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

[Terra]

Zomp's blog post : http://zompist.wordpress.com/2013/04/30 ... -examples/
I've made a thread, because email sucks.

English
- sandy beach --vs-- rocky headland ("shore" means both) (http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=shore)
- short (in height (vs "tall")) --vs-- short (in length (vs "long"))
- old (of people (vs "young")) --vs-- old (of things (vs "new"))
- floor (inside) --vs-- ground (outside) (In Britain, "floor" can mean both.)

German
- kennen, connaitre (know (to be acquainted with)) --vs-- wissen, savoir (know (as a fact))
- du, tu --vs-- sie, vous
- Wand (wall (of a room)) --vs-- Mauer (wall (of a city)) (http://www.quut.com/berlin/german/firewall.html)
- auf (on (a table, horizontal surface)) --vs-- (on (a wall, vertical surface))
- "treffen" can mean "meet" or "hit". Compare English "Will his shot connect?". (The context being basketball.)

Latin
- horn --vs-- antler ("cornú" means both.)
- roof --vs-- ceiling --vs-- canopy ("téctum" means all.) (It can also be used in a 'pars pro toto' manner to mean "house, dwelling, shelter".)

PIE
- *b^hleh_3-wo- gave both English "blue" and Latin "flávus" (yellow, blonde).
- animate water (*h_2ep-) --vs-- inanimate water (*wed- -> Latin "unda")
- animate fire (*h_1ng^w-ni- -> Latin "ignis") --vs-- inanimate fire (??*paewr- -> Greek "pyr", English "fire")

Japanese
- all the various terms for "I" (watashi, atashi, washi, boku, etc), "you" (kimi, omae, etc), etc
- older brother/sister --vs-- younger brother/sister
- jump --vs-- fly ("tobu" means both)
- ride (a horse) --vs-- drive (a car) --vs-- pilot (an airplane) ("noru" means all)
- sun --vs-- day (日 "hi" means both. There's also 火, again "hi", which means fire. I don't know whether the kanjis have the same reading by accident, or because they come from a single word/root whose meaning happens to be split in writing. The latter is certainly believable though; Compare English "day", which comes from PIE *d^heg^w^h, which means "to burn", and which also yielded Latin "febris", which means "fever", and Proto-Celtic *deg^wi-, which means "flame".)
- horn --vs-- antler ("tsuno" means both.)
- foot --vs-- leg ("ashi" means both) (http://wals.info/chapter/129)
- hand --vs-- arm ("te" means both)
- blue --vs-- green (青い "aoi" means both, but mainly blue. Grass and vegetables can be this color. Compare 緑 "midori", which is mainly green.) (http://wals.info/chapter/132)
- red --vs-- yellow (赤い "akai" means both, but mainly red. The sun can be this color. Compare 黄色 "kiiro", which is mainly yellow.)
I recommend searching google images with the desired kanji to get an idea of what a certain word can describe.

edit: I'd rather edit my first post then clutter up the thread with another post. All this really needs to be organized into a wiki page anyways.

[finlay]

what's this in aid of?

[Terra]

http://zompist.wordpress.com/2013/04/30 ... -examples/

[finlay]

oh ok

draw and write are the same in japanese (kaku), which makes trying to explain the difference to children a pain.

[Terra]

Finlay, in Japan, do you always refer to your coworkers with "-san"? In America/Britain, wouldn't you just use their first name instead?

Also, I remember briefly talking a with a Japanese professor of mine a couple years ago about this semantic division thing, and he mentioned that Japanese divides the terms for the "beetle" more exactly than English. I don't know said terms or divisions though. Looking at the salient features of beetles, perhaps it has to do with the horn?

[Nae]

I'm sure Zomp realises just how massive that kind of project is, but eh.

Finnish has tietää 'know' (< *'to road, to path'), know of something, know of someone, and the opposite know is tuntea, 'to know someone', but also 'to feel, to feel an emotion, to register touching sensations'.

Some completely innocuous Finnish verbs have a sexual double meaning, but only if the object is in the partitive (not in the accusative-genetive or nominative).

panna pane-, 'to put something somewhere' or 'to fuck someone/thing'.
naida 'to marry someone' or 'to fuck someone/thing'.

[finlay]

Finlay, in Japan, do you always refer to your coworkers with "-san"? In America/Britain, wouldn't you just use their first name instead?

Also, I remember briefly talking a with a Japanese professor of mine a couple years ago about this semantic division thing, and he mentioned that Japanese divides the terms for the "beetle" more exactly than English. I don't know said terms or divisions though. Looking at the salient features of beetles, perhaps it has to do with the horn?

No, because we speak English at work and we try and keep things fairly informal. I often refer to students with -san though, or I talk about other receptionists with -san. We still use first names with everyone, though. I don't know many of my students' surnames. Sometimes it feels too informal so adding -san is a quick shortcut.

As for animal terms, you will be hard-pressed to find any rhyme or reason to this. There may well be no particular reason why one language divides things differently from another, although of course there will be words in Japanese that we don't really have in English just because we don't really have the animal outside of Japan – tanuki is a great example, which was erroneously translated as raccoon in the subtitles to "Pom Poko".

I've found this a bit with fish names. For instance, saba and hokke are both types of mackerel; maguro and toro are both types of tuna; I thought ika meant squid but apparently it also covers cuttlefish (but tbh I don't really know what a cuttlefish is); and ebi is a weird one because it usually means shrimp/prawns, but there are quite a few different kinds, and it also covers some kinds of lobsters. Once or twice my students have struggled to name a particular kind of animal in english, and they've drawn a picture of a lobster on the board and yet sworn blind it's not a lobster, because to them it's ebi and lobster is usually translated as something else (zarigani, maybe). That's the other kind of semantic mismatch – both Japanese and English have words for shrimp and lobster, but there's an overlap region which is one thing in one language and the other thing in the other language. (The dictionary gives both ise-ebi and zari-gani as translations for lobster, incidentally – in one case a type of shrimp and the other a type of crab.)

Lobster is such a horrible-sounding word though.

Oh, as far as "know", I'm not sure of the exact distinction in Japanese, but I think shiru covers the meanings of both kennen and wissen, but wakaru, which also means understand, is often used instead. I think I'm ok at using it roughly correctly, but I'm a bit hazy on how to explain it; perhaps that wakaru is more visceral than shiru somehow.

[Terra]

Could the overlap be a crayfish? They look like lobsters, but are small like shrimp.

Lobster is such a horrible-sounding word though.

Why? Because Japanese can't say it?

As for animal terms, you will be hard-pressed to find any rhyme or reason to this. There may well be no particular reason why one language divides things differently from another, although of course there will be words in Japanese that we don't really have in English just because we don't really have the animal outside of Japan – tanuki is a great example, which was erroneously translated as raccoon in the subtitles to "Pom Poko".

Are there any animals that your Japanese students have trouble naming because they're not familiar with it (like Westerners do with tanuki)?

[Yiuel Raumbesrairc]

Quick one for French :

river :
fleuve (France : river that pours into the ocean; Québec : the main river of a large river basin that pours directly into the ocean)
vs.
rivière (any other river that is large enough for a small boat to navigate on)

Therefore, you have fleuve Amazone, fleuve Mississippi, fleuve Fraser, fleuve Mackenzie, fleuve Yukon and fleuve Saint-Laurent (which, in Quebec, is our prototype for "Fleuve"), but rivière Ohio, rivière Arkansas, rivière Arthabaska, rivière des Outaouais.

Hudson river, which pours into the sea at New York City, would be le fleuve Hudson in France, but many Quebeckers will call it la rivière Hudson because it is relatively small for us.

[clawgrip]

Finlay, in Japan, do you always refer to your coworkers with "-san"? In America/Britain, wouldn't you just use their first name instead?

Also, I remember briefly talking a with a Japanese professor of mine a couple years ago about this semantic division thing, and he mentioned that Japanese divides the terms for the "beetle" more exactly than English. I don't know said terms or divisions though. Looking at the salient features of beetles, perhaps it has to do with the horn?

No, because we speak English at work and we try and keep things fairly informal. I often refer to students with -san though, or I talk about other receptionists with -san. We still use first names with everyone, though. I don't know many of my students' surnames. Sometimes it feels too informal so adding -san is a quick shortcut.

To give my own experience, at my workplace, when speaking English:
I refer to my students without -san
I refer to English-speaking Japanese teachers with Mr.
I refer to non-English-speaking teachers with -sensei
I refer to non-English-speaking, non-teaching staff with -san

As for animal terms, you will be hard-pressed to find any rhyme or reason to this. There may well be no particular reason why one language divides things differently from another, although of course there will be words in Japanese that we don't really have in English just because we don't really have the animal outside of Japan – tanuki is a great example, which was erroneously translated as raccoon in the subtitles to "Pom Poko".

I've found this a bit with fish names. For instance, saba and hokke are both types of mackerel; maguro and toro are both types of tuna; I thought ika meant squid but apparently it also covers cuttlefish (but tbh I don't really know what a cuttlefish is); and ebi is a weird one because it usually means shrimp/prawns, but there are quite a few different kinds, and it also covers some kinds of lobsters. Once or twice my students have struggled to name a particular kind of animal in english, and they've drawn a picture of a lobster on the board and yet sworn blind it's not a lobster, because to them it's ebi and lobster is usually translated as something else (zarigani, maybe). That's the other kind of semantic mismatch – both Japanese and English have words for shrimp and lobster, but there's an overlap region which is one thing in one language and the other thing in the other language. (The dictionary gives both ise-ebi and zari-gani as translations for lobster, incidentally – in one case a type of shrimp and the other a type of crab.)

Lobster is such a horrible-sounding word though.

As for the animal terms, it can go on forever, but here are some that are mentioned, plus some other interesting ones:

- A beetle with one central horn is is kabutomushi, while a beetle with pincers is a kuwagata.
- Freshwater eels are unagi, conger eels are anago, moray eels are utsubo.
- Racoon is araiguma and raccoon dog is tanuki, but as finlay says, almost no one understands this.
- Most shrimp are ebi, but rock lobsters (looks like a lobster but has no claws) are iseebi, lobsters with claws are often called robusutā or omāru ebi (from French homard) zarigani means crayfish, and is classified linguistically as a type of crab ("kani"), like finlay says, despite clearly being within the range of ebi (since they're basically just mini-lobsters).
- While toro on its own often refers to fatty tuna, it actually can refer to any fatty meat, e.g. toro-sāmon (fatty salmon), buta-toro (fatty pork).
- Primates are a mess. In English, we don't consider the suborder Stepsirrhini to be monkeys (lemurs, galagos, lorisids, aye-ayes, according to Wikipedia), but in Japanese they are considered varieties of saru (monkey). Gibbons are also classified as a type of monkey in Japanese (tenagazaru) but are apes in English. There seems to be no term equivalent to English "great ape." Based on a little questioning I did a long time ago, it seems like gorillas, orangutans and chimpanzees may be considered monkeys but are generally each thought of as their own individual type of animal, while humans are completely separate, and are definitely not considered to be a type of saru in the popular mind.
- Japanese also has a catch-all term for little crawling things, mushi, which covers insects, arachnids, worms, centipedes, and all those things.
- doves and pigeons are not differentiated
- antlers and horns are never commonly differentiated - they are both tsuno.
- on the subject of claws, Japanese does not differentiate "claws" and "scissors" (they are both hasami), which is kind of amusing ("the crab's scissors").

Plants are also confusing:
- squash, melons, and gourds are completely out of synch with their biological classification, both in English and in Japanese, and they don't always line up between the languages. Japanese meron, generally refers to something that looks kind of like a cantaloupe on the outside but is green on the inside. I don't really know what to call it in English. Calling it anything other than simply "melon" in English will generally illicit confusion in Japanese listeners.
- In Japan there is really only one kind of squash that is commonly eaten, which they call kabocha, and it is usually translated as "pumpkin" despite being small and green. This took me aback at first, because to me, a pumpkin, first and foremost, must be orange. It does look like a pumpkin in shape though, but I had never seen it before coming to Japan. According to Wikipedia, it's called "kabocha squash" which is utterly unhelpful.

Oh, as far as "know", I'm not sure of the exact distinction in Japanese, but I think shiru covers the meanings of both kennen and wissen, but wakaru, which also means understand, is often used instead. I think I'm ok at using it roughly correctly, but I'm a bit hazy on how to explain it; perhaps that wakaru is more visceral than shiru somehow.

I think shiru and wakaru have some overlap and there are situations where either one will do. Shiru can never be used to mean "understand" though.

Others:
Oshieru is often translated as "teach" but it is different from English, because "teach" implies that the information being conveyed is a skill, technique, or complex set of knowledge. In Japanese, it just means convey any information of any kind or amount, and it is usual to use oshieru even for simple information like a name or phone number. So Japanese speakers will often say things like "Please teach me your phone number."

Japanese:
- does not differentiate "bite" and "chew" (both are kamu)
- does not differentiate "hear/listen" and "ask" (both are kiku)
- does not differentiate "foot" and "leg" (both are ashi, and surprisingly, there is no set way to clarify)
- does not differentiate "chin" and "jaw" (both are ago)
- does not differentiate "beard" and "moustache" (both are hige)
- clearly differentiates "upper back" and "lower back" (senaka and koshi respectively)
- does not differentiate "meal" and "cooked rice" (gohan or meshi; it does, however, differentiate "cooked rice" and "uncooked rice" kome)
- often does not differentiate "swallow" and "drink" (but can if necessary; both are generally nomu, but nomikomu exists for swallow)
- often does not differentiate "jump" and "fly" (but can if necessary; both are generally tobu; haneru also exists for jump or bound)
- differentiates "cold" based on whether it is caused by the environment or a tangible object (so, for example, a cold room is samui but cold water is tsumetai) (it differentiates "hot" the same way, but only in writing, not in speech).
- distinguishes a roof designed to be stood on (okujō) from one you are not meant to stand on (yane).
- distinguishes simple bags and sacks (fukuro) from handbags, purses, backpacks, etc. (kaban).

- In English, for anything you put on your body, "wear" will suffice. In Japanese, things you put on top of your head require the verb kaburu, shirts, jackets, etc. on your upper body use kiru, things on your legs and feet use haku, and things like makeup, glasses, jewellery, etc. use tsukeru.

-A final interesting one: archery (kyūdō) and horseback archery (yabusame) are traditionally considered completely different arts.

[zompist]

This is all great stuff! Thanks and keep 'em coming.

[clawgrip]

Could the overlap be a crayfish? They look like lobsters, but are small like shrimp.

Lobster is such a horrible-sounding word though.

Why? Because Japanese can't say it?

As for animal terms, you will be hard-pressed to find any rhyme or reason to this. There may well be no particular reason why one language divides things differently from another, although of course there will be words in Japanese that we don't really have in English just because we don't really have the animal outside of Japan – tanuki is a great example, which was erroneously translated as raccoon in the subtitles to "Pom Poko".

Are there any animals that your Japanese students have trouble naming because they're not familiar with it (like Westerners do with tanuki)?

North American ungulates are unclear to Japanese speakers.

Some points:
- Moose in Japanese is either mūsu or herajika, the latter term identifying it as a type of deer (shika). In my experience, many people are unfamiliar with what exactly this animal is if presented with the term mūsu, but some people may recognize it as a deer.
- Elk is, according to Wikipedia, Amerika aka shika or wapichi, and according to Google translate, herajika. Note the overlap here with moose. My guess is that the average Japanese person is completely unfamiliar with this animal and would simply identify it as a deer or reindeer if shown a picture of it.
- Translating these two animals on Google translate results in moose as mūsu and elk as herajika. I know Google translate is not the most trustworthy of translation tools, but I think this confusion is reflective of Japanese understanding of these animals (i.e. lacking).
- Caribou, as I understand it, refers to the same exact animal as reindeer, and is simply the word for reindeer that live in North America. Reindeer is tonakai in Japanese and is readily understood to be a deer-like animal. Like caribou in English, the name tonakai does not distinctly identify it as a deer. I am not sure if Japanese people generally consider it to be a type of deer or something distinct, but I guess it is probably similar to how in English I guess we consider elk to be basically a type of deer.

The conclusion is that Japanese speakers are mainly familiar with shika (deer) and tonakai (reindeer).

Also frogs and toads are not distinguished in Japanese. They're both kaeru. Similarly, crocodiles and alligators are both wani. Butterflies (chōchō) and moths (ga) are differentiated just as in English, though.

And another random one I thought of: island chains that are clearly in a line are rettō, while island groups that are clearly not in a line and just happen to be in the same area are shotō. This is fairly strictly differentiated in Japanese, while in English we just use archipelago for both.

[finlay]

I know this applies to at least Japanese, and I'm pretty sure it applies to quite a few European languages too: the distinction in English between watch/see/look at (and other ones too like observe, view), and hear/listen to, doesn't exist. I spend a lot of time trying to clear up this confusion. I think when I was teaching Spanish people I had to do the same thing a lot.

It's interesting that you brought up those ones in that last post, by the way, because they're pretty much all ones I have no clue about either. Crocodile and alligator is something fairly insignificant to do with the shape of their jaw, right?

[clawgrip]

I think the shape of the jaw is just the main way that a lay person can differentiate them visually, but there are probably other differences that only biologists care about. Honestly I think Japanese has the right idea here by using just a single word for both, because as far as I know the habitats of these animals do not overlap at all, and people who do not live near them have no idea which is which anyway and can never figure out which word to use, so there really doesn't need to be two distinct words. Not to mention caimans, whatever those even are.

[zompist]

An alert reader on Twitter commented "In Hebrew the semantic space for make/create is different, with one word that specifically means to create ex nihilo."

Can anyone explain this and provide the words in question?

[Yiuel Raumbesrairc]

In France (and common) French, we
"regarde la télévision" (look at the television)

In Quebec French, notwithstanding correction, we
"écoute la télévision" (listen to the television)

An there is no equivalent to "watch" in that sense; its equivalent is strickly restricted to the synonym of "to guard" ("garder"), but notice the etymological link between "garder" and "regarder"

[Terra]

I think the shape of the jaw is just the main way that a lay person can differentiate them visually, but there are probably other differences that only biologists care about. Honestly I think Japanese has the right idea here by using just a single word for both, because as far as I know the habitats of these animals do not overlap at all, and people who do not live near them have no idea which is which anyway and can never figure out which word to use, so there really doesn't need to be two distinct words. Not to mention caimans, whatever those even are.

According to Wikipedia, American Crocodiles and America Alligators do overlap in the very southern tip of Florida. But yeah, I doubt that most people know the difference between the two, and instead just use the words interchangeably. It seems about as important for having different words for one-humped and two-humped camels imo.

- Elk is, according to Wikipedia, Amerika aka shika or wapichi, and according to Google translate, herajika. Note the overlap here with moose. My guess is that the average Japanese person is completely unfamiliar with this animal and would simply identify it as a deer or reindeer if shown a picture of it.

Very interesting, thanks.

"kabocha squash"

That's as ridiculous as "shika deer".

An alert reader on Twitter commented "In Hebrew the semantic space for make/create is different, with one word that specifically means to create ex nihilo."

Don't forget the well-known do/make distinction that English has.

- While toro on its own often refers to fatty tuna, it actually can refer to any fatty meat, e.g. toro-sāmon (fatty salmon), buta-toro (fatty pork).

Reminds me of English terms for the animal vs the animal as food:
- pig vs pork
- cow vs beef
- sheep vs mutton
- deer vs venison

There's also the normal/English roots vs learned/Latin/Greek roots thing:
- bird flu vs avian flu
- pig DNA vs porcine DNA

The doomed campaigns of grammar teachers' go after a few:
- less vs fewer
- can vs may

PIE had multiple words for fire and water.
- http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=fire
- http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=water

Some more from German:
- auf vs an (English has only "on".)
-- Something is "auf dem Tisch" (on the table), but "an der Wand" (on the wall).
- "treffen" means "meet", but it can also mean "hit, strike". Hitting something is just meeting it with force, after all.

Also, may I suggest moving this thread to L&L? I didn't expect it to get this big.

[clawgrip]

"kabocha squash"

That's as ridiculous as "shika deer".

Strictly speaking, I actually don't think it's that ridiculous. This is because:
a. We don't otherwise have a word for this in English (unlike 'deer')
b. It is following an established pattern, e.g. butternut squash, spaghetti squash, etc.
Anyway it looks like the Wikipedia article is now simply "kabocha" so it seems to have changed since I last looked or I'm remembering something that never existed.

- While toro on its own often refers to fatty tuna, it actually can refer to any fatty meat, e.g. toro-sāmon (fatty salmon), buta-toro (fatty pork).

Reminds me of English terms for the animal vs the animal as food:
- pig vs pork
- cow vs beef
- sheep vs mutton
- deer vs venison

There's also the normal/English roots vs learned/Latin/Greek roots thing:
- bird flu vs avian flu
- pig DNA vs porcine DNA

This is actually the opposite. The examples you've given are two separate words used to refer to the same thing, while the example of toro is one word with a single meaning being expanded to a more general meaning. A good parallel in English is 'steak', which implies beef on its own, but can be applied to other foods, e.g. salmon steak, venison steak, tofu steak (!), etc.

[Nae]

In Finnish there is no -{language} suffix. There are two ways to refer languages, three if you count languages with non-nation, separate names:

1) 'Language of [Place or language name]': suomen kieli, suomenkielinen 'Finnish, Finnish-speaking', ruotsin kieli, ruotsinkielinen 'Swedish, swedish-speaking'

2) Zero-derivation from place name, (without capitalisation when writing): puhun suomea 'I speak Finland'

3) or just 'Quechua' or "kymri". If you didn't know the names, you might say, hypothetically, 'en puhu walesiä' or ^(½?)'en puhu walesin kieltä'

EDIT:

I presume lack of distinctions is also ok. Though this isn't monomorphemic.

[Ser]

First of all: THIS SHOULD DEFINITELY BE MOVED TO L&L

Also, this post suddenly got out of hand, much longer than what I had intended, so I apologize for that beforehand.

- I personally find all that vocabulary that English has for sexual acts (some of them specific to porn, e.g. "creampie", or "squirting", which is really peeing while faking an orgasm) quite commendable, in particular the numerous nouns: blowjob, rimjob, cunnilingus, fisting/to fist, ass-fucking, ass-licking, bareback sex... My dialect of Spanish in comparison is quite poor in it. Some weeks ago I asked some friends how do people normally say "horny", and even though there's some commonly-used phrases for that like tener ganas literally 'to be eager', and estar caliente lit. 'to be hot', that's not even what those expressions most readily mean ('to be eager to do something' and 'to have fever' respectively), they're used rather indirectly. One of my friends told me she prefered to just use the English word horny (/ˈxoɾni/), borrowing it.

There's of course verbs commonly used for "to blow (a male)" (chupársela (a un hombre) lit. "to suck it (to a man)"), or for "to fuck": coger (a alguien) lit. "to fuck (sb)", pisar (a alguien) "to stomp (sb)", darse (a alguien) lit. "to give (sb) to oneself". But still, there's no noun equivalent to "blowjob", the verb chupar 'to suck' would have to be used somehow.
- Spanish doesn't have different lexemes "to jump" and "to hop"—it basically uses saltar for both, although it does distinguish "to bounce" from them: rebotar. What Tigger does in Winnie the Pooh can be variously referred to as saltar or rebotar.
- Spanish doesn't have different lexemes for "to do" and "to make", using hacer for both. "To create" does have a simple straight-forward translation though: crear.
- Spanish doesn't have different lexemes for "to complain" and "to whine". You would modify quejarse using adverbs or such.
- Spanish compulsorily distinguishes glosa 'linguistic gloss' and brillo/lustre '(e.g. window) gloss'.
- Spanish doesn't distinguish in, at and on, using en for all three. Next time you hear a Spanish speaker saying I'm in the computer/in the table instead of I'm at the computer/at the table, or I'm on the car right now instead of I'm in the car right now, don't be surprised.
- French distinguishes being in a certain city at some irrelevant point (the point is to say it's in that city and not another city), which would be à une certaine ville; and being in a certain city at a particular point: dans une certaine ville.
- Actually, we can probably generalize something about French having the same preposition, à, standing for "to" of movement towards something, "at (e.g. the door)", and "in (an irrelevant point in a city)". Since Zompist knows French I think he can add all that stuff about what prepositions are used with what sort of countries (depending if they're feminine or masculine, and if they're islands or not).
- The Spanish Academies and their fans insist that Spanish should distinguish, at all times, deber 'must' when it's about obligation (I must pay my debts) from deber de 'must' when it's about talking about conjectures of reality (he hasn't come for a week, he must be really sick; Viktor was interested in that house, he must have known about what happened). I'm sure the vast majority of speakers doesn't make this distinction though, using deber and deber de quite interchangeably (I get the impression deber de might be more common, at least IMD).
- The Spanish Academies also say a distinction should be made between the series encima de/debajo de/dentro de/fuera de and arriba de/abajo de/adentro de/afuera de, where the first series comprises prepositions for static location on/under/inside/outside something, and the second series expresses change to a location on/under/etc. Thus, a different preposition could be used in "it's on top of the table" (encima de) and "I put it on the table" (arriba de) (both could be rendered with en of course, as I said above). My dialect does not distinguish these naturally, using the second series only. I'm not sure if anybody distinguishes them in all registers at all, in fact.
- My dialect of Spanish (that of San Salvador, El Salvador) has distinct lexemes for 'public "basic" school (usually grades 1-6 or 1-8)' escuela, 'public secondary school' instituto, and 'private school with all grades from 1 to 11' colegio. If a private school doesn't have all grades, but only lower ones, it can be variously referred to as colegio or escuela (they're not common anyway). There are also a few public schools with all grades from 1 to 11, these are referred to as institutos as well. In Spanish officialese they can all be referred to as escuelas, otherwise the distinction is pretty much compulsory and standard, it can be found in (national) newspaper articles, etc.
- My dialect also distinguishes budín 'solid pudding' from pudín 'soft pudding'.
- 1st century BC Latin distinguished ostium 'a regular, one-piece door (leading to a room for example)' and iānua 'a two-part door, a double-doored entrance at the entrance of a house or building'.
- Mandarin distinguishes 可以 kěyǐ 'can [do X], because of permission', 能 néng 'can [do X], because of physical ability, because external possibilities allow it' (I can pick up this table; I'm too busy right now, can see you on Friday), 会 huì 'can [do X], because of a learned ability stored in the brain' (I can swim; I can speak Chinese).
- Note that 会 huì can also be a future marker. In fact, Mandarin has some different semantic overlaps in 想 xiǎng, 想要 xiǎngyào, 要 yào, 需要 xūyào, compared with 'want ~ need'. Xiǎng is a softer sort of "want, would like", yào is a stronger sort of "want" closer to "need" (besides working as a future marker along with 会 huì), xiǎngyào is in the middle of them I suppose (and might also belong to a slightly higher register), xūyào is pretty much equivalent to "need".

Shit, that last one was awkward, not that my Chinese is good anyway. Actually, the more I think about this sort of differences in semantic fields the more muddled up the words get in my mind, managing registers and implications, etc. Witness the use of bromear ~ fregar ~ joder ~ molestar in my dialect, mapping to "to joke ~ to annoy":
bromear: "to joke" as in not being serious about a threat, or about anything that a somebody supposedly promises to do in general ("we were not being serious about banning you, we were just joking!"). Also, talking lightly about something serious ("joking about religion").
fregar: colloquial synonym of bromear. Interestingly, in ¡Dejá de fregar!, literally 'Stop of fregar!', there's a strong implication that the speaker is annoyed at the other person's words, but ¡Dejá de bromear! is much more amicable, more likely to be used if the speaker is more tired than annoyed. It can also be used meaning "fooling around (a place)", for example, walking around a mall shouting stupid shit at passers-by (but bromear can't be used this way). This verb usually means "to do/wash (the dishes)" in international Spanish (as it does in many other dialects), but it's practically never used that way in my dialect, not even in the locally-produced media.
joder: of a vulgar register, it kinda balances between "joke" and "annoy". It can be used as a vulgar synonym of fregar, including its "fooling around (a place)" meaning, though implying a nastier behaviour, more ridiculous obviously-not-meant-seriously promises. It can also be used meaning "to fucking annoy (somebody)".
molestar: a straight-forward translation of "to annoy (somebody)".

There's also this verb, amolar, that is mostly used by adults to describe the nasty behaviour of kids in general: annoying their siblings, other children or other adults by whining; not stopping to talk to them, poking them endlessly, etc. But as far as I know annoy can't be used like that. I think English-speaking parents generally tell their kids more specific things like "Shut up!", "Stop doing that!", "Leave him alone!", as opposed to a general ¡Dejá de amolar!.

Various things could be said about fruit/animal metaphors for people too.

Also, since you're collecting etymologies, Linguoboy once said that the word for "whisky" in Osage is apparently some compound of "fire" and "water" (hpéecenii, from hpéece-níi fire-water, so, fiery water).

[clawgrip]

In Finnish there is no -{language} suffix. There are two ways to refer languages, three if you count languages with non-nation, separate names:

This reminds me...Japanese has no conversational, standalone word for "language". The things that do exist are:
1. The language suffix ("-go"), e.g. Furansugo (French), Suwahirigo (Swahili);
2. The academic word gengo which is not used in everyday speech;
3. The word kotoba which literally means "word" can sometimes be used for languages or dialects;
3. The word kokugo; this means "national language;" by default it refers Japanese as a school subject, but if you use it in a way that implies plural, it can refer to other languages "E.g. how many national languages do you speak?" The required inclusion of "national" feels very clumsy to me though.

Also sorry giving nothing but Japanese examples...it's really the only thing I can contribute.

[Astraios]

An alert reader on Twitter commented "In Hebrew the semantic space for make/create is different, with one word that specifically means to create ex nihilo."

Can anyone explain this and provide the words in question?

".בראשית ברא אלוהים את השמים ואת הארץ"
bərēšīt̠ bārāˀ ˀɛ̆lōhīm ˀēt̠ haššāmayim wəˀēt̠ hāˀārɛṣ /beʁe'ʃit ba'ʁa ʔelo'him ʔet haʃa'majim ve'ʔet ha'ʔaʁeʦ/
In the beginning God created the sky and the earth.

You can only really use bārāˀ of a deity, because it means specifically "X creates Y out of nothing"; one of God's names is habbōrēˀ 'the Creator'. For everyone else, who can't create things ex nihilo, there's other words like yāṣar 'produce', hōlīd̠ 'beget', ˁāśā 'do, make', etc., but none of them mean 'ex nihilo' whereas bārāˀ does. For example if you called God hāˁōśɛ it'd mean "the one who makes things (from raw materials)", as opposed to habbōrēˀ which very definitely means "the one who makes things (from nothing)".

I've not heard bārāˀ anywhere outside of religious or fictional religious contexts, and Hebrew Wiktionary explains it as ˁāśā yēš mēˀayin literally "make there-is from there-is-not".

EDIT: And apparently, Arabic has the same word baraˀa, though I'm not entirely certain if the meaning is the same. Wiktionary only says "Parallel root in Arabic: baraˀa", and my deadtree dictionary only says "baraˀa - bārāˀ". And Arabic translations of bereshit seem to prefer xalaqa 'create'.

North American ungulates are unclear to Japanese speakers.

Some points:
- Moose in Japanese is either mūsu or herajika, the latter term identifying it as a type of deer (shika). In my experience, many people are unfamiliar with what exactly this animal is if presented with the term mūsu, but some people may recognize it as a deer.
- Elk is, according to Wikipedia, Amerika aka shika or wapichi, and according to Google translate, herajika. Note the overlap here with moose. My guess is that the average Japanese person is completely unfamiliar with this animal and would simply identify it as a deer or reindeer if shown a picture of it.
- Translating these two animals on Google translate results in moose as mūsu and elk as herajika. I know Google translate is not the most trustworthy of translation tools, but I think this confusion is reflective of Japanese understanding of these animals (i.e. lacking).

How sure are you that this isn't a result of the difference between European and American terminology for the two? An American moose is the same species as a European elk.

[Salmoneus]

Damnit, you beat me to it.

Yeah, "elk" originally meant what Americans call "moose" - a moose is an elk that lives in america. Confusingly, however, when europeans came to america, they used 'elk' for a type of large deer instead, and borrowed a local word when they then rediscovered elk ('moose'). European languages didn't start out with a word for what americans call elk, because they don't live in europe. So they've mostly just been calling american elk and eurasian elk both 'elk' [which is good, because it's a great word that doesn't get used enough], although there is another borrowed word for american elk, 'wapiti'.

However, both wapiti and elk live (or lived) in east asia, so the japanese might actually have a better chance of having clear terminology for them...

[clawgrip]

Thanks guys, that explains pretty clearly then why herajika could refer both to moose and elk (NA terminology). Still, moose do not seem to be a well-known animal in Japan, and elk even less so.

[Astraios]

English has a lot of lexical distinctions that Hebrew only makes by gender-marking; boy/girl, man/woman, dog/bitch, handsome/pretty - yɛ́lɛd̠/yaldā, ˀīš/ˀiššā, kɛ́lɛb̠/kalbā, nāˀɛ/nāˀā.


Lakota has a lot of interesting divisions in its copulas, but my favourite one is the one between é and héčha. The difference is approximately identificatory copula vs. classificatory copula, but in practice it's generally translated as "X is a" vs. "X is the":

Lé wówapi kiŋ é. "This is the book." (The identity of 'this' is 'the book'.)
Lé wówapi héčha. "This is a book." (The class of 'this' is 'books'.)

In addition to that, Lakota has four levels of definiteness for nominals:

wówapi waŋží "a book; any old book" (indefinite, unknown to speaker)
wówapi waŋ "a particular book" (indefinite, known to speaker)
wówapi kiŋ "the book" (definite, known to speaker)
wówapi k'uŋ "the aforementioned book; you know, that old book" (definite, known to both speaker and listener)