language duck 🦆

How to say "grape" in Romance and Germanic languages in Europe

From Latin ūva (“grape”):

uva (Spanish/Castilian)

uva (Asturian)

uva (Italian)

uva (Portuguese)

uga/uba (Aragonese)

uva (Galician)

uva (Judaeo-Spanish)

uva (Piedmontese)

uga (Lombard)

iva (Romansch)

úa (Sardinian)

ùa/ova (Venetian)

auã (Aromanian)

From Latin racēmus ("cluster or bunch of grapes"):

raisin (French)

racina (Sicilian)

raïm (Catalan)

rasim (Occitan)

resim (Franco-Provençal)

roésin (Picard)

roejhén (Walloon)

Unknown origin:

strugure (Romanian)

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From Old French grape (cluster of fruit or flowers, bunch of grapes"):

grape (English

grape (Scots)

Literally "wine-berry":

Wiitrybel (Alemannic German)

Weinba/Weinbeer (Upper/Southern German)

vínber (Icelandic)

From Proto-West Germanic *þrūbō ("cluster" or "grape"):

Traube (German)

drue (Danish)

druva (Swedish)

drue (Norwegian)

druif/wijndruif (Dutch)

druif (Afrikaans)

troyb (Yiddish)

Druve/Druuv (Low German)

drúf (West Frisian)

17.10.24// really busy, but will make time to visit cute vegan cafes!!

life lately has been full of lesson planning, studying german and spending time with beloved ones. i’m so glad for the peace i have. 🌸

✨"Sehr geehrte Besucher, aufgrund Ihres hohen Alters ist unsere Leopardin leider gestorben"✨

The marking on the picture around the word "Ihres" points to the importance of proper capitalization of the formal you in German to distinguish it from her/your

ihr = her (feminine singular possessive pronoun) / your (plural personal pronoun; this doesn't make sense here though)

aufgrund ihres hohen Alters -> because of her (the female leopards) old age

Ihr = you (formal)

aufgrund Ihres hohen Alters -> because of your (the readers)visitors) old age

Dear visitor, due to her old age, the female leopard has unfortunately passed away.

vs.

I got inspired by a post that I cannot find now to link and decided to rewrite the sentences asigning the same color to the same sentence parts and to repost them and comment some interesting linguistic features.

Direction of writing is right-to-left.

Personal pronouns and verbs are written together, just like articles and possessive adjectives are also written together with nouns in a single word.

Prepositions may appear alone or attached to noun phrases.

No relative pronoun is needed.

The direct object is placed at the end of the sentence because the rest of the complements directly refer to it.

Articles may or may not appear explicitly.

Both prepositions and postpositions occur.

No relative pronoun is needed and the subject pronoun in the subordinate clause may be omitted.

Possessive adjectives and postpositions are attached after nouns, just like personal pronouns and verbs certain occasions.

Articles and nouns are written together.

A comma is needed before the relative pronoun.

The second verbal form is placed at the end of the clause.

Verbs are moved to the end of the sentence in subordinate clauses.

A comma is needed before the relative pronoun.

Personal pronouns and verbs are written together.

Postpositions and possessive adjectives are attached to the back of nouns.

A relative pronoun followed by the verb “to be” connects two prepositional phrases.

A comma is needed before the relative pronoun.

The construction “to want” requires a personal pronoun in the accusative case.

There are no indeterminate articles.

Both prepositions and postpositions occur.

A relative pronoun is necessary to connect both clauses.

The object precedes the verb and is in turn preceded by its complements.

Postpositions are free morphemes.

A relative pronoun is necessary to connect both clauses, but the subject pronoun in the subordinate clause may be omitted.

Possessive adjectives are integrated into postpositions.

A relative pronoun followed by the verb “to be” connects two prepositional phrases.

The object precedes the verb and is in turn preceded by its complements.

Noun phrases include articles.

The subject pronoun in the subordinate clause may be omitted.

The subject pronoun may be omitted in any clause.

Verbs are placed at the end of the sentence.

A relative pronoun as well as the verb “to be” connects two prepositional phrases.

There are no indeterminate articles.

Personal adjectives are placed after nouns.

There are no indeterminate articles.

A comma is needed before the relative pronoun.

The subject pronoun in the subordinate clause may be omitted.

A relative pronoun followed by the verb “to be” connects two prepositional phrases.

Sentence complements are placed before the verb and the object.

Personal pronouns and verbs are written together.

Postpositions are free morphemes.

Determinate articles are attached after nouns, while indeterminate ones are free morphemes.

Possessive adjectives follow nouns.

A relative pronoun is necessary to connect both clauses.

There are no articles.

Verbs in the past inflect for gender.

A comma is needed before the relative pronoun.

Subject pronouns may be omitted.

The verb “to try on” requires a reflexive pronoun.

A relative pronoun is necessary to connect both clauses.

A relative pronoun followed by the verb “to be” connects two prepositional phrases.

Possessive adjectives follow nouns.

The subordinate clause precedes the main one.

Personal pronouns are attached to verb forms in the form of infixes or suffixes.

Postpositions and possessive adjectives are attached to nouns.

a messy and incomplete list

nachvollziehen (v.) -- to understand, but less empathetic. i.e. i see the steps that brought you to that conclusion, but i don't understand you.

doch (interj.) -- you're wrong and really it's the opposite of what you said. often said with a healthy dose of sass. i.e. "this isn't a good movie." "doch. (it is)"

frech (adj.) -- somewhere between naughty and sassy and silly. when you're being a bit of a brat, you're being frech.

dreist (adj.) -- audacious, but far more colloquial. when you have the goddamn audacity, you are dreist. i.e. to park that far over the line is dreist as hell

heimat (n.) -- home, but stronger. a home is wherever you have built a life, but heimat is where your roots are. heimat is where you feel pangs of nostalgia when you go to visit your family for christmas and see the shop at the corner.

weltschmerz (n.) -- literally 'world-pain'. the world sucks and sometimes you just sit and feel the pain of it all. that's weltschmerz.

existenzberechtigung (n.) -- the right to exist, often in a comedic context. i.e. pineapple on pizza has absolutely no existenzberechtigung.

fernweh (n.) -- literally 'far-ache'. the opposite of homesickness, the desire to go far away. i guess wanderlust is similar, but that is also a german word, and this is more painful and visceral

schweigen (v./n.) -- the act of not speaking. silence, but more deliberate. the palpable feeling that people are withholding their voice.

Language does not simply name pre-existing categories; categories do not exist in 'the world'

— Daniel Chandler, Semiotics for Beginners

I read this quote a few years ago, but I don’t think I truly understood it until one day, when I was looking at the wikipedia article for “star” and I thought to check the Japanese article, see if I could get some Japanese reading practice in. I was surprised to find that the article was not titled 「星」, but 「恒星」, a word I’d never seen before. I’d always learnt that 星 was the direct translation for “star” (I knew the japanese also contained meanings the english didn’t, like “dot” or “bullseye”, but I thought these were just auxiliary definitions in addition to the direct translation of “star” as in "a celestial body made of hydrogen and helium plasma").

To try and clear things up for myself, I searched japanese wikipedia for 星. It was a disambiguation page, with the main links pointing to the articles for 天体 (astronomical object) and スター（記号）(star symbol). There was no article just called 「星」.

It’s an easy difference to miss, because in everyday conversation, 星 and star are equivalent. They both describe the shining lights in the night sky. They both describe this symbol: ★. They even both describe those enormous celestial objects made of plasma.

But they are different - different enough to not share a wikipedia article. 星 is used to describe any kind of celestial body, especially if it appears shiny and bright in the night sky. “Star” can be used this way too (like Venus being called the “morning star”), but it’s generally considered inaccurate to use the word like this, whereas there is no such inaccuracy with 星. You can say “oh that’s not actually a star, it’s a planet”, but you CAN’T say 「実はそれは星ではなく惑星だよ」 (TL: that’s not actually a hoshi, it’s a planet). A planet IS a 星.

星 is a very common word, essentially equivalent to “star”, but its meaning is closer to “celestial body”. I haven’t looked into the etymology/history but it’s almost like both english and japanese started out with a simple, common word for the lights in the sky - star/星 , but as we found out more about what these lights actually were, english doubled down on using the common word for the specific scientific concept, while japanese kept the common word generic and instead came up with a new word for the more specific concept. If this is actually what happened, I’d guess that kanji probably had something to do with it - 星 as a component kanji exists inside the word for planet, 惑星, and in the word for comet, 彗星, and in the scientific word for “star”, 恒星, so it makes sense that it would indicate a more general concept when used standalone.

This discovery helped me understand that quote - categories don’t exist in the world, we are the ones who create them. I thought that the concept of “star” was something that would be consistent across all languages, but it’s not, because the concept of “star” is not pre-existing. Each language had to decide how to name each of those similar star-like concepts (the ★ symbol, hot balls of gas, twinkling lights in the sky, planets, comets, etc), and obviously not every language is going to group those concepts under the same words with the same nuance.

Afrikaans has two words for brother-in-law : 1) swaer and 2) skoonbroer