Re: Help me with semantic examples! (from Zomp's blog)

[Astraios]

Hebrew uses all its terms pretty equally for boys and girls: yāp̠ɛ/yāp̠ā 'beautiful', ħāmūd̠/ħămūd̠ā 'cute', etc.

[clawgrip]

Japanese does both.
- kakkoii "cool" is more likely to describe a man than a woman. Like "cool", it can also be used to describe attitude, skill sets, impressively cool actions that people perform, etc.
- otokomae has the word "man" ("otoko") right in it and so only describes a man's appearance
- kirei "pretty" (when describing people) is more likely to describe a woman than a man - also, this word means "clean" when applied to objects instead of people
- utsukushii "beautiful" is also generally only for describing women's appearances (when describing appearances anyway; you could, for exaple, describe a man's singing voice as utsukushii)
- kawaii "cute" is gender neutral and readily applicable to either, but, just like English 'cute', is not necessarily appropriate for a manly/rugged type of attractiveness

[Ser]

Going through these today, I got curious about terms for beauty. We have beautiful/handsome/pretty/cute, which seem in part to be determined by gender and the type of beauty.

French seems to agree on gendered terms... at least, it seems that jolie and mignonne are more used for women than joli and mignon for men, but I may be wrong.

I think Spanish is pretty even-- guapo/a is used for both, for instance.

Actually, guapo is mostly for males. You can use it for girls meaning basically 'hot', but I don't think it's that common of an adjective for them... I'd be far more likely to use (estar) (bien) buena 'hot', (ser/estar) bonita 'pretty', (ser) linda/bella/preciosa 'beautiful' (bella is more cheesy than linda, and preciosa more than bella—using the verb estar would mean they look "temporarily" beautiful because of their make-up + clothes/dress).

As for guys, it's mostly about (ser/estar) guapo 'handsome, good-looking; hot', (estar) (bien) bueno 'hot', and (ser/estar) lindo 'cute'. (The terms translate easily into English.) You can refer to a guy with (ser) bello/precioso, but they're quite cheasy and slightly effeminating.

[hwhatting]

German has schön (all-purpose "beautiful"), hübsch "pretty", süß "cute" (lit. "sweet"), niedlich "cute". All of them can be applied to both genders, but as Serafin mentioned for some Spanish terms, hübsch, niedlich, and süß don't really work for the "rugged male" type of beauty, and one would finde them applied mostly to girls / women and to boys / young men, not to older men: niedlich is even more restrictive - it has an implication of smallness and cuddliness and is applied mostly to children and cute animals, or by teenage girls to cute boys.
EDIT: All the words I mentioned can also be applied to things / objects.

[Ser]

niedlich is even more restrictive - it has an implication of smallness and cuddliness and is applied mostly to children and cute animals, or by teenage girls to cute boys.

This is what lindo in Spanish is too (re-reading my post I wasn't really clear).

[gach]

Finnish indicates beauty not too differently to English. The basic terms are kaunis and komea. Kaunis indicates fairness and is the default word used for females. Komea can be translated as "handsome" and is the default word for males. It's also used for non-human things when they are rugged or you consider them awe-inspiring. So a natural scenery can be either kaunis or komea depending on the prevailing feelings it gives to you. Komea can also be devoid of any connotations of beauty and simply mean "impressive". (Another unrelated word for "impressive" is vaikuttava, lit. "affect-PRES.ACT.PARTICIPLE") For abstract beauty you use kaunis. You'll use this for example when describing a mathematical proof beautiful, meaning elegant. This is synonymous to saying tyylikäs (lit. "sth. having style") which just means "elegant".

For people you can also use kaunis and komea with the opposite to normal gender assignment, but this implies strong secondary connotations. For females komea invokes the sense of certain masculinity while for males kaunis signifies unusual fairness or femininity. It doesn't have to be derogatory in any sense but often has the same connotation as saying "a man who does make-up".

For "cute" you might say söpö or nätti. Söpö is the more affectionate one of these. Its use is mostly segregated by the attitudes of the speaker. If you are very much into fluffy bunnies and everything pink, then there are more things that can be söpö than ones that can't. If you like heavy metal and cheap beer better, you are very likely to either not use the word at all or only use it in a derogatory sense. In my experience the median seems to be a bit closer to the end of using söpö only as a marked word. Nätti means "cute" more in the sense of "just fine". So for example calling a girl or her clothes nätti might mean that they look fine but you are not going to make a fuss about it. You can also contrast nätti with kaunis in which case nätti also becomes to mean "not exactly beautiful".

There's also soma which translates as "cute" or "pretty" and is more neutral than söpö and nätti, but you don't tend to hear it too often.

[Ulrike Meinhof]

Swedish uses snygg as an all-purpose adjective for beauty/prettiness (in both people and inanimate objects), and anyone can call anyone snygg regardless of the sex of both the speaker and the person spoken of. Söt is pretty much equivalent to 'cute' and is probably more commonly used with females. Vacker has a sense of 'classic beauty' and applies (if used at all) mostly to women.

-----

Swedish distinguishes (disk)ho or vask (both '(kitchen) sink') from handfat '(bathroom) sink'; these are not commonly thought of as the same sort of thing.

[Qwynegold]

kaatua - fall down from a standing position. It can be either person or thing.
pudota/tippua - fall down from a height or into a hole. These two are more or less synonymous.

For me, kaatua is "fall over" whereas pudota/tippua is just "fall down a hole", "fall off something" or just "fall". I hear "fall down" from other people sometimes for the kaatua meaning, but I would never use it that way.

Ah, it must've been a typo or something. Yeah, fall over is a better translation. Another way to illustrate this is that the causative forms of these verbs are kaataa (fell smth) and pudottaa (drop smth).

[Qwynegold]

Japanese 'play' (asobu) is also different from English. It's sort of like the opposite of 'work' and can be used for adults as well as children. For example, asobi ni kuru means "come over for a visit" but is literally "come to play" and is completely natural to use even for adults who are not going to do anything but eat, drink and talk, for example.

I knew there must be a word like this from hearing my students speak. Once, a student told me another student played with her on the weekend and then they slept together. o.O

Japanese
kagi - lock or key

Technically 鍵 kagi only means 'key', and 'lock' is 錠 jō, but because Japanese allows a lot of grey area for the specification of subjects and objects, passive and active, people can get away with referring to both with the same word. Now kagi is kind of taking on the meaning of lock as well, as you say. Not sure what they put on signs in stores where they sell padlocks or door locks, but they might use jō in those cases.

Huh! They never taught us that in Japanese class! D:

And here's some others:

Japanese
oru - fold or break by bending



Finnish
pensseli; sivellin - paintbrush for art, I don't know if these are complete synonyms, or if one is sharp tipped and the other broad tipped
suti - brush for painting houses etc with

kuori - shell, husk, bark or peel

ajaa - drive, but depending on the object it can also mean shave or mow lawn, or with takaa (from behind) it means chase



Swedish
korn - grain or barley



Swedish/Finnish
pärla/helmi - pearl or bead

[Qwynegold]

Swedish uses snygg as an all-purpose adjective for beauty/prettiness (in both people and inanimate objects), and anyone can call anyone snygg regardless of the sex of both the speaker and the person spoken of. Söt is pretty much equivalent to 'cute' and is probably more commonly used with females. Vacker has a sense of 'classic beauty' and applies (if used at all) mostly to women.

There's also stilig for handsome.

[Qwynegold]

Oh, one thing that came to mind: mysa, gosa, hångla. But I'll let someone else try to explain these (muahahaha) because I have to go. It seems like people have very different ideas of what these things entail.

[Ulrike Meinhof]

Swedish uses snygg as an all-purpose adjective for beauty/prettiness (in both people and inanimate objects), and anyone can call anyone snygg regardless of the sex of both the speaker and the person spoken of. Söt is pretty much equivalent to 'cute' and is probably more commonly used with females. Vacker has a sense of 'classic beauty' and applies (if used at all) mostly to women.

There's also stilig for handsome.

There's lots of words, but most have very strong secondary meanings (stilig connotes being properly dressed, well-behaved, etc.), or even primary meanings other than beauty proper.

[Astraios]

Thought of another one in Hebrew, again related to religious stuff.

ˀɛ̆lōah - god; specifically the god of the Hebrew people (also ˀɛ̆lōhīm - same meaning) (cognate to Arabic ˀallāh)
ˀēl - god; either the Hebrew god or any other deity (fem. ˀēlā - goddess)
ˀɛ̆līl - god; specifically not the Hebrew god (fem. ˀɛ̆līlā - goddess)

English sorta has similar distinctions (God vs. god vs. idol) but doesn't always differentiate between them whereas Hebrew does.

[Corundum]

English distinguishes between "pen" and "pencil", Swedish has "penna" that covers both.

English has "squid" and "octopus", Swedish has "bläckfisk" ("bläck" = "ink", "fisk" = "fish") that means "cephalopod". Well, English has a word for "cephalopod" too, so I guess it's rather a matter of Swedish lacking words for "squid" or "octopus". (However, "bläckfisk" is a base level everyday register word, just like "squid" and "octopus" in English)

English has "wall", but Swedish distinguishes between "vägg" and "mur": a "vägg" is a wall of a room indoors (or separating the indoors from the outside), while a "mur" is a wall outdoors.

English distinguishes between "monkey" and "ape", Swedish has "apa" that covers both, essentially "non-human simian".

English distinguishes between "house" and "building", while Swedish "hus" covers more than "house", but I'm not sure about how much of "building" is covered.

English distinguishes between "lake", "sea", and "ocean", while Swedish distinguishes between "sjö" (lake/sea) and "hav" (sea/ocean).

English disinguishes between "town" and "city", Swedish has "stad" that covers both. (Does "stad" match French "ville"? I don't speak French)

[Corundum]

For Astraios or whoever knows the answer: does Biblical Hebrew have different words for "African lion" and "Asian lion"?

[Imralu]

Swedish distinguishes (disk)ho or vask (both '(kitchen) sink') from handfat '(bathroom) sink'; these are not commonly thought of as the same sort of thing.

At least my dialect of English is the same. In the kitchen there's a sink and in the bathroom there's a basin. Hmm, maybe just my family?

[finlay]

dunno if I mentioned it before, but Japanese people are always convinced there is a strict difference between "tired" (tsukareta) and "sleepy" (nemui). I think this is just poor teaching, because they're taught that those words are equal to the english rough translations, but for me "tired" means I want to go to bed, while tsukareta means you're just mentally worn out or something.

as for discussions of town/city, don't forget that english (at least when talking about the uk) has a four-way distinction on the size of urban establishments:
hamlet - village - town - city
and you could arguably include metropolis as the step above city. traditionally the distinction is how established the church is in each place: a hamlet is a very tiny village with no church (the implication is a loose grouping of houses possibly including a farm, and nothing more). a village probably has just houses, a church and maybe a general store. you probably have to go somewhere else to go shopping properly. a town has shops as well, but can be any size above that (the largest is 200,000 people). and a city is a town/village with a cathedral, or now a town that's been specifically appointed as a "city" by the government, meaning that it's important. in general they go up by size but the size is not actually the primary way to distinguish them for some reason. and then america kinda breaks this by having cities with populations of 20. i'd be interested to see, from those of you who've mentioned that their language contains no city~town distinction, whether you have a town~village distinction and a village~hamlet distinction.

in japan i think there's a three or four way distinction:
村〜町〜市〜都 (village-town-city-metropolis, mura-machi/cho-shi-to)
the last one, to, is usually translated as metropolis, used for Tokyo, and it's the same administrative level as a prefecture. 市 is much more widely used here than city is in the uk, and it seems to be kind of the default, whereas in the uk town is the default. in larger cities like tokyo or yokohama you've also got 区 (ku) which is like district, usually translated as ward (basically equivalent to boroughs in london or new york). mura and machi are much smaller. one of the biggest differences ime is that 町 can also be used to mean a neighbourhood in a city, so i've had to call out students on saying "hometown" or "my town" when they actually mean another part of tokyo. also, because in japanese these seem to be obligatory suffixes on the names of cities, i have to eventually tell them to stop saying "yokohama city" or "mitaka city" or "suginami ward" every time they mention the place... just say "yokohama" or "mitaka" or "suginami". (the exception i make is when it's ambiguous, like i'd say "shinjuku ward" because if you just say "shinjuku" you probably mean the area around shinjuku station only. also the japanese government officially calls the "区" in tokyo "cities" in English, which is just confusing)

also i think the conversational word for city not as a suffix is 都市, toshi, which is just a combination of the last two.

[clawgrip]

I wouldn't consider 都 to as used in Japanese administration to be a type of city. There are two main reasons: 1. there are cities, towns, and villages located within 東京都 Tokyo-to; 2. we have the abbreviation 都道府県 Todōfuken for the largest official level of division (prefectural), and 市町村 shichōson for the next level below (municipal). We say Japan has 47 prefectures, and that includes Tokyo. It's all a big, ridiculous mess because the city of Tokyo ceased to exist in 1943 when its government was merged with the prefectural government. I don't know why, but I just assume it had at least something to do with the reduction and streamlining of bureaucracy during wartime.

The elimination of the City of Tokyo has resulted in an anomaly, namely the existence of 区 ku with no city above them. This is otherwise impossible, as all ku must by nature belong to a "city designated by government ordinance" (i.e. city with more than 500,000 people). Realistically, these 23 wards of tokyo are different from wards elsewhere and operate essentially as cities and officially translate 区 ku as "city" in all their signs, documents, etc.

It does have a very strange consequence though: after 10 years in Japan, I still have yet to get a satisfactory answer from any Japanese person to the question, "What is the capital of Japan?" People say "Tokyo" but there is no city of Tokyo. It can't be Tokyo prefecture, because you can't have a capital city with independent cities inside of it. Everyone recognizes it's ridiculous to claim you are in the capital city of Japan while you're standing on Iwo Jima, even though this is within Tokyo Prefecture. Saying Shinjuku seems most logical since the government office is there, except that that office is for the whole prefecture, and absolutely no one says that the capital of Japan is Shinjuku. It doesn't help that "capital city" in Japanese is 首都 shuto which contains the 都 from Tokyo Prefecture 東京都 Tokyo-to. So there appears to be no answer.

[finlay]

I guess I'm biased because city administration and boundaries work very differently in the UK, but to me Tokyo is still a city, taking it as the whole urban area or something like that. Saying that things like Mitaka or Kokubunji are cities is illogical because there's no space between them and the next one. I know America is also like that though.

[Rui]

Fuck Internet in China, I just wrote out a long reply and it got eaten up. Let's try again.

dunno if I mentioned it before, but Japanese people are always convinced there is a strict difference between "tired" (tsukareta) and "sleepy" (nemui). I think this is just poor teaching, because they're taught that those words are equal to the english rough translations, but for me "tired" means I want to go to bed, while tsukareta means you're just mentally worn out or something.

I think "exhausted" is more similar to that mentally (or physically) worn out feeling. There's definitely a difference between "exhausted" and "tired", and not so much one between "tired" and "sleepy"...though I would mostly only use "sleepy" with children, never with other adults.

hamlet - village - town - city

And then you come to the US, where the official title of a city all depends on the state that you're in. In my home state, Connecticut, we have New England towns which are obviously not found anywhere really outside of New England. Every municipality is a town, and then we have certain towns that are also cities that have a different form of government. They are often bigger, and actually the biggest towns in the state are in fact cities (Bridgeport, Hartford, Stamford, etc.), but there is no regard for population. There's probably cities in CT with only a few thousand residents. We don't really have officially designated villages or hamlets, those are usually unofficially-named neighborhoods within a town or city.

Compare that to a state like California, where city and town are apparently interchangeable, and as such the vast majority of municipalities are cities (460 cities vs. 22 towns). Versus Connecticut, which has 169 towns, 21(?) of which are cities.

[Astraios]

For Astraios or whoever knows the answer: does Biblical Hebrew have different words for "African lion" and "Asian lion"?

Not as far as I'm aware. There's several words for lion: ˀaryē, lāb̠īˀ, layiš, and šaħal, but I'm not aware of any difference in meaning. The first is the common word, the second's poetic, and the other two are biblical.

EDIT: I just remembered. Poetic Hebrew has a specific word for a young lion; kəp̠īr, where English and normal Hebrew make do with "lion cub", gūr ˀaryē.

EDITEDIT: On the subject of cats, 'leopard' in Hebrew is nāmēr, and 'tiger' is ṭīg̠rīs. In English it's pretty common for people who don't know the difference to confuse lions and tigers, whereas in Hebrew it's very common for ṭīg̠rīs to be confused with and replaced by nāmēr.

[clawgrip]

I guess I'm biased because city administration and boundaries work very differently in the UK, but to me Tokyo is still a city, taking it as the whole urban area or something like that. Saying that things like Mitaka or Kokubunji are cities is illogical because there's no space between them and the next one. I know America is also like that though.

I agree, there's generally a big difference between administrative regions and the reality of urban agglomerations. The Greater Tokyo Area is really one urban agglomeration stretching between several prefectures with a population of 31-36 million people, depending on how you reckon it. But for a combination of administrative and historical reasons, this type of metropolitan area is generally divided up, and the designation given is usually city (at least in the two countries I've lived).

I once made up a kind of flow chart of how Japanese administrative divisions work (it's more complicated than it seems at first). I should see if I can find it. There are one or two places with some weird systems.

[finlay]

Yeah, we don't do that so much in the UK; although Greater London (a metropolitan region) does contain two Cities, London (which is about one square mile) and Westminster, the rest are called boroughs, essentially a special name. It sort of happens with the other English metropolitan regions, like Leeds and Bradford which are different cities with distinct identities and centres which happen to bleed together. In Scotland it tends to be more clear cut than in England ime, perhaps because there are much fewer people.

In Japan, it's obvious to me now that Tokyo and Yokohama are actually different cities in a real sense like this, but frankly you'll have to do a lot of convincing if you're gonna tell me that Shinjuku and Shibuya constitute different cities in anything other than administrative structure, and even more than that concerning the distinction between Mitaka and Musashino. I think we're only getting confised here because they officially abolished Tokyo-shi in 1948, because it wouldn't make much difference if the structure was like it is now but we could refer to what is now the "23 wards" as Tokyo City. And even though Tokyo is administratively like a prefecture, it's not a prefecture because 都 kinda also means city.

As for the islands, they may be obviously not part of Tokyo as a city, but that didn't stop my students from telling me there'd been a 6.9 earthquake "in Tokyo" last month when it was actually in Miwakejima or something.

[clawgrip]

Yeah, we don't do that so much in the UK; although Greater London (a metropolitan region) does contain two Cities, London (which is about one square mile) and Westminster, the rest are called boroughs, essentially a special name. It sort of happens with the other English metropolitan regions, like Leeds and Bradford which are different cities with distinct identities and centres which happen to bleed together. In Scotland it tends to be more clear cut than in England ime, perhaps because there are much fewer people.

In Japan, it's obvious to me now that Tokyo and Yokohama are actually different cities in a real sense like this, but frankly you'll have to do a lot of convincing if you're gonna tell me that Shinjuku and Shibuya constitute different cities in anything other than administrative structure, and even more than that concerning the distinction between Mitaka and Musashino.

I am curious to hear what you think makes Tokyo and Yokohama different but does not work for Shibuya and Shinjuku. Not that I necessarily disagree...I'm just curious to see what you think distinguishes them. It is not density, I think. If you travel the length of the Keihin-Tohoku line through three prefectures, it's going to be pretty densely built up basically the entire way. It just varies between "pretty dense" and "extremely dense."

I think we're only getting confised here because they officially abolished Tokyo-shi in 1948, because it wouldn't make much difference if the structure was like it is now but we could refer to what is now the "23 wards" as Tokyo City. And even though Tokyo is administratively like a prefecture, it's not a prefecture because 都 kinda also means city.

As for the islands, they may be obviously not part of Tokyo as a city, but that didn't stop my students from telling me there'd been a 6.9 earthquake "in Tokyo" last month when it was actually in Miwakejima or something.

Therein lies the confusion. Tokyo is clearly a prefecture, as far as level and type of government is concerned, but it has a unique and ambiguous name that obscures it. The special wards of Tokyo are clearly cities as far as level and type of government is concerned (with very minor exceptions*), but they are named in such a way that suggests they are one level of government lower than they actually are. Machida is within Tokyo, yet it seems an extremely odd sentiment to say, for example, "I live in the capital city of Japan, in Mitaka (City)."

[finlay]

distance, different identities, distinct centres.

like, shinjuku and shibuya could probably function as cities if they were on their own in the wilderness, and they do attract a different crowd, but actually they function as part of tokyo. and really they don't "feel" that much different, whereas yokohama really does feel different.

whereas mitaka and musashino are just basically suburban areas of tokyo; they don't really feel like proper cities in their own right (although again, kichijoji could function as a city if it was airlifted into the countryside somewhere).

also, tokyo and kanagawa have a great big fuck-off river in between them... even that half a kilometre serves as a mental boundary, I think. except when you get to machida which is arbitrarily in tokyo.