au' in this case is a contraction of the locative adpositional à and the masculine definite article 'le'. The meaning of 'à' is particularly flexible but in most cases means 'at' or 'to', but also 'as', 'like' or even 'according to'. The last is probably the best translation in this case as in 'Omelette [made] according to the cheese'

Japanese:

チーズオムレツ chīzu omuretsu

Cheese borrowed from English, omelette from French.

Simple noun-noun compound, just as in English.

TehranHamburger wrote:Omelette au Fromage
omelette[FEM] LOC_PREP DEF_ART[MSC] cheese[MSC]

That's some very weird, largely untypical style of glossing.

I'd say

• omelette[F] to_DEF.M.SG cheese[M]

would be a far more normal/sensible way to gloss that.

In my dialect Spanish, that of San Salvador (the capital of El Salvador), I'd say it probably goes as Omelet con queso /omeˈlet kon ˈkeso/ [omeˈlet koŋ ˈkeso], which would be glossed pretty straight-forwardly:

• omelette[M] with cheese[M]

Spanish Wikipedia seems to suggest that it's often called tortilla francesa (tortilla[F] French.F) in Spain (and that's what it uses for the article's title), but I've never heard this term in San Salvador, only omelet.

Serafín wrote:

TehranHamburger wrote:Omelette au Fromage
omelette[FEM] LOC_PREP DEF_ART[MSC] cheese[MSC]

That's some very weird, largely untypical style of glossing.

It is, I actually made it up because I didn't know a good way to capture à in gloss because:

I'd say

• omelette[F] to_DEF.M.SG cheese[M]

would be a far more normal/sensible way to gloss that.

'to' does not really do 'à' enough justice, one of the things that makes omelette au fromage such an interesting construct is the plurality of uses à in French has. In the format I am currently using for this document I actually serialized it as:

cntr:[pp:LOC art:

]. I intend the format to be maschine-parsable and remove any ambiguities. Hence the complication. In my dialect Spanish, that of San Salvador (the capital of El Salvador), I'd say it probably goes as Omelet con queso /omeˈlet kon ˈkeso/ [omeˈlet koŋ ˈkeso], which would be glossed pretty straight-forwardly: omelette[M] with cheese[M] Spanish Wikipedia seems to suggest that it's often called tortilla francesa (tortilla[F] French.F) in Spain (and that's what it uses for the article's title), but I've never heard this term in San Salvador, only omelet. Ah quite interesting, a commitative adpositional.

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TehranHamburger wrote:'to' does not really do 'à' enough justice, one of the things that makes omelette au fromage such an interesting construct is the plurality of uses à in French has.

But hardly ever do glosses do justice to prepositions, because semantic distributions among languages' prepositions are often very radically different. I don't see what's the problem with using "to" here.

Ah quite interesting, a commitative adpositional.

But, that's pretty boring...

Serafín wrote:

TehranHamburger wrote:'to' does not really do 'à' enough justice, one of the things that makes omelette au fromage such an interesting construct is the plurality of uses à in French has.

But hardly ever do glosses do justice to prepositions, because semantic distributions among languages' prepositions are often very radically different. I don't see what's the problem with using "to" here.

They don't, that's why I prefer to not literally translate them to a word like 'to' but a term like 'loc-pp' and explain their semantics in an addendum.

Ah quite interesting, a commitative adpositional.

But, that's pretty boring...

Certainly not as interesting as the French one. But at the very least it's not a simple compound. I'm mostly looking for variety, the lists gets rather boring if every language uses a compound which thusfar seems to be the most frequent vessel.

Catalan

Truita de formatge, lit. "omelette of cheese". The cheese is always found inside the omelette.

The etymology is dubious, but seems to come from *trota or *trotta, a metathesis of Lat. torta. Influence from Lat. tructa "trout" (which evolved to Cat.truita) is also possible.

No one has it in conlangs by the way? Conlangs create an interesting perspective of how people solve the construct of signifying an ingredient used for it.

TehranHamburger wrote:They don't, that's why I prefer to not literally translate them to a word like 'to' but a term like 'loc-pp' and explain their semantics in an addendum.

But that's not any better, because you're not representing the allative notion of à either. You could use "in" and it'd be the same... And even then, as you said, this use of à is more like "according to [cheese]" anyway...

Izambri wrote:Truita de formatge, lit. "omelette of cheese".

I guess I could accept omelet de queso too.

The cheese is always found inside the omelette.

But contents in an omelette are found inside by definition, so I stand by my phrasing.

I admit I found "cheese omelette" a bit of a weird thing to say at first because, well, omelettes are not a common thing to eat in San Salvador at all (even though, on the other hand, eating scrambled, poached, hard-boiled and fried eggs is). And the very few times I've had omelettes, they did have cheese inside, so it sounded a bit redundant... But yes, I've just been informed omelettes don't have to contain cheese inside.

Dutch:

Kaasomelet or omelet met kaas
"cheese-omelette" and "omelette with cheese", respectively.

In Greek I would say:

ομελέτα με τυρί

literally : Omelette with cheese

I did some looking around for some wacky things like τυρομελετα that seemed very unlikely but possible, and came up with nothing. I looked around for things like that because a number of greek food things have compound names: αυγολέμονο, τυρóπιτα (I guess this might count, sort of different), φασουλάδα (again, a bit of a weird one having what seems to be the words for beans and oil).

Are you going to be the Janko of Cheese Omelettes?

Serafín wrote:

Izambri wrote:Truita de formatge, lit. "omelette of cheese". The cheese is always found inside the omelette.

But contents in an omelette are found inside by definition, so I stand by my phrasing.

My specification isn't superfluous, since Catalan truita de formatge can refer, basically, to two things: a) an omelette with cheese inside (the beaten eggs are fried in a span and, while frying, the cheese is added), and b) an omelette consisting of a mix of beaten eggs and grated/powdered cheese (the mix is fried in a span).
That results in two types of cheese omelette, the main difference been how the cheese is contained: in the first case the cheese is wrapped up by the fried beaten egg, while in the second case the cheese is part of the omelette's structure.
In Catalan truita de formatge basically means the first one: an omelette with cheese inside. Hence my specification.

trucha de queso xDDDDDDDDDD

Thry wrote:trucha de queso xDDDDDDDDDD

Not a very obvious joke to a native speaker, though.

Izambri wrote:

Thry wrote:trucha de queso xDDDDDDDDDD

Not a very obvious joke to a native speaker, though.

I honestly don't follow. Cheese trout? Did I drop my brains?

Burke wrote:Are you going to be the Janko of Cheese Omelettes?

GAH! You beat me to the punch!!!

To a native of what, Catalan or Spanish?

Burke wrote:I honestly don't follow. Cheese trout? Did I drop my brains?

Precisely, that's what I thought. Like, I didn't know Catalan had truita for torta/omelette, but I did know it had truita for trucha [< L tructa] so... that was the result of what I parsed.

Finnish:

juustomunakas
juusto-muna-kas
cheese-egg-QUAL
"cheese omelette"

This is quite simply a compound of juusto ("cheese") and munakas ("omelette"). Juusto is a Germanic loan into Finnic, compare with Estonian juust (id.) and Swedish ost (id.) Munakas on the other hand is build on top of the old native word muna ("egg") which appears with the same meaning throughout Uralic and is traceable into Proto Uralic *muna (id.). The word and most of its cognates also have secondary meanings of "testicle" or "penis" and also these seem to go back to the protolanguage.

The word munakas is coined from muna by applying the derivational affix -(i)kAs. This generally creates quality adjectives, e.g. voima ("strength") > voimakas ("strong"); väri ("colour") > värikäs ("colourful"), but noun derivations are common as well and can even be verb based, asu- ("live") > asukas ("resident"). A more literal interpretation of munakas would then be "something with/from egg". There's also the loan word omeletti with identical meaning but I can't think of any sensible reason to prefer it.

Serafín wrote:

TehranHamburger wrote:Spanish Wikipedia seems to suggest that it's often called tortilla francesa (tortilla[F] French.F) in Spain (and that's what it uses for the article's title), but I've never heard this term in San Salvador, only omelet.

When I was on the Canaries tortilla was definitely the only word I heard for an omelet, Spanish style or not.

Indonesian:

dadar keju
omelette cheese

Keju is loan from portuguese queijo and dadar is... well... omelette.

I have no idea why this language has a native root for omelette. But there you have it.

Vardelm wrote:

Burke wrote:Are you going to be the Janko of Cheese Omelettes?

GAH! You beat me to the punch!!!

Someone was bound to say it.

I love Janko. The dude is everywhere.

Thry wrote:To a native of what, Catalan or Spanish?

Catalan, obviously. A native will understand truita de formatge only as cheese omelettte; the "cheese trout" joke would need to be explained.
It's one of those homophone/homonym jokes that aren't so obvious to natives.

Thry wrote:Precisely, that's what I thought. Like, I didn't know Catalan had truita for torta/omelette, but I did know it had truita for trucha [< L tructa] so... that was the result of what I parsed.

Truita means "omelette", but not "torta". The latter can be represented by coca or pastís, depending on the context or what we're exactly talking about.

Catalan, obviously. A native will understand truita de formatge only as cheese omelettte; the "cheese trout" joke would need to be explained.
It's one of those homophone/homonym jokes that aren't so obvious to natives.

What explanation is required? Catalan natives are also Spanish natives for the most part so saying "trucha de queso" kinda makes the truita double entendre explicit. It was not intended as a joke, though, it was just my clumsy parsing.

I tested your theory and got the following response: the native seemed baffled, so I asked why and she said that while she had understood my mistake, truita de fromatge as the fish with cheese, she's accustomed to hearing trutja for trout, which made the double entendre more difficult to relate. I wonder how trutja arose? Influence from Castilian trucha itself?

Thry wrote:What explanation is required? Catalan natives are also Spanish natives for the most part so saying "trucha de queso" kinda makes the truita double entendre explicit. It was not intended as a joke, though, it was just my clumsy parsing.

Truita is almost exclusively used for "omelette" while "trout" is usually and practically referred as truita de riu. If someone says truita de formatge implying "cheese trout" the joke/play will have many points to fail (in that case only the context can save it / make it work).

I tested your theory and got the following response: the native seemed baffled, so I asked why and she said that while she had understood my mistake, truita de fromatge as the fish with cheese, she's accustomed to hearing trutja for trout, which made the double entendre more difficult to relate. I wonder how trutja arose? Influence from Castilian trucha itself?

Your source is quite useless if she thinks trutja is the same as truita de riu. The word, in fact, is a variant of truja, a female pig.

So why is it used for a fish?

Thry wrote:So why is it used for a fish?

Explain that it, please, so I don't answer wrongly.