UniLang

linguoboy wrote:

Linguaphile wrote: koti home
koti bag

Koti tripped me up because I kept confusing it with kota and wanted to translate it as "hut" rather than "home".

Well, it does come from kota! According to this site, it is said it comes from the plural declensions of kota such as kotiin (pl illative) and kodissa (pl inessive).

rakennus building; construction
rakendus appliance; application; app

viisas wise
viisakas polite

dona - woman
dona - doughnut / donut

viineri Danish pastry
viiner wiener, small boiled sausage

agalla oak gall
agalla gill

galar grief
galar illness

galar grief
galar illness

galar to ogle, to copulate (used for birds)

Doing Duolingo's Scottish Gaelic tree now and there are some interesting cairde bréige

gruagach maiden
gruagach shaggy uncouth person, sasquatch, ogre, brownie

(Both from Old Irish grúag "hair of the head".)

greannach grumpy
greannach irritated; irritating

(The Irish word can also mean "amusing", but that's from a different root and the more usual derivation is greannmhar. Irish words for "grumpy" include cancrach, which really looks to me like it should have something to do with cancer.)

Okay, this is tripping me up now, too.

In Irish, the 3S past tense form of bí "to be" is bhí, dependent form raibh.

In Scottish Gaelic, bi is the dependent form of the future tense bidh. So whenever I see a sentence that starts with with chan bhi "will not be", my first instinct is to translate it as "wasn't".

quiproquo nm - misunderstanding; mistaking one thing or situation for another
quid pro quo n - favor or benefit exchanged for something

I've been seeing quiproquo for a while in the title of a webseries about false friends between different varieties of French, but it never occurred to me the term might have a significantly different meaning from the English equivalent. You might say I was the victim of a quiproquo.

amassar - to accumulate, amass
amassar - to knead, crush, wrinkle

start
staart - tail

boot
boot - boat

soovitus recommendation, suggestion
sovitus fitting, trying on clothes; atonement; musical arrangement

subsist
subsistir to continue to exist
subsistere to stop

seinn play a musical instrument; sing (of birds), chatter
seinn sing (a song); [dated] play a musical instrument

Interesting how these two verbs have diverged. I wonder if it's anything to do with the popularity of "mouth music" (a.k.a. puirt à beul) in the Highlands.

Trotz defiance
trots pride

In this case, the Dutch is a borrowing of the German, so the divergence must be fairly recent.

leg
legg shank (portion of the leg from the knee to the ankle)

infancy
infancia childhood, early years

According to the DRAE, infancia is "[el] período de la vida humana desde el nacimiento hasta la pubertad" ("[the] period of human life from birth until puberty"). That's a much broader span of time than is covered by "infancy" in English, which only designates the period of time when one is an "infant" (a young child who needs constant care).

linguoboy wrote: infancy
infancia childhood, early years

According to the DRAE, infancia is "[el] período de la vida humana desde el nacimiento hasta la pubertad" ("[the] period of human life from birth until puberty"). That's a much broader span of time than is covered by "infancy" in English, which only designates the period of time when one is an "infant" (a young child who needs constant care).

Spanish "infancia" covers the period of time in which one is an "infante" (in the first sense below).
infant baby
infante child (also: non-hereditary child of the Spanish or Portuguese monarch [of any age]; foot soldier [of any age])

But we more or less use the same meaning as Spanish for this one (a person who is infantile is not acting like a baby but is simply childish and immature):
infantile
infantil

In Italian, the word infante is not used, but the word infanzia has the same meaning as Spanish.

But confusingly enough, the current official term for kindergarten is scuola dell'infanzia (3-6 years old).

So infanzia covers a larger timespan than scuola dell'infanzia: it also covers children who go to asilo nido* (nursery, 0-3 years old) and scuola primaria (primary/elementary school, 6-11 years old).

Only a few years ago, kindergarten was scuola materna (maternal school), a term that does not make sense either, and in colloquial language we call it asilo (asylum) which makes even less sense.
*And the term for nursery means literally "nest asylum".

And primary/elementary school was scuola elementare. Interesting that we switched from the American English to the British English wording.

OldBoring wrote:Only a few years ago, kindergarten was scuola materna (maternal school), a term that does not make sense either, and in colloquial language we call it asilo (asylum) which makes even less sense.
*And the term for nursery means literally "nest asylum".

Is scuola materna a calque of French école maternelle?
Speaking of that, I had a quick look at its Wiki article to see if I could find out something about the origin of its name, but I found this:

Leur vocation première est essentiellement sociale : il s'agit d'offrir un lieu de protection aux enfants des ouvrières, afin de les soustraire aux dangers de la rue. C'est pourquoi la maternelle est d'abord nommée « salle d'asile

So they were originally called "salle d'asile" in France as they offered protection to working class families against the dangers of the street. But when I first learnt of that meaning of asilo in Italian, it just seemed weird to me.

Wow, so much French influence, I didn't know