Thoughts on the Spanish Language

Stormtroper

vandro chan es tsundere con Glenn-senpai

glennmagusharvey

@vandro What does "vete a verga" mean?

vandro

"Vete a [sic] verga" is a ungrammatical spanish for Go to the dick. The proper insult i Vete a la verga. Yes, dick is femenine in most slang terms.

Stormtroper

bede a berga :-DDDD

glennmagusharvey

Stormtroper wrote: »

:-DDDD

dos puntos raya de de de de

glennmagusharvey

This narrator appears to practice distinción, suggesting that he is from Spain, if I'm reading this Wikipedia article right: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonological_history_of_Spanish_coronal_fricatives

Stormtroper

Si, en definitiva es español de España, hostias.

glennmagusharvey

Stormtroper wrote: »

Si, en definitiva es español de España, hostias.

"hostias"?

vandro

The piece of bread they give you at mass, spain is the only region that uses that as a mild curseword.

Stormtroper

Es lo que dices a cada rato cuando hablas como un tio de España.

glennmagusharvey

I feel that at some point someone else has to have thought that the fact that "deportes" means "sports" in Spanish could be used in an awful pun about immigration issues in the United States.

I'm just not sure if I should be the person to try to construct such a pun.

glennmagusharvey

So I decided to venture into the Spanish-language general forum on Steam, because lol free conversational practice with the benefit of having all the time I want to look up words and figure out how I want to conjugate them.

I replied relevantly to a post (telling someone that Nintendo is Fire Emblem's publisher and Steam releases depend on the publisher, incidentally also learning that "editorial" apparently means publishing company).  I also attached a line saying I'm learning Spanish and apologizing for any mistakes (which I did make since I originally had "editor" rather than "editorial").

I got the following response:

No pasa nada, es mas se agradece el esfuerzo de intentar escribir español, y aunque no soy filologo, has escrito bien. Animo y sigue esforzandote.

Let me see if I have gotten this correct:

No pasa nada = "it's no big deal", idiomatic (lit. "nothing doesn't happen")
es mas = I'm not sure what this means.  It could be "you are, but" (formal) or "it is, but", but I can't figure out which would make sense.  Alternatively, maybe the mas is missing an accent and serves as an adverb describing "agradece"?
se agradece el esfuerzo de intentar escribir español = "the effort to try to write Spanish is appreciated"
y aunque no soy filologo = "and although I'm not a philologist"
has escrito bien = "you have written well" (informal)
Animo y sigue esforzandote = "I inspire, and encouraging you follows"?  That sounds kinda unwieldy, albeit something that could make sense in context.  Or am I missing something?

edit: oh gosh putting it in a quoteblock like that makes it look like hieroglyphics or something

glennmagusharvey

glennmagusharvey wrote:

The Spanish for "eschatology" is "escatología", hence "Esca".  Furthermore, that is how her name is pronounced in Japanese.  That said, there is no official Spanish translation as far as I can tell.

Looking back at this, I guess Spanish just pronounces loanwords as they come, not unlike how English can deal with a bunch of really strange French loanwords spelled in ways that make no sense according to rules of English pronunciation (denoument being roughly "day nu monk" for example).  That's because today I heard "DJ" pronounced on a Spanish-language radio station as it is pronounced in English ("dee jay", or "di yei" perhaps, as opposed to "de jota"), and Wikipedia does observe that "sh" is just taken as its original sound in English loanwords.

Stormtroper

es mas = I'm not sure what this means.  It could be "you are, but" (formal) or "it is, but", but I can't figure out which would make sense.  Alternatively, maybe the mas is missing an accent and serves as an adverb describing "agradece"?

It's a set phrase meaning 'in fact'. 'Más' means 'plus' (edit: or 'more') so you can see how it becomes that.

Edit: on second though "what's more" is an even better translation.

Animo y sigue esforzandote = "I inspire, and encouraging you follows"?  That sounds kinda unwieldy, albeit something that could make sense in context.  Or am I missing something?

I just realized that I don't know how to translate 'ánimo' (noun). Anyhows, that sentence basically means 'cheer up and keep on putting effort'

Looking back at this, I guess Spanish just pronounces loanwords as they come, not unlike how English can deal with a bunch of really strange French loanwords spelled in ways that make no sense according to rules of English pronunciation (denoument being roughly "day nu monk" for example).  That's because today I heard "DJ" pronounced on a Spanish-language radio station as it is pronounced in English ("dee jay", or "di yei" perhaps, as opposed to "de jota"), and Wikipedia does observe that "sh" is just taken as its original sound in English loanwords.

Although it's gotten more common in recent decades, the majority of loanwords are hispanified. It might not be that noticiable since that means lots of loanwords end up not looking like loanwords, but it's much more prevalent than in English, and is almost never done without using Spanish phonetics (except often 'sh' if the speaker can pronounce it).

I've never really liked English tendency to switch pronunciation/phonetics mid-phrase, I've always found it out of place.

glennmagusharvey

a world líder in béisbol

Stormtroper

Huh, I hadn't realized that 'líder' is (probably) a loanword.

vandro

líder is a loanword, but doesn't look like it. Spanish tries to be self-consistent up to the point of butchering the origin of the word to fit it in. All the neologisms that contain ph are turned into f, obscuring its origin. Ánimo cannot be translated as is, for it is an incomplete expression, most likely deriving from "Ten ánimo" (you get spirit)

glennmagusharvey

vandro wrote: »

líder is a loanword, but doesn't look like it. Spanish tries to be self-consistent up to the point of butchering the origin of the word to fit it in.

I frequently complain that English doesn't do this, and instead adopts all sorts of assorted pronunciation systems.

Meanwhile...

a children's book wrote:

A lo largo de las costas, Costa Rica tiene llanuras bajas y selvas tropicales.  Ahí hace mucho calor.

Is it literally trying to say there's a lot of heat generated in these areas (which would be a strange thing to say), or is hacer just typically used to refer to weather conditions in this way?

a children's book wrote:

Un ferrocarril permite a los campesinos llevar sus cultivos a los puertos del mar.  Una carretera conecta a Costa Rica con los otros países de Centroamérica. ... Cuando los costarricenses entran a una casa, dicen "con permiso". ... La gente monta a caballo por deporte y para viajar.

Is it just a thing that a good number of verbs just take prepositions in cases that English would treat as direct objects?  It certainly seems like it.

Well, to be fair, English's "direct object" for "to allow" or "to permit" isn't really a direct object, because "I allow you to do something" is more properly written as "I permit, for you, the act of doing something".  "Riding a horse", "entering a house", and "connecting a place by means of a road network" treat "a horse", "a house", and "a place" as direct objects though.  Meanwhile, "montar" seems to take different prepositions depending on what is used as a means of transportation since apparently it's "montar a caballo" but "montar en bicicleta".

a children's book wrote:

Como Costa Rica tiene muchas costas, llega gente a practicar surfing.

Well that's another thing I have to look into: under what circumstances does verb come before subject.

also lol loanwords

vandro

a caballo is the only one I see using a, all others I've seen use en. Hacer calor/frío is just the set expressión, the weather makes it hot/cold would be a way to read it. People around here don't use practicar surfing. They hispanicize the verb using -ear. "llega gente a surfear".

I don't get your direct object question tho. Direct objects only work on transitive verbs, entrar is not one. conectar is one, so costa rica is the direct object there.

glennmagusharvey

Yeah, I was surprised to see "surfing"; I figured Spanish had to have a word for that.  There was also "kayak" on the same page, but that's a loanword even in English, from Inuktitut...and besides, I think it's already pronounced properly according to Spanish pronunciation rules.

I guess entrar takes the intransitive meaning.

In the sentence with conectar, "conecta" is followed by "a Costa Rica", making the sentence "A highway connects to Costa Rica with other countries of Central America" if I do a word-for-word translation, which is why I drew attention to it.

vandro

Costa Rica is treated as a person by the spanish sentence, the question asked  to determine the direct object is "To whom connects the highway to Central America?".

Spanish doesn't have a Who Whom distinction, it uses a derivative of latin whom for everything, so the distinction from who to whom is made using "a quien".

glennmagusharvey

vandro wrote: »

Costa Rica is treated as a person by the spanish sentence, the question asked  to determine the direct object is "To whom connects the highway to Central America?".

Spanish doesn't have a Who Whom distinction, it uses a derivative of latin whom for everything, so the distinction from who to whom is made using "a quien".

I guess I can see the logic if I rephrase it as "The highway with the other Central American countries connects to Costa Rica." Though I also wonder if it's correct to say that line without the "a".



Thanks!

vandro

You drop the a and must put a con. Conecta Costa Rica con Centroamérica.

glennmagusharvey

But it already says "con los otros países de Centroamérica".

vandro

You are right. I was mistaken in my impression.

glennmagusharvey

" wrote:

A Runabout?  I'll steal it!!  No one will ever know!!

Un Runabout?  ¡¡Lo robaré!!  ¡¡Nadie nunca sabrá!!

Points considered:
1. Runabout being just a foreign name...would that be considered neuter (as I just did) or masculine (because it is un auto)?
2. Getting to practice future tense
3. Saber is for knowing of a fact or knowing a body of knowledge, while conocer is for knowing/being familiar with a person/object/place, right?
4. lol, double negatives ("no one will never know")
5. jamás vs. nunca?
6. If the intention is strong exclamation, where English would use two exclamation points, would Spanish use two inverted exclamation points as well?

Stormtroper

1. Runabout being just a foreign name...would that be considered neuter (as I just did) or masculine (because it is un auto)?

Whichever sounds right, which I think has to do with the gender of what it is, so Runabout -> car -> carro -> masculine (it's a car, right?).

3. Saber is for knowing of a fact or knowing a body of knowledge, while
conocer is for knowing/being familiar with a person/object/place, right?

That's the general rule, yeah, but unfortunately it's not always clear which of the two applies, and so as with many things the only way to be sure when to use which is through practice/getting a knack on what sounds natural.
I remember a French course mentioning that the difference between savoir/connaître was the hardest thing to learn about it, fortunately I just double-checked that it was the same as in Spanish and got to skip that lesson

5. jamás vs. nunca?

They're synonims. Most of the time I don't think one will sound more off than the other. That said I find that sentence off, and would translate it instead as 'nadie (lo) sabrá nunca/jamás'.

6. If the intention is strong exclamation, where English would use two
exclamation points, would Spanish use two inverted exclamation points as
well?

Correct. (See user title)

glennmagusharvey

Stormtroper wrote: »

Whichever sounds right, which I think has to do with the gender of what it is, so Runabout -> car -> carro -> masculine (it's a car, right?).

Sí, un runabout es un carro.

(I did make one mistake because it turns out "runabout" is a common noun, not a proper noun, so I shouldn't have capitalized it.)

Stormtroper wrote: »

They're synonims. Most of the time I don't think one will sound more off than the other. That said I find that sentence off, and would translate it instead as 'nadie (lo) sabrá nunca/jamás'.

I had kinda noticed that nunca tended to be separated from other negatives.  I guess it's a word order custom thing.

glennmagusharvey

Fun fact of the moment:

Arabic "al rasif" = "the platform" => Spanish "arrecife" = "reef"

(English got "reef" from Old Norse "rif" which meant "rib" or "reef", though.  And Arabic now has a different word for reef, "sa'ab".)

glennmagusharvey

Messing around: attempting to translate something without a dictionary.

"This (female) singer's has an unconventional voice."

"Esta cantadora tiene una voz inconvencional."

Let's see how far off I am.

1. Apparently "cantador" does exist but is either rare or applies mostly to pop singers, and the variant "cantaor" is used by flamenco singers, while I'm getting mixed signals about "cantante" and "cantor".  There's also "vocalista".  "Cantora" seems like the best word to use here as I'm speaking about someone who's a singer by profession (for what it's worth I'm referring to the lead singer for the song "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun").  (commentary source: http://forum.wordreference.com/threads/cantor-cantador-cantante.1888781/ )

2. Apparently "inconvencional" exists in Portuguese?  While Google Translate suggests "poco convencional", which seems odd unless that's just the idiomatic phrase with this meaning.  I wonder if "una voz non convencional" would have been the better solution.

I don't know why I find Cyndi Lauper's voice so strange in this song.  I am much more familiar with her voice singing "Time After Time" and I much prefer that voice anyway.

(Oh hey let's try this one too.  This time with the help of the internet because there's too much of this I don't know.)

No sé por qué encuentro la voz de Cyndi Lauper tan extraño en esta canción.  Son mucho más familiarizado con su voz cuando canta "Time After Time" y mucho prefiero esa voz de todos modos.

(Did I get the relative clause right?  And is there a way to use the gerund "cantando" rather than "cuando canta"?  Also it seems that usage examples I saw use the verb for "familiarize with" ("familiarizar con") rather than directly stating "be familiar with" ("ser/estar familiar con") so I guess that's how it's done.)